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| Works by WILLIAM JAMES, M.D., Ph. et Litt.D.,

LL.D.; Correspondent of the Institute of France;
Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University.

The Principles of Psychology. 2vols. 8vo. $4.80,
net. New York: Henry Holt & Co. 1890.

Psychology: Briefer Course. 12mo. $1.60, zet. New
York: Henry Holt & Co. 1892.

The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular
Philosophy. 12mo0. $2.00. New York: Longmans,
Green & Co. 1897.

Is Life Worth Living? 18mo. sc cents, wet. Philadel
phia: S. B. Weston, 1305 Arch Streer. 1896.

Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to
the Doctrine. 16mo. $1.00. Boston: Houghton,
Mifflin & Co. 1808.

Talks to Teachers on Psychology: and to Students
on Some of Life’s Ideals. 12mo. $1.50, met. New
York: Henry Holt & Co. 1899.

The Literary Remains of Henry James, Edited, with
an introduction, by Witt1am JAmeEs. With Portrait.
Crown 8vo. $2.00. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
1885.

The Foundations of Ethics. By Joun Epwarp Maupe,
Edited by Wittiam JAMeEs. 12mo. $1.50. New York:
Henry Hot & Co. 1887. x

ie

—

AMERICAN SCIENCE SERIES--ADVANCED COURSE

EE sPRINCIPLES

OF

mee bi OlOG Y

BY

WILLIAM JAMES

PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOL. fF

NEW YORK

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1910

Copyright, 1899
BY
HENRY HOLT & CO.

CAMELOT PRESS, PRINTERS, NEW YORE

TO
MY DEAR FRIEND

rs FRANCOIS PILGLON,
AS A TOKEN OF AFFECTION,
AND AN ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF WHAT I OWE
TO THE
CRITIQUE PHILOSOPHIQUE.

PRHEFACEH.

THE treatise which follows has in the main grown up in
connection with the author’s class-room instruction in
Psychology, although it is true that some of the chapters
are more ‘metaphysical,’ and others fuller of detail, than
is suitable for students who are going over the subject for
the first time. The consequence of this is that, in spite of
the exclusion of the important subjects of pleasure and
pain, and moral and esthetic feelings and judgments, the
work has grown to a length which no one can regret more
than the writer himself. The man must indeed be sanguine
who, in this crowded age, can hope to have many readers
for fourteen hundred continuous pages from his pen. But
wer Vieles bringt wird Manchem etwas bringen ; and, by judi-
ciously skipping according to their several needs, I am sure
that many sorts of readers, even those who are just begin-
ning the study of the subject, will find my book of use.
Since the beginners are most in need of guidance, I sug-
gest for their behoof that they omit altogether on a first
reading chapters 6, 7, 8, 10 (from page 330 to page 371),
12, 13, 15, 17, 20, 21, and 28. The better to awaken the
neophyte’s interest, it is possible that the wise order would
be to pass directly from chapter 4 to chapters 25, 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 fairly
treated at all. An abridgment of it, called ‘ The Spatial
Quale, which appeared in the Journal of Speculative
Philosophy, vol. xu. p. 64, may be found by some per-
sons a useful substitute for the entire chapter.

I have kept close to the point of view of natural science
throughout the book. Kvery natural science assumes cer-

Mf

vi PREFACE.

tain data uncritically, and declines to challenge the ele-
ments between which its own ‘laws’ obtain, and from
which its own deductions are carried on. Psychology, the
science of finite individual minds, assumes as its data (1)
thoughts and feelings, and (2) a physical world in time and
space with which they coexist and which (3) they know. Of
course these data themselves are discussable ; but the dis-
cussion of them (as of other elements) is called meta-
physics and falls outside the province of this book. This
book, assuming that thoughts and feelings exist and are
vehicles of knowledge, thereupon contends that psychology
when she has ascertained the empirical correlation of the
various sorts of thought or feeling with definite conditions
of the brain, can go no farther—can go no farther, that is,
as a natural science. If she goes farther she becomes
metaphysical. All attempts to explain our phenomenally
given thoughts as products of deeper-lying entities
(whether the latter be named ‘Soul,’ ‘Transcendental
Ego,’ ‘Ideas,’ or ‘ Elementary Units of Consciousness’) are
metaphysical. This book consequently rejects both the
associationist and the spiritualist theories; and in this
strictly positivistic point of view consists the only feature
of it for which I feel tempted to claim originality. Of
course this point of view is anything but ultimate. Men
must keep thinking; and the data assumed by psychology,
just like those assumed by physics and the other natural
sciences, must some time be overhauled. The effort to
overhaul them clearly and thoroughly is metaphysics ;
but metaphysics can only perform her task well when dis-
tinctly conscious of its great extent. Metaphysics fragmen-
tary, irresponsible, and half-awake, and unconscious that
she is metaphysical, spoils two good things when she in-
jects herself into a natural science. And it seems to me
that the theories both of a spiritual agent and of associated
‘ideas’ are, as they figure in the psychology-books, just such
metaphysics as this. Even if their results be true, it
would be as well to keep them, as thus presented, out of
psychology as itis to keep the results of idealism out of
physics.

I have therefore treated our passing thoughts as inte-

PREFACE. Vil

gers, and regarded the mere laws of their coexistence with
brain-states as the ultimate laws for our science. The
reader will in vain seek for any closed system in the book.
It is mainly a mass of descriptive details, running out into
queries which only a metaphysics alive to the weight of
her task can hope successfully to deal with. That will
perhaps be centuries hence; and meanwhile the best mark
of health that a science can show is this unfinished-seeming
front.

The completion of the book has been so slow that
several chapters have been published successively in Mind,
the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, the Popular Science
Monthly, and Scribner’s Magazine. Acknowledgment is
made in the proper places.

The bibliography, I regret to say, is quite unsystem-
atic. I have habitually given my authority for special
experimental facts ; but beyond that I have aimed mainly
to cite books that would probably be actually used by
the ordinary American college-student in his collateral
reading. The bibliography in W. Volkmann von Volkmar’s
Lehrbuch der Psychologie (1875) is so complete, up to its
date, that there is no need of an inferior duplicate. And
for more recent references, Sully’s Outlines, Dewey’s Psy-
chology, and Baldwin’s Handbook of Psychology may be
advantageously used.

Finally, where one owes to so many, it seems absurd to
single out particular creditors; yet I cannot resist the
temptation at the end of my first literary venture to record
my gratitude for the inspiration I have got from the writ-
ings of J.S. Mill, Lotze, Renouvier, Hodgson, and Wundt,
and from the intellectual companionship (to name only five
names) of Chauncey Wright and Charles Peirce in old
times, and more recently of Stanley Hall, James Putnam,
and Josiah Royce.

HARVARD University, August 1890.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.

PAGE
THE SCOPE OF PSYCHOLOGY, . ‘ in ie:
Mental Manifestations depend on Cerebral Contlitions: ie
Pursuit of ends and choice are the marks of Mind’s presence, 6.

CHAPTER II.

THE FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN, . : : f : 4 Ae
Reflex, semi-reflex, and voluntary acts, 12. The Frog’s nerve-
centres, 14. General notion of the hemispheres, 20. Their
Education—the Meynert scheme, 24. The phrenological con-
trasted with the physiological conception, 27. The localization
of function in the hemispheres, 30. The motor zone, 31. Motor
Aphasia, 37. The sight-centre, 41. Mental blindness, 48. The
hearing-centre, 52. Sensory Aphasia, 54. Centres for smell and
taste, 57. The touch-centre, 58. Man’s Consciousness limited to
the hemispheres, 65. The restitution of function, 67. Final
correction of the Meynert scheme, 72. Conclusions, 78.

CHAPTER III.

On SomE GENERAL CONDITIONS OF BRAIN-ACTIVITY, er

The summation of Stimuli, 82. Reaction-time, 85. Cerebral
blood-supply, 97. Cerebral Thermometry, 99. Phosphorus and
Thought, 101.

CHAPTER IV.
HABIT, . ; P ; . ; 2 ; : : . 104

Due to plasticity of neural matter, 105. Produces ease of
action, 112. Diminishes attention, 115. Concatenated perform-
ances, 116. Ethical implications and pedagogic maxims, 120.

CHAPTER V.

THE AUTOMATON-THEORY, . ; . 128
The theory described, 128. See Fa it; 133, Redan

against it, 138.
/ 751 i 1x

x CONTENTS.

CHAPTER VI.
PAGE

THE MIND-STUFF THEORY, . : : ‘ - : . 145

Evolutionary Psychology demands a Mind-dust, 146. Some

alleged proofs that it exists, 150. Refutation of these proofs, 154.

Self-compounding of mental facts is inadmissible, 158. Can

states of mind be unconscious? 162. Refutation of alleged proofs

of unconscious thought, 164. Difficulty of stating the connection

between mind and brain, 176. ‘The Soul’ is logically the least

objectionable bypothesis, 180. Conclusion, 182.

CHAPTER VII.

THE METHODS AND SNARES OF PSYCHOLOGY, . ‘ . 183

Psychology is a natural Science, 188. Introspection, 185.
Experiment, 192. Sources of error, 194. The ‘ Psychologist’s
fallacy,’ 196.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE RELATIONS OF MINDS TO OTHER THINGS, . ; . 199

Time relations: lapses of Consciousness—Locke v. 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 Psychol-
ogist’s point of view, 218. Two kinds of knowledge, acquaint-
ance and knowledge about, 221.

CHAPTER IX.

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT, . 3 F : , P . 224

Consciousness tends to the personal form, 225. It is in con-
stant change, 229. It is sensibly continuous, 237. ‘Substantive’
and ‘transitive’ parts of Consciousness, 243. Feelings of rela-
tion, 245. Feelings of tendency, 249. The ‘fringe’ of the
object, 258. The feeling of rational sequence, 261. Thought
possible in any kind of mental materia, 265. Thought and lan-
guage, 267. Consciousness is cognitive, 271. he word Object,
275. Every cognition is due to one integral pulse of thought,
276. Diagrams of Thought’s stream, 279. Thought is always
selective, 284.

CHAPTER X.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF, . : 3 ; ; . 291

The Empirical Self or Me, 291. Its constituents, 292. The
material self, 292. The Social Self, 293. The Spiritual Self, 296.
Difficulty of apprehending Thought as a purely spiritual activity,

CONTENTS. x1

PAGE

299. Emotions of Self, 305. Rivalry and conflict of one’s different
selves, 309. Their hierarchy, 318. What Self we love in ‘ Self-
love,’ 317. The Pure Ego, 329. The verifiable ground of the
sense of personal identity, 332. The passing Thought is the only
Thinker which Psychology requires, 338. Theories of Self-con-
sciousness: 1) The theory of the Soul, 342. 2) The Associationist
theory, 350. 3) The Transcendentalist theory, 360. The muta-
tions of the Self, 373. Insane delusions, 375. Alternating selves,
379. Mediumships or possessions, 398. Summary, 400.

CHAPTER XI.

ATTENTION, ; d ; , : : : . 402

Its neglect by English psychologists, 402. Description of it,
404. To how many things can we attend at once? 405. Wundt’s
experiments on displacement of date of impressions simultaneously
attended to, 410. Personal equation, 413. The varieties of
attention, 416. Passive attention, 418. Voluntary attention, 420.
Attention’s effects on sensation, 425 ;—on discrimination, 426 ;—
on recollection, 427 ;—on reaction-time, 427. The neural pro-
cess in attention: 1) Accommodation of sense-organ, 434.
2) Preperception, 438. Is voluntary attention a resultant or a
force? 447. The effort to attend can be conceived as a
resultant, 450. Conclusion, 458. Acquired Inattention, 455.

CHAPTER XII.

Wanonprrem .- ~f) 2.) |. ret: . 459

The sense of sameness, 459. Conception defined, 461. Con-
ceptions are unchangeable, 464. Abstract ideas, 468. Universals,
473. The conception ‘of the same’ is not the ‘same state’ of
mind, 480.

CHAPTER XIII.

DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON, . : . : . 483

Locke on discrimination, 483. Martineau ditto, 484. Simul-
taneous sensatious originally fuse into one object, 488. The
principle of mediate comparison, 489. Not all differences are
differences of composition, 490. The conditions of discrimina-
tion, 494. Thesensation of difference, 495. The transcendental-
ist theory of the perception of differences uncalled for, 498. The
process of analysis, 502. The process of abstraction, 505. The
improvement of discrimination by practice, 508. Its two causes,
510. Practical interests limit our discrimination, 515. Reaction-
time after discrimination, 528. The perception of likeness, 528.
The magnitude of differences, 530. The measurement of dis-

xii CONTENTS.

PAGE
criminative sensibility : Weber’s law, 5383. Fechner’s interpreta-
tion of this as the psycho-physic law, 537. Criticism thereof, 545.
CHAPTER XIV. |
ASSOCIATION, : < , , : : : : . 550

The problem of the connection of our thoughts, 550. It
depends on mechanical conditions, 558. Association is of objects
thought-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 associa-
tion, 571. The law of interest, 572. Association by similarity,
578. Elementary expression of the difference between the three
kinds of association, 581. Association in voluntary thought, 583.
Similarity no elementary law, 590. History of the doctrine of
association, 594.

CHAPTER XV.

THE PERCEPTION OF TIME, . ; s A ; 4 . 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 our
time-estimate, 624. The feeling of past time is a present feeling,
627. Its cerebral process, 632.

CHAPTER XVI.
Memory, . ‘ : : ; : ; : . 643

Primary memory, 643. Analysis of the phenomenon of mem-
ory, 648. Retention and reproduction are both caused by paths
of association in the brain, 658. The conditions of goodness in
memory, 659. Native retentiveness is unchangeable, 663. All im-
provement of memory consists in better thinking, 667. Other con-
ditions of good memory, 669. Recognition, or the sense of famil-
iarity, 673. Exact measurements of memory, 676. Forgetting,
679. Pathological cases, 681. Professor Ladd criticised, 687.

PSYCHOLOGY.

CHAPTER I.
THE SCOPE OF PSYCHOLOGY.

PsycHoLoay is the Science of Mental Life, both of its
phenomena and of their conditions. ‘I'he phenomena are
such things as we call feelings, desires, cognitions, reason-
ings, decisions, and the like; and, superficially considered,
their variety and complexity is such as to leave a chaotic
impression on the observer. The most natural and con-
sequently the earliest way of unifying the material was,
first, to classify it as well as might be, and, secondly, to
affiliate the diverse mental modo» thus found, upon a
simple entity, the personal Soul, of which they are taken
to be so many facultative manifestations. Now, for in-
stance, the Soul manifests its faculty of Memory, now of
Reasoning, now of Volition, or again its Imagination or its
Appetite. This is the orthodox ‘spiritualistic’ theory of
scholasticism and of common-sense. Another and a less
obvious way of unifying the chaos is to seek common ele-
ments im the divers mental facts rather than a common
agent behind them, and to explain them constructively by
the various forms of arrangement of these elements, as one
explains houses by stones and bricks. The ‘association-
ist’ schools of Herbart in Germany, and of Hume the
Mills and Bain in Britain have thus constructed a psychology
without a soul by taking discrete ‘ideas,’ faint or vivid,
and showing how, by their cohesions, repulsions, and forms

2 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

of succession, such things as reminiscences, perceptions,
emotions, volitions, passions, theories, nd all the other
furnishings of an individual’s mind may be engendered.
The very Self or ego of the individual comes in this
way to be viewed no longer as the pre-existing source of
the representations, but rather as their last and most com-
plicated fruit.

Now, if we strive rigorously to simplify the phenomena
in either of these ways, we soon become aware of inade-
quacies in our method. Any particular cognition, for ex-
ample, or recollection, is accounted for on the soul-theory
by being referred to the spiritual faculties of Cognition
or of Memory. These faculties themselves are thought
of as absolute properties of the soul; that is, to take
the case of memory, no reason is given why we should
remember a fact as it happened, except that so to re-
member it constitutes the essence of our Recollective
Power. We may, as spiritualists, try to explain our mem-
ory’s failures and blunders by secondary causes. But
its successes can invoke no factors save the existence of
certain objective things to be remembered on the one
hand, and of our faculty of memory on the other. When,
for instance, I recall my graduation-day, and drag all its
incidents and emotions up from death’s dateless night, no
mechanical cause can explain this process, nor can any
analysis reduce it to lower terms or make its nature seem
other than an ultimate datum, which, whether we rebel or
not at its mysteriousness, must simply be taken for granted
if we are to psychologize at all. However the associationist
may represent the present ideas as thronging and arranging
themselves, still, the spiritualist insists, he has in the end to
admit that something, be it brain, be it ‘ideas,’ be it ‘ asso-
ciation,’ knows past time as past, and fills it out with this
or that event. And when the spiritualist calls memory an
‘irreducible faculty, he says no more than this admission
of the associationist already grants.

And yet the admission is far from being a satisfactory
simplification of the concrete facts. For why should this
absolute god-given Faculty retain so much better the events
of yesterday than those of last year, and, best of all, those

THE SCOPE OF PSYCHOLOG Y. 3

of an hour ago? Why, again, in old age should its grasp
of childhood’s events seem firmest ? Why should illness
and exhaustion enfeeble it? Why should repeating an ex-
perience strengthen our recollection of it? Why should
drugs, fevers, asphyxia, and excitement resuscitate things
long since forgotten ? If we content ourselves with merely
affirming that the faculty of memory is so peculiarly con-
stituted by nature as to exhibit just these oddities, we seem
little the better for having invoked it, for our explanation
becomes as complicated as that of the crude facts with which
we started. Moreover there is something grotesque and
irrational in the supposition that the soul is equipped with
‘ elementary powers of such an ingeniously intricate sort.
Why should our memory cling more easily to the near than
the remote? Why should it lose its grasp of proper sooner
than of abstract names? Such peculiarities seem quite fan-
tastic ; and might, for aught we can see a priori, be the
precise opposites of what they are. Evidently, then, the
faculty does not exisi absolutely, but works under conditions ,
and the quest of the conditions becomes the psychologist’s
most interesting task.

However firmly he may hold to the soul and her re-
membering faculty, he must acknowledge that she never
exerts the latter without a cve, and that something must al-
ways precede and remind us of whatever we are to recollect.
“ Anidea!” says the associationist, “an idea associated with
the remembered thing; and this explains also why things
repeatedly met with are more easily recollected, for their as-
sociates on the various occasions furnish so many distinct
avenues of recall.” But this does not explain the effects of
fever, exhaustion, hypnotism, old age, and the like. And
in general, the pure associationist’s account of our mental
life is almost as bewildering as that of the pure spiritualist.
This multitude of ideas, existing absolutely, yet clinging
together, and weaving an endless carpet of themselves, like
dominoes in ceaseless change, or the bits of glass in a
kaleidoscope,—whence do they get their fantastic laws of
clinging, and why do they cling in just the shapes they do ?

For this the associationist must introduce the order of
experience in the outer world. The dance of the ideas is

+t PSYCHOLOG Y.

a copy, somewhat mutilated and altered, of the order of
phenomena. But the slightest reflection shows that phe-
nomena have absolutely no power to influence our ideas
until they have first impressed our senses and our brain,
The bare existence of a past fact is no ground for our re-
membering it. Unless we have seen it, or somehow under-
gone it, we shall never know of its having been. The expe-
riences of the body are thus one of the conditions of the
faculty of memory being what it is. And a very small
amount of reflection on facts shows that one part of the
body, namely, the brain, is the part whose experiences are
directly concerned. If the nervous communication be cut
off between the brain and other parts, the experiences of
those other parts are non-existent for the mind. The eye
is blind, the ear deaf, the hand insensible and motionless.
And conversely, if the brain be injured, consciousness is
abolished or altered, even although every other organ in
the body be ready to play its normal part. A blow on the
head, a sudden subtraction of blood, the pressure of an
apoplectic hemorrhage, may have the first effect; whilst a
very few ounces of alcohol or grains of opium or hasheesh,
or a whiff of chloroform or nitrous oxide gas, are sure to
have the second. The delirium of fever, the altered self
of insanity, are all due to foreign matters circulating
through the brain, or to pathological changes in that
organ’s substance. The fact that the brain is the one
immediate bodily condition of the mental operations is
indeed so universally admitted nowadays that I need
spend no more time in illustrating it, but will simply
postulate it and pass on. The whole remainder of the
book will be more or less of a proof that the postulate was
correct.

Bodily experiences, therefore, and more particularly
brain-experiences, must take a place amongst those con-
ditions of the mentallife of which Psychology need take
account. The spiritualist and the associationist must both
be ‘cerebralists, to the extent at least of admitting that
certain peculiarities in the way of working of their own
favorite principles are explicable only by the fact that the
brain laws are a codeterminant of the result.

THE SCOPE OF PSYCHOLOGY. 5

Our first conclusion, then, is that a certain amount of
brain-physiology must be presupposed or included in
Psychology.*

In still another way the pyschologist is forced to be
something of a nerve-physiologist. Mental phenomena are
not only conditioned a parte ante by bodily processes; but
they lead to them a parte post. That they lead to acts is of
course the most familiar of truths, but Ido not merely mean
acts in the sense of voluntary and deliberate muscular
performances. Mental states occasion also changes in the
calibre of blood-vessels, or alteration in the heart-beats, or
processes more subtle still, in glands and viscera. If these
are taken into account, as well as acts which follow at some
remote period because the mental state was once there, it will
be safe to lay down the general law that no mental modifica-
tion ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily
change. The ideas and feelings, e.g., which these present
printed characters excite in the reader’s mind not only
occasion movements of his eyes and nascent movements of
articulation in him, but will some day make him speak, or
take sides in a discussion, or give advice, or choose a book
to read, differently from what would have been the case had
they never impressed his retina. Our psychology must there-
fore take account not only of the conditions antecedent to
mental states, but of their resultant consequences as well.

But actions originally prompted by conscious intelli-
gence may grow so automatic by dint of habit as to be
apparently unconsciously performed. Standing, walking,
buttoning and unbuttoning, piano-playing, talking, even
saying one’s prayers, may be done when the mind is ab-
sorbed in other things. The performances of animai
instinct seem semi-automatic, and the reflex acts of self-
preservation certainly are so. Yet they resemble intelli-
gent acts in bringing about the same ends at which the ani-
mals’ consciousness, on other occasions, deliberately aims.

* Of. Geo. T. Ladd: Elements of Physiological Psychology (1887), pt
m1, chap. rr, §§ 9, 12.

8 PSYCHOLOG Y.

Shall the study of such machine-like yet purposive acts as
these be included in Psychology ?

The boundary-line of the mental is certainly vague. It
is better not to be pedantic, but to let the science be as
vague as its subject, and include such phenomena as these
if by so doing we can throw any light on the main business
in hand. It will ere long be seen, I trust, that we can;
and that we gain much more by a broad than by a narrow
conception of our subject. At a certain stage in the devel-
opment of every science a degree of vagueness is what
best consists with fertility. On the whole, few recent for-
mulas have done more real service of a rough sort in psy-
chology than the Spencerian one that the essence of mental’
life and of bodily life are one, namely, ‘the adjustment of
inner to outer relations.’ Such a formula is vagueness
incarnate; but because it takes into account the fact that
minds inhabit environments which act on them and on
which they in turn react; because, in short, it takes mind
in the midst of all its concrete relations, it is immensely
more fertile than the old-fashioned ‘ rational psychology,’
which treated the soul as a detached existent, sufficient
unto itself, and assumed to consider only its nature and
properties. I shall therefore feel free to make any sallies
into zoology or intc pure nerve-physiology which may
seem instructive for our purposes, but otherwise shall leave
those sciences to the physiologists.

Can we state more distinctly still the manner in which
the mental life seems to intervene between impressions
made from without upon the body, and reactions of the
body upon the outer world again? Let us look at a few
facts.

If some iron filings be sprinkled on a table and a mag-
net brought near them, they will fly through the air for a
certain distance and stick to its surface. A savage see-
ing the phenomenon explains it as the result of an attrac-
tion or love between the magnet and the filings. But
let a card cover the poles of the magnet, and the filings
will press forever against its surface without its ever oc-
curring to them to pass around its sides and thus come into

THE SCOPE OF PSYCHOLOGY. 7

more direct contact with the object of their love. Blow
bubbles through a tube into the bottom of a pail of water,
they will rise to the surface and mingle with the air. Their
action may again be poetically interpreted as due to a
longing to reccmbine with the mother-atmosphere above
the surface. But if you invert a jar full of water over the
pail, they will rise and remain lodged beneath its bottom,
shut in from the outer air, although a slight deflection
from their course at the outset, or a re-descent towards the
rim of the jar when they found their upward course im-
peded, would easily have set them free.

If now we pass from such actions as these to those of
living things, we notice a striking difference. Romeo wants
Juliet as the filings want the magnet; and if no obstacles
intervene he moves towards her by as straight a line as
they. But Romeo and Juliet, if a wall be built between
them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against
its opposite sides like the magnet and the filings with the
card. Romeo soon finds a circuitous way, by scaling the
wall or otherwise, of touching Juliet’s lips directly. With
the filings the path is fixed; whether it reaches the end
depends on accidents. With the lover it is the end which
is fixed, the path may be modified indefinitely.

Suppose a living frog in the position in which we placed
our bubbles of air, namely, at the bottom of a jar of water.
The want >f breath will soon make him also Jong to rejoin
the mother-atmosphere, and he will take the shortest path
to his end by swimming straight upwards. But if a jar
full of water be inverted over him, he will not, like the
bubbles, perpetually press his nose against its unyielding
roof, but will restlessly explore the neighborhood until
by re-descending again he has discovered a path round its
brim to the goal of his desires. Again the fixed end, the
varying means!

Such contrasts between living and inanimate perform-
ances end by leading men to deny that in the physical
world final purposes exist at all. Loves and desires are
to-day no longer imputed to particles of iron or of air.
No one supposes now that the end of any activity which
they may display is an ideal purpose presiding over the

8 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

activity from its outset and soliciting or drawing it into
being by a sort of vis a fronte. The end, on the contrary, is
deemed a mere passive result, pushed into being a tergo,
having had, so to speak, no voice in its own production,
Alter the pre-existing conditions, and with inorganic ma~
terials you bring forth each time a different apparent end.
But with intelligent agents, altering the conditions changes
the activity displayed, but not the end reached; for here
the idea of the yet unrealized end co-operates with the con-
ditions to determine what the activities shall be.

The pursuance of future ends and the choice of means for
their attainment are thus the mark and criterion of the presence
of mentality ina phenomenon. We all use this test to dis-
criminate between an intelligent and a mechanical per-
formance. We impute no mentality to sticks and stones,
because they never seem to move for the sake of anything,
but always when pushed, and then indifferently and with no
sign of choice. So we unhesitatingly call them senseless.

Just so we form our decision upon the deepest of all
philosophic problems: Is the Kosmos an expression of
intelligence rational in its inward nature, or a brute ex-
ternal fact pure and simple? If we find ourselves, in con-
templating it, unable to banish the impression that it is a
realm of final purposes, that it exists for the sake of some-
thing, we place intelligence at the heart of it and havea
religion. If, on the contrary, in surveying its irremediable
flux, we can think of the present only as so much mere
mechanical sprouting from the past, occurring with no
reference to the future, we are atheists and materialists.

In the lengthy discussions which psychologists have
carried on about the amount of intelligence displayed by
lower mammals, or the amount of consciousness involved in
the functions of the nerve-centres of reptiles, the same test
has always been applied: Is the character of the actions
such that we must believe them to be performed for the sake
of their result? The result in question, as we shall here-
after abundantly see, is as a rule a useful one,—the animal
is, on the whole, safer under the circumstances for bringing
it forth. So far the action has a teleological character;

THE SCOPE OF PSYCHOLOGY. 9

but such mere outward teleology as this might still be the
blind result of vis a tergo. The growth-and movements of
plants, the processes of development, digestion, secretion,
etc., in animals, supply innumerable instances of per-
formances useful to the individual which may nevertheless
be, and by most of us are supposed to be, produced by
automatic mechanism. The physivlogist does not con-
fidently assert conscious intelligence in the frog’s spinal
cord until he has shown that the useful result which the
nervous machinery brings forth under a given irritation
remains the same when the machinery is altered. If, to take
the stock instance, the right knee of a headless frog be irri-
tated with acid, the right foot will wipe it off. When, how-
ever, this foot is amputated, the animal will often raise the
left foot to the spot and wipe the offending material away.

Pfliiger and Lewes reason from such facts in the follow-
ing way : Ifthe first reaction were the result of mere machin-
ery, they say ; if that irritated portion of the skin discharged
the right leg as a trigger discharges its own barrel of a shot-
gun; then amputating the right foot would indeed frustrate
the wiping, but would not make the left leg move. It would
simply result in the right stump moving through the empty
air (which is in fact the phenomenon sometimes observed),
The right trigger makes no effort to discharge the left barre]
if the right one be unloaded ; nor does an electrical ma-
chine ever 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 the
purpose of wiping the acid, then nothing is more natura]
than that, when the easiest means of effecting that purpose
prove fruitless, other means should be tried. Every failure
must keep the animal in a state of disappointment which
will lead to all sorts of new trials and devices; and tran-
quillity will not ensue till one of these, by a happy stroke,
achieves the wished-for end.

In a similar way Goltz ascribes intelligence to the
frog’s optic lobesand cerebellum. We alluded above to the
manner in which a sound frog imprisoned in water will dis-
cover an outlet to the atmosphere. Goltz found that frogs
deprived of their cerebral hemispheres would often exhibit

10 PSYCHOLOGY.

a like ingenuity. Such a frog, after rising from the bottom
and finding his farther upward progress checked by the
glass bell which has been inverted over him, will not per-
sist in butting his nose against the obstacle until dead of
suffocation, but will often re-descend and emerge from under
its rim as if, not a definite mechanical propulsion upwards,
but rather a conscious desire to reach the air by hook or
crook were the main-spring of his activity. Goltz con-
cluded from this that the hemispheres are not the sole seat
of intellect in frogs. He made the same inference from
observing that a brainless frog will turn over from his back
to his belly when one of his legs is sewed up, although the
movements required are then very different from those
excited under normal circumstances by the same annoying
position. They seem determined, consequently, not merely
by the antecedent irritant, but by the final end,—though the
irritant of course is what makes the end desired.

Another brilliant German author, Liebmann,* argues
against the brain’s mechanism accounting for mentai action,
by very similar considerations. A machine as such, he
says, will bring forth right results when it is in good order,
and wrong results if out of repair. But both kinds of result
flow with equally fatal necessity from their conditions. We
cannot suppose the clock-work whose structure fatally
determines it to a certain rate of speed, noticing that this
speed is too slow or too fast and vainly trying to correct it.
Its conscience, if it have any, should be as good as that of
the best chronometer, for both alike obey equally well the
same eternal mechanical laws—laws from behind. But if
the brain be out of order and the man says “ Twice four are
two,” instead of ‘Twice four are eight,” or else “ I must go
to the coal to buy the wharf,” instead of “I must go to the
wharf to buy the coal,” instantly there arises a conscious-
ness of error. The wrong performance, though it obey the
same mechanical law as the right, is nevertheless con-
demned,—condemned as contradicting the inner law—the
law from in front, the purpose or ideal for which the brain
should act, whether it do so or not.

ee

* Zur Analysis der Wirklichkeit, p. 489.

THE SCOPE OF PSYCHOLOGY. 1}

We need not discuss here whether these writers in draw-
ing their conclusion have done justice to all the premises
involved in the cases they treat of. We quote their argu-
ments only to show how they appeal to the principle that
no actions but such as are done for an end, and show a choice of
means, can be culled indubitable expressions of Mind.

I shall then adopt this as the criterion by which to cir-
cumscribe the subject-matter of this work so far as action
enters into it. Many nervous performances will therefore
be unmentioned, as being purely physiological. Nor will the
anatomy of the nervous system and organs of sense be
described anew. ‘The reader will find in H. N. Martin’s
‘Human Body,’ in G. T. Ladd’s ‘ Physiological Psychol-
ogy, and in all the other standard Anatomies and Physi-
ologies, a mass of information which we must regard as pre-
liminary and take for granted in the present work.* Of
the functions of the cerebral hemispheres, however, since
they directly subserve consciousness, it will be well to
give some little account.

* Nothing is easier than to familiarize one’s self with the mammalian
brain. Get asheep’s head, a small saw, chisel, scalpel and forceps (all
three can best be had from a surgical-instrument maker), and unriivel its
parts either by the aid of a human dissecting book,such as Holden’s‘Manual
of Anatomy,’ or by the specific directions ad hoe given in such books as
Foster and Lawgley’s ‘Practical Physiology’ (Macmillan) or Morrell’s
‘Comparative Anatomy and Dissection of Mammalia’ (Longmans).

CHAPTER II.
THE FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN.

Ir I begin chopping the foot of a tree, its branches are
unmoved by my act, and its leaves murmur as peacefully as
ever in the wind. If, on the contrary, I do violence to the
foot of a fellow-man, the rest of his body instantly responds
to the aggression by movements of alarm or defence. The
reason of this difference is that the man has a nervous system
whilst the tree has none; and the function of the nervous
system is to bring each part into harmonious co-operation
with every other. The afferent nerves, when excited by
some physical irritant, be this as gross in its mode of oper-
ation as a chopping axe or as subtle as the waves of lighi,
conveys the excitement to the nervous centres. The com-
motion set up in the centres does not stop there, but dis-
charges itself, if at all strong, through the efferent nerves
into muscles and glands, exciting movements of the limbs
and viscera, or acts of secretion, which vary with the animal,
and with the irritant applied. These acts of response have
usually the common character of being of service. They
ward off the noxious stimulus and support the beneficial
one; whilst if, in itself indifferent, the stimulus be a sign of
some distant circumstance of practical importance, the
animal’s acts are addressed to this circumstance so as to
avoid 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-waves
falling on my tympanum by quickening their movements.
If I stumble as I run, the sensation of falling provokes a
movement of the hands towards the direction of the fall,
the effect of which is to shield the body from too sudden a
shock. If a cinder enter my eye, its lids close forcibly
and a copious flow of tears tends to wash it out.

12

THE FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 13

These three responses to a sensational stimulus differ,
however, in many respects. The closure of the eye and the
Jachrymation are quite involuntary, and so is the disturbance °
of the heart. Such involuntary responses we know as
‘reflex’ acts. The motion of the arms to break the shock
of falling may also be called reflex, since it occurs too
quickly to be deliberately intended. Whether it be instinc-
tive or whether it result from the pedestrian education of
childhood may be doubtful ; it is, at any rate, less automatic
than the previous acts, for a man might by conscious effort
learn to perform it more skilfully, or even to suppress it alto-
gether. Actions of this kind, into which instinct and volition
enter upon equal terms, have been called ‘semi-reflex.’ The
act of running towards the train, on the other hand, has no
instinctive element about it. Itis purely the result of edu-
cation, and is preceded by a consciousness of the purpose to
be attained and a distinct mandate of the will. It is a ‘vol-
untary act.’ Thus the animal’s reflex and voluntary per-
formances shade into each other gradually, being connected
by acts which may often occur automatically, but may also
be modified by conscious intelligence.

An outside observer, unable to perceive the accompany-
ing consciousness, might be wholly at a loss to discriminate
between the automatic acts and those which volition es-
corted. But if the criterion of mind’s existence be the
choice of the proper means for the attainment of a supposed
end, all the acts seem to be inspired by intelligence, for
appropriateness characterizes them all alike. This fact, now,
has led to two quite opposite theories about the relation to
consciousness of the nervous functions. Some authors,
finding that the higher voluntary ones seem to require the
guidance of feeling, conclude that over the lowest reflexes
some such feeling also presides, though it may be a feeling
of which we remain unconscious. Others, finding that reflex
and semi-automatic acts may, notwithstanding their appro-
priateness, take place with an unconsciousness apparently
complete, fly to the opposite extreme and maintain that the
appropriateness even of voluntary actions owes nothing to
the fact that consciousness attends them. They are, accord-
ing to these writers, results of physiological mechanism pure

14 PSYCHOLUGY.

and simple. In a near chapter we shall return to this
controversy again. Let us now look a little more closely
at the brain and at the ways in which its states may be sup-
posed to condition those of the mind.

THE FROG’S NERVE-CENTRES.

Both the minute anatomy and the detailed physiology
of the brain are achievements of the present generation, or
rather we may say (beginning with Meynert) of the past
twenty years. Many points are still obscure and subject
to controversy ; but a general way of conceiving the organ
has been reached on all hands which in its main feature
seems not unlikely to stand, and which even gives a most
plausible scheme of the way in which cerebral and mental
operations go hand in hand.

The best way to enter the subject will be to take a lower
creature, like a frog, and study by the vivisectional method
the functions of his different nerve-centres. The frog’s
nerve-centres are figured in the accompany-
ing diagram, which needs no further ex-
planation. I will first proceed to state
what happens when various amounts of
the anterior parts are removed, in different
frogs, in the way in which an ordinary
student removes them; that is, with no ex-
treme precautions as to the purity of the
operation. We shall in this way reach a
very simple conception of the functions of
the various centres, involving the strongest
possible contrast between the cerebral
Fig, 1. ¢ H, Cerebral hemispheres and the lower lobes. | This

Optic Thalami; OL; sharp conception will have didactic ad-
Cuceaiin tiie O; vantages, for it is often very instructive
Medulla Oblongata; ; 5 °

SC,Spinal Cord. to start with too simple a formula and
correct it later on. Our first formula, as we shall later
see, will have to be softened down somewhat by the results
of more careful experimentation both on frogs and birds,
and by those of the most recent observations on dogs,

THE FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 15

monkeys, and man. But it will put us, from the outset, in
clear possession of some fundamental notions and distine-
tions which we could otherwise not gain so well, and none
of which the later more completed view will overturn.

If, then, we reduce the frog’s nervous system to the
spinal cord alone, by making a section behind the base of
the skull, between the spinal cord and the medulla oblon-
gata, thereby cutting off the brain from all connection with
the rest of the body, the frog will still continue to live, but
with a very peculiarly modified activity. It ceases to breathe
or swallow; it lies flat on its belly, and does not, like a
normal frog, sit up on its fore paws, though its hind legs are
kept, as usual, folded against its body and immediately re-
sume this position if drawn out. If thrown on its back, it
lies there quietly, without turning over like a normal frog.
Locomotion and voice seem entirely abolished. If we sus-
pend it by the nose, and irritate different portions of its
skin by acid, it performs a set of remarkable ‘defensive’
movements calculated to wipe away the irritant. Thus, if
the breast be touched, both fore paws will rub it vigorously;
if we touch the outer side of the elbow, the hind foot of the
same side will rise directly to the spot and wipe it. The
back of the foot will rub the knee if that be attacked, whilst
if the foot be cut away, the stump will make ineffectual
movements, and then, in many frogs, a pause will come, as
if for deliberation, succeeded by a rapid passage of the
opposite 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 of
irritation, so little as almost to resemble in their machine-
like regularity the performances of a jumping-jack, whose
legs must twitch whenever you pull the string. The spinal
cord of the frog thus contains arrangements of cells and
fibres fitted to convert skin irritations into movements of
defence. We may call it the centre for defensive movements
in this animal. We may indeed go farther than this, and
by cutting the spinal cord in various places find that its
separate segments are independent mechanisms, for appro-
priate activities of the head and of the arms and legs respec-

16 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

tively. The segment governing the arms is especially
active, in male frogs, in the breeding season; and these mem-
bers alone with the breast and back appertaining to them,
everything else being cut away, will then actively grasp a
finger placed between them and remain hanging to it for a
considerable time.

The spinal cord in other animals has analogous powers.
Even in man it makes movements of defence. Paraplegics
draw up their legs when tickled; and Robin, on tickling
the breast of a criminal an hour after decapitation, saw the
arm and hand move towards the spot. Of the lower fune-
tions of the mammalian cord, studied so ably by Goltz and
others, this is not the place to speak.

If, in a second animal, the cut be made just behind the
optic lobes so that the cerebellum and medulla oblongata
remain attached to the cord, then swallowing, breathing,
crawling, and a rather enfeebled jumping and swimming
are added to the movements previously observed.* 'There
are other reflexes too. The animal, thrown on his back,
immediately turns over to his belly. Placed in a shallow
bowl, which is floated on water and made to rotate, he re-
sponds to the rotation by first turning his head and then
waltzing around with his entire body, in the opposite direc-
tion to the whirling of the bowl. If his support be tilted so
that his head points downwards, he points it up; he points
it down if it be pointed upwards, to the right if it be
pointed to the left, etc. But his reactions do not go
farther than these movements of the head. He will not,
like frogs whose thalami are preserved, climb up a board
if the latter be tilted, but will slide off it to the ground.

If the cut be made on another frog between the tha-
lami and the optic lobes, the locomotion both on land
and water becomes quite normal, and, in addition to the
reflexes already shown by the lower centres, he croaks
regularly whenever he is pinched under the arms. He
compensates rotations, etc., by movements of the head, and
turns over from his back; but still drops off his tilted

* It should be said that this particular cut commonly proves fatal. The
text refers to the rare cases which survive.

THE FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. a iy

board. As his optic nerves are destroyed by the usual
operation, it is impossible to say whether he will avoid
obstacles placed in his path.

When, finally, a frog’s cerebral hemispheres alone are cut
off by a section between them and the thalami which pre-
serves the latter, an unpractised observer would not at first
suspect anything abnormal about the animal. Not only is
he capable, on proper instigation, of all the acts already
described, but he guides himself by sight, so that if an
obstacle be set up between him and the light, and he be
forced to move forward, he either jumps over it or swerves
to one side. He manifests sexual passion at the proper
season, and, unlike an altogether brainless frog, which em-
braces anything placed between his arms, postpones this’
reflex act until a female of his own species is provided.
Thus far, as aforesaid, a person unfamiliar with frogs
might not suspect a mutilation; but even such a person
would soon remark the almost entire absence of spontane-
ous motion—that is, motion unprovoked by any present in-
citation of sense. The continued movements of swimming,
performed by the creature in the water, seem to be the
fatal result of the contact of that fluid with its skin. They
cease when a stick, for example, touches his hands. This
is a sensible irritant towards which the feet are automatic-
ally drawn by reflex action, and on which the animal re-
mains sitting. He manifests no hunger, and will suffer a
fly to crawl over his nose unsnapped at. Fear, too, seems
to have deserted him. In a word, he is an extremely com-
plex machine whose actions, so far as they go, tend to
self-preservation ; but still a machine, in this sense—that it
seems to contain no incalculable element. By applying
the right sensory stimulus to him we are almost as certain
of getting a fixed response as an organist is of hearing a
certain tone when he pulls out a certain stop.

But now if to the lower centres we add the cerebral
hemispheres, or if, in other words, we make an intact ani-
mal the subject of our observations, all this is changed. In
addition to the previous responses to present incitements
of sense, our frog now goes through long and complex acts
of locomotion spontaneously, or as if moved by what in our-

18 PSYCHOLOGY.

selves we should call an idea. His reactions to outward
stimuli vary their form, too. Instead of making simple
defensive movements with his hind legs like a headless
frog if touched, or of giving one or two leaps and then sit-
ting still like a hemisphereless one, he makes persistent
and varied efforts at escape, as if, not the mere contact of
the physiologist’s hand, but the notion of danger suggested
by it were now his spur. Led by the feeling of hunger,
too, he goes in search of insects, fish, or smaller frogs, and
varies his procedure with each species of victim. The
physiologist cannot by manipulating him elicit croaking,
erawling up a board, swimming or stopping, at will. His
conduct has become incalculable. We can no longer foretell
it exactly. Effort to escape is his dominant reaction, but
he may do anything else, even swell up and become per-
fectly passive in our hands.

Such are the phenomena commonly observed, and such
the impressions which one naturally receives. Certain
general conclusions follow irresistibly. First of all the
following:

The acts of all the centres involve the use of the same
muscles. When a headless frog’s hind leg wipes the acid, he
calls into play all the leg-muscles which a frog with his
full medulla oblongata and cerebellum uses when he turns
from his back to his belly. Their contractions are, how-
ever, combined differently in the two cases, so that the re-
sults vary widely. We must consequently conclude that
specific arrangements of cells and fibres exist in the
cord for wiping, in the medulla for turning over, ete.
Similarly they exist in the thalami for jumping over
seen obstacles and for balancing the moved body; in the
optic lobes for creeping backwards, or what not. But in
the hemispheres, since the presence of these organs brings
no new elementary form of movement with it, but only deter-
mines differently the occasions on which the movements shall
occur, making the usual stimuli less fatal and machine-like ;
we need suppose no such machinery directly co-ordinative
of muscular contzactions to exist. We may rather assume,
when the mandate for a wiping-movement is sent forth by

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 19

the hemispheres, that a current goes straight to the wiping-
arrangement in the spinal cord, exciting this arrangement
as a whole. Similarly, if an intact frog wishes to jump
over a stone which he sees, all he need do is to excite from
the hemispheres the jumping-centre in the thalami or
wherever it may be, and the latter will provide for the de-
tails of the execution. It is like a general ordering a
colonel to make a certain movement, but not telling him
how it shall be done.*

The same muscle, then, is repeatedly represented at different
heights; and at each it enters into a different combination
with other muscles to co-operate in some special form of
concerted movement. At each height the movement is dis-
charged by some particular form of sensorial stimulus. Thus
in the cord, the skin alone occasions movements; in the
upper part of the optic lobes, the eyes are added; in the
thalami, the semi-circular canals would seem to play a part;
whilst the stimuli which discharge the hemispheres would
seem not so much to be elementary sorts of sensation, as
groups ot sensations forming determinate objects or things.
Prey is not pursued nor are enemies shunned by ordinary
hemisphereless frogs. Those reactions upon complex cir-
cumstances which we call instinctive rather than reflex, are
already ‘n this animal dependent on the brain’s highest
lobes, and still more is this the case with animals higher
in the zoological scale.

The results are just the same if, instead of a frog, we
take a pigeon, and cut out his hemispheres as they are ordi-
narily cut out for a lecture-room demonstration. There is
not a movement natural to him which this brainless bird
cannot perform if expressly excited thereto; only the inner
promptings seem deficient, and when left to himself he
spends most of his time crouched on the ground with his
head sunk between his shoulders as if asleep.

* T confine myself to the frog for simplicity’s sake. In higheranimals,
especially the ape and man, it would seem as if not only determinate com-
binations of muscles, but limited groups or even single muscles could be
innervated from the hemispheres.

20 PSYCHOLOGY.

GENERAL NOTION OF HEMISPHERES.

All these facts lead us, when we think about them, to
some such explanatory conception as this: The lower centres
act from present sensational stimuli alone; the hemispheres act
from perceptions and considerations, the sensations which they
may receive serving only as suggesters of these. But what
are perceptions but sensations grouped together? and what
are considerations but expectations, in the fancy, of sensa-
tions which will be felt one way or another according as”
action takes this course or that? If I step aside on seeing
a rattlesnake, from considering how dangerous an animal
he is, the mental materials which constitute my prudential
reflection are images more or less vivid of the movement
of 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 images
are constructed out of my past experiences. They are repro-
ductions of what I have felt or witnessed. They are, in
short, remote sensations ; and the difference between the hemi-
sphereless animal and the whole one may be concisely ex-
pressed by saying that the one obeys absent, the other only
present, objects.

The hemispheres would then seem to be the seat of mem-
ory. Vestiges of past experience must in some way be
stored up in them, and must, when aroused by present
stimuli, first appear as representations of distant goods
and evils; and then must discharge into the appropriate
motor channels for warding off the evil and securing the
benefits of the good. If we liken the nervous currents to
electric currents, we can compare the nervous system, C,
below the hemispheres to a direct circuit from sense-
organ to muscle along the line 8S... OC... M of Fig. 2(p. 21).
The hemisphere, H, adds the long circuit or loop-line
through which the current may pass when for any reason
the direct line is not used.

Thus, a tired wayfarer on a hot day throws himself on

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 21

the damp earth beneath a maple-tree. The sensations of
delicious rest and coolness pour-
ing themselves through the direct
line would naturally discharge into
the muscles of complete exten-
sion: he would abandon himself
to the dangerous repose. But the
loop-line being open, part of the
current is drafted along it, and
awakens rheumatic or catarrhal
reminiscences, which prevail over
the ppg tons of sense, and make ee:

the’'man arise and pursue his way to where he may enjoy his
rest more safely. Presently we shall examine the manner
in which the hemispheric loop-line may be supposed to
serve as a reservoir for such reminiscences as these. Mean-
while I will ask the reader to notice some corollaries of its
being such a reservoir.

First, no animal without it can deliberate, pause, post-
pone, nicely weigh one motive against another, or compare.
Prudence, in a word, is for such a creature an impossible
virtue.. Accordingly we see that nature removes those func-
tions in the exercise of which prudence is a virtue from the
lower centres and hands them over to the cerebrum. Wher-
ever a creature has to deal with complex features of the en-
vironment, prudence is a virtue. The higher animals have so
to deal; and the more complex the features, the higher we
call the animals. The fewer of his acts, then, can such an
animal 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 very
few indeed; and in apes and men hardly any at all.

The advantages of this are obvious. Take the prehen-
sion of food as an example and suppose it to be a reflex
performance of the lower centres. The animal will be con-
demned fatally and irresistibly to snap at it whenever
presented, no matter what the circumstances may be;
he can no more disobey this prompting than water can
refuse to boil when a fire is kindled under the pot. His
life will again and again pay the forfeit of his gluttony.

22 PSYCHOLOGY.

Exposure to retaliation, to other enemies, to traps, to
poisons, to the dangers of repletion, must be regular
parts of his existence. His lack of all thought by which to
weigh the danger against the attractiveness of the bait, and
of all volition to remain hungry a little while longer,
is the direct measure of his lowness in the mental seale.
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 soon
expiate the degradation of their intelligence by the extinc-
tion of their type, did not their exaggerated fecundity atone
for their imprudence. Appetite and the acts it prompts
have consequently become in all higher vertebrates func-
tions of the cerebrum. They disappear when the physiol-
ogist’s knife nas 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 devolves
exclusively upon the hemispheres. When these are shorn
away the pigeon pays no attention to the billings and coo-
ings of its mate. And Goltz found that a bitch in heat
would excite no emotion in male dogs who had suffered
large loss of cerebral tissue. Those who have read Dar-.
win’s ‘ Descent of Man’ know what immense importance in
the amelioration of the breed in birds this author ascribes
to the mere fact of sexual selection. The sexual act is not
performed until every condition of circumstance and senti-
ment is fulfilled, until time, place, and partner all are fit.
But in frogs and toads this passion devolves on the lower
centres. They show consequently a machine-like obe-
dience to the present incitement of sense, and an almost
total exclusion of the power of choice. Copuiation occurs
per fas aut nefas, occasionally between males, often with
dead females, in puddles exposed on the highway, and
the male may be cut in two without letting go his hold.
Every spring an immense sacrifice of batrachian life takes
place from these causes alone.

No one need be told how dependent all human social
elevation is upon the prevalence of chastity. Hardly any
factor measures more than this the difference between civili«

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 23

zation and barbarism. Physiologically interpreted, chastity
means nothing more than the fact that present solicitations
of sense are overpowered by suggestions of esthetic and
moral fitness which the circumstances awaken in the
cerebrum ; and that upon the inhibitory or permissive in-
fluence of these alone action directly depends.

Within the psychic life due to the cerebrum itself the
same general distinction obtains, between considerations of
the more immediate and considerations of the more remote.
In all ages the man whose determinations are swayed by
reference to the most distant ends has been held to possess
the highest intelligence. The tramp who lives from hour
to hour; the bohemian whose engagements are from day
to day; the bachelor who builds but for a single life;
the father who acts for another generation ; the patriot
who thinks of a whole community and many generations ;
and finally, the philosopher and saint whose cares are for
humanity and for eternity,—these range themselves in an
unbroken hierarchy, wherein each successive grade results
from an increased manifestation of the special form of
action by which the cerebral centres are distinguished
from all below them.

In the ‘loop-line’ along which the memories and ideas
of the distant are supposed to lie, the action, so far as it is
a physical process, must ve interpreted after the type of the
action in the lower centres. If regarded here as a reflex
process, it must be reflex there as well. The current in
both places runs out into the muscles only after it has first
run in; but whilst the path by which it runs out is deter-
mined in the lower centres by reflections few and fixed
amongst the cell-arrangements, in the hemispheres the
reflections are many and instable. This, it will be seen, is
only a difference of degree and not of kind, and does not
change the reflex type. The conception of all action as
conforming to this type is the fundamental conception of
modern nerve-physiology. So much for our general pre-
liminary conception of the nerve-centres! Let us define it
more distinctly before we see how well physiological ob-
servation will bear it out in detail.

24 PSYCHOLOG Y.

THE EDUCATION OF THE HEMISPHERES.

Nerve-currents run in through sense-organs, and whilst
provoking reflex acts in the lower centres, they arouse ideas
in the hemispheres, which either permit the reflexes in
question, check them, or substitute others for them. All
ideas being in the last resort reminiscences, the question to
answer is: How can processes become organized in the hemi-
spheres which correspond to reminiscences in the mind ?*

Nothing is easier than to conceive a possible way in
which this might be done, provided four assumptions be
granted. ‘These assumptions (which after all are inevitable
in any event) are:

1) The same cerebral process which, when aroused
from without by a sense-organ, gives the perception of an
object, will give an idea of the same object when aroused
by other cerebral processes from within.

2) If processes 1, 2, 3,4 have once been aroused to-
gether or in immediate succession, any subsequent arousal
of any one of them (whether from without or within) will
tend to arouse the others in the original order. [This is the
so-called law of association. |

3) Every sensorial excitement propagated to a lower
centre tends to spread upwards and arouse an idea.

4) Every idea tends ultimately either to produce a
movement or to check one which otherwise would be pro-
duced.

Suppose now (these assumptions being granted) that we
have a baby before us who sees a candle-flame for the first

* [ hope that the reader will take no umbrage at my so mixing the
physical and mental, and talking of refiex acts and hemispheres and remi-
niscences in the same breath, as if they were homogeneous quantities and
factors of one causal chain. I have done so deliberately ; for although I
admit that from the radically physical point of view it is easy to conceive —
of 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,’
{ yet suspect that point of view of being an unreal abstraction. Reflexes
in centres may take place even where accompanying feelings or ideas guide
them. In another chapter I shall try to show reasons for not abandoning
this common-sense position ; meanwhile language lends itself so much
more easily to the mixed way of describing, that I will continue to employ
the latter. The more radical-minded reader can always read ‘ ideational
process’ for * idea.’

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 25

time, and, by virtue of a reflex tendency common in babies
of a certain age, extends his
hand to grasp it, so that his
fingers get burned. So far we
have two reflex currents in
play: first, from the eye to the
extension movement, along the
line 1—1—1—1 of Fig. 3; and
second, from the finger to the
movement of drawing back the
hand, along the line 2—2—2—2,
If this were the baby’s whole
nervous system, and if the re-
flexes were once for all organic,
we should have no alteration in his behavior, no matter
how often the experience recurred. The retinal image of
the flame would always make the arm shoot forward, the
burning of the finger would always send it back. But we
know that ‘the burnt child dreads the fire,’ and that one
experience usually protects the fingers forever. The point
is to see how the hemispheres may bring this result to pass.
We must complicate our diagram (see Fig. 4). Let
the current 1—1, from the eye, discharge upward as well as
downward when it reaches the lower centre for vision, and
arouse the perceptional process s' in the hemispheres ;_ let
the feeling of the arm’s exten-
sion also send up a current
which leaves a trace of itself,
m'; let the burnt finger leave
an analogous trace, s°; and
let the movement of retrac-
tion leave m*. ‘These four
processes will now, by virtue
of assumption 2), be associ-
ated together by the path
s'—m'—s’—m’*, running from
Peete the fst to the Tas no tha
plana, ything touches off s’, ideas
of the extension, of the burnt

finger, and of the retraction will pass in rapid succession

=)

MMi,
= MWS

Fia. 3.

SJ

1)
ANY! UA
Mp

26 PSYCHOLOG ¥Y.

through the mind. The effect on the child’s conduct when
the candle flame is next presented is easy to imagine. Of
course the sight of it arouses the grasping reflex; but it
arouses simultaneously the idea thereof, together with that
of the consequent pain, and of the final retraction of the
hand; and if these cerebral processes prevail in strength
over the immediate sensation in the centres below, the last
idea will be the cue by which the final action is discharged.
The grasping will be arrested in mid-career, the hand
drawn back, and the child’s fingers saved.

In all this we assume that the hemispheres do not
natively couple any particular sense-impression with any
special motor discharge. They only register, and preserve
traces of, such couplings as are already organized in the
reflex centres below. But this brings it inevitably about
that, when a chain of experiences has been already regis-
tered and the first link is impressed once again from without,
the last link will often be awakened in idea long before it
can exist in fact. And if this last link were previously
coupled with a motion, that motion may now come from the
mere ideal suggestion without waiting for the actual impres-
sion to arise. Thus an animal with hemispheres acts in an-
ticipation of future things ; or, to use our previous formula, he
acts from considerations of distant good and ill. If we give
the name of partners to the original couplings of impressions
with motions in a reflex way, then we may say that the func-
tion of the hemispheres is simply to bring about exchanges
among the partners. Movement m”, which natively is sensa-
tion s”’s partner, becomes through the hemispheres the
partner of sensation s’, s* or s*. It is like the great com-
mutating switch-board at a central telephone station. No
new elementary process is involved ; no impression nor any
motion peculiar to the hemispheres; but any number of
combinations impossible to the lower machinery taken
alone, and an endless consequent increase in the possibilities
of behavior on the creature’s part.

All this, as a mere scheme,* is so clear and so concordant

* [shall call it hereafter for shortness ‘the Meynert scheme;’ for the
child-and-flame example, as well as the whole general notion that the hemi-
spheres are a supernumerary surface for the projection and association of

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 27

with the general look of the facts as almost to impose itself
on our belief; but it is anything but clear in detail. The
brain-physiology of late years has with great effort sought
to work out the paths by which these couplings of sensa-
tions with movements take piace, both in the hemispheres
and in the centres below.

So we must next test our scheme by the facts discovered
in this direction. We shall conclude, I think, after taking
them all into account, that the scheme probably makes
the lower centres too machine-like and the hemispheres
not quite machine-like enough, and must consequently be
softened 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 modern
way of looking at the matter with the phrenological concep-
tion which but lately preceded it.

THE PHRENOLOGICAL CONCEPTION.

In a certain sense Gall was the first to seek to explain
in detail how the brain could subserve our mental opera-
tions. His way of proceeding was only too simple. He took
the faculty-psychology as his ultimatum on the mental side,
and he made no farther psychological analysis. Wherever
he found an individual -vith some strongly-marked trait
of character he examined his head; and if he found the
latter prominent in a certain region, he said without more
ado that that region was the ‘organ’ of the trait or
faculty in question. The traits were of very diverse ccn-
stitution, some being simple sensibilities like ‘weight’
or ‘color;’ some being instinctive tendencies like ‘alimen-
tiveness’ or ‘amativeness ;’ and others, again, being com-
plex resultants like ‘conscientiousness, ‘individuality.’
Phrenology fell promptly into disrepute among scientific
men because observation seemed to show that large facul-

sensatidns and movements natively coupled in the centres below, is due to
Th. Meynert, the Austrian anatomist. For a popular account of his views,
see his pamphlet ‘Zur Mechanik des Gehirnbaues,’ Vienna, 1874. His
most recent development of them is embodied in his ‘ Psychiatry,’ a
clinical treatise on diseases of the forebrain, translated by B. Sachs, New
York, 1885.

28 PSYCHOLOGY.

ties and large ‘bumps’ might fail to coexist; because the
scheme of Gall was so vast as hardly to admit of accurate
determination at all—who of us can say even of his own
brothers whether their perceptions of weight and of time are
well developed or not ?—because the followers of Gall and
Spurzheim were unable to reform these errors in any appre-
ciable degree ; and, finally, because the whole analysis of
faculties was vague and erroneous from a psychologic point
of view. Popular professors of the lore have nevertheless
continued to command the admiration of popular audiences ;
and there seems no doubt that Phrenology, however little
it satisfy our scientific curiosity about the functions of dif-
ferent portions of the brain, may still be, in the hands of
intelligent practitioners, a useful help in the art of reading
character. A hooked nose and a firm jaw are usually signs
of practical energy ; soft, delicate hands are signs of refined
sensibility. Even so may a prominent eye be a sign of
power over language, and a bull-neck a sign of sensuality.
But the brain behind the eye and neck need no more be
the organ of the signified faculty than the jaw is the
organ of the will or the hand the organ of refinement.
These correlations between mind and body are, however, so
frequent that the ‘characters’ given by phrenologists are
often remarkable for knowingness and insight.

Phrenology hardly does more than restate the problem.
To answer the question, “ Why do I lke children?” by
saying, “Because you have a large organ of philoprogeni-
tiveness,” but renames the phenomenon to be explained.
What is my philoprogenitiveness ? Of what mental ele-
ments does it consist? And how can a part of the brain
be its organ? A science of the mind must reduce such
complex manifestations as ‘ philoprogenitiveness’ to their
elements. A science of the brain must point out the func-
tions of its elements. A science cf the relations of mind
and brain must show how the elementary ingredients of the
former correspond to the elementary functions of the latter.
But phrenology, except by occasional coincidence, takes no
account of elements at all. Its ‘faculties,’ as a rule, are
fully equipped persons in a particular mental attitude.
Take, for example, the ‘faculty’ of language. It involves

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 29

in reality a host of distinct powers. We must first have
images of concrete things and ideas of abstract qualities
and relations; we must next have the memory of words
and then the capacity so to associate each idea or image
with a particular word that, when the word is heard, the
idea shall forthwith enter our mind. We must conversely,
as soon as the idea arises in our mind, associate with it a
mental image of the word, and by means of this image we
must innervate our articulatory apparatus so as to repro-
duce the word as physical sound. To read or to write a
language other elements still must be introduced. But it
is plain that the faculty of spoken language alone is so
complicated as to call into play almost all the elementary
powers which the mind possesses, memory, imagination,
association, judgment, and volition. A portion of the brain
competent to be the adequate seat of such a faculty would
needs be an entire brain in miniature,—just as the faculty
itself is really a specification of the entire man, a sort of
homunculus.

Yet just such homunculi are for the most part the
phrenological 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 idea
which 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. In-
stead of dividing the latter into effective elements, she divides it into
personal beings of peculiar character. . . . ‘Herr Pastor, sure there
be a horse inside,’ called out the peasants to X after their spiritual
shepherd had spent hours in explaining to them the construction of the
locomotive. With a horse inside truly everything becomes clear, even
though it be a queer enough sort of horse—the horse itself calls for no
explanation! Phrenology takes a start to get beyond the point of view
of the ghost-like soul entity, but she ends by populating the whole skull
with ghosts of the same order.” *

Modern Science conceives of the matter in a very differ-
ent way. Brain and mind alike consist of simple elements,
sensory and motor. ‘ Allnervous centres,” says Dr. Hugh-
lings Jackson,+ “from the lowest to the very highest (the

* Geschichte des Materialismus, 2d ed., 1. p. 345.
+ West Riding Asylum Reports, 1876, p. 267.

30 PSYCHOLOG Y.

substrata of consciousness), are made up of nothing else
than nervous arrangements, representing impressions and
movements. ...I do not see of what other materials
the brain can be made.” Meynert represents the matter
similarly when he calls the cortex of the hemispheres the
surface of projection for every muscle and every sensitive
point of the body. The muscles and the sensitive points
are represented each by a cortical point, and the brain is
nothing but the sum of all these cortical points, to which,
on the mental side, as many ideas correspond. Ideas of
sensation, ideas of motion are, on the other hand, the ele-
mentary factors out of which the mind is built up by the
associationists in psychology. ‘There is a complete parallel-
ism between the two analyses, the same diagram of little
dots, circles, or triangles joined by lines symbolizes equally
well the cerebral and mental processes: the dots stand for
cells or ideas, the lines for fibres or associations. We shall
have later to criticise this analysis so far as it relates to
the mind; but there is no doubt that it is a most convenient,
and has been a most useful, hypothesis, formulating the
facts in an extremely natural way.

If, then, we grant that motor and sensory ideas variously
associated are the materials of the mind, all we need do to get
a complete diagram of the mind’s and the brain’s relations
should be to ascertain which sensory idea corresponds to
which sensational surface of projection, and which motor
idea to which muscular surface of projection. The associa-
tions would then correspond to the fibrous connections be-
tween the various surfaces. This distinct cerebral localization
of the various elementary sorts of idea has been treated as
a ‘postulate’ by many physiologists (e.g. Munk); and the
most stirring controversy in nerve-physiology which the
present generation has seen has been the localization-
question.

THE LOCALIZATION OF FUNCTIONS IN THE
HEMISPHERES.

Up to 1870, the opinion which prevailed was that which
the experiments of Flourens on pigeons’ brains had made
plausible, namely, that the different functions of the hemi-

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 31

spheres were not locally separated, but carried on each by
the aid of the whole organ. MHitzig in 1870 showed, how-
ever, that in a dog’s brain highly specialized movements
could be produced by electric irritation of determinate
regions of the cortex ; and Ferrier and Munk, half a dozen
years later, seemed to prove, either by irritations or excis-
ions or both, that there were equally determinate regions
connected with the senses of sight. touch, hearing, and
smell. Munk’s special sensorial localizations, however,
disagreed with Ferrier’s; and Goltz, from his extirpation-
experiments, came to a conclusion adverse to strict local-
ization of any kind. The controversy is not yet over. I
will not pretend to say anything more of it historically, but
give a brief account of the condition in which matters at
present stand.

The one thing which is perfectly well established is this,
that the ‘central’ convolutions, on either side of the fissure of
Rolando, and (at least in the monkey) the calloso-marginal
convolution (which is continuous with them on the mesial
surface where one hemisphere is applied against the other),
form the region by which all the motor incitations which
leave the cortex pass out, on their way to those executive
centres in the region of the pons, medulla, and spinal cord
from which the muscular contractions are discharged in
the last resort. The existence of this so-called ‘motor
zone’ is established by the lines of evidence successively
given below :

(1) Cortical Irritations. Electrical currents of small
intensity applied to the surface of the said convolutions in
dogs, monkeys, and other animals, produce well-defined
movements 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 opposite
to the brain irritations : If the left hemisphere be excited, the
movement is of the right leg, side of face, etc. All the objec-
tions at first raised against the validity of these experiments
have been overcome. The movements are certainly not due
to irritations of the base of the brain by the downward spread
of the current, for: a) mechanical irritations will produce
them, though less easily than electrical; 6) shifting the

32 PSYCHOLOGY.

electrodes to a point close by on the surface changes the
movement in ways quite inexplicable by changed physical
conduction of the current; c) if the cortical ‘centre’ for a
certain movement be cut under with a sharp knife but left
in situ, although the electric conductivity is physically
unaltered by the operation, the physiological conductivity
is gone and currents of the same strength no longer pro-
duce the movemen’s which they did; d) the time-interval
between the application of the electric stimulus to the cor-
tex and the resultant movement is what it would be if the
cortex acted physiologically and not merely physically in
transmitting the irritation. It is namely a well-known fact
that when a nerve-current has to pass through the spinal
cord to excite a muscle by refiex action, the time is longer
than if it passes directly down the motor nerve: the cells
of the cord take a certain time to discharge. Similarly,
when a stimulus is applied directly to the cortex the muscle
contracts two or three hundredths of a second later than it
does when the place on the cortex is cut away and the elec-
trodes are applied to the white fibres below.*

(2) Cortical Ablations. When the cortical spot which is
found to produce a movement of the fore-leg, in a dog,
is excised (see spot 5 in Fig. 5), the leg in question becomes
peculiarly affected. Atfirstitseems paralyzed. Soon, how-
ever, it is used with the other legs, but badly. The animal
does not bear his weight on it, allows it to rest on its dorsal
surface, stands with it crossing the other leg, does not remove
it if it hangs over the edge of a table, can no longer ‘give the
paw’ at word of command if able to do so before the opera-
tion, does not use it for scratching the ground, or holding a
bone as formerly, lets it slip out when running on a smooth

* For a thorough discussion of the various objections, see Ferrier’s
‘Functions of the Brain,’ 2d ed., pp. 227-234. and Francois-Franck’s
‘Lecons sur les Fonctions Motrices du Cerveau ’ (1887), Legon 31. The most
minutely accurate experiments on irritation of cortical points are those
of Paneth, in Pfliiger’s Archiv, vol 37, p. 528.—Recently the skull has been
fearlessly opened by surgeons, and operations upon the human brain per-
formed, sometimes with the happiest results. In some of these operations
the cortex has been electrically excited for the purpose of more exactly
localizing the spot, and the movements first observed in dogs and monkeys
have then been verified in men.

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 33

surface or when shaking himself, etc., etc. Sensibility of
all kinds seems diminished as well as motility, but of this I
shall speak later on. Moreover the dog tends in voluntary
movements to swerve towards the side of the brain-lesion in-
stead of going straightforward. All these symptoms gradu-
ally decrease, so that even with a very severe brain-lesion
the dog may be outwardly indistinguishable from a well dog
after eight or ten weeks. Still, a sight chloroformization
will reproduce the disturbances, even then. There is a cer-
tain appearance of ataxic in-coérdination in the movements
—the dog lifts his fore-feet high and brings them down with
more strength than usual, and yet the trouble is not ordi-

Fig. 5.—Left Hemisphere of Dog’s Brain, after Ferrier. A. the fissure of Sylvius. B,
the crucial sulcus. O, the olfactory bulb. J, IJ, III, IV, indicate the first, second,
third, and fourth external convolutions respectively. (1), (4), and (5) are on the
sigmoid gyrus.

nary lack of co-ordination. Neither is there paralysis.

The strength of whatever movements are made is as great

as ever—dogs with extensive destruction of the motor zone

can jump as high and bite as hard as ever they did, but
they seem less easily moved to do anything with the affected
parts. Dr. Loeb, who has studied the motor disturbances
of dogs more carefully than any one, conceives of them en
masse as effects of an increased inertia in al] the processes
of innervation towards the side opposed to tbe lesion. All
such movements require an unwonted effort for their exe-
cution; and when only the normally usual effort is made
they fall behind in effectiveness.*

* J. Loeb: ‘ Beitriige zur Physiologie des Grosshirns; Pfliiger’s Ar-
chiv, xxxix. 293. I simplify the author’s statement.

34 PSYCHOLOGY.

Even when the entire motor zone of a dog is removed,
there is no permanent paralysis of any part, but only this
curious sort of relative inertia when the two sides of the
body are compared; and this itself becomes hardly notice-
able after a number of weeks have elapsed. Prof. Goltz
has described a dog whose entire left hemisphere was de-
stroyed, and who retained only a slight motor inertia on the
right half of the body. In particular he could use his right

Z
ON

foo BG gAiiPVEMENTS OF
ay WG A AND E0or 065
Page ACs es :

SS =". °° RETRACAYTION ~ “s
§, PROTRACTION
.

sae

PLATYSMA
Ly

Fie. 6.—Left Hemisphere of Monkey’s Brain. Outer Surface.

paw for holding a bone whilst gnawing it, or for reaching
after a piece of meat. Had he been taught to give his paw
before the operations, it would have been curious to see
whether that faculty also came back. His tactile sensi-
bility was permanently diminished on the right side.* In
monkeys a genuine paralysis follows upon ablations of the
cortex in the motor region. This paralysis affects parts of
the body which vary with the brain-parts removed. The
monkey’s opposite arm or leg hangs flaccid, or at most takes a
small part in associated movements. When the entire region
is removed there is a genuine and permanent hemiplegia
in which the arm is more affected than the leg; and this is

* Goltz: Pfliiger’s Archiv, x11. 419.

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 35

followed months later by contracture of the muscles, as in
man after inveterate hemiplegia.* According to Schaefer
and Horsley, the trunk-muscles also become paralyzed after
destruction of the marginal convolution on both sides (see
Fig. 7). These differences between dogs and monkeys show
the danger of drawing general conclusions from experiments
done on any one sort of animal. I subjoin the figures given
by the last-named authors of the motor regions in the
monkey’s brain.t

OVEMENTS Offre xion AT en
TOES AND / KNEE

MS NGS] AT aT oy,
is FOOT, LE wip _/MOVEMENTS
if Gutej OF RoTATIO;

1D LAT. Le

TAIL ano

Fig. 7.—Left Hemisphere of Monkey’s Brain. Mesial Surface.

In man we are necessarily reduced to the observation
post-mortem of cortical ablations produced by accident or
disease (tumor, hemorrhage, softening, etc.). What results
during life from such conditions is either localized spasm,
or palsy of certain muscles of the opposite side. The cor-
tical regions which invariably produce these results are
homologous with those which we have just been study-
ing in the dog, cat, ae, etc. Figs. 8 and 9 show the result of

* «Hemiplegia’ means one-sided palsy.

¢ Philosophical Transactions, vol. 179, pp. 6. 10 (1888). In a later paper
(id. p. 205) Messrs. Beevor and Horsley go into the localization still more
minutely, showing spots from which single muscles or single digits can be
made to contract.

36 PSYCHOLOG ¥Y.

169 cases carefully studied by Exner. The parts shaded

are regions where lesions produced no motor disturbance.

Fic. 8.—Right Hemisphere of Human Brain, Lateral Surface.
Those left white were, on the contrary, never injured with-
out motor disturbances of some sort. Where the injury to

\\\

VV
auLSQULANLVNVUUANUUNNNH

\

rear,

Mesial Surface.

Fic. 9.—Right Hemisphere of Human Brain.

the cortical substance is profound in man, the paralysis is
’ a

permanent and is succeeded by muscular rigidity in the

paralyzed parts, just as it may be in the monkey.

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 37

(3) Descending degenerations show the intimate connec-
tion of the rolandic regions of the cortex with the motor
tracts of the cord. When, either in man or in the lower‘ani-
mals, these regions are destroyed, a peculiar degenerative
change known as secondary sclerosis is found to extend
downwards through the white fibrous substance of the
brain in a perfectly definite manner, affecting certain dis-
tinct strands which pass through the inner capsule, crura,
and pons, into the anterior pyramids of the medulla oblon-
gata, 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 rolandic:
regions with these motor columns of the cord is also clearly
given. Flechsig’s ‘Pyramidenbahn’ forms an uninter-
rupted strand (distinctly traceable in human embryos,
before its fibres have acquired their white ‘medullary
sheath’) passing upwards from the pyramids of the me-
dulla, and traversing the internal capsule and corona radi-
ata to the convolutions in question (Fig. 10). None of the
inferior gray matter of the brain seems to have any connec-
tion with this important fibrous strand. It passes directly
from the cortex to the motor arrangements in the cord, de-
pending for its proper nutrition (as the facts of degenera-
tion show) on the influence of the cortical cells, just as motor
nerves depend for their nutrition on that of the cells of the
spinal cord. Electrical stimulation of this motor strand in
any accessible part of its course has been shown in dogs to
produce movements analogous to those which excitement
of the cortical surface calls forth.

One of the most instructive proofs of motor localization
in the cortex is that furnished by the disease now called
aphemia, or motor Aphasia. Motor aphasia is neither loss
of voice nor paralysis of the tongue or lips. The patient’s
voice is as strong as ever, and all the innervations of his
hypoglossal and facial nerves, except those necessary for
speaking, may go on perfectly well. He can laugh and cry,
and even sing; but he either is unable to utter any words at
all; ora few meaningless stock phrases form his only speech ;
or else he speaks incoherently and confusedly, mispronounc-

38 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

ing, misplacing, and misusing his words in various degrees,
Sometimes his speech is a mere broth of unintelligible syl-
lables. In cases of pure motor aphasia the patient recog-

Cortica/
: , end
SS *,
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Fic. 10.—Sehematic Transverse Rection of Brain showing Motor Strand.—After
Edinger.

N spinal

nizes his mistakes and suffers acutely from them. Now
whenever a patient dies in such a condition as this, and
an examination of his brain is permitted, it is found that

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 39

the lowest frontal gyrus (see Fig. 11) is the seat of injury.
Brocea first noticed this fact in 1861, and since then the
gyrus has gone by the name of Broca’s convolution. The

eo

Fig. 11.—Schematic Profile of Left Hemisphere, with the parts shaded whose
destruction causes motor (¢ Broca’) and sensory (‘ Wernicke *) Aphasia.
injury in right-handed people is found on the left hemi-
sphere, and in left-handed people on the right hemisphere.
Most people, in fact, are left-brained, that is, all their
delicate and specialized movements are handed over to
the charge of the left hemisphere. The ordinary right-
handedness for such movements is only a consequence of
that fact, a consequence which shows outwardly on account
of that extensive decussation of the fibres whereby most of
those from the left hemisphere pass to the right half of the
body only. But the left-brainedness might exist in equal
measure and not show outwardly. This would happen
wherever organs on both sides of the body could be goy-
erned by the left hemisphere ; and just such a case seems
offered by the vocal organs, in that highly delicate and
special motor service which we call speech. Either hemi-
sphere can innervate them bilaterally, just as either seems
able to innervate bilaterally the muscles of the trunk, ribs,
and diaphragm. Of the special movements of speech, how-

40 PSYCHOLOGY.

ever, it would appear (from the facts of aphasia) that the
left hemisphere in most persons habitually takes exclusive
charge. With that hemisphere thrown out of gear, speech is
undone ; even though the opposite hemisphere still be there
for the performance of less specialized acts, such as the
various movements required in eating.

It will be noticed that Broca’s region is homologous
with the parts ascertained to produce movements of the
lips, tongue, and larynx when excited by electric currents
in apes (cf. Fig. 6, p. 34). The evidence is therefore as com-
plete as it well can be that the motor incitations to these
organs 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 called
agraphia: they have lost the power to write. They can
read writing and understand it; but either cannot use the
pen at all or make egregious mistakes with it. The seat
of the lesion here is less well determined, owing to an in-
sufficient number of good cases to conclude from.* There
is no doubt, however, that it is (in right-handed people) on
the left side, and little doubt that it consists of elements
of the hand-and-arm region specialized for that service.
The symptom may exist when there is little or no disability
in the hand for other uses. If it does not get well, the
‘patient usually educates his right hemisphere, ie. learns
to write with his left hand. In other cases of which we
shall say more a few pages later on, the patient can write
both spontaneously and at dictation, but cannot read even
what he has himself written! All these phenomena are
now quite clearly explained by separate brain-centres for
the various feelings and movements and tracts for associat-
ing these together. But their minute discussion belongs to
inedicine rather than to general psychology, and I can only
use them here to illustrate the principles of motor locali-
zation.t Under the heads of sight and hearing I shall
have a little more to say.

* Nothnagel und Naunyn ; Die Localization in den Gehirnkrankheiten

(Wiesbaden, 1887), p. 34.
+ An accessible account of the history of our knowledge of motor
aphasia is in W. A. Hammond’s ‘ Treatise on the Diseases of the Nervous

System,’ chapter VII.

a

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 41

The different lines of proof which I have taken up
establish conclusively the proposition that all the motor
impulses 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 is
involved in a motor impulse leaving the cortex, things grow
more obscure. Does the impulse start independently from
the convolutions in question, or does it start elsewhere and
merely flow through? And to what particular phase of
psychic activity does the activity of these centres corre-
spond? Opinions and authorities here divide; but it will
be better, before entering into these deeper aspects of the
problem, to cast a glance at the facts which have been
made out concerning the relations of the cortex to sight,
hearing, and smell.

Sight.

Ferrier was the first in the field here. He found, when
the anguwar convolution (that lying between the ‘intra
parietal’ and ‘external occipital’ fissures, and bending
round the top of the fissure of Sylvius, in Fig. 6) was ex-
cited in the monkey, that movements of the eyes and head
as if for vision occurred ; and that when it was extirpated,
what he supposed to be total and permanent blindness
of the opposite eye followed. Munk almost immediately
declared total and permanent blindness to follow from de-
struction of the occipital lobe in monkeys as well as dogs, and
said that the angular gyrus had nothing to do with sight,
but was only the centre for tactile sensibility of the eyeball.
Munk’s absolute tone about his observations and his theo-
retic arrogance have led to hisruinas anauthority. But he
did two things of permanent value. He was the first to
distinguish in these vivisections between sensorial and
psychic blindness, and to describe the phenomenon of rest?-
tution of the visual function after its first impairment by
an operation ; and the first to notice the hemiopic character
of the visual disturbances which result when only one
hemisphere is injured. Sensorial blindness is absolute
insensibility to light; psychic blindness is inability to rec-
ognize the meaning of the optical impressions, as when we

42 PSYCHOLOGY.

see a page of Chinese print but it suggests nothing to us,
A hemiopic disturbance of vision is one in which neither
retina is affected in its totality, but in which, for example,
the left portion of each retina is blind, so that the animal
sees nothing situated in space towards its right. Later
observations have corroborated this hemiopic character of
all the disturbances of sight from injury to a single hemi-
sphere in the higher animals; and the question whether
an animal’s apparent blindness is sensorial or only psychic
has, since Munk’s first publications, been the most urgent
one to answer, in all observations relative to the function of
sight.

Goltz almost simultaneously with Ferrier and Munk
reported experiments which led him to deny that the
visual function was essentially bound up with any one
localized portion of the hemispheres. Other divergent
results soon came in from many quarters, so that, without
going into the history of the matter any more, I may report
the existing state of the case as follows :*

In fishes, frogs, and lizards vision persists when the
hemispheres are entirely removed. This is admitted for
frogs and fishes even by Munk, who denies it for birds.

All of Munk’s birds seemed totally blind (blind senso-
rially) after removal of the hemispheres by his operation.
The following of a candle by the head and winking at a
threatened blow, which are ordinarily held to prove the
retention of crude optical sensations by the lower centres
in supposed hemisphereless pigeons, are by Munk ascribed
to vestiges of the visual sphere of the cortex left behind
by the imperfection of the operation. But Schrader, who
operated after Munk and with every apparent guarantee of
completeness, found that all his pigeons saw after two
or three weeks had elapsed, and the inhibitions resulting
from the wound had passed away. They invariably avoided
even the slightest obstacles, flew very regularly towards
certain perches, etc., differing toto celo in these respects
with certain simply blinded pigeons who were kept with

* The history up to 1885 may be found in A. Christiani: Zur Physi-
ologie des Gehirnes (Berlin, 1855).

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 43

them for comparison. They did not pick up food strewn
on the ground, however. Schrader found that they would
do this if even a small part of the frontal region of the
hemispheres was left, and ascribes their non-self-feeding
when deprived of their occipital cerebrum not to a visual,
but to a motor, defect, a sort of alimentary aphasia.*

In presence of such discord as that between Munk and
his opponents one must carefully note how differently sig-
nificant is loss, from preservation, of a function after an opera-
tion on the brain. The loss of the function does not neces-
sarily show that it 72s dependent on the part cut out; but its
preservation does show that it is not dependent: and this is
true though the loss should be observed ninety-nine times
and the preservation only once ina hundred similar excisions.
That birds and mammals can be blinded by cortical abla-
tion is undoubted; the only question is, must they be so?
Only then can the cortex be certainly called the ‘seat of
sight.’ The blindness may always be due to one of those
remote effects of the wound on distant parts, inhibitions,
extensions of inflammation,—interferences, in a word,—
upon which Brown-Séquard and Goltz have rightly insisted,
and the importance of which becomes more manifest every
day. Such effects are transient; whereas the symptoms of
deprivation (Ausfallserscheinungen, as Goltz calls them) which
come from the actual loss of the cut-out region must from
the nature of the case be permanent. Blindness in the
pigeons, so far as it passes away, cannot possibly be charged
to their seat of vision being lost, but only to some influence
which temporarily depresses the activity of that seat.
The same is true mutatis mutandis of all the other effects of
operations, and as we pass to mammals we shall see still
more the importance of the remark.

In rabbits loss of the entire cortex seems compatible
with the preservation of enough sight to guide the poor
animals’ movements, and enable them to avoid obstacles.
Christiani’s observations and discussions seem conclusively

* Pfliiger’s Archiv, vol. 44, p. 176. Munk (Berlin Academy Sitzsungs-
berichte, 1859, xxx) returns to the charge, denying the extirpations of
Schrader to be complete: ‘‘ Microscopic portions of the Sehsphire must
remain.”

44 PSYCHOLOGY.

to have established this, although Munk found that all his
animals were made totally blind.*

In dogs also Munk found absolute stone-blindness after
ablation of the occipital lobes. He went farther and
mapped out determinate portions of the cortex thereupon,
which he considered correlated with definite segments of the
two retin, so that destruction of given portions of the cor-
tex produces blindness of the retinal centre, top, bottom,
or right or left side, of the same or opposite eye. There
seems little doubt that this definite correlation is mythologi-
eal. Other observers, Hitzig, Goltz, Luciani, Loeb, Exner,
etc., find, whatever part of the cortex may be ablated on
one side, that there usually results a hemiopic disturbance
of both eyes, slight and transient when the anterior lobes
are the parts attacked, grave when an occipital lobe is the
seat of injury, and lasting in proportion to the latter’s
extent. According to Loeb, the defect is a dimness of vis-
ion (‘hemiamblyopia’) in which (however severe) the centres
remain the best seeing portions of the retina, just as they
are in normal dogs. The lateral or temporal part of each
retina seems to be in exclusive connection with the cortex
of its own side. The centre and nasal part of each seems,
on the contrary, to be connected with the cortex of the
opposite hemispheres. Loeb, who takes broader views
than any one, conceives the hemiamblyopia as he con-
ceives the motor disturbances, namely, as the expression
of an increased inertia in the whole optical machinery, of
which the result is to make the animal respond with greater
effort to impressions coming from the half of space opposed
to the side of the lesion. Ifa 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 the
lesion be a slight one, shaking slightly the piece of meat
on his right (this makes of it a stronger stimulus) makes him
seize upon it first. If only one piece of meat be offered, he
takes it, on whichever side it be.

When both occipital lobes are extensively destroyed
total blindness may result. Munk maps out his ‘Seh-

* A. Christiani: Zur Physiol. d. Gehirnes (Berlin, 1885),chaps. 1, rT, Iv.
H. Munk: Berlin Akad. Stzgsb. 1884, xxiv.

————————

=) ee

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 45

sphare’ definitely, and says that blindness must result
when the entire shaded part, marked A, 4, in Figs. 12
and 13, is involved in the lesion. Discrepant reports |
of other observations he explains as due to incomplete

Fie. 12. Fie. 13.
The Dog’s visual centre according to Munk, the entire striated region, A, A, being the
exclusive seat of vision, and the dark central circle, A’, being correlated with the
retinal centre of the opposite eye.

ablation. Luciani, Goltz, and Lannegrace, however, con-
tend that they have made complete bilateral extirpations
of Munk’s Sehsphire more than once, and found a sort
of crude indiscriminating sight of objects to return in a
few weeks.* The question whether a dog is blind or not
is harder to solve than would at first appear; for simply
blinded dogs, in places to which they are accustomed, show
little of their loss and avoid all obstacles; whilst dogs
whose occipital lobes are gone may run against things fre-
quently and yet see notwithstanding. The best proof that
they may see is that which Goltz’s dogs furnished: they
carefully avoided, as it seemed, strips of sunshine or paper
on the floor, as if they were solid cbstacles. This no really
blind dog would do. Luciani tested his dogs when hungry
(a condition which sharpens their attention) by strewing

* Luciani und Seppili: Die Functions-Localization auf der Grosshirn-
rinde (Deutsch von Fraenkel), Leipzig, 1886, Dogs M, N, and$. Goltz in
Pfliiger’s Archiv, vol. 34, pp. 490-6; vol. 42, p. 454. Cf. also Munk: Berlin
Akad. Stzgsb. 1886, vir, vir, pp. 113-121, and Loeb: Pfliiger’s Archiv,
vol. 39, p. 337.

46 PSYCHOLOGY.

pieces of meat and pieces of cork before them. If they
went straight at them, they saw; and if they chose the meat
and left the cork, they saw discriminatingly. The quarrel
is very acrimonious; indeed the subject of localization of
functions in the brain seems to have a peculiar effect on the
temper of those who cultivate it experimentally. The
amount of preserved vision which Goltz and Luciani report
seems hardly to be worth considering, on the one hand;
and on the other, Munk admits in his penultimate paper
that out of 85 dogs he only ‘succeeded’ 4 times in his opera-
tion of pr fee complete blindness by complete extirpa-
tion of his ‘ Tenens. ** The safe conclusion for us is that
Luciani’s diagram, Fig. 14, represents something like the

Fig. 14.—Distribution of the Visual Function in the Cortex, according to Luciani.

truth. The occipital lobes are far more important for
vision than any other part of the cortex, so that their com-
plete destruction makes the animal almost blind. As for
the crude sensibility to light which may then remain, noth-
ing exact is known either about its nature or its seat.

In the monkey, doctors also disagree. The truth seems,
however, to be that the occipital lobes in this animal also are
the part connected most intimately with the visual function.
The function would seem to go on when very small portions
of them are left, for Ferrier found no ‘appreciable impair-
ment’ of it after almost complete destruction of them on both
sides. On the other hand, he found complete and perma-
nent blindness to ensue when they and the angular gyri in
addition were destroyed on both sides. Munk, as well as

* Berlin Akad. Sitzungsberichte, 1886, vi, vu, p. 124.

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 47

Brown and Schaefer, found no disturbance of sight from
destroying the angular gyri alone, although Ferrier found
blindness to ensue. This blindness was probably due to
inhibitions exerted in distans, or to cutting of the white
optical fibres passing under the angular gyri on their way
to the occipital lobes. Brown and Schaefer got complete
and permanent blindness in one monkey from total destruc-
tion of both occipital lobes. Luciani and Seppili, perform-
ing this operation on two monkeys, found that the animals
were only mentally, not sensorially, blind. After some
weeks they saw their food, but could not distinguish by
sight between figs and pieces of cork. Luciani and Seppili
seem, however, not to have extirpated the entire lobes.
When one lobe only is injured the affection of sight is
hemiopic in monkeys: in this all observers agree. On
the whole, then, Munk’s original location of vision in the
occipital lobes is confirmed by the later evidence.*

In man we have more exact results, since we are not
driven to interpret the vision from the outward conduct.
On the other hand, however, we cannot vivisect, but must
wait for pathological lesions to turn up. The pathologists
who have discussed these (the literature is tedious ad libi-
tum) conclude that the occipital lobes are the indispensable
part for vision inman. Hemiopic disturbance in both eyes
comes 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 region
of the cortex. In these cases it seems probable that it is
due to an actio in distans, probably to the interruption of

* H. Munk: Functionen der Grosshirnrinde (Berlin, 1881), pp. 36-40.
Ferrier : Functions, etc., 2ded., chap. rx, pt. 1. 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 de-
stroyed, and in one monkey even when angular gyri and occipital lobes
were destroyed altogether. His paper is in the Archives de Médecine
Expérimentale for January and March, 1889. I only know it from the
abstract in the Neurclogisches Centralblatt, 1889, pp. 108-420. The reporter
doubts the evidence of vision in the monkey. It appears to have consisted
in avoiding obstacles and in emotional disturbance in the presence of men,

48 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

fibres proceeding from the occipital lobe. There seem te
be a few cases on record where there was injury to the
occipital lobes without visual defect. Ferrier has collected
as many as possible to prove his localization in the angular
gyrus.* A strictapplication of logical principles would make
one of these cases outweigh one hundred contrary ones. And
yet, remembering how imperfect observations may be, and
how individual brains may vary, it would certainly be rash for
their sake to throw away the enormous amount of positive
evidence for the occipital lobes. Individual variability is
always a possible explanation of an anomalous case. There
is no more prominent anatomical fact than that of the ‘de-
cussation of the pyramids,’ nor any more usual pathologi-
cal fact than its consequence, that left-handed hemorrhages
into the motor region produce right-handed paralyses.
And yet the decussation is variable in amount, and seems
sometimes to be absent altogether.t If, in such a case as
this last, the left brain were to become the seat of apoplexy,
the left and not the right half of the body would be the
one to suffer paralysis.

The schema on the opposite page, copied from Dr.
Seguin, expresses, on the whole, the probable truth about the
regions concerned in vision. Not the entire occipital lobes,
but the so-called cunei, and the first convolutions, are the
cortical parts most intimately concerned. Nothnagel agrees
with Seguin in this limitaticn of the essential tracts.

A most interesting effect of cortical disorder is mental
blindness. This consists not so much in insensibility to
optical impressions, as in inability to understand them.
Psychologically it is interpretable as loss of associations be-
tween optical sensations and what they signify; and any
interruption of the paths between the optic centres and the
centres for other ideas ought to bring it about. Thus,

* Localization of Cerebral Disease (1878), pp. 117-8.

+ For cases see Flechsig : Die Leitungsbahnen in Gehirn u. Riickenmark
(Leipzig, 1876), pp. 112, 272; Exner’s Untersuchungen, etc., p. 83 ; Ferrier s
Localization, etc., p. 11; Francois-Franck’s Cerveau Moteur, p. 63, note.

t E. C. Seguin: Hemianopsia of Cerebral Origin, in Journal of Nervous
and Mental Disease, vol. x1. p. 80. Nothnagel und Naunyn: Ueber die
Localization der Gehirnkrankheiten (Wiesbaden, 1887), p. 10.

OO ee

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 49

printed letters of the alphabet, or words, signify certain
sounds and certain articulatory movements. If the con-
nection between the articulating or auditory centres, on the
one hand, and the visual centres on the other, be ruptured,

[ES TOGN ES R.N.F

\ (|
Nl (
ye \
T \
\

o \

7.

\
i
lms

P.0-G-

105 bo.

Fic. 15.—Scheme of the mechanism of vision, after Seguin. The cuneus convolution
(Cu) of the right occipital lobe is supposed to be injured, and all the parts which
lead to it are darkly shaded to show that they fail to exert their function. FO. are
the intra-hemispheric optical fibres. P.O. C. is the region of the lower optic cen-
tres (corpora geniculata and quadrigemina). T. O. D. is the right optic tract; C, the
chiasma; F’. L. D. are the fibres going to the lateral or temporal half T of the right
retina; and F’. C. S. are those going to the central or nasal half of the left retina.
O. D. is the right, and O. S. the left eyeball. The rightward half of each is there-
fore blind: in other words, the right nasal field, R. N. F., and the left temporal field,
L. T. F., have become invisible to the subject with the lesion at Cu.

we ought a priori to expect that the sight of words would
fail to awaken the idea of their sound, or the movement for
pronouncing them. We ought, in short, to have alexia, or
inability to read : and this is just what we do have in many

50 FSYCHOLOG ¥.

cases of extensive injury about the fronto-temporal regions,
as a complication of aphasic disease. Nothnagel suggests
that whilst the cuneus is the seat of optical sensations, the
other parts of the occipital lobe may be the field of optical
memories and ideas, from the loss of which mental blind-
ness should ensue. In fact, all the medical authors speak
of mental blindness as if it must consist in the loss of visual
images from the memory. It seems to me, however, that
this is a psychological misapprehension. A man whose
power of visual imagination has decayed (no unusual phe-
nomenon in its lighter grades) is not mentally blind in
the least, for he recognizes perfectly all that he sees. On
the other hand, he may be mentally blind, with his optical
imagination well preserved ; as in the interesting case pub-
lished by Wilbrand in 1887.* In the still more interest-
ing case of mental blindness recently published by Lissauer,t
though the patient made the most ludicrous mistakes, call-
ing for instance a clothes-brush a pair of spectacles, an um-
brella a plant with flowers, an apple a portrait of a lady, ete.
etc., he seemed, according to the reporter, to have his men-
tal images fairly well preserved. It is in fact the momen-
tary loss of our non-optical images which makes us mentally
blind, just as itis that of our non-auditory images which
makes us mentally deaf. I am mentally deaf if, hearing a
bell, I can’t recall how it looks; and mentally blind if, see-
ing it, I can’t recall its sound or its name. As a matter of
fact, 1 should have to be not merely mentally blind, but
stone-blind, if all my visual images were lost. For although
I am blind to the right half of the field of view if my
left occipital region is injured, and to the left half if my
right region is injured, such hemianopsia does not deprive
me of visual images, experience seeming to show that
the unaffected hemisphere is always suflicient for pro-
duction of these. To abolish them entirely I should have
to be deprived of both occipital lobes, and that would de-
prive me not only of my inward images of sight, but of my

* Die Seelenblindheit, etc., p. 51 ff. The mental blindness was in
this woman’s case moderate in degree.
+ Archiv f. Psychiatrie, vol. 21, p. 222.

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 51

sight altogether.* Recent pathological annals seem to offer
a few such cases.t Meanwhile there are a number of cases
of mental blindness, especially for written language, coupled
with hemianopsia, usually of the rightward field of view.
These are all explicable by the breaking down, through
disease, of the connecting tracts between the occipital lobes
and other parts of the brain, especially those which go to
the centres for speech in the frontal and temporal regions of
the left hemisphere. They are to be classed among distur-
bances of conduction or of association; and nowhere can I find
any fact which should force us to believe that optical images
need{ be lost in mental blindness, or that the cerebral
centres for such images are locally distinct from those for
direct sensations from the eyes. §

Where an object fails to ‘be recognized by sight, it often
happens that the patient will recognize and name it as soon
as he touches it with his hand. This shows in an interest-

* Nothnagel (doc. cit. p. 22) says: ‘‘ Dies trifft aber nicht zu.” He gives,
however, no case in support of his opinion that double-sided cortical lesion
may make one stone-blind and yet not destroy one’s visual images ; so tbat
I do not know whether it is an observation of fact or an @ priori as-
sumption.

+ In acase published by C. §. Freund: Archiv f. Psychiatrie, vol. xx, the
occipital lobes were injured, but their cortex was not destroyed, on both
sides. There was still vision. Cf. pp. 291-5.

tI say ‘need,’ forI do not of course deny the possible coexistence of the
twosymptoms. Many a brain-lesion might block optical associations and at
the same time impair optical imagination, without entirely stopping vision.
Such a case seems to have been the remarkable one from Charcot which I
shall give rather fully in the chapter on Imagination.

§ Freund (in the article cited above ‘Ueber optische Aphasie und
Seelenblindheit’) and Bruns (‘ Ein Fall von Alexie,’ etc., in the Neuro-
logisches Centralblatt for 1888, pp. 581, 509) explain their cases by broken-
down conduction. Wilbrand, whose painstaking monograph on mental
blindness was referred to a moment ago, gives none but a prior? reasons for
his belief that the optical ‘ Erinnerungsfeld’ must be locally distinct from
the Wahrnehmungsfeld (cf. pp. 84, 93). The @ prior? reasons are really the
other way. Mauthner (‘Gehirn u. Auge’ (1881), p. 487 ff.) tries to show
that the ‘mental blindness’ of Munk’s dogsand apes after occipital mutila-
tion was not such, but real dimness of sight. The best case of mental
plindness yet reported is that by Lissauer, as above. The reader will also
do well to read Bernard : De l’Aphasie (1885) chap. v: Ballet: Le Langage
Intérieur (1886), chap. vir; and Jas. Ross’s little book on Aphasia (1887),
p. 74.

52 PSYCHOLOGY.

ing way how numerous the associative paths are which all
end by running out of the brain through the channel of
speech. The hand-path is open, though the eye-path be
closed. When mental blindness is most complete, neither
sight, touch, nor sound avails to steer the patient, and a sort
of dementia which has been called asymbolia or aprawia is
the result. The commonest articles are not understood.
The patient will put his breeches on one shoulder and his
hat upon tbe other, will bite into the soap and lay his shoes
on the table, or take his food into his hand and throw it
down again, not knowing what to do with it, etc. Such dis-
order can only come from extensive brain-injury.*

The method of degeneration corroborates the other evi-
dence localizing the tracts of vision. In young animals one
gets secondary degeneration of the occipital regions from
destroying an eyeball, and, vice versa, degeneration of the
optic nerves from destroying the occipital regions. The
corpora geniculata, thalami, and subcortical fibres leading
to the occipital lobes are also found atrophied in these
cases. The phenomena are not uniform, but are indispu-
table ;+ so that, taking all lines of evidence together, the
special connection of vision with the occipital lobes is per-
fectly made out. It should be added that the occipital
lobes have frequently been found shrunken in cases of ia-
veterate blindness in man.

Hearing.

Hearing is hardly as definitely localized as sight. In the
dog, Luciani’s diagram will show the regions which directly or
indirectly affect it for the worse when injured. As with sight,
one-sided lesions produce symptoms on both sides. The
mixture of black dots and gray dots in the diagram is meant
to represent this mixture of ‘ crossed’ and ‘ uncrossed’ con-
nections, though of course no topographical exactitude is
aimed at. Of all the region, the temporal lobe is the most
important part; yet permanent absolute deafness did not

* For a case see Wernicke’s Lehrb. d. Gehirnkrankheiten, vol. 1. p.
554 (1881). he

+ The latest account of them is the paper ‘ Uber die optischen Centren
u. Bahnen’ by von Monakow in the Archiv fiir Psychiatrie, vol. xx. p. 714,

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 53

result in a dog of Luciani’s, even from bilateral destruction
of both temporal lobes in their entirety. *

In the monkey, Ferrier and Yeo once found permanent
deafness to follow destruction of the upper temporal con-
volution (the one just below the fissure of Sylvius in Fig.

Fie. 16.—Luciani’s Hearing Region.

6) on both sides. Brown and Schaefer found, on the con-
trary, that in several monkeys this operation failed to notice-
ably affect the hearing. In one animal, indeed, both entire
temporal lobes were destroyed. After a week or two of
depression of the mental faculties this beast recovered and
became one of the brightest monkeys possible, domineering
over all his mates, and admitted by all who saw him to
have all his senses, including hearing, ‘ perfectly acute.’ t
Terrible recriminations have, as usual, ensued between the
investigators, Ferrier denying that Brown and Schaefer’s
ablations were complete, t Schaefer that Ferrier’s monkey
was really deaf. In this unsatisfactory condition the sub-
ject must be left, although there seems no reason to doubt
that Brown and Schaefer’s observation is the more important
of the two.

In man the temporal lobe is unquestionably the seat of
the hearing function, and the superior convolution adjacent
to the sylvian fissure is its most important part. The phe-
nomena of aphasia show this. We studied motor aphasia a
few pages back; we must now consider sensory aphasia.

* Die Functions-Localization, etc., Dog X; see also p. 161.
+ Philos. Trans., vol. 179, p. 312.

¢ Brain, vol. xr. p. 10.

§ Ibid. p. 147.

54 PSYCHOLOGY.

Our knowledge of this disease has had three stages: we
may talk of the period of Broca, the period of Wernicke,
and the period of Charcot. What Broca’s discovery was we
have seen. Wernicke was the first to discriminate those
cases in which the patient can not even understand speech
from those in whick he can understand, only not talk; and
to aseribe the former condition to lesion of the temporal
lobe.* The condition in question is word-deafness, and the
disease is auditory aphasia. The latest statistical survey of
the subject is that by Dr. Allen Starr.+ In the seven cases
of pure word-deafness which he has collected, cases in which
the patient could read, talk, and write, but not understand
what was said to him, the lesion was limited to the first and
second temporal convolutions in their posterior two thirds.
The lesion (in right-handed, i.e. left-brained, persons) is
always on the left side, like the lesion in motor aphasia.
Crude hearing would not be abolished, even were the left
centre for it utterly destroyed; the right centre would still
provide for that. But the linguistic use of hearing appears
bound up with the integrity of the left centre more or less
exclusively. Here it must be that words heard enter into
association with the things which they represent, on the one
hand, and with the movements necessary for pronouncing
them, on the other. Ina large majority of Dr. Starr’s fifty
cases, the power either to name objects or to talk coherently
was impaired. This shows that in most of us (as Wernicke
said) speech must go on from auditory cues; that is, it
must be that our ideas do not innervate our motor centres
directly, but only after first arousing the mental sound of
the words. This is the immediate stimulus to articulation ;
and where the possibility of this is abolished by the de-
struction of its usual channel in the left temporal lobe, the
articulation must suffer. In the few cases in which the
channel is abolished with no bad effect on speech we must
suppose an idiosyncrasy. The patient must innervate his
speech-organs either from the corresponding portion of the
other hemisphere or directly from the centres of ideation,

* Der aphasische Symptomencomplex (1874). See in Fig. 11 the con-
volution marked WERNICKE. ~
+ ‘The Pathology of Sensory Aphasia,’ ‘ Brain,’ July, 1889.

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 55

those, namely, of vision, touch, etc., without leaning on the
auditory region. It is the minuter analysis of the facts in
the light of such individual differences as these which con-
stitutes Charcot’s contribution towards clearing up the
subject.

Every namable thing, act, or relation has numerous
properties, qualities, or aspects. In our minds the proper-
ties of each thing, together with its name, form an associated
group. If different parts of the brain are severally con-
cerned with the several properties, and a farther part with
the hearing, and still another with the uttering, of the name,
there must inevitably be brought about (through the law of
association which we shall later study) such a dynamic connec-
tion amongst all these brain-parts that the activity of any one
of them wiJl be likely to awaken the activity of all the rest.
When we are talking as we think, the wetimate process is that
of utterance. If the brain-part for that be injured, speech
is impossible or disorderly, even though all the other brain-
parts be intact: and this is just the condition of things
which, on page 37, we found to be brought about by
limited lesion of the left inferior frontal convolution. But
back of that last act various orders of succession are
possible in the associations of a talking man’s ideas. The
more usual order seems to be from the tactile, visual, or
other properties of the things thought-about to the sound
of their names, and then to the latter’s utterance. But if in
a certain individual the thought of the look of an object or
of the look of its printed name be the process which
habitually precedes articulation, then the loss of the
hearing centre will pro tanto not affect that individual’s
speech. He will be mentally deaf, i.e. his wnderstanding of
speech will suffer, but he will not be aphasic. In this way
it is possible to explain the seven cases of pure word-deaf-
ness which figure in Dr. Starr’s table.

If this order of association be ingrained and habitual in
that individual, injury to his visual centres will make him
not only word-blind, but aphasic as well. His speech will
become confused in consequence of an occipital lesion.
Naunyn, consequently, plotting out on a diagram of the
hemisphere the 71 irreproachably reported cases of

56 PSYCHOLOGY.

aphasia which he was able to collect, finds that the lesions
concentrate themselves in three places: first, on Broca’s
centre ; second, on Wernicke’s ; third, on the supra-marginal
and angular gyri under which those fibres pass which con-
nect the visual centres with the rest of the brain* (see F ig.
17). With this result Dr, Starr’s analysis of purely sensory
cases agrees.

jo)
as
.
sz.
oe
ae

Fie. 17

Ina later chapter we shall again return to these differences
in the effectiveness of the sensory spheres in different
individuals. Meanwhile few things show more beautifully
than the history of our knowledge of aphasia how the
sagacity and patience of many banded workers are in time
certain to analyze the darkest confusion into an orderly
display.t There is no ‘centre of Speech’ in the brain any
more than there is a faculty of Speech in the mind. The
entire brain, more or less, is at work in a man who uses
language. The subjoined diagram, from Ross, shows the
four parts most critically concerned, and, in the light of our
text, needs no farther explanation (see Fig. 18).

* Nothnagel und Naunyn: op. cit., plates.
+ Ballet’s and Bernard’s works cited on p. 51 are the most accessible
documents of Charcot’s school. Bastian’s book on the Brain as an Organ

of Mind (last three chapters) is also good.

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 57

Smell.

Everything conspires to point to the median descending
part of the temporal lobes as being the organs of smell,
Even Ferrier and Munk agree on the hippocampal gyrus,

Fia. 18,

though Ferrier restricts olfaction, as Munk does not, to the
lobule or uncinate process of the convolution, reserving the
rest of it for touch. Anatomy and pathology also point to
the hippocampal gyrus; but as the matter is less interest-
ing from the point of view of human psychology than were
sight and hearing, I will say no more, but simply add
Luciani and Seppili’s diagram of the dog’s smell-centre.* Of

* For details, see Ferrier’s ‘Functions,’ chap. rx. pt. 11, and Chas,
K. Mills: Transactions of Congress of American Physicians and Sur
geons, 1888, vol. I. p. 278.

58 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

-—. Taste

we know little that is definite. What little there is points
to the lower temporal regions again. Consult Ferrier as
below.

Touch.

Interesting problems arise with regard to the seat of
tactile and muscular sensibility. Huitzig, whose experiments
on dogs’ brains fifteen years ago opened the entire subject

Fic. 19.—Luciani’s Olfactory Region in the Dog.

which we are discussing, ascribed the disorders of motility
observed after ablations of the motor region to a loss of
what he called muscular consciousness. The animals do
not notice eccentric positions of their limbs, will stand with
their legs crossed, with the affected paw resting on its back
or hanging over a table’s edge, etc.; and do not resist our
bending and stretching of it as they resist with the un-
affected paw. Goltz, Munk, Schiff, Herzen, and others.
promptly ascertained an equal defect of cutaneous sensi-
bility to pain, touch, and cold. The paw is not withdrawn
when pinched, remains standing in cold water, ete. Fer-
rier meanwhile denied that there was any true anesthesia
produced by ablations in the motor zone, and explains
the appearance of it as an effect of the sluggish motor
responses of the affected side.* Munkt and Schiff }, on the

* Functions of the Brain, chap. x. § 14.

+ Ueber die Functionen d. Grosshirnrinde (1881), p. 50

tLezioni di Fisioloria sperimentale sul sistema nervoso encefalico
(1873), p. 527 ff. Also ‘Brain,’ vol. rx. p. 298.

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 59

contrary, conceive of the ‘motor zone’ as essentially sen-
sory, and in different ways explain the motor disorders as
secondary results of the anesthesia which is always there.
Munk calls the motor zone the Fiihlsphire of the animal’s
limbs, ete., and makes it codrdinate with the Sehsphiire,
the Horsphiire, etc., the entire cortex being, according to
him, nothing but a projection-surface for sensations, with
no exclusively or essentially motor part. Such a view
would be important if true, through its bearings on the
psychology of volition. What is the truth? As regards
the fact of cutaneous anesthesia from motor-zone ablations,
all other observers are against Ferrier, so that he is proba-
bly wrong in denying it. On the other hand, Munk and
Schiff are wrong in making the motor symptoms depend on
the anesthesia, for in certain rare cases they have been
observed to exist not only without insensibility, but with
actual hyperesthesia of the parts.* The motor and
sensory symptoms seem, therefore, to be independent
variables.

In monkeys the latest experiments are those of Horsley
and Schaefer,+ whose results Ferrier accepts. They find
that excision of the hippocampal convolution produces tran-
sient insensibility of the opposite side of the body, and that
permanent insensibility is produced by destruction of its
continuation upwards above the corpus callosum, the so-
called gyrus fornicatus (the part just below the ‘calloso-
marginal fissure’ in Fig. 7). The insensibilityis at its maxi-
mum when the entire tract comprising both convolutions is
destroyed. Ferrier says that the sensibility of monkeys is
‘entirely unaffected’ by ablations of the motor zone,t and
Horsley and Schaefer consider it by no means necessarily

* Bechterew (Pfliiger’s Archiv., vol. 35, p. 187) found no anesthesia in
a cat with motor symptoms from ablation of sigmoid gyrus. Luciani got
hyperesthesia coexistent with cortical motor defect in a dog, by simulta-
neously hemisecting the spinal cord (Luciani u. Seppili, op. czt. p. 284).
Goltz frequently found hyperesthesia of the whole body to accompany
motor defect after ablation of both frontal lobes, and he once found it
after ablating the motor zone (Pfliiger’s Archiv, vol. 34, p. 471).

+ Philos. Transactions, vol. 179, p. 20 ff.

¢ Functions, p. 375.

60 PSYCHOLOGY.

abolished.* Luciani found it diminished in his three ex.
periments on apes.t

In man we have the fact that one-sided paralysis from
disease of the opposite motor zone may or may not be
accompanied with anesthesia of the parts. Luciani, who

Fie. 20.—Luciani’s Tactile Region in the Dog.

believes that the motor zone is also sensory, tries to minim-
ize the value of this evidence by pointing to the insufficiency
with which patients are examined. He himself believes that
in dogs the tactile sphere extends backwards and forwards
of the directly excitable region, into the frontal and parietal
lobes (see Fig. 20). Nothnagel considers that pathological
evidence points in the same direction;+ and Dr. Mills, care-
fully reviewing the evidence, adds the gyri fornicatus and
hippocampi to the cutaneo-muscular region in man.§ If one
compare Luciani’s diagrams together (Figs. 14, 16, 19, 20)
one will see that the entire parietal region of the dog’s skull
is common to the four senses of sight, hearing, smell, and
touch, including muscular feeling. The corresponding re-
gion in the human brain (upper parietal and supra-marginal
gyri—see Fig. 17, p. 56) seems to be a somewhat similar
place of conflux. Optical aphasias and motor and tactile
disturbances all result from its injury, especially when that is
on the left side.|| The lower we go in the animal scale the

* Pp. 15-17. + Luciani u. Seppili, op. cit. pp. 275-288.
LOD ctl pile: § Trans. of Congress, etc., p. 272.
|| See Exner’s Unters. iib. Localization, plate xxv.

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 61

less differentiated the functions of the several brain-parts
seem to be.* It may be that the region in question still
represents in ourselves something like this primitive condi-
tion, and that the surrounding parts, in adapting themselves
more and more to specialized and narrow functions, have
left it as a sort of carrefour through which they send cur-
rents and converse. That it should be connected with
musculo-cutaneous feeling is, however, no reason why the
motor zone proper should not be so connected too. And
the cases of paralysis from the motor zone with no accom-
panying anesthesia may be explicable without denying all
sensory function to that region. For, as my colleague Dr.
James Putnam informs me, sensibility is always harder to
kill than motility, even where we know for a certainty that
the lesion affects tracts that are both sensory and motor.
Persons whose hand is paralyzed in its movements from
compression of arm-nerves during sleep, still feel with their
fingers ; and they may still feel in their feet when their legs
are paralyzed by bruising of the spinal cord. In a simi-
lar way, the motor cortex might be sensitive as well as
motor, and yet by this greater subtlety (or whatever the
peculiarity may be) in the sensory currents, the sensibility
might survive an amount of injury there by which the
motility was destroyed. Nothnagel considers that there are
grounds for supposing the muscular sense to be exclusively
connected with the parietal lobe and not with the motor
zone. “ Disease of this lobe gives pure ataxy without palsy,
and of the motor zone pure palsy without loss of muscular
sense.” + He fails, however, to convince more competent
critics than the present writer,t so I conclude with them
that as yet we have no decisive grounds for locating muscular
and cutaneous feeling apart. Much still remains to be
learned about the relations between musculo-cutaneous
sensibility and the cortex, but one thing is certain: that
neither the occipital, the forward frontal, nor the temporal
lobes seem to have anything essential to do with it in man.

* Cf. Ferrier’s Functions, etc., chap. tv and chap. x, §§ 6 to 9.

+ Op. cit. p. 17.

¢ E.g. Starr, loc. cit. p 272; Leyden, Beitrige zur Lehre v. d. Localiza-
tion im Gehirn (1888), p. 72.

62 PSYCHOLOGY.

It is knit up with the performances of the motor zone and
of the convolutions backwards and midwards of them. ‘The
reader must remember this conclusion when we come tc
the chapter on the Will.

I must add a word about the connection of aphasia
with the tactile sense. On p. 40 I spoke of those cases
in which the patient can write but not read his own writ-
ing. He cannot read by his eyes; but he can read by the
feeling in his fingers, if he retrace the letters in the air.
It is convenient for such a patient to have a pen in hand
whilst reading in this way, in order to make the usual feel-
ing of writing more complete.* In such a case we must
suppose that the path between the optical and the graphic
centres remains open, whilst that between the optical and
the auditory and articulatory centres is closed. Only thus
can we understand how the look of the writing should fail
to suggest the sound of the words to the patient’s mind,
whilst it still suggests the proper movements of graphic
imitation. These movements in their turn must of course
be felt, and the feeling of them must be associated with
the centres for hearing and pronouncing the words. The
injury in cases like this where very special combinations
fail, whilst others go on as usual, must always be supposed
to be of the nature of increased resistance to the passage
of certain currents of association. If any of the elements of
mental function were destroyed the incapacity would
necessarily be much more formidable. A patient who can
both read and write with his fingers most likely uses an
identical ‘graphic’ centre, at once sensory and motor, for
both operations.

I have now given, as far as the nature of this book will
allow, a complete account of the present state of the locali-
zation-question. In its main outlines it stands firm, though
much 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 in
motion, and excitable by every small stimulus. They are

* Bernard, op. cit. p. 84.

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 63

irascible and amative in an extraordinary degree, and their
sides grow bare with perpetual reflex scratching; but they
show no local troubles of either motion or sensibility. In
monkeys not even this lack of inhibitory ability is shown,
and neither stimulation nor excision of the prefrontal lobes
produces any sympwms whatever. One monkey of Horsley
and Schaefer’s was as tame, and did certain tricks as well,
after as before the operation.* It is probable that we have
about reached the limits of what can be learned about brain-
functions from vivisecting inferior animals, and that we
must hereafter look more exclusively to human pathology
for light. The existence of separate speech and writing
centres in the left hemisphere in man; the fact that palsy
from cortical injury is so much more complete and endur-
ing in man and the monkey than in dogs; and the farther
fact that it seems more difficult to get complete sens drial
blindness from cortical ablations in the lower animals than
in man, all show that functions get more specially local-
ized as evolution goes on. In birds localization seems
hardly to exist, and in rodents it is much less conspicuous
than in carnivora. Even for man, however, Munk’s way of
mapping out the cortex into absolute areas within which
only one movement or sensation is represented is surely
false. The truth seems to be rather that, although there is
a correspondence of certain regions of the brain to certain
regions of the body, yet the several parts within each bodily
region are represented throughout the whole of the corre-
sponding brain-region like pepper and salt sprinkled from
the same caster. This, however, does not prevent each
‘part’ from having its focus at one spot within the brain-
region. The various brain-regions merge into each other
in the same mixed way. As Mr. Horsley says: “There are
border centres, and the area of representation of the face
merges into that for the representation of the upper limb.
If there was a focal lesion at that point, you would have
the movements of these two parts starting together.” +

+ Trans. of Congress of Am. Phys. and Surg. 1888, vol. I. p. 348.
Beevor and Horsley’s paper on electric stimulation of the monkey’s brain

is the most beautiful work yet done for precision. See Phil. Trans., vol.
179, p. 205, especially the plates.

64 PSYCHOLOG Y,

The accompanying figure from Paneth shows just how the
matter stands in the dog.*

I am speaking now of localiza.
tions breadthwise over the brain-
surface. It is conceivable that
there might be also localizations
depthwise through the cortex. The
more superficial cells are smaller,
the deepest layer of them is large;
and it has been suggested that the
superficial cells are sensorial, the
deeper ones motor;t or that the
superficial ones in the motor region
are correlated with the extremities
of the organs to be moved (fingers,
etc.), the deeper ones with the more
central segments (wrist, elbow,
etc.).{ It need hardly be said that
all such theories are as yet but
guesses.

We thus see that the postulate
of Meynert and Jackson which we
started with cn p. 30 is on the whole
most satisfactorily corroborated
by subsequent objective research.
tc The lighest centres do probably
Fia. 21.—Dog’s motor centres, right contain nothing but arrangements

hemisphere, according to Paneth.

—The points of the motor region *omy , , 4
are correlated as follows Sith for ML esenting I and

muscles: the loops with the orbi- movements, and other arrangements
cularis palpebrarum; the plain 2

crosses with the flexor, the crosses : 1:
inscribed in circles with ie ex- for coupling the activity of these

tensor, digitorum communis of arrangements together.§ Currents
the fore-paw; the plain circles : Z
with the abductor pollicis pouring in from the sense-organs
longus; the double crosses with 4
the extensor communis of the first excite some arrangements,

hind-limb.

* Ptliiger’s Archiv, vol. 37, p. 523 (1885).

+ By Luys in his generally preposterous book ‘The Brain’; also by
Horsley

¢ C. Mercier: The Nervous System and the Mind, p. 124.

§ The frontal lobes as yet remain a puzzle. Wundt tries to explain
them as an organ of ‘apperception’ (Grundziige d. Physiologischen
Psychologie, 3d ed., vol. 1. p. 233 £.), but 1 confess myself unable to appre-
hend clearly the Wundtian philosophy so far as this word enters into it, so
must be contented with this bare reference.—Until quite recently it was

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 65

which in turn excite others, until at last a motor discharge
downwards of some sort occurs. When this is once
clearly grasped there remains little ground for keeping
up that old controversy about the motor zone, as_ to
whether it is in reality motor or sensitive. The whole
cortex, inasmuch as currents run through it, is both. All
the currents probably have feelings going with them, and
sooner or later bring movements about. In one aspect, then,
every centre is afferent, in another efferent, even the motor
cells of the spinal cord having these two aspects insepara-
bly conjoined. Marique,* and Exner and Panetht have
shown that by cutting rownd a ‘motor’ centre and so sepa-
rating it from the influence of the rest of the cortex, the
same disorders are produced as by cutting it out, so that
really it is only the mouth of the funnel, as it were,
through which the stream of innervation, starting from else-
where, pours ;{ consciousness accompanying the stream,
and being mainly of things seen if the stream is strongest
occipitally, 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 vague
formulation like this is as much as we can safely venture on
in the present state of science; and in subsequent chapters
I expect to give confirmatory reasons for my view.
MAN’S CONSCIOUSNESS LIMITED TO THE HEMISPHERES.

But is the consciousness which accompanies the activity of
the cortex the only consciousness that man has ? or are his lower
centres conscious as well ?

This is a difficult question to decide, how difficult one
only learns when one discovers that the cortex-conscious-
ness itself of certain objects can be seemingly annihilated

aggregate of other centres. Fortunately this custom is already on the
wane.

* Rech. Exp. sur le Fonctionnement des Centres Psycho-moteurs (Brus-
sels, 1885).

+ Piliger’s Archiv, vol. 44, p. 544.

$1 ought to add, however, that Francois-Franck (Fonctions Motrices,
p. 870) got, in two dogs and a cat, a different result from this sort of ‘ cir:
cumvallation.’

66 PSYCHOLOGY.

tor’s hand, and yet be proved by circumstantial evidence to
exist all the while in a split-off condition, quite as ‘ ejective’*
to the rest of the subject’s mind as that mind is to the mind
of the bystanders.t The lower centres themselves may
conceivably all the while have a split-off consciousness of
their own, similarly ejective to the cortex-consciousness ;
but whether they have it or not can never be known from
merely introspective evidence. Meanwhile the fact that
occipital destruction in man may cause a blindness which
is apparently absolute (no feeling remaining either of light
or dark over one half of the field of view), would lead us to
suppose that if our lower optical centres, the corpora
quadrigemina, and thalami, do have any consciousness, it
is at all events a consciousness which does not mix with
that which accompanies the cortical activities, and which
has nothing to do with our personal Self. In lower
animals this may not be so much the case. The traces of
sight found (supra, p. 46) in dogs and monkeys whose occip-
ital lobes were entirely destroyed, may possibly have been
due to the fact that the lower centres of these animals saw,
and that what they saw was not ejective but objective to
the remaining cortex, ie. it formed part of one and the
same inner world with the things which that cortex per-
ceived. It may be, however, that the phenomena were due
to the fact that in these animals the cortical ‘ centres’ for
vision reach outside of the occipital zone, and that destruc-
tion of the latter fails to remove them as completely as in
man. This, as we know, is the opinion of the experiment-
ers themselves. For practical purposes, nevertheless, and
limiting the meaning of the word consciousness to the per-
sonal self of the individual, we can pretty confidently answer
the question prefixed to this paragraph by saying that the
cortex is the sole organ of consciousness in man.t If there

* For this word, see T. K. Clifford’s Lecturesand Essays (1879), vol. 11.
p. 72.

+ See below, Chapter VIII.

t Cf. Ferrier’s Functions, pp. 120, 147, 414. See also Vulpian: Lecons
sur la Physiol. du Syst. Nerveux, p. 548; Luciani u. Seppili, op. czt. pp.
404-5; H. Maudsley: Physiology of Mind (1876), pp. 188 ff., 197 ff., and
241 ff. In G. H. Lewes’s Physical Basis of Mind, Problem LV: ‘ The Reflex
Theory,’ a very full history of the question is given.

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 67

be any consciousness pertaining to the lower centres, it is
a consciousness of which the self knows nothing.

THE RESTITUTION OF FUNCTION.

Another problem, not so metaphysical, remains. The
most general and striking fact connected with cortical in-
jury is that of the restoration of function. Functions lost at
first are after a few days or weeks restored. How are we
to understand this restitution ?

Two theories are in the field:

1) Restitution is due to the vicarious action either of the
rest of the cortex or of centres lower down, acquiring func-
tions which 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 the
exercise. This is the view of which Goltz and Brown-
Séquard are the most distinguished defenders.

Inhibition is a vera causa, of that there can be no doubt.
The pneumogastric nerve inhibits the heart, the splanch-
nic inhibits the intestinal movements, and the superior
laryngeal those of inspiration. The nerve-irritations which
may inhibit the contraction of arterioles are innumerable,
and reflex actions are often repressed by the simultaneous
excitement of other sensory nerves. For all such facts the
reader must consult the treatises on physiology. What
concerns us here is the inhibition exerted by different parts
of “ne nerve-centres, when irritated, on the activity of dis-
tant parts. The flaccidity of a frog from ‘shock,’ for a
minute or so after his medulla oblongata is cut, is an in-
hibition from the seat of injury which quickly passes away.

What is known as ‘surgical shock’ (unconsciousness,
pallor, dilatation of splanchnic blood-vessels, and general
syncope and collapse) in the human subject is an inhibition
which lasts a longer time. Goltz, Freusberg, and others,
cutting the spinal cord in dogs, proved that there were
functions inhibited still longer by the wound, but which re-
established themselves ultimately if the animal was kept
alive. The lumbar region of the cord was thus found to
contain independent vaso-motor centres, centres for erec-

68 PSYCHOLOGY.

tion, for control of the sphincters, ete., which could be
excited to activity by tactile stimuli and as readily reinhib-
ited by others simultaneously applied.* We may therefore
plausibly suppose that the rapid reappearance of motility,
vision, etc., after their first disappearance in consequence
of a cortical mutilation, is due to the passing off of
inhibitions exerted by the irritated surface of the wound.
The only question is whether all restorations of function
must be explained in this one simple way, or whether some
part of them may not be owing to the formation of entirely
new 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 theory
facts may be cited such as the following: In dogs whose dis-
turbances due to cortical lesion have disappeared, they may
in consequence of some inner or outer accident reappear in all
their intensity for 24 hours or so and then disappear again. +
In a dog made half blind by an operation, and then shut
up in the dark, vision comes back just as quickly as in
other similar dogs whose sight is exercised systematically
every day.t A dog which has learned to beg before the
operation recommences this practice quite spontaneously
a week after a double-sided ablation of the motor zone.$
Occasionally, in a pigeon (or even, it is said, in a dog)
we see the disturbances less marked immediately after
the operation than they are half an hour later.| This
would be impossible were they due to the subtraction of the
organs which normally carried them on. Moreover the
entire drift of recent physiological and pathological specu-
lation is towards enthroning inhibition as an ever-present
and indispensable condition of orderly activity. We shall
see 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

* Goltz: Pfliiger’s Archiv, vol. 8, p. 460; Freusberg: zbid. vol. 10, p. 174
+ Goltz: Verrichtungen des Grosshirnz, p. 78.

¢t Loeb: Pfliger’s Archiv, vol. 29, p. 276.

§ Ibid. p. 289.

| Schrader: tid. vol. 44, p. 218.

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 69

of the system;* and Brown-Séquard has for years been
accumulating examples to show how far its influence ex-
tends. + Under these circumstances it seems as if error
might more probably lie in curtailing its sphere too much
than in stretching it too far as an explanation of the
phenomena following cortical lesion. ¢

On the other hand, if we admit no re-education of cen-
tres, we not only fly in the face of an @ priori probability,
but we find ourselves compelled by facts to suppose an
almost incredible number of functions natively lodged in the
centres below the thalami or even in those below the corpora
quadrigemina. I will consider the a priori objection after
first taking a look at the facts which I have in mind. They
confront us the moment we ask ourselves just which are the
parts which perform the functions abolished by an operation
after sufficient time has elapsed for restoration to occur ?

The first observers thought that they must be the cor-
responding parts of the opposite or intact hemisphere. But as
long ago as 1875 Carville and Duret tested this by cutting
out the fore-leg-centre on one side, in a dog, and then, after
waiting till restitution had occurred, cutting it out on the
opposite side as well. Goltz and others have done the
same thing.§ Ifthe opposite side were really the seat of the
restored function, the original palsy should have appeared
again and been permanent. Butit did not appear at all;
there appeared only a palsy of the hitherto unaffected side.
The next supposition is that the parts surrounding the cut-out
region learn vicariously to perform its duties. But here,
again, experiment seems to upset the hypothesis, so far as
the motor zone goes at least; for we may wait till motility
has returned in the affected limb, and then both irritate the

* The Nervous System and the Mind (1888), chaps. m1, vi; also in
Brain, vol. xi. p. 361.

+ Brown-Séquard has given a résumé of his opinions in the Archives
de Physiologie for Oct. 1889, 5me. Série, vol. 1. p. 751.

¢ Goltz first applied the inhibition theory to the brain in his ‘ Verrich-
tungen des Grosshirns,’ p. 39 ff. On the general philosophy of Inhibition
the reader may consult Brunton’s ‘Pharmakology and Therapeutics,’
p. 154 ff., and also ‘ Nature,’ vol. 27, p. 419 ff.

§ E.g. Herzen, Herman u. Schwalbe’s Jahres-bericht for 1886, Physiol
Abth. p. 38. (Experiments on new-born puppies.)

70 PSYCHOLOGY.

cortex surrounding the wound without exciting the limb
to movement, and ablate it, without bringing back the
vanished palsy.* It would accordingly seem that the cere-
bral centres below the cortex must be the seat of the regained
activities. But Goltz destroyed a dog’s entire left hemi-
sphere, together with the corpus striatum and the thalamus
on that side, and kept him alive until a surprisingly small
amount of motor and tactile disturbance remained.t These
centres cannot here have accounted for the restitution. He
has even, as it would appear,{ ablated both the hemispheres
of a dog, and kept him alive 51 days, able to walk and stand,
The corpora striata and thalami in this dog were also prac-
tically gone. In view of such results we seem driven, with
M. Francois-Franck,§ to fall back on the ganglia lower still,
or even on the spinal cord as the ‘vicarious’ organ of which
we are in quest. If the abeyance of function between the
operation and the restoration was due exclusively to inhibi-
tion, then we must suppose these lowest centres to be in
reality extremely accomplished organs. They must always
have done what we now find them doing after function is
restored, even when the hemispheres were intact. Of
course this is conceivably the case; yet it does not seem
very plausible. And the @ priori considerations which a
moment since I said I should urge, make it less plausible
still.

For, in the first place, the brain is essentially a place of
currents, which run in organized paths. Loss of function
can only mean one of two things, either that a current can
no longer run in, or that if it runs in, it can no longer run
out, by its old path. Either of these inabilities may come
from a local ablation; and ‘restitution’ can then only mean
that, in spite of a temporary block, an inrunning current has
at last become enabled to flow out by its old path again—
e.g., the sound of ‘give your paw’ discharges after some

* Francois-Franck : op. cit. p. 882. Results are somewhat contradictory.

+ Pfliiger’s Archiv, vol. 42, p. 419.

¢ Neurologisches Centralblatt, 1889, p. 372.

§ Op. cit. p. 387. See pp. 878 to 388 for a discussion of the whole
question. Compare also Wundt’s Physiol. Psych., 3d ed., 1. 226 ff., and
Luciani u. Seppili, pp. 248, 298.

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRALN. Tt

weeks into the same canine muscles into which it used te
discharge before the operation. As far as the cortex itself
goes, since one of the purposes for which it actually exists
is the production of new paths,* the only question before
us is: Is the formation of these particular ‘vicarious’ paths
too much to expect of its plastic powers? It would cer-
tainly be too much to expect that a hemisphere should
receive currents from optic fibres whose arriving-place with-
in it is destroyed, or that it should discharge into fibres of
the pyramidal strand if their place of exit is broken down.
Such lesions as these must be irreparable within that
hemisphere. Yet even then, through the other hemisphere,
the corpus callosum, and the bilateral connections in the
spinal cord, one can imagine some road by which the old
muscles might eventually be innervated by the same in-
coming currents which innervated them before the block.
And for all minor interruptions, not involving the arriving-
place of the ‘cortico-petal’ or the place of exit of the ‘cortico-
fugal’ fibres, roundabout paths of some sort through the
affected hemisphere itself must exist, for every point of it
is, remotely at least, in potential communication with every
other point. The normal paths are only paths of least
resistance. Ifthey get blocked or cut, paths formerly more
resistant become the least resistant paths under the changed
conditions. It must never be forgotten that a current that
runs in has got to run out somewhere ; and if it only once
succeeds by accident in striking into its old place cf exit
again, the thrill of satisfaction which the consciousness
connected with the whole residual brain then receives will
reinforce and fix the paths of that moment and make them
more likely to be struck into again. The resultant feeling
that the old habitual act is at last successfully back again,
becomes itself a new stimulus which stamps all the exist-
ing currents in. It is matter of experience that such feel-
ings of successful achievement do tend to fix in our memory
whatever processes have led to them; and we shall have

* The Chapters on Habit, Association, Memory, and Perception will
change our present preliminary conjecture tbat that is one of its essentia!
uses, into an unshakable conviction.

72 PSYCHOLOGY.

a good deal more to say upon the subject when we come te
the Chapter on the Will.

My conclusion then is this: that some of the restitution
of function (especially where the cortical lesion is not too
great) is probably due to genuinely vicarious function on
the put of the centres that remain; whilst some of it
is due to the passing off of inhibitions. In other words,
both the vicarious theory and the inhibition theory are
true in their measure. But as for determining that measure,
or saying which centres are vicarious, and to what extent
they can learn new tricks, that is impossible at present.

FINAL CORRECTION OF THE MEYNERT SCHEME.

And now, after learning all these facts, what are we to
think of the child and the candle-flame, and of that scheme
which provisionally imposed itself on our acceptance after
surveying the actions of the frog? (Cf. pp. 25-6, supra.) It
will be remembered that we then considered the lower cen-
tres en masse as machines for responding to present sense-
impressions exclusively, and the hemispheres as equally
exclusive organs of action from inward considerations or
ideas ; and that, following Meynert, we supposed the hemi-
spheres to have no native tendencies to determinate activity,
but to be merely superadded organs for breaking up the
various reflexes performed by the lower centres, and com-
bining their motor and sensory elements in novel ways. It
will also be remembered that I prophesied that we should
be obliged to soften down the sharpness of this distinction
after 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 the
lower centres are more spontaneous, and that the hemi-
spheres are more automatic, than the Meynert scheme
allows. Schrader’s observations in Goltz’s Laboratory on
hemisphereless frogs* and pigeons t give an idea quite
different from the picture of these creatures which is
classically current. Steiner's { observations on frogs

* Pfliiger’s Archiv, vol. 41, p. 75 (1887). + Jbid., vol. 44, p. 175 (1889)
¢ Untersuchungen tiber die Physiologie des Froschhirns, 1885.

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 73

already went a good way in the same direction, showing,
for example, that locomotion is a well-developed function
of the medulla oblongata. But Schrader, by great care
in the operation, and by keeping the frogs a long time alive,
found that at least in some of them the spinal cord would
produce movements of locomotion when the frog was
smartly roused by a poke, and that swimming and croaking
could sometimes be performed when nothing above the
medulla oblongata remained.* Schrader’s hemisphereless
frogs moved spontaneously, ate flies, buried themselves
in the ground, and in short did many things which before
his observations were supposed to be impossible unless the
hemispheres remained. Steinert and Vulpian have re-
marked an even greater vivacity in fishes deprived of their
hemispheres. Vulpian says of his brainless carpst that
three days after the operation one of them darted at food
and ata knot tied on the end ofa string, holding the latter so
tight between his jaws that his head was drawn out of
water. Later, “they see morsels of white of egg; the
moment these sink through the water in front of them,
they follow and seize them, sometimes after they are on the
bottom, sometimes before they have reached it. In captur-
ing and swallowing this food they execute just the same
movements as the intact carps which are in the same aqua-
rium. ‘The only difference is that they seem to see them at
less distance, seek them with less impetuosity and less per-
severance in all the points of the bottom of the aquarium,
but they struggle (so to speak) sometimes with the sound
carps to grasp the morsels. It is certain that they do not
confound these bits of white of egg with other white bodies,
small pebbles for example, which are at the bottom of the
water. The same carp which, three days after operation,
seized the knot on a piece of string, no longer snaps at it
now, but if one brings it near her, she draws away from it
by swimming backwards before it comes into contact with

* Toc. cit. pp. 80, 82-8. Schrader also found a diting-reflex developed
when the medulla oblongata is cut through just behind the cerebellum.

+ Berlin Akad. Sitzungsberichte for 1886.

t+ Comptes Rendus, vol. 102, p. 90.

74 PSYCHOLOG Y.

her mouth.” * Already on pp. 9-10, as the reader may re:
member, we instanced those adaptations of conduct to new
conditions, on the part of the frog’s spinal cord and thalami,
which led Pfliiger and Lewes on the one hand and Goltz on
the other to locate in these organs an intelligence akin to
that 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 purpose
behind them is quite as persuasive. In pigeons Schrader
found that the state of somnolence lasted only three or four
days, after which time the birds began indefatigably to
walk about the room. They climbed out of boxes in which
they were put, jumped over or flew up upon obstacles, and
their sight was so perfect that neither in walking nor flying
did they ever strike any object in the room. They had
also definite ends or purposes, flying straight for more
convenient perching places when made uncomfortable by
movements imparted to those on which they stood ; and of
several possible perches they always chose the most con-
venient. “If we give the dove the choice of a horizontal
bar (#eck) or an equally distant table to fly to, she always
gives decided preference to the table. Indeed she chooses
the table even if itis several meters farther off than the bar
or the chair.” Placed on the back of a chair, she flies first
to the seat and then to the floor, and in general “ will for-
sake a high position, although it give her sufficiently firm
support, and in order to reach the ground will make use of
the environing objects as intermediate goals of flight, show-
ing a perfectly correct judgment of their distance. Although
able to fly directly to the ground, she prefers to make the
journey in successive stages... . Once on the ground, she
hardly ever rises spontaneously into the air.” +

Young rabbits deprived of their hemispheres will stand,
run, start at noises, avoid obstacles in their path, and give
responsive cries of suffering when hurt. Rats will do the
same, and throw themselves moreover into an attitude of
defence. Dogs never survive such an operation if per-
formed at once. But Goltz’s latest dog, mentioned on p.

* Comptes Rendus de l’Acad. d. Sciences, vol. 102, p. 1580.
+ Loc. cit. p. 216.

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 75

70, which is said to have been kept alive for fifty-one days
after both hemispheres had been removed by a series of
ablations and the corpora striata and thalami had softened
away, shows how much the mid-brain centres and the cord
can do even in the canine species. Taken together, the
number of reactions shown to exist in the lower centres by
these observations make out a pretty good case for the Mey-
nert scheme, as applied to these lower animals. That
scheme demands hemispheres which shall be mere supple-
ments or organs of repetition, and in the light of these
observations they obviously are so to a great extent. But
the Meynert scheme also demands that the reactions of the
lower centres shall all be native, and we are not absolutely
sure that some of those which we have been considering
may not have been acquired after the injury ; and it further-
more demands that they should be machine-like, whereas
the expression of some of them makes us doubt whether
they may not be guided by an intelligence of low degree.
Even in the lower animals, then, there is reason to soften
down that opposition between the hemispheres and the
lower centres which the scheme demands. The hemi-
spheres may, it is true, only supplement the lower centres,
but the latter resemble the former in nature and have
some small amount at least of ‘spontaneity’ and choice.
But when we come to monkeys and man the scheme
well-nigh breaks down altogether; for we find that the
hemispheres do not simply repeat voluntarily actions which
the lower centres perform as machines. There are many
functions which the lower centres cannot by themselves
perform at all. When the motor cortex is injured in a man
or a monkey genuine paralysis ensues, which in man is
incurable, and almost or quite equally so in the ape. Dr.
Seguin knew a man with hemi-blindness, from cortical
injury, which had persisted unaltered for twenty-three
years. ‘Traumatic inhibition’ cannot possibly account
for this. The blindness must have been an ‘ Ausfallser-
scheinung,’ due to the loss of vision’s essential organ. It
would seem, then, that in these higher creatures the lower
centres must be less adequate than they are farther down
in the zoological scale ; and that even for certain elementary

76 PS YCHOLOG Y.

combinations of movement and impression the co-operation
of the hemispheres is necessary from the start. Even in
birds and dogs the power of eating properly is lost when
the frontal lobes are cut off.*

The plain truth is that neither in man nor beast are the
hemispheres the virgin organs which our scheme called
them. So far from being unorganized at birth, they must
have native tendencies to reaction of a determinate sort.+
These are the tendencies which we know as emotions and
instincts, and which we must study with some detail in later
chapters of this book. Both instincts and emotions are reac
tions upon special sorts of objects of perception ; they de-
pend on the hemispheres; and they are in the first instance
reflex, that is, they take place the first time the exciting ob-
ject is met, are accompanied by no forethought or delibera-
tion, and are irresistible. But they are modifiable to a
certain extent by experience, and on later occasions of
meeting the exciting object, the instincts especially have
less of the blind impulsive character which they had at
first. All this will be explained at some length in Chapter
XXIV. Meanwhile we can say that the multiplicity of emo-
tional and instinctive reactions in man, together with his
extensive associative power, permit of extensive recouplings
of the original sensory and motor partners. The conse-
quences of one instinctive reaction often prove to be the
inciters of an opposite reaction, and being suggested on later
occasions by the original object, may then suppress the
first reaction altogether, just as in the case of the child and
the flame. For this education the hemispheres do not need

* Goltz: Pfliiger’s Archiv, vol. 42, p. 447; Schrader: zbéd. vol. 44, p.
219 ff. It is possible that this symptom may be an effect of traumatic
inhibition, however.

+ A few years ago one of the strongest arguments for the theory that
the hemispheres are purely supernumerary was Soltmann’s often-quoted
observation that in new-born puppies the motor zone of the cortex is not
excitable by electricity and only becomes so in the course of a fortnight,
presumably after the experiences of the lower centres have educated it to
motor duties. Paneth’s later observations, however, seem to show that
Soltmann may have been misled through overnarcotizing his victims
(Pfliiger’s Archiv, vol. 37, p. 202). In the Neurologisches Centralblatt
for 1889, p. 518, Bechterew returns to the subject on Soltmann’s side with:
out, however, noticing Paneth’s work.

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 77

to be tabule rase at first, as the Meynert scheme would
have them; and so far from their being educated by the
lower centres exclusively, they educate themselves.*

We have already noticed the absence of reactions from
fear and hunger in the ordinary brainless frog. Schrader
gives a striking account of the instinctless condition of his
brainless pigeons, active as they were in the way of loco-
motion and voice. ‘The hemisphereless animal moves in a
world of bodies which .. . are all of equal value for him....
He is, to use Goltz’s apt expression, impersonal... . Every
object is for him only a space-occupying mass, he turns out
of his path for an ordinary pigeon no otherwise than for a
stone. He may try to climb over both. All authors agree
that they never found any difference, whether it was an in-
animate body, a cat, a dog, or a bird of prey which came in
their pigeon’s way. The creature knows neither friends
nor enemies, in the thickest company it lives like a hermit.
The languishing cooing of the male awakens no more im-
pression than the rattling of the peas, or the call-whistle
which in the days before the injury used to make the birds
hasten to be fed. Quite as little as the earlier observers
have I seen hemisphereless she-birds answer the courting
of the male. A hemisphereless male will coo all day long
and show distinct signs of sexual excitement, but his activ-
ity is without any object, it is entirely indifferent to him
whether the she-bird be there or not. If one is placed near
him, he leaves her unnoticed. ... As the male pays no at-
tention to the female, so she nEes none to her young. The
brood may follow the mother ceaselessly ae for food,
but they might as well ask it from a stone. ... The hemi-

* Miinsterberg (Die Willenshandlung, 1888, p. 134) challenges Meynert’s
scheme 7m toto, saying that whilst we have in our personal experience
plenty of examples of acts which were at first voluntary becoming second-
arily automatic and reflex, we have no conscious record of a single origi-
nally retlex 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 pestulates must
in the nature of things antedate recollection. But it scems to me that
Miinsterberg’s rejection of the scheme may possibly be correct as regards
reflexes from the lower centres. Everywhere in this depaitme:t of psy:
chogenesis we are made to feel how ignorant we really arc

78 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

sphereless pigeon is in the highest degree tame, and fears
man as little as cat or bird of prey.” *

Putting together now all the facts and reflections which
we have been through, it seems to me that we can no longer
hold strictly to the Meynert scheme. If anywhere, it will
apply to the lowest animals; but in them especially the
lower centres seem to have a degree of spontaneity and
choice. On the whole, I think that we are driven to sub-
stitute for 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 of
future discoveries of detail.

CONCLUSION.

All the centres, in all animals, whilst they are in one
aspect mechanisms, probably are, or at least once were,
organs of consciousness in another, although the conscious-
ness is doubtless much more developed in the hemispheres
than it is anywhere else. The consciousness must every-
where prefer some of the sensations which it gets to others ;
and if it can remember these in their absence, however
dimly, they must be its ends of desire. If, moreover, it can
identify in memory any motor discharges which may have
led to such ends, and associate the latter with them, then
these motor discharges themselves may in turn become
desired as means. This is the development of will ; and its
realization must of course be proportional to the possible
complication of the consciousness. Even the spinal cord
may possibly have some little power of will in this sense,
and of effort towards modified behavior in consequence of
new experiences of sensibility. t ;

* Pfliiger’s Archiv, vol. 44, p. 280-1.

+ Naturally, as Schiff long ago pointed out (Lehrb. d. Muskel-u. Ner-
venphysiologie, 1859, p. 213 ff.), the ‘ Riickenmarksseele,’ if it now exist,
can have no higher sense-corsciousness, for its incoming currents are
solely from the skin. But it may, in its dim way, both feel, prefer, and
desire. See, for the view favorable to the text: G. H. Lewes, The Physiol-
ogy of Common Life (1860). chap. rx. Goltz (Nervencentren des Frosches
1869, pp. 102-130) thinks that the frog’s cord has no adaptative power. This
tuy be the case in such experiments as his, because the beheaded frog’s

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. ao

All nervous centres have then in the first instance one
essential function, that of ‘intelligent’ action. They feel,
prefer one thing to another, and have ‘ends.’ Like all
other organs, however, they evolve from ancestor to descend-
ant, and their evolution takes two directions, the lower
centres passing downwards into more unhesitating autom-
atism, and the higher ones upwards into larger intellectu-
ality.* Thus it may happen that those functions which
can safely grow uniform and fatal become least accompanied
by mind, and that their organ, the spinal cord, becomes a
more and more soulless machine; whilst on the contrary
those functions which it benefits the animal to have adapted
to delicate environing variations pass more and more to the
hemispheres, whose anatomical structure and attendant
consciousness grow more and more elaborate as zoological
evolution proceeds. In this way it might come about that
in man and the monkeys the basal ganglia should do fewer
things by themselves than they can do in dogs, fewer in dogs
than in rabbits, fewer in rabbits than in hawks,+ fewer in
hawks than in pigeons, fewer in pigeons than in frogs, fewer
in frogs than in fishes, and that the hemispheres should
correspondingly do more. This passage of functions for-
ward to the ever-enlarging hemispheres would be itself one
of the evolutive changes, to be explained like the develop-
ment of the hemispheres themselves, either by fortunate
variation or by inherited effects of use. The reflexes, on
this view, upon which the education of our human hemi-
spheres depends, would not be due to the basal ganglia

short 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 the
simple reflexes of the frog’s cord, show that there is some adaptation to new
conditions, inasmuch as when usual paths of conduction are interrupted by
a cut, new puths are taken. According to Rosenthal, these grow more
pervious (i.e. require a smaller stimulus) in proportion as they are more
often traversed.

* Whether this evolution takes place through the inheritance of habits
acquired, or through the preservation of lucky variations, is an alternative
which we need not discuss here. We shall consider it in the last chapter
in the book. For our present purpose the modus operandi of the evolution
makes no difference, provided it be admitted to occur.

+ See Schrader’s Observations, Joc. cit.

80 PSYCHOLOGY.

alone. They would be tendencies in the hemispheres them.
selves, modifiable by education, unlike the reflexes of the
medulla oblongata, pons, optic lobes and spinal cord. Such
cerebral reflexes, if they exist, form a basis quite as good
as that which the Meynert scheme offers, for the acquisition
of memories and associations which may later result in all
sorts of ‘changes of partners’ in the psychic world. The
diagram of the baby and the candle (see page 25) can be
re-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 touch-
ing tendency the next time the candle is perceived, and
excite the tendency to withdraw—so that the retinal picture
will, upon that next time, be coupled with the original
motor partner of the pain. We thus get whatever psycho-
logical truth the Meynert scheme possesses without en-
tangling ourselves 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 hemi-
spheres to the other lobes, is, it seems to me, that in which
it is safest to indulge. If it has no other advantage, it at
any rate makes us realize how enormous are the gaps in our
knowledge, the moment we try to cover the facts by any
one formula of a general kind.

CHAPTER III.

«-

ON SOME GENERAL CONDITIONS OF BRAIN-ACTIVITY.

Tue elementary properties of nerve-tissue on which
the brain-functions depend are far from being satisfactorily
made out. The scheme that suggests itself in the first
instance to the mind, because it is so obvious, is certainly
false: I mean the notion that each cell stands for an idea
or part of an idea, and that the ideas are associated or
‘bound into bundles’ (to use a phrase of Locke’s) by the
fibres. If we make a symbolic diagram on a blackboard,
of the laws of association between ideas, we are inevitably
Jed to draw circles, or closed figures of some kind, and to
connect them by lines. When we hear that the nerve-cen-
tres contain cells which send off fibres, we say that Nature
has realized our diagram for us, and that the mechanical
substratum of thought is plain. In some way, it is true, our
diagram must be realized in the brain; but surely in no
such visible and palpable way as we at first suppose.* An
enormous number of the cellular bodies in the hemispheres
are fibreless. Where fibres are sent off they soon divide into
untraceable ramifications ; and nowhere do we see a simple
coarse anatomical connection, like a line on the black-
board, between two cells. Too much anatomy has been
found to order for theoretic purposes, even by the anat-
omists ; and the popular-science notions of cells and fibres
are almost wholly wide of the truth. Let us therefore rele-
gate the subject of the intimate workings of the brain to

* T shall myself in later places indulge in much of this schematization.
The reader will understand once for all that it is symbolic; and that the
use of it is hardly more than to show what a deep congruity there is between
mental processes and mechanical processes of some kind, not necessarily of
the exact kind portrayed.

81

82 PSYCHOLOGY.

the physiology of the future, save in respect to a few points
of which a word must now be said. And first of

THE SUMMATION OF STIMULI

in the same nerve-tract. This is a property extremely im-
portant for the understanding of a great many phenomena
of the neural, and consequently of the mental, life; and it
behooves us to gain a clear conception of what it means be-
fore we proceed any farther.

The law is this, that a stimulus which would be inadequate by
itself to excite a nerve-centre to effective discharge may, by acting
with one or more other stimuli (equally ineffectual by themselves
alone) bring the discharge about. The natural way to con-
sider this is as a summation of tensions which at last over-
come a resistance. The first of them produce a ‘latent
excitement’ or a ‘ heightened irritability ’—the phrase is
immaterial so far as practical consequences go; the last is
the straw which breaks the camel’s back. Where the
neural process is one that has consciousness for its accom-
paniment, the final explosion would in all cases seem to
involve a vivid state of feeling of a more or less substantive
kind. But there is no ground for supposing that the ten-
sions whilst yet submaximal or outwardly ineffective, may
not also have a share in determining the total conscious-
hess present in the individual at the time. In later
chapters we shall see abundant reason to suppose that they
do have such a share, and that without their contribution
the fringe of relations which is at every moment a vital in-
gredient of the mind’s object, would not come to conscious-
ness at all.

The subject belongs too much to physiology for the
evidence to be cited in detail in these pages. I will throw
into a note a few references for such readers as may be in
terested in following it out,* and simply say that the direct

*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: Johns
Hopkins 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. 1. Thl.
m1. p. 31. Francois-Franck: Lecons sur les Fonctions motrices du Cer-

GHNERAL CONDITIONS OF BRAIN-ACTIVITY. 83

electrical irritation of the cortical centres sufficiently proves
the point. For it was found by the earliest experimenters
here that whereas it takes an exceedingly strong current
to produce any movement when a single induction-shock
is used, a rapid succession of induction-shocks (‘ faradiza-
tion’) will produce movements when the current is com-
paratively weak. A single quotation from an excellent
investigation will exhibit this law under further aspects:

‘* Tf we continue to stimulate the cortex at short intervals with the
strength of current which produces the minimal muscular contrac-
tion [of the dog’s digital extensor muscle], the amount of contraction
gradually increases till it reaches the maximum. Each earlier stimula-
tion leaves thus an effect behind it, which increases the efficacy of the
following one. In this summation of the stimuli... . the foliowing
points may be noted: 1) Single stimuli entirely inefficacious when
alone may become efficacious by sufficiently rapid reiteration. If the
current used is very much less than that which provokes the first begin-
ning of contraction, a very large number of successive shocks may be
needed before the movement appears—20, 50, once 106 shocks were
needed. 2) The summation takes place easily in proportion to the
shortness of the interval between the stimuli. A current too weak to
give effective summation when its shocks are 3 seconds apart will be
capable of so doing when the interval is shortened to 1 second. — 3)
Not only electrical irritation leaves a modification which goes to swell
the following stimulus, but every sort of irritant which can produce a
contraction does so. If in any way a reflex contraction of the muscle
experimented on has been produced, or if it is contracted spontaneously
by the animal (as not unfrequently happens ‘by sympathy,’ during a
deep inspiration), it is found that an electrical stimulus, until then
inoperative, operates energetically if immediately applied.” *

Furthermore :

‘‘In a certain stage of the morphia-narcosis an ineffectively weak
shock will become powerfully effective, if, immediately before its appli-

veau, p. 51 ff., 889.—For the process of summation in nerves and muscles,
ef. Hermann: ibid. Thl. 1. p. 109, and vol. 1. p. 40. Also Wundt:
Physiol. Psych., 1. 243 ff.; Richet : Travaux du Laboratoire de Marey, 1877,
p. 97; L’Homme et l’Intelligence, pp. 24 ff., 468; Revue Philosophique,
t. xxr. p. 564. Kronecker u. Hall: Archiv f. (Anat. u.) Physiol., 1879 ;
Schonlein . did. 1882, p. 357. Sertoli (Hofmann and Schwalbe’s Jahres-
bericht, 1882. p. 25. De Watteville: Neurologisches Centralblatt, 1883,
No. 7. Griinhagen: Arch. f. d. ges. Physiol., Bd. 34, p. 301 (1884).

* Bubnoff und Heidenhain : Ueber Erregungs- und Hemmungsvorgiinge
innerhalb der motorischen Hirncentren. Archiv f. d. ges. Physiol., Bd.
26, p. 156 (1881).

84 PSYCHOLOGY.

eation to the motor centre, the skin of certain parts of the body is
exposed to gentle tactile stimulation. . .. If, having ascertained the
subminimal strength of current and convinced one’s self repeatedly of its
inefficacy, we draw our hand a single time lightly over the skin of the
paw whose cortical centre is the object of stimulation, we find the cur-
rent at once strongly effective. The increase of irritability lasts some
seconds before it disappears. Sometimes the effect of a single light
stroking of the paw is only sufficient to make the previously ineffectual
current produce a very weak contraction. Repeating the tactile stimu-
lation will then, as a rule, increase the contraction’s extent.” *

We constantly use the summation of stimuli in our
practical appeals. If a car-horse balks, the final way of
starting him is by applying a number of customary incite-
ments at once. If the driver uses reins and voice, if one
bystander pulls at his head, another lashes his hind
quarters, and the conductor rings the bell, and the dis-
mounted passengers shove the car, all at the same moment,
his obstinacy generally yields, and he goes on his way re-
joicing. If we are striving to remember a lost name or fact,
we think of as many ‘cues’ as possible, so that by their
joint action they may recall what no one of them can recall
alone. The sight of a dead prey will often not stimulate a
beast to pursuit, but if the sight of movement be added to
that of form, pursuit occurs. “ Briicke noted that his brain-
less hen, which made no attempt to peck at the grain under
her very eyes, began pecking if the grain were thrown on
the ground with force, so as to produce a rattling sound.” +
“Dr. Allen Thomson hatched out some chickens on a carpet,
where he kept them for several days. They showed no in-
clination to scrape, . . . but when Dr. Thomson sprinkled
a little gravel on the carpet, . . . the chickens immediately
began their scraping movements.” + A strange person, and
darkness, are both of them stimuli to fear and mistrust in
dogs (and for the matter of that, in men). Neither circum-

* Archiv f. d. ges. Physiol., Bd. 26, p. 176 (1881). Exner thinks (7id.
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 as
the general philosophy of summation goes.

+G Hi. Lewes: Physical Basis of Mind, p. 479, where many similai
examples are given, 487-9. ;

t Romanes: Mental Evolution in Animals, p. 168.

GENERAL CONDITIONS OF BRAIN-ACTIVITY. 85

stance alone may awaken outward manifestations, but to-
gether, i.e. when the strange man is met in the dark, the dog
will be excited to violent defiance.* Street-hawkers well
know the efficacy of summation, for they arrange themselves
in a line upon the sidewalk, and the passer often buys from
the last one of them, through the effect of the reiterated so-
licitation, what he refused to buy from the first in the row.
Aphasia shows’ many examples of summation. A patient
who cannot name an object simply shown him, will name it
if he touches as well as sees it, ete.

Instances of summation might be multiplied indefinitely,
butit is hardly worth while to forestall subsequent chapters.
Those on Instinct, the Stream of Thought, Attention, Dis-
crimination, Association, Memory, Aisthetics, and Will, will
contain numerous exemplifications of the reach of the prin-
ciple in the purely psychological field.

REACTION-TIME.

One of the lines of experimental investigation most
diligently followed of late years is that of the ascertain-
ment of the time occupied by nervous events. Helmholtz led
off by discovering the rapidity of the current in the sciatic
nerve of the frog. But the methods he used were soon
applied to the sensory nerves and the centres, and the
results caused much popular scientific admiration when
described as measurements of the ‘velocity of thought.’
The phrase ‘ quick as thought’ had from time immemorial
signified all that was wonderful and elusive of determina-
tion in the line of speed; and the way in which Science
laid her doomful hand upon this mystery reminded people
of the day when Franklin first ‘eripwit celo fulmen, fore-

. *See a similar instance in Mach: Beitriige zur Analyse der Empfin-
dungen, p. 36, a sparrow being the animal. My young children are afraid
of their own pug-dog, if he enters their room «fter they are in bed and the
lights are out. Compare this statement also: ‘‘ The first question to a
peasant seldom proves more than a flapper to rouse the torpid adjustments
of his ears. The invariable answer of a Scottish peasant is, ‘What’s your
wull? —that of the English, a vacant stare. A second and even a third
question may be required to elicit an answer.” (R. Fowler: Some Obser-
vations on the Mente! State of the Blind, and Deaf, and Dumb (Salisbury,
1843), p. 14.)

86 PSYCHOLOG Y.

shadowing the reign of a newer and colder race of gods.
We shall take up the various operations measured, each in
the chapter to which it more naturally pertains. I may
say, however, immediately, that the phrase ‘velocity of
thought’ is misleading, for it is by no means clear in any
of the cases what particular act of thought occurs during
the time which is measured. ‘ Velocity of nerve-action’ is
liable to the same criticism, for in most cases we do not know
what particular nerve-processes occur. What the times
in question really represent is the total duration of certain
reactions upon stimuli. Certain of the conditions of the reac-
tion are prepared beforehand ; they consist in the assump-
tion of those motor and sensory tensions which we name
the expectant state. Just what happens during the actual
time occupied by the reaction (in other words, just what
is added to the pre-existent tensions to produce the actual
discharge) is not made out at present, either from the
neural or from the mental point of view.

The method is essentially the same in all these investiga-
tions. A signal of some sort is communicated to the subject,
and at the same instant records itself on a time-register-
ing apparatus. The subject then makes a muscular move-
ment of some sort, which is the ‘reaction,’ and which also
records itself automatically. The time found to have elapsed
between the two records is the total time of that observation.
The time-registering instruments are of various types.

Signal. Reaction.

Reaction- line

Time-line.

Fia. 21.

One type is that of the revolving drum covered with smol ed
paper, on which one electric pen traces a line which the
signal breaks and the ‘reaction’ draws again ; whilst another
electric pen (connected with a pendulum or a rod of metal
vibrating at a known rate) traces alongside of the former

GENERAL CONDITIONS OF BRAIN-ACTIVITY. 87

line a ‘ time-line’ of which each undulation or link stands
for a certain fraction of a second, and against which the
break in the reaction-line can be measured. Compare
Fig. 21, where the line is broken by the signal at the first
arrow, and continued again by the reaction at the second.
Ludwig’s Kymograph, Marey’s Chronograph are good ex-
amples of this type of instrument.

Another type of instrument is represented by the stop-
watch, of which the most perfect form is Hipp’s Chrono-
scope. The hand on the dial measures intervals as short
aS qglgg Of a second. The signal (by an appropriate electric

Fic. 22.—Bowditch’s Reaction-timer. F, tuning-fork carrying a little plate which
holds the paper on which the electric pen M makes the tracing, and sliding .n
grooves on the base-board. P, a plug which spreads the prongs of the fork apart
when it is pushed forward to its extreme limit, and releases them when it is drawn
back to a certain point. The fork then vibrates, and, its backward movement con-
tinuing, an undulating line is drawn on the smoked paper by the pen. At Tisa
tongue fixed to the carriage of the fork, and at K an electric key which the tongue
opens and with which the electric penis connected. At the instant of opening, the
ven changes its place and the undulating line is drawn at a different level on the
paper. The opening can be made to serve as a signal to the reacter in a variety
of ways, and his reaction can be made to close the pen again, when the line re-
turns to its first level. The reaction time = the number of undulations traced at
the second level.

connection) starts it; the reaction stops it; and by reading
off its initial and terminal positions we have immediately
and with no farther trouble the time we seek. A still
simpler instrument, though one not very satisfactory in its
working, is the ‘ psychodometer’ of Exner & Obersteiner,
of which I picture a modification devised by my colleague
Professor H. P. Bowditch, which works very well.

The manner in which the signal and reaction are con-
nected with the chronographic apparatus varies indefinitely

88 PSYCHOLOG Y.

in different experiments. Every new problem requires
some new electric or mechanical disposition of apparatus.*

The least complicated time-measurement is that known
as simple reaction-time, in which there is but one possible
signal and one possible movement, and both are known in
advance. The movement is generally the closing of an elec-
tric key with the hand. The foot, the jaw, the lips, even
the eyelid, have been in turn made organs of reaction, and
the apparatus has been modified accordingly.t The time
usually elapsing between stimulus and movement les be-
tween one and three tenths of a second, varying according
to circumstances which will be mentioned anon.

The subject of experiment, whenever the reactions are
short and regular, is ina state of extreme tension, and feels,’
when the signal comes, as if it started the reaction, by a
sort of fatality, and as if no psychic process of perception
or volition had a chance to intervene. The whole succession
is so rapid that perception seems to be retrospective, and
the time-order of events to be read off in memory rather
than known at the moment. This at least is my own per-
sonal experience in the matter, and with it I find others to
agree. The question is, What happens inside _of us, either
in brain or mind? and to answer that we must analyze just
what processes the reaction involves. It is evident that
some time is lost in each of the following stages :

1. The stimulus excites the peripheral sense-organ
adequately for a current to pass into the sensory nerve ;

2. The sensory nerve is traversed ;

3. The transformation (or reflection) of the sensory into
a motor current occurs in the centres ;

4, The spinal cord and motor nerve are traversed ;

5. The motor current excites the muscle to the contract-
ing point.
per a 8 ect cee

* The reader will find a great deal about chronographic apparatus in
J. Marey: La Méthode Graphique, pt. u. chap. 11. One can make pretty
fair measurements with no other instrument than a watch, by making a
large 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. Holmes
first suggested this method, which has been ingeniously elaborated and
applied by Professor Jastrow. See Science’ for September 10, 1886.

+ See, for a few modifications, Cattell, Mind, x1. 220 ff.

GENERAL CONDITIONS OF BRAIN-ACTIVITY. 89

Time is also lost, of course, outside the muscle, in the
joints, skin, etc., and between the parts of the apparatus;
and when the stimulus which serves as signal is applied to
the skin of the trunk or limbs, time is lost in the sensorial
conduction through the spinal cord.

The stage marked 3 is the only one that interests us
here. The other stages answer to purely physiological
processes, but stage 3 is psycho-physical; that is, it is a
higher-central process, and has probably some sort of con-
sciousness accompanying it. What sort?

Wundt has little difficulty in deciding that it is con-
sciousness of a quite elaborate kind. He distinguishes
between two stages in the conscious reception of an im-
pression, calling one perception, and the other apperception,
and likening the one to the mere entrance of an object into
the periphery of the field of vision, and the other to its
coming to occupy the focus or point of view. Inattentive
awareness of an object, and attention to it, are, it seems to
me, equivalents for perception and apperception, as Wundt
uses the words. To these two forms of awareness of the
impression 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 in
the succession in which they have been named.* So at
least I understand him. The simplest way to determine
the time taken up by this psycho-physical stage No. 3
would be to determine separately the duration of the sev-
eral purely physical processes, 1, 2, 4, and 5, and to sub-
tract them from the total reaction-time. Such attempts
have been made. t But the data for calculation are too

* Physiol. Psych., m. 221-2. Cf. also the first edition, 728-9. I must
confess to finding al! Wundt’s utterances about ‘apperception ’ both vacil-
lating and obscure. I see no use whatever for the word, as he employs it,
in Psychology. Attention, perception, conception, volition, are its ample
equivalents. Why we should need a single word to denote all these things
by turns, Wundt fails to make clear. Consult, however, his pupil Staude’s
article, ‘ Ueber den Begriff der Apperception,’ etc., in Wundt’s periodical
Philosophische Studien, 1. 149, which may be supposed official. For a
minute criticism of Wundt’s ‘apperception,’ see Marty. Vierteljahrschrift
f. wiss. Philos., x. 346.

+ By Exner, for example, Pfliiger’s Archiv, vu. 628 ff.

D0 PSYCHOLOGY.

inaccurate for use, and, as Wundt himself admits, * the pre-
cise duration of stage 3 must at present be left enveloped
with that of the other processes, in the total reaction-time.

My own belief is that no such succession of conscious
feelings as Wundt describes takes place during stage 3.
It is a process of central excitement and discharge, with
which doubtless some feeling coexists, but what feeling we
cannot tell, because it is so fugitive and so immediately
eclipsed by the more substantive and enduring memory of
the impression as it came in, and of the executed move-
ment of response. Feeling of the impression, attention to
it, thought of the reaction, volition to react, woud, undoubt-
edly, all be links of the process under other conditions,+ and
would lead to the same reaction—after an indefinitely longer
time. But these other conditions are not those of the
experiments we are discussing; and it is mythological psy-
chology (of which we shall see many later examples) to con-
clude that because two mental processes lead to the same
result they must be similar in their inward subjective con-
stitution. The feeling of stage 3 is certainly no articulate
perception. It can be nothing but the mere sense of a
reflex discharge. The reaction whose time is measured is,
in short, a reflex action pure and simple, and not a psychic
act, A foregoing psychic condition is, it is true, a pre-
requisite for this reflex action. The preparation of the
attention and volition; the expectation of the signal and
the readiness of the hand to move, the instant it shall come;
the nervous tension in which the subject waits, are all con-
ditions of the formation in kim for the time being of a new
path or are of reflex discharge. The tract from the sense-
organ which receives the stimulus, into the motor centre
which discharges the reaction, is already tingling with pre-
monitory innervation, is raised to such a pitch of he:ghtened
irritability by the expectant attention, that the signal is
instantaneously sufficient to cause the overflow.{ No other

* P. 222. Cf. also Richet, Rev. Philos., v1. 395-6.

+ For instance, if, on the previous day, one had resolved to act on a
signal when it should come, and it now came whilst we were engaged in
other things, and reminded us of the resolve.

t ‘‘I need hardly mention that success in these experiments depends in
a high degree on our concentration of attention. If inattentive, one gets

GENERAL CONDITIONS OF BRAIN-ACTIVITY. 91

tract of the nervous system is, at the moment, in this hair-
trigger condition. The consequence is that one sometimes
responds to a wrong signal, especially if it be an impression
of the same kind with the signal we expect.* But if by
chance we are tired, or the signal is unexpectedly weak,
and we do not react instantly, but only after an express
perception that the signal has come, and an express yoli-
tion, the time becomes quite disproportionately long (a
second or more, according to Exner +), and we feel that the
process is in nature altogether different.

In fact, the reaction-time experiments are a case to
which we can immediately apply what we have just learned
about the summation of stimuli. ‘ Expectant attention’ is
but the subjective name for what objectively is a partial
stimulation of a certain pathway, the pathway from the
‘centre’ for the signal to that for the discharge. In Chapter
XI we shall see that all attention involves excitement from
within of the tract concerned in feeling the objects to which
attention is given. The tract here is the excito-motor are
about to be traversed. The signal is but the spark from
without which touches off a train already laid. The per-
formance, under these conditions, exactly resembles any
reflex action. The only difference is that whilst, in the
ordinarily so-called reflex acts, the reflex arc is a permanent
result of organic growth, it is here a transient result of
previous cerebral conditions. +

very discrepant figures. . . . This concentration of the attention is in the
highest degree exhausting. After some experiments in which I was con-
cerned to get results as uniform as possible, I was covered with perspiration
and excessively fatigued although I had sat quietly in my chair al] the
while.” (Exner, loc. cit. vit. 618.)

* Wundt, Physiol. Psych., 0. 226.

+ Pfliger’s Archiv, vir. 616.

¢ In short, what M. Delbceuf calls an ‘organe adventice.’ The reaction-
time, moreover, is quite compatible with the reaction itself being of a reflex
order. Some reflexes (sneezing, e.g.) are very slow. The only time-
measurement of a reflex act in the human subject with which I am
acquainted is Exner’s measurement of winking (in Pfliiger’s Archiv f.
d. gesammt. Physiol., Bd. vu. p. 526, 1874). He found that when the
stimulus was a flash of light it took the wink 0.2168 sec. to occur. A strong
electric shock to the cornea shortened the time to 0.0578 sec. The ordinary
‘reaction-time ’ is midway between these values. Exner ‘ reduces’ his times
by eliminating the physiclogical process of conduction. His ‘reduced

92 PSYCHOLOGY.

T am happy to say that since the preceding paragraphs
(and the notes thereto appertaining) were written, Wundt
has himself become converted to the view which I defend.
He now admits that in the shortest reactions “there is
neither apperception nor will, but that they are merely
brain-refleces due to practice.” * The means of his conver-
sion are certain experiments performed in his laboratory
by Herr L. Lange, + who was led to distinguish between
two 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,

minimum winking-time’ is then 0.0471 (bid. 531), whilst his reduced reac-
tion-time is 0.0828 (cid. vir. 637). These figures have really no scientific
value beyond that of showing, according to Exner’s own belief (vu. 531),
that reaction-time and reflex-time measure processes of essentially the same
order. His description, moreover, of the process is an excellent description
of a reflex act. ‘‘ Every one,” says he, ‘‘ who makes reaction-time experi-
ments for the first time is surprised to find how little he is master of his own
movements, so soon as it becomes a question of executing them with a
maximum of speed. Not only does their energy lie, as it were, outside the
field of choice, but even the time in which the movement occurs depends
only partly upon ourselves. We jerk our arm, and we can afterwards tell
with astonishing precision whether we have jerked it quicker or slower than
another time, although we have no power to jerk it exactly at the wished-for
moment.”—Wundat himself admits that when we await a strong signal with
tense preparation there is no consciousness of any duality of ‘ appercep-
tion’ and motor response; the two are continuous (Physiol. Psych., 1.
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 all
they are very rudimentary. . . . The subject, by a voluntary effort [before
the signal comes], puts the lines of communication between the centre for”
the stimulus ‘‘and the centre for the co-ordination of motions ... inastate
of unstable equilibrium. When, therefore, a nervous impulse reaches the”
former centre, ‘‘ it causes brain-changes in two directions; an impulse moves
along to the cortex and calls forth there a perception corresponding to the
stimulus, while at the same time an impulse follows a line of small resist-
ance to the centre for the co-ordination of motions, and the proper nervous
impulse, already prepared and waiting for the signal, is sent from the
centre to the muscle of the hand. When the reaction has often been
made the entire cerebral process becomes automatic, the impulse of itself
takes the well-travelled way to the motor centre, and releases the motor
impulse.” (Mind, xr. 232-3.)—Finally, Prof. Lipps has, in his elaborate
way (Grundtatsachen, 179-188), made mince-meat of the view that stage 3
involves either conscious perception or conscious will.
* Physiol. Psych., 5d edition (1887), vol. 11. p. 266.
+ Philosophische Studien, vol. 1v. p. 479 (1888).

GENERAL CONDITIONS OF BRAIN-ACTIVITY. 93

one keeps one’s mind as intent as possible apon the ex-
pected signal, and ‘ purposely avoids ’* thinking of the move-
ment to be executed; in the ‘extreme muscular’ way one
‘does not think at all’ + of the signal, but stands as ready as
possible for the movement. The muscular reactions are
much shorter than the sensorial ones, the average differ-
ence being in the neighborhood of a tenth of a second.
Wuadt accordingly calls them ‘shortened reactions’ and,
with Lange, admits them to be mere reflexes; whilst the
sensorial reactions he calls ‘complete,’ and holds to his
original conception as far as they are concerned. The
facts, however, do not seem to me to warrant even this
amount 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 must
be rejected from the count as non-typical. “Only after
the reacter has succeeded by repeated and conscientious
practice in bringing about an extremely precise co-ordina-
tion of his voluntary impulse with nis sense-impression
do we get times which can be regarded as typicai sensorial
reaction-times.” + Now it seems to me that these excessive
and ‘ untypical’ times are probably the real ‘ complete times,’
the only ones in which distinct processes of actual percep-
tion and volition occur (see above, pp. 88-9). The typicai
sensorial time which is attained by practice is probabiy
another sort of reflex, less perfect than the reflexes pre-
pared by straining one’s attention towards the movement. §
The times are much more variable in the sensorial way
than in the muscular. The several muscular reactions
differ little from each other. Only in them does the phe-
nomenon occur of reacting on a false signal, or of reacting
before the signal. Times intermediate between these two
types occur according as the attention fails to turn itself
exclusively to one of the extremes. It is obvious that Herr
Lange’s distinction between the two types of reaction 1s a
highly important one, and that the ‘extreme muscuiar

* Loc. cit. p. 488. + Loc. cit. p. 487. t Loc. cit. p. 489.
§ Lange has an interesting hypothesis as to the brain-process concerned
in the Jatter, for which I can only refer to his essay.

94 PSYCHOLOGY.

method,’ giving both the shortest times and the most con-
stant ones, ought to be aimed at in all comparative investi-
gations. Herr Lange’s own muscular time averaged
0.123 ; his sensorial time, 0’’.230.

These reaction-time experiments are then in no sense
measurements of the swiftness of thought. Only when we
complicate them is there a chance for anything like an
intellectual operation to occur. ‘They may be complicated
mm various ways. The reaction may be withheld until the
signal has consciously awakened a distinct idea (Wundt’s
discrimination-time, association-time) and then performed.
Or there may be a variety of possibie signals, each with
a different reaction assigned to it, and the reacter may
be uncertain which one he is about to receive. The
reaction would then hardly seem to occur without a pre-
jimimary recognition and choice. We shall see, however,
in the appropriate chapters, that the discrimination and
choice involved in such a reaction are widely different from
the intellectual operations of which we are ordinarily con-
scious under those names. Meanwhile the simple reaction-
time remains as the starting point of all these superinduced
complications. It is the fundamental physiological con-
stant in all time-mexsurements. As such, its own variations
have an interest, and must be briefly passed in review.*

The reaction-time varies with the individual and his age.
An individual may have it particularly long in respect of
signais of one sense (Buccola, p. 147), but not of others.
Old and uncultivated people have it long (nearly a second,
in an oid pauper observed by Exner, Pfliiger’s Archiv, vir.
612-4). Children have it long (half a second, Herzen in
Buccola, p. 152).

Practice shortens it to a quantity which is for each indi-
vidual a minimum beyond which no farther reduction can
be made. The aforesaid old paupex’s time was, alter
much practice, reauced to 0.1866 sec. (loc. cit. p. 626).

* The reader who wishes to know more about the matter will find a
most faithful compilation of all that kas been done, together with much
original matter, in G. Buccola’s ‘Legge del Tempo,’ etc. See also chap-
ter xvi of Wundt’s Physiol. Psychology ; Exner in Hermann’s Hdbch.,
Bd. 2, Thi. m. pp. 252-280; also Ribot’s Contemp. Germ. Psych.
chap. VIII.

GHNERAL CONDITIONS OF BRAIN-ACTIVITY. 95

Fatigue lengthens it.

Concentration of attention shortens it. Details will be
given in the chapter on Attention.

The nature of the signal makes it vary.* Wundt writes:

‘‘T found that the reaction-time for impressions on the skin with
electric stimulus is less than for true touch-sensations, as the following
averages show:

Average, wee
Sounds e- ree ence eee ORG Tesee: 0.0221 see.
| LISS. 0 eR OR ea 05222" te 0.0219 ‘
Electric skin-sensation...... 0:201 “* De@illay Ce
Mouch=SensAniONs).. 4-6... -.0s21o 0.0134 ‘

‘‘T here bring together the averages which have been obtained by
some other observers :

Hirsch. Hankel. Exner.
SONG Ee Oboe ne cere 0.149 0.1505 0.1360
Meile tee sees tes Ose 0.200 0.2246 0.1506
Skin-sensation. .... ....0.182 0.1546 021337 7

Thermic reactions have been lately;measured by A.
Goldscheider and by Vintschgau (1887), who find them
slower than reactions from touch. That from heat espe-
cially is very slow, more so than from cold, the differences
(according to Goldscheider) depending on the nerve-ter-
minations in the skin.

Gustatory reactions were measured by Vintschgau. They
differed according to the substances used, running up to
half a second as a maximum when identification took place.
The mere perception of the presence of the substance on
the tongue varied from 0.159 to 0.219 (Pfliiger’s Archiv,
XIV. 529).

Olfactory reactions have been studied by Vintschgau,

*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, and
again by carrying our hand towards our back. The moment registered was
always that at which the hand broke an electric contact in starting to
move. But it started one or two hundredths of a second later when the
more extensive movement was the one to be made. Orchansky, on the
other hand, experimenting on contractions of the masseter muscle, found
(Archiv f. (Anat. u.) Physiol., 1889, p. 187) that the greater the amplitude
of contraction intended, the shorter grew the time of reaction. He
_ explains this by the fact that a more ample contraction makes a greater
appeal to the attention, and that this shortens the times.

+ Physiol. Psych., 11. 2238.

26 PSYCHOLOG Y.

Buccola, and Beaunis. They are slow, averaging about
half a second (cf. Beaunis, Recherches exp. sur l’ Activité
Cérébrale, 1884, p. 49 ff).

It will be observed that sownd is more promptly reacted
on than either sight or touch. Taste and smell are slower
than either. One individual, who reacted to touch upon
the tip of the tongue in 0.125, took 0.993 to react upon
the taste of quinine applied to the same spot. In another,
upon the base of the tongue, the reaction to touch being
0”.141, that to sugar was 0.552 (Vintschgau, quoted by
Buccola, p.103). Buccola found the reaction to odors to
vary from 0”.334 to 0.681, according to the perfume used
and the individual.

The intensity of the signal makes a difference. The in-
tenser the stimulus the shorter the time. Herzen (Grund-
linien einer allgem. Psychophysiologie, p. 101) compared
the reaction from a corn on the toe with that from the skin
of the hand of the same subject. The two places were
stimulated simultaneously, and the subject tried to react
simultaneously with both hand and foot, but the foot always
went quickest. When the sound skin of the foot was
touched instead of the corn, it was the hand which always
reacted first. Wundt tries to show that when the signal is
made barely perceptible, the time is probably the same in
all the senses, namely, about 0.332” (Physiol. Psych., 2d
ed., 11. 224).

Where the signal is of touch, the place to which it is
applied 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 reaction
was shorter than when the middle of the upper arm was
used, in spite of the greater length of nerve-trunk to be
traversed in the latter case. This discovery invalidates the
measurements of the rapidity of transmission of the current
in human nerves, for they are all based on the method of
comparing reaction-times from places near the root and
near the extremity of a limb. The same observers found
that signals seen by the periphery of the retina gave longer
times than the same signals seen by direct vision.

The season makes a difference, the time being some hun-

GENERAL CONDITIONS OF BRAIN-ACTIVITY. 97

dredths of a second shorter on cold winter days (Vintschgau
apud Exner, Hermann’s Hdbh., p. 270).

Intoxicants alter the time. Coffee and tea appear to
shorten it. Small doses of wine and alcohol first shorten and
then lengthen it; but the shortening stage tends to disap-
pear if 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 previous
ones, could find no very decided effects from ordinary doses
(Journal of Physiology, vu. 311). Morphia lengthens the
time. <Amyl-nitrite lengthens it, but after the inhalation it
may fall to less than the normal. Ether and chloroform
lengthen it (for authorities, etc., see Buccola, p. 189).

Certain diseased states naturally lengthen the time.

The hypnotic trance has no constant effect, sometimes
shortening and sometimes lengthening it (Hall, Mind, vim.
170; James, Proc. Am. Soc. for Psych. Research, 246).

The time taken to inhibit a movement (e.g. to cease con-
traction of jaw-muscles) seems to be about the same as to
produce one (Gad, Archiv f. (Anat. u.) Physiol., 1887, 468 ;
Orchansky, zid., 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 sort
of work which appeals particularly to patient and exact

.minds, and they have not failed to profit by the opportunity.

CEREBRAL BLOOD-SUPPLY.

The next point to occupy our attention is the changes of
circulation which accompany cerebral activity.

All parts of the cortex, when electrically excited, produce
alterations both of respiration and circulation. The blood-
pressure rises, as a rule, all over the body, no matter where
the cortical irritation is applied, though the motor zone is
the most sensitive region for the purpose. Elsewhere the
current must be strong enough for an epileptic attack to be
produced.* Slowing and quickening of the heart are also
observed, and are independent of the vaso-constrictive
phenomenon. Mosso, using his ingenious ‘plethysmo-

* Francois-Franck, Fonctions Motrices, Legon xxm.

98 PSYCHOLOG Y.

graph’ as an indicator, discovered that the blood-supply to
the arms diminished during intellectual activity, and found
furthermore tbat the arterial tension (as shown by the
sphygmograph) was increased in these members (see

A

Fig. 23.—Sphymographie pulse-tracing. A, during intellectual repose ; B, during in-
tellectual activity. (Mosso.)

Fig. 23). So slight an emotion as that produced by the
entrance of Professor Ludwig into the laboratory was in-
stantly followed by a shrinkage of the arms.* The brain
itself is an excessively vascular organ, a sponge full of
blood, in fact; and another of Mosso’s inventions showed
that when less blood went to the arms, more went to the
head. The subject to be observed lay on a delicately bal-
anced table which could tip downward either at the head
or at the foot if the weight of either end were increased.
The moment emotional or intellectual activity began in the
subject, down went the balance at the head-end, in conse-
quence of the redistribution of blood in his system. But
the best proof of the immediate aftflux of blood to the brain
during mental activity is due to Mosso’s observations on
three persons whose brain had been laid bare by lesion of
the skull. By means of apparatus described in his book, +
this physiologist was enabled to let the brain-pulse record
itself directly by atracing. The intra-cranial blood-pressure
rose immediately whenever the subject was spoken to, or
when he began to think actively, as in solving a problem in
mental arithmetic. Mosso gives in his work a large num-
ber of reproductions of tracings which show the instanta-
neity of the change of blood-supply, whenever the mental
activity was quickened by any cause whatever, intellectual

* La Paura (1884), p. 117.

+ Ueber den Kreislauf des Blutes im menschlichen Gehirn (1881),
chap. m. The Introduction gives the history of our previous knowledge
of the subject.

GENERAL CONDITIONS OF BRAIN-ACTIVITY. 99

or emotional. He relates of his female subject that one
day whilst tracing her brain-pulse he observed a sudden
rise with no apparent outer or inner cause. She however
confessed to him afterwards that at that moment she had
caught sight of a skull on top of a piece of furniture in the
room, and that this had given her a slight emotion.

The fluctuations of the blood supply to the brain were
independent of respiratory changes,* and followed the
quickening of mental activity almost immediately. We
must suppose a very delicate adjustment whereby the cir-
culation follows the needs of the cerebral activity. Blood
very likely may rush to each region of the cortex accord-
ing as it is most active, but of this we know nothing. I need
hardly say that the activity of the nervous matter is the
primary phenomenon, and the afflux of blood its secondary
consequence. Many popular writers talk as if it were
the other way about, and as if mental activity were due to
the affux of blood. But, as Professor H. N. Martin has
well said, ‘‘that belief has no physiological foundation
whatever; it is even directly opposed to all that we know of
cell life.”’} A chronic pathological congestion may, it is true,
have secondary consequences, but the primary congestions
which we have been considering follow the activity of the
brain-cells by an adaptive reflex vaso-motor mechanism
doubtless as elaborate as that which harmonizes blood-
supply with cell-action in any muscle or gland.

Of the changes in the cerebral circulation during sleep
I will speak in the chapter which treats of that subject.

CEREBRAL THERMOMETRY.

Brain-activity seems accompanied by a local disengagement
of heat. 'The earliest careful work in this direction was by
Dr. J. S. Lombard in 1867. Dr. Lombard’s latest results in-
clude the records of over 60,000 observations.{ He noted the

agrees with Professor Mosso. Gley found his pulse rise 1-3 beats, his
carotid dilate, and his radial artery contract during hard mental work.

+ Address before Med. and Chirurg. Society of Maryland, 1879.

¢ See his book: ‘‘ Experimental Researches on the Regional Tempera
ture of the Head” (London, 1879).

100 PSYCHOLOG Y.

changes in delicate thermometers and electric piles placed
against the scalp in human beings, and found that any intel-
lectual effort, such as computing, composing, reciting poetry
silently or aloud, and especially that emotional excitement
such as an anger fit, caused a general rise of temperature,
which rarely exceeded a degree Fahrenheit. The rise was
in most cases more marked in the middle region of the head
than elsewhere. Strange to say, it was greater in reciting
poetry silently than in reciting it aloud. Dr. Lombard’s
explanation is that ‘in internal recitation an additional
portion of energy, which in recitation aloud was con-
verted into nervous and muscular force, now appears as
heat.” * I should suggest rather, if we must have a theory,
that the surplus of heat in recitation to one’s self is due to
inhibitory processes which are absent when we recite aloud.
In the chapter on the Will we shall see that the simple cen-
tral process is to speak when we think; to think silently
involves a check in addition. In 1870 the indefatigable
Schiff took up the subject, experimenting on live dogs and
chickens, plunging thermo-electric needles into the sub-
stance of their brain, to eliminate possible errors from
vascular changes in the skin when the thermometers were
placed upon the scalp. After habituation was established,
he tested the animals with various sensations, tactile, optic,
olfactory, and auditory. He found very regularly an im-
mediate deflection of the galvanometer, indicating an abrupt
alteration of the intra-cerebral temperature. When, for in-
stance, he presented an empty roll of paper to the nose of
his dog as it lay motionless, there was a small deflection,
but when a piece of meat was in the paper the deflection
was much greater. Schiff concluded from these and other
experiments that sensorial activity heats the brain-tissue,
but he did not try to localize the increment cf heat beyond
finding that it was in both hemispheres, whatever might be
the sensation applied. t Dr. R. W. Amidon in 1880 made
a farther step forward, in localizing the heat produced by
voluntary muscular contractions. Applying a number of

* Loc. cit. p. 195.
+ The most convenient account of Schiff’s experiments is by Prof.
Herzen, in the Revue Philosophique, vol. 1. p. 36.

GENERAL CONDITIONS OF BRAIN-ACTIVITY. 101

delicate surface-thermometers simultaneously against the
scalp, he found that when different muscles of the body
were made to contract vigorously for ten minutes or more,
different regions of the scalp rose in temperature, that the
regions were well focalized, and that the rise of temperature
was often considerably over a Fahrenheit degree. As a re-
sult of his investigations he gives a diagram in which num-
bered regions represent the centres of highest temperature
for the various special movements which were investigated.
To a large extent they correspond to the centres for the
same movements assigned by Ferrier and others on other
grounds ; only they cover more of the skull.*

Phosphorus and Thought.

Chemical action must of course accompany brain-activity.
But little definite is known of its exact nature. Cholesterin
and creatin are both excrementitious products, and are
both found in the brain. The subject belongs to chemistry
rather than to psychology, and I only mention it here for
the sake of saying a word about a wide-spread popu-
lar error about brain-activity and phosphorus. ‘ Ohne
Phosphor, kein Gedanke, was a noted war-cry of the
‘materialists’ during the excitement on that subject which
filled Germany in the ’60s. The brain, like every other
organ of the body, contains phosphorus, and a score of
other chemicals besides. Why the phosphorus should be
picked out as its essence, no one knows. It would be
equally true to say ‘Ohne Wasser kein Gedanke,’ or ‘Ohne
Kochsalz kein Gedanke’ ; for thought would stop as quickly
if the brain should dry up or lose its NaCl as if it lost its
phosphorus. In America the phosphorus-delusion has
twined itself round a saying quoted (rightly or wrongly)
from Professor L. Agassiz, to the effect that fishermen are
more intelligent than farmers because they eat so much fish,
which contains so much phosphorus. AI] the facts may be
doubted.

The only straight way to ascertain the importance of

* A New Study of Cerebral Cortical Localization (N. Y., Putnam,
1880), pp. 48-53.

102 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

phosphorus to thought would be to find whether more is
excreted by the brain during mental activity than during
rest. Unfortunately we cannot do this directly, but can
only gauge the amount of PO, in the urine, which repre-
sents other organs as well as the brain, and this procedure,
as Dr. Edes says, is like measuring the rise of water at the
mouth of the Mississippi to tell where there has been a
thunder-storm in Minnesota.* It has been adopted, how-
ever, by a variety of observers, some of whom found the
phosphates in the urine diminished, whilst others found
them increased, by intellectual work. On the whole, it is
impossible to trace any constant relation, In maniacal
excitement less phosphorus than usual seems to be excreted.
More is excreted during sleep. There are differences be-
tween the alkaline and earthy phosphates into which I will
not enter, as my only aim is to show that the popular way
of looking at the matter has no exact foundation.t The
fact that phosphorus-preparations may do good in nervous
exhaustion proves nothing as to the part played by phos-
phorus in mental activity. Like iron, arsenic, and other
remedies it is a stimulant or tonic, of whose intimate work-
ings in the system we know absolutely nothing, and which
moreover does good in an extremely small number of the
cases in which it is prescribed.

The phosphorus-philosophers have often compared
thought to a secretion. “The brain secretes thought, as the
kidneys secrete urine, or as the liver secretes bile,” are
phrases which one sometimes hears. The lame analogy
need hardly be pointed out. The materials which the brain
pours into the blood (cholesterin, creatin, xanthin, or what-
ever they may be) are the analogues of the urine and the
bile, being in fact real material excreta. As far as these
matters go, the brain is a ductless gland. But we know of
nothing connected with liver- and kidney-activity which can

* Archives of Medicine, vol. x, No. 1 (1883).

+ Without multiplying references, I will simply cite Mendel (Archiv f.
Psychiatrie, vol. m1, 1871), Mairet (Archives de Neurologie, vol. rx, 1885),
and Beaunis (Rech. Expérimentales sur ]’ Activité Cérébrale, 1887). Richet
gives a partial bibliography in the Revue Scientifique, vol. 38, p. 788 (1886).

GENERAL CONDITIONS OF BRAIN-ACTIVITY. 103

be in the remotest degree compared with the stream of
thought that accompanies the brain’s material secretions.

There remains another feature of general brain-physi-
ology, and indeed for psychological purposes the most
important feature ofall. I refer to the aptitude of the brain
for acquiring habits. But I will treat of that in a chapter
by itself.

CHAPTER IV.*

HABIT.

WHEN we look at living creatures from an outward point
of view, one of the first things that strike us is that they
are bundles of habits. In wild animals, the usual round of
daily behavior seems a necessity implanted at birth; in
animals domesticated, and especially in man, it seems, to a
great extent, to be the result of education. The habits to
which there is an innate tendency are called instincts; some
of those due to education would by most persons be called
acts of reason. It thus appears that habit covers a very
large part of life, and that one engaged in studying the
objective manifestations of mind is bound at the very out-
set to define clearly just what its limits are.

The moment one tries to define what habit is, one is led
to the fundamental properties of matter. The laws of
Nature are nothing but the immutable habits which the
different elementary sorts of matter follow in their actions
and reactions upon each other. In the organic world, how-
ever, the habits are more variable than this. Even instincts
vary from one individual to another of a kind; and are
modified in the same individual, as we shall later see, to
suit the exigencies of the case. The habits of an elemen-
tary particle of matter cannot change (on the principles of
the atomistic philosophy), because the particle is itself an
unchangeable thing; but those of a compound mass of
matter can change, because they are in the last instance due
to the structure of the compound, and either outward forces
or inward tensions can, from one hour to another, turn that
structure into something different from what it was. That
is, they can do so if the body be plastic enough to maintain

* This chapter has already appeared in the Popular Science Monthly

for February 1887.
104

HABIT. 105

its integrity, and be not disrupted when its structure yields.
The change of structure here spoken of need not involve
the outward shape; it may be invisible and molecular, ay
when a bar of iron becomes magnetic or crystalline through
the action of certain outward causes, or India-rubber
becomes friable, or plaster ‘sets.’ All these changes are
rather slow; the material in question opposes a certain
resistance to the modifying cause, which it takes time to
overcome, but the gradual yielding whereof often saves the
material from being disintegrated altogether. When the
structure has yielded, the same inertia becomes a condition
of its comparative permanence in the new form, and of the
new habits the body then manifests. Plasticity, then, in
the wide sense of the word, means the possession of a struc-
ture weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong
enough not to yield all at once. Each relatively stable
phase of equilibrium in such a structure is marked by
what we may call a new set of habits. Organic matter,
especially nervous tissue, seems endowed with a very ex-
traordinary degree of plasticity of this sort; so that we
may without hesitation lay down as our first proposition
the following, that the phenomena of habit in living beings are
due to the plasticity* of the organic materials of which their
bodies are composed.

But the philosophy of habit is thus, in the first instance,
a chapter in physics rather than in physiology or psychol-
ogy. That it is at bottou: a physical principle is admitted
by all good recent writers on the subject. They call atten-
tion to analogues of acquired habits exhibited by dead mat-
ter. Thus, M. Léon Dumont, whose essay on habit is per-
haps the most philosophical account yet published, writes:

‘« Every one knows how a garment, after having been worn a certain
time, 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 of
cohesion. A lock works better after being used some time; at the out-
set more force was required to overcome certain roughnesses in the
mechanism. The overcoming of their resistance is a phenomenon of
habituation. It costs less trouble to fold a paper when it has been

* In the sense above explained, which applies to inner structure as well
as to outer form.

106 PSYCHOLOGY.

folded already. This saving of trouble is due to the essential nature of
habit, which brings it about that, to reproduce the effect, a less amount
of the outward cause is required. The sounds of a violin improve by
use in the hands of an able artist, because the fibres of the wood at last
contract habits of vibration conformed to harmonic relations. This is
what gives such inestimable value to instruments that have belonged to
great masters. Water, in flowing, hollows out for itself a channel, which
grows broader and deeper; and, after having ceased to flow, it resumes,
when it flows again, the path traced by itself before. Just so, the im-
pressions of outer objects fashion for themselves in the nervous system
more and more appropriate paths, and these vital phenomena recur
under similar excitements from without, when they have been inter-
rupted a certain time.” *

Not in the nervous system alone. A scar anywhere is
a locus minoris resistentie, more liable to be abraded,
inflamed, to suffer pain and cold, than are the neighboring
parts. A sprained ankle, a dislocated arm, are in danger
of being sprained or dislocated again; joints that have once
been attacked by rheumatism or gout, mucous membranes
that have been the seat of catarrh, are with each fresh re-
currence more prone to a relapse, until often the morbid
state chronically substitutes itself for the sound one. And
if we ascend to the nervous system, we find how many so-
called functional diseases seem to keep themselves going
simply because they happen to have once begun; and how
the torcible cutting short by medicine of a few attacks is
often sufficient to enable the physiological forces to get pos-
session of the field again, and to bring the organs back to
functions ofhealth. Epilepsies, neuralgias, convulsive affec-
tions of various sorts, insomnias, are so many cases in point.
And, to take what are more obviously habits, the success
with which a ‘ weaning’ treatment can often be applied to
the victims of unhealthy indulgence of passion, or of
mere complaining or irascible disposition, shows us how
much the morbid manifestations themselves were due to the
mere inertia of the nervous organs, when once launched on
a false career.

Can we now form a notion of what the inward physical
changes may be like, in organs whose habits have thus

* Revue Philosophique, 1, 324.

HABIT. 107

struck into new paths? In other words, can we say just
what mechanical facts the expression ‘change of habit’
covers when it is applied to a nervous system? Certainly
we cannot in anything like a minute or definite way. But
our usual scientific custom of interpreting hidden molecular
events after the analogy of visible massive ones enables us to
frame easily an abstract and general scheme of processes
which the physical changes in question may be like. And
when once the possibility of some kind of mechanical inter-
pretation is established, Mechanical Science, in her present
mood, will not hesitate to set her brand of ownership upon
the matter, feeling sure that it is only a question of time
when the exact mechanical explanation of the case shall be
found out.

If habits are due to the plasticity of materials to out-
ward agents, we can immediately see to what outward
influences, if to any, the brain-matter is plastic. Not to
mechanical pressures, not to thermal changes, not to any
of the forces to which all the other organs of our body are
exposed ; for nature has carefully shut up our brain and
spinal cord in bony boxes, where no influences of this sort
can get at them. She has floated them in fluid so that
only the severest shocks can give them a concussion, and
blanketed and wrapped them about in an altogether excep-
tional way. The only impressions that can be made upon
them are through the blood, on the one hand, and through
the sensory nerve-roots, on the other; and it is to the infi-
nitely attenuated currents that pour in through these latter
channels that the hemispherical cortex shows itself to be so
peculiarly susceptible. The currents, once in, must find a
way out. In getting out they leave their traces in the paths
which they take. The only thing they can do, in short, is
to deepen old paths or to make new ones; and the whole
plasticity of the brain sums itself up in two words when
we call it an organ in which currents pouring in from the
sense-organs make with extreme facility paths which do
not easily disappear. For, of course, a simple habit, like
every other nervous event—the habit of snuffling, for
example, or of putting one’s hands into one’s pockets, or of
biting one’s nails—is, mechanically, nothing but a reflex

108 PSYCHOLOGY.

discharge ; and its anatomical substratum must be a path
in the system. The most complex habits, as we shall
presently see more fully, are, from the same point of view,
nothing but concatenated discharges in the nerve-centres,
due to the presence there of systems of reflex paths, so
organized as to wake each other up successively—the im-
pression produced by one muscular contraction serving as
a stimulus to provoke the next, until a final impression
inhibits the process and closes the chain. The only diffi-
cult mechanical problem is to explain the formation de novo
of a simple reflex or path in a pre-existing nervous system.
Here, as in so many other cases, it is only the premier pas
qui coute. For the entire nervous system is nothing but a
system of paths between a sensory terminus a quo and a mus-
cular, glandular, or other terminus ad quem. A path once
traversed by a nerve-current might be expected to follow
the law of most of the paths we know, and to be scooped
out and made more permeable than before ;* and this ought
to be repeated with each new passage of the current.
Whatever obstructions may have kept it at first from being
a path should then, little by little, and more and more, be
swept out of the way, until at last it might become a natural
drainage-channel. This is what happens where either
solids or liquids pass over a path; there seems no reason
why it should not happen where the thing that passes is a
mere wave of rearrangement in matter that does not dis-
place itself, but merely changes chemically or turns itself
round in place, or vibrates across the line. The most
plausible views of the nerve-current make it out to be the
passage of some such wave of rearrangement as this. If
only a part of the matter of the path were to ‘rearrange’
itself, the neighboring parts remaining inert, it is easy to
see how their inertness might oppose a friction which it
would take many waves of rearrangement to break down
and overcome. I we call the path itself the ‘organ,’ and
the wave of rearrangement the ‘function,’ then it is obvi-

* Some paths, to be sure, are banked up by bodies moving through
them under too great pressure, and made impervious. These special cases
we disregard.

HABIT. 109

ously a case for repeating the celebrated French formula
of ‘ La fonction fait Vorgane.’

So nothing is easier than to imagine how, when a cur-
rent once has traversed a path, it should traverse it more
readily still a second time. But what made it ever traverse
it the first time?* In answering this question we can only
fall back on our general conception of a nervous system as
a mass of matter whose parts, constantly kept in states of
different tension, are as constantly tending to equalize their
states. The equalization between any two points occurs
through whatever path may at the moment be most per-
vious. But, as a given point of the system may belong,
actually or potentially, to many different paths, and, as the
play of nutrition is subject to accidental changes, blocks
may from time to time occur, and make currents shoot
through unwonted lines. Such an unwonted line would be
a new-created path, which if traversed repeatedly, would
become the beginning of a new reflex arc. All this is vague
to the last degree, and amounts to little more than saying
that a new path may be formed by the sort of chances that
in nervous material are likely to occur. But, vague as it
is, it is really the last word of our wisdom in the matter. t

It must be noticed that the growth of structural modi-
fication in living matter may be more rapid than in any
lifeless mass, because the incessant nutritive renovation of
which the living matter is the seat tends often to corroborate

* We cannot say the will, for, though many, perhaps most, human
habits were once voluntary actions, no action, as we shall see in a later
chapter, can be primarily such. While an habitual action may once have
been voluntary, the voluntary action must before that, at least once, have
been impulsive or reflex. It is this very first occurrence of all that we
consider in the text.

+ Those who desire a more definite formulation may consult J. Fiske’s
‘Cosmic Philosophy,’ vol 1. pp. 142-146 and Spencer’s ‘ Principles of
Biology,’ sections 302 and 303, and the part entitled ‘Physical Synthesis’
of-his ‘ Principles of Psychology.’ Mr. Spencer there tries, not only to
show how new actions may arise in nervous systems and form new reflex
ares therein, but even how nervous tissue may actually be born by the pas-
sage of new waves of isometric transformation through an originally indif-
ferent mass. I cannot help thinking that Mr. Spencer’s data, under a great
show of precision, conceal vagueness and improbability, and even self:
contradiction.

110 PSYCHOLOGY.

and fix the impressed modification, rather than to counter-
act it by renewing the original constitution of the tissue
that has been impressed. Thus, we notice after exercising
our muscles or our brain in a new way, that we can do so
no longer at that time ; but after a day or two of rest, when
we resume the discipline, our increase in skill not seldom
surprises us. I have often noticed this in learning a tune ;
and it has led a German author to say that we learn to swim
during the winter and to skate during the summer.
Dr. Carpenter writes :*

‘‘Tt is a matter of universal experience that every kind of training
for special aptitudes is both far more effective, and leaves a more per-
manent impress, when exerted on the growing organism than when
brought to bear on the adult. The effect of such training is shown in
the tendency of the organ to ‘ grow to’ the mode in which it is habitually
exercised ; as is evidenced by the increased size and power of particular
sets of muscles, and the extraordinary flexibility of joints, which are
acquired by such as have been early exercised in gymnastic perfor-
mances. . . . There is no part of the organism of man in which the
reconstructive activity is so great, during the whole period of life, as it
is in the ganglionic substance of the brain. This is indicated by the
enormous supply of blood which it receives. .. . It is, moreover, a
fact of great significance that the nerve-substance is specially dis-
tinguished by its reparative power. For while injuries of other tissues
(such as the muscular) which are distinguished by the speciality of their
structure and endowments, are repaired by substance of a lower or less
specialized type, those of nerve-substance are repaired by a complete
reproduction of the normal tissue ; as is evidenced in the sensibility of
the newly forming skin which is closing over an open wound, or in the
recovery of the sensibility of a piece of ‘transplanted’ skin, which has
for a time been rendered insensible by the complete interruption of the
continuity of its nerves. The most remarkable example of this repro-
duction, however, is afforded by the results of M. Brown-Séquard’st
experiments upon the gradual restoration of the functional activity of
the spinal cord after its complete division ; which takes place in a way
that indicates rather a reproduction of the whole, or the lower part of
the cord and of the nerves proceeding from it, than a mere reunion of
divided surfaces. This reproduction is but a special manifestation of
the reconstructive change which is always taking place in the nervous
system ; it being not less obvious to the eye of reason that the ‘ waste’
occasioned by its functional activity must be constantly repaired by the

* Mental Physiology ’ (1874,) pp. 339-345.
+{See, later, Masius in Van Benedens’ and Van Bambeke’s ‘ Archives
de Biologie,’ vol. 1 (Liége, 1880).—W. J.]

HABIT. 111

production of new tissue, than it is to the eye of sense that such repa-
ration supplies an actual loss of substance by disease or injury.

‘* Now, in this constant and active reconstruction of the nervous
system, we recognize a most marked conformity to the general plan
manifested in the nutrition of the organism as a whole. For, in the
first place, it is obvious that there is a tendency to the production of a
determinate type of structure ; which type is often not merely that of
the species, but some special modification of it which characterized one
or both of the progenitors. But this type is peculiarly liable to modi-
fication during the early period of life ; in which the functional activity
of the nervous system (and particularly of the brain) is extraordinarily
great, and the reconstructive process proportionally active. And this
modifiability expresses itself in the formation of the mechanism by
which those secondarily automatic modes of movement come to be
established, which, in man, take the place of those that are congenital
in most of the animals beneath him ; and those modes of sense-percep-
tion come to be acquired, which are elsewhere clearly instinctive. For
there can be no reasonable doubt that, in both cases, a nervous
mechanism is developed in the course of this self-education, correspond-
ing with that which the lower animals inherit from their parents. The
plan of that rebuilding process, which is necessary to maintain the
integrity of the organism generally, and which goes on with peculiar
activity in this portion of it, is thus being incessantly modified ; and in
this manner all that portion of it which ministers to the eaternal life of
sense and motion that is shared by man with the animal kingdom at
large, becomes at adult age the expression of the habits which the
individual has acquired during the period of growth and development.
Of these habits, some are common to the race generally, while others
are peculiar to the individual ; those of the former kind (such as walk-
ing erect) being universally acquired, save where physical inability
prevents ; while for the latter a special training is needed, which is
usually the more effective the earlier it is begun—as is remarkably
seen in the case of such feats of dexterity as require a conjoint edu-
cation of the perceptive and of the motor powers. And when thus
developed during the period of growth, so as to have become apart of
the constitution of the adult, the acquired mechanism is thenceforth
maintained in the ordinary course of the nutritive operations, so as to
be ready for use when called upon, even after long inaction.

‘* What is so clearly true of the nervous apparatus of animal life can
searcely be otherwise than true of that which ministers to the automatic
activity of the mind. For, as already shown, the study of psychology
has evolved no more certain result than that there are uniformities of
mental action which are so entirely conformable to those of bodily action
as to indicate their intimate relation to a ‘mechanism of thought and
feeling,’ acting under the like conditions with that of sense and motion.
The psychical principles of association, indeed, and the physiological
principles of netrition, simply express—the former in terms of mind,

—

112 PSYCHOLOGY.

the latter in terms of brain—the universally admitted fact that any
sequence of mental action which has been frequently repeated tends to
perpetuate itself ; so that we find ourselves automatically prompted to
think, feel, or do what we have been before accustomed to think, feel,
or do, under like circumstances, without any consciously formed pwr-
pose, or anticipation of results. For there is no reason to regard the
cerebrum as an exception to the general principle that, while each part
of the organism tends to form itself in accordance with the mode in
which it is habitually exercised, this tendency will be especially strong
in the nervous apparatus, in virtue of that ¢rcessant regeneration which
is the very condition of its functional activity. It scarcely, indeed,
admits of doubt that every state of ideational consciousness which is
either very strong or is habitually repeated leaves an organic impres-
sion on the cerebrum ; in virtue of which that same state may be re-
produced at any future time, in respondence to a suggestion fitted to
excite it. . . . The ‘strength of early association’ is a fact so
universally recognized that the expression of it has become proverbial ;
and this precisely accords with the physiological principle that, during
the period of growth and development, the formative activity of the
brain will be most amenable to directing influences. It is in this way
that what is early ‘learned by heart’ becomes branded in (as it were)
upon the cerebrum; so that its ‘traces’ are never lost, even though
the conscious memory of it may have completely faded out. For, when
the organic modification has been once fived in the growing brain, it
becomes a part of the normal fabric, and is regularly maintained by
nutritive substitution ; so that it may endure to the end of life, like the
sear of a wound.”

Dr. Carpenter’s phrase that owr nervous system grows to
the modes in which it has been exercised expresses the philos-
ophy of habit ina nutshell. We may now trace some of
the practical applications of the principle to human life.

The first result of it is that habit simplifies the movements
required to achieve a given result, makes them_ more_accurate
and diminishes fatigue.

‘‘The beginner at the piano not only moves his finger up and down
in order to depress the key, he moves the whole hand, the forearm and
even 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 con-
traction of the abdominal muscles occurs as well. Principally, however,
the impulse is determined to the motion of the hand and of the single
finger. This is, in the first place, because the movement of the finger
is the movement thought of, and, in the second place, because its move-
ment and that of the key are the movements we try to perceive, along
with the results of the latteron the ear. The more often the process

er

HABIT. 113

is repeated, the more easily the movement follows, on account of the
increase in permeability of the nerves engaged.

‘‘But the more easily the movement occurs, the slighter is the
stimulus required to set it up; and the slighter the stimulus is, the
more its effect is confined to the fingers alone.

‘* Thus, an impulse which originally spread its effects over the whole
body, or at least over many of its movable parts, is gradually deter-
mined to a single definite organ, in which it effects the contraction of
a few limited muscles. In this change the thoughts and perceptions
which start the impulse acquire more and more intimate causal relations
with a particular group of motor nerves.

‘To recur to a simile, at least partially apt, imagine the nervous
system to represent a drainage-system, inclining, on the whole, toward
certain muscles, but with the escape thither somewhat clogged. Then
streams of water will, on the whole, tend most to fill the drains that
go towards these muscles and to wash out the escape. In case of a
sudden ‘ flushing,’ however, the whole system of channels will fill itself,
and the water overflow everywhere before it escapes. But a moderate
quantity of water invading the system will flow through the proper
escape alone.

*¢ Just so with the piano-player. As soon as his impulse, which has
gradually learned to confine itself to single muscles, grows extreme,
it overflows into larger muscular regions. He usually plays with his
fingers, his body being at rest. But no sooner does he get excited than
his whole body becomes ‘animated,’ and he moves his head and trunk,
in particular, as if these also were organs with which he meant to
belabor the keys.” *

Man is born with a tendency to do more things than he
has 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 most
of them must be the fruit of painful study. If practice did
not make perfect, nor habit economize the expense of ner-
vous and muscular energy, he would therefore be in a sorry
plight. As Dr. Maudsley says : +

‘‘Tf an act became no easier after being done several times, if the
careful direction of consciousness were necessary to its accomplishment
on each occasion, it is evident that the whole activity of a lifetime might
be confined to one or two deeds—that no progress could take place in
development. A man might be occupied all day in dressing and un-

* G. H. Schneider: ‘Der menschliche Wille’ (1882), pp. 417-419 (freely
translated). For the drain-simile, see also Spencer’s ‘ Psychology,’ part
v, chap. VII.

+ Physiology of Mind, p. 155.

114 PSYCHOLOG Y.

dressing himself ; the attitude of his body would absorb all his atten.
tion and energy ; the washing of his hands or the fastening of a button
would be as difficult to him on each oceasion as to the child on its first
trial; and he would, furthermore, be completely exhausted by his ex-
ertions. Think of the pains necessary to teach a child to stand, of the
many efforts which it must make, and of the ease with which it at
last stands, unconscious of any effort. For while secondarily auto-
matie acts are accomplished with comparatively little weariness—in
this regard approaching the organic movements, or the original reflex
movements—the conscious effort of the will soon produces exhaus-
tion. A spinal cord without . . . memory would simply be an idiotic
spinal cord. .. . It is impossible for an individual to realize how
much he owes to its automatic agency until disease has impaired its
functions.”

The next result is that habit diminishes the conscious atten-
tion with which our acts are performed. =

One may state this abstractly thus: If an act require for
its execution a chain, 4, B, C, D, EF, F, G, ete., of successive
neryous events, then in the first performances of the action
the conscious will must choose each of these events from a
number of wrong alternatives that tend to present them-
selves; but habit soon brings it about that each event calls
up its own appropriate successor without any alternative
offering itself, and without any reference to the conscious
will, until at last the whole chain, 4, B, C, D, E, F, G, rattles
itself off as soon as A occurs, just as if A and the rest of
the chain were fused into a continuous stream. When we
are learning to walk, to ride, to swim, skate, fence, write,
play, or sing, we interrupt ourselves at every step by un-
necessary movements and false notes. When we are pro-
ficients, on the contrary, the results not only follow with
the very minimum of muscular action requisite to bring them
forth, they also follow from a single instantaneous ‘ cue.’
The marksman sees the bird, and, before he knows it, he
has aimed and shot. A gleam in his adversary’s eye, a
momentary pressure from his rapier, and the fencer finds
that he has instantly made the right parry and return. A
siance at the musical hieroglyphics, and the pianist’s fingers
have rippled through a cataract of notes. And not only
is it the right thing at the right time that we thus involun-
tarily do, but the wrong thing also, if it be an habitual

HABIT. BES

thing. Who is there that has never wound up his watch on
taking off his waistcoat in the daytime, or taken his latch-
key out on arriving at the door-step of a friend? Very
absent-minded persons in going to their bedroom to dress
for dinner have been known to take off one garment after
another and finally to get into bed, merely because that was
the habitual issue of the first few movements when per-
formed at a later hour. The writer well remembers how,
on revisiting Paris after ten years’ absence, and, finding
himself in the street in which for one winter he had attended
school, he lost himself in a brown study, from which he was
awakened by finding himself upon the stairs which led to
the apartment in a house many streets away in which he
had lived during that earlier time, and to which his steps
from the school had then habitually led. We all of us have
a definite routine manner of performing certain daily offices
connected with the toilet, with the opening and shutting of
familiar cupboards, and the like. Our lower centres know
the order of these movements, and show their knowledge
by their ‘surprise’ if the objects are altered so as to oblige
the movement to be made in a different way. But our
higher thought-centres know hardly anything about the
matter. Few men can tell off-hand which sock, shoe, or
trousers-leg they put on first. They must first mentally
rehearse the act; and even that is often insufficient—
the act must be performed. So of the questions, Which
valve of my double door opens first? Which way does my
door swing? etc. I cannot fell the answer; yet my hand
never makes a mistake. No cone can describe the order in
which he brushes his hair or teeth; yet it is likely that the
order is a pretty fixed one in all of us.

These results may be expressed as follows:

In action grown habitual, what instigates each new
muscular contraction to take place in its appointed order
is not a thought or a perception, but the sensation occa-
stoned by the muscular contraction just finished. A strictly
voluntary act has to be guided by idea, perception, and
volition, throughout its whole course. In an habitual ac-
tion, mere sensation is a sufficient guide, and the upper

116 PSYCHOLOG Y.

regions of brain and mind are set comparatively free. A
diagram will make the matter clear :

\A AA |

Let A, B, C, D, EF, F, G represent an habitual chain of
muscular contractions, and let a, b,c, d,e, f stand for the
respective sensations which these contractions excite in us
when they are successively performed. Such sensations
will usually be of the muscles, skin, or joints of the parts
moved, but they may also be effects of the movement upon
the eye or the ear. Through them, and through them
alone, we are made aware whether the contraction has or
has not occurred. When the series, 4, B, C, D, FE, F, G, is
being learned, each of these sensations becomes the object
of a separate perception by the mind. By it we test each
movement, to seeif it be right before advancing to the next.
We hesitate, compare, choose, revoke, reject, etc., by intel-
lectual means; and the order by which the next movement
is discharged is an express order from the ideational centres
after this deliberation has been gone through.

In habitual action, on the contrary, the only impulse
which the centres of idea or perception need send down is
the initial impulse, the command to start. This is repre-
sented in the diagram by V; it may be a thought of the
first movement or of the last result, or a mere perception
of 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 instigated
movement 4, than 4, through the sensation a of its own
occurrence, awakens B reflexly; 2 then excites C through
b, and so on till the chain is ended, when the intellect gen-
erally takes cognizance of the final result. The process, in
fact, resembles the passage of a wave of ‘ peristaltic’ motion

HABIT. 117

down the bowels. The intellectual perception at the end
is indicated in the diagram by the effect of G being repre-
sented, at G’,in the ideational centres above the merely
sensational line. The sensational impressions, a, b,c, d, e, f,
are all supposed to have their seat below the ideational
lines. That our ideational centres, if involved at all by a,
6, c, d, e, f, are involved in a minimal degree, is shown by
the fact that the attention may be wholly absorbed else-
where. We may say our prayers, or repeat the alphabet,
with our attention far away.

‘* A musical performer will play a piece which has become familiar
by repetition while carrying on an animated conversation, or while con-
tinuously engrossed by some train of deeply interesting thought; the
accustomed sequence of movements being directly prompted by the
sight of the notes, or by the remembered succession of the sownds (if
the piece is played from memory), aided in both cases by the guiding
sensations derived from the muscles themselves. But, further, a higher
degree of the same ‘ training’ (acting on an organism specially fitted to
profit by it) enables an accomplished pianist to play a difficult piece of
music at sight; the movements of the hands and fingers following so
immediately upon the sight of the notes that it seems impossible to
believe that any but the very shortest and most direct track can be the
channel of the nervous communication through which they are called
forth. The following curious example of the same class of acquired
aptitudes, which differ from instincts only in being prompted to action
by the will, is furnished by Robert Houdin :

‘** With a view of cultivating the rapidity of visual and tactile per-
ception, and the precision of respondent movements, which are neces-
sary for success in every kind of prestidigitation, Houdin early practised
the art of juggling with balls in the air; and having, after a month’s
practice, become thorough master of the art of keeping up fowr balls at
once, he placed a book before him, and, while the balls were in the air,
accustomed himself to read without hesitation. ‘ This,’ he says, ‘ will
probably seem to my readers very extraordinary; but I shall surprise
them still more when I say that I have just amused myself with repeat-
ing this curious experiment. Though thirty years have elapsed since
the time I was writing, and though I have scarcely once touched the
balls during that period, I can still manage to read with ease while
keeping three balls up.’”” (Autobiography, p. 26.)*

We have called a, 6, c, d, e, f, the antecedents of the suc-
cessive muscular attractions, by the name of sensations.
Some authors seem to deny that they are even this. If not

* Carpenter’s ‘ Mental Physiology ’ (1874), pp. 217, 218.

118 PSYCHOLOG Y.

even this, they can only be centripetal nerve-currents, not
suflicient to arouse feeling, but sufficient to arouse motor
response.* It may be at once admitted that they are not
distinct volitions. The will, if any will be present, limits
itself to a permission that they exert their motor effects.
Dr. Carpenter writes :

‘*There may still be metaphysicians who maintain that actions
which were originally prompted by the will with a distinct intention,
and which are still entirely under its control, can never cease to be
volitional; and that either an infinitesimally small amount of will is
required to sustain them when they have been once set going, or that
the will is in a sort of pendulum-like oscillation between the two actions
—the maintenance of the train of thought, and the maintenance of the
train of movement. But if only an infinitesimally small amount of will
is necessary to sustain them, is not this tantamount to saying that they
go on by a force of their own? And does not the experience of the
perfect continuity of our train of thought during the performance of
movements that have become habitual, entirely negative the hypothesis
of oscillation ? Besides, if such an oscillation existed, there must be
intervals in which each action goes on of itself; so that its essentially
automatic character is virtually admitted. The physiological explana-
tion, that the mechanism of locomotion, as of other habitual move-
ments, g7ows to the mode in which it is early exercised, and that it then
works automatically under the general control and direction of the will,
can scarcely be put down by any assumption of an hypothetical neces-
sity, which rests only on the basis of ignorance of one side of our com-
posite nature.” t

But if not distinct acts of will, these immediate ante-
cedents of each movement of the chain are at any rate
accompanied by consciousness of some kind. They are
sensations to which we are usually inattentive, but which im-
mediately call our attention if they go wrong. Schneider’s
account of these sensations deserves to be quoted. In the
act of walking, he says, even when our attention is entirely
off,

‘“we are continuously aware of certain muscular feelings; and we
have, moreover, a feeling of certain impulses to keep our equilibrium

and to set down one leg after another. It is doubtful whether we could
preserve equilibrium if no sensation of our body’s attitude were there,

* Von Hartmann devotes a chapter of his ‘ Philosophy of the Uncon-
scious’ (English translation, vol. 1. p. 72) to proving that they must be
both zdeas and unconscious.

+ ‘Mental Physiology,’ p. 20.

HABIT. 119

and doubtful whether we should advance our leg if we had no sensation
of its movement as executed, and not even a minimal feeling of impulse
to set it down. Knitting appears altogether mechanical, and the knitter
keeps 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 the
knitting goes on of itself. She will rather say that she has a feeling of
it, that she feels in her hands that she knits and how she must knit, and
that therefore the movements of knitting are called forth and regulated
by the sensations associated therewithal, even when the attention is
called away.

‘So of every one who practises, apparently automatically, a long-
familiar handicraft. The smith turning his tongs as he smites the iron,
the carpenter wielding his plane, the lace-maker with her bobbin, the
weaver at his loom, all will answer the same question in the same way
by saying that they have a feeling of the proper management of the
implement in their hands.

‘In these cases, the feelings which are conditions of the appropriate
acts are very faint. But none the less are they necessary. Imagine
your hands not feeling; your movements could then only be provoked
by ideas, and if your ideas were then diverted away, the movements
ought to come to a standstill, which is a consequence that seldom
geeurs.” *

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 contrac-
tion of the muscles of the left hand and fingers in order that the
violin may continue to be held fast and not let fall. The sensations
themselves which the holding of the instrument awakens in the hand,
since they are associated with the motor impulse of grasping, are suf-
ficient to cause this impulse, which then lasts as long as the feeling
itself lasts, or until the impulse is inhibited by the idea of some antag-
onistic motion.”

And the same may be said of the manner in which the right
hand holds the bow:

‘*Tt sometimes happens, in beginning these simultaneous combina-
tions, that one movement or impulse will cease if the consciousness
turn particularly toward another, because at the outset the guiding
sensations must all be strongly felt. The bow will perhaps slip from
the fingers, because some of the muscles have relaxed. But the
slipping is a cause of new sensations starting up in the hand, so that
the attention is in a moment brought back to the grasping of the bow.

‘The following experiment shows this well: When one begins to
play on the violin, to keep him from raising his right elbow in playing

* «Der menschliche Wille,’ pp. 447, 448.

120 PSYCHOLOGY.

a book is placed under his right armpit, which he is ordered to hold
fast by keeping the upper arm tight against his body. The muscular
feelings, and feelings of contact connected with the book, provoke an
impulse to press it tight. But often it happens that the beginner,
whose attention gets absorbed in the production of the notes, lets drop
the book. Later, however, this never happens; the faintest sensations
of contact suffice to awaken the impulse to keep it in its place, and the
attention may be wholly absorbed by the notes and the fingering with
the left hand. Zhe simultaneous combination of movements is thus
in the first instance conditioned by the facility with which in us, along-
side of intellectual processes, processes of inattentive feeling may still
go on.” *

This brings us by a very natural transition to the ethical
implications of the law of habit. They are numerous and
momentous. Dr. Carpenter, from whose ‘ Mental Physiol-
ogy’ we have quoted, has so prominently enforced the
principle that our organs grow to the way in which they
have been exercised, and dwelt upon its consequences, that
his 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 the
degree to which this is true no one can probably appreciate
-as well as one who is a veteran soldier himself. The daily
‘drill and the years of discipline end by fashioning a man
completely over again, as to most of the possibilities of his
conduct.

‘‘There is a story, which is credible enough, though it may not
be true, of a practical joker, who, seeing a discharged veteran
carrying home his dinner, suddenly called out, ‘ Attention!’ where-
upon the man instantly brought his hands down, and lost his mutton
and potatoes in the gutter. The drill had been thorough, and its
effects had become embodied in the man’s nervous structure.” f

Riderless cavalry-horses, at many a battle, have been
seen to come together and go through their customary
evolutions at the sound of the bugle-call. Most trained
domestic animals, dogs and oxen, and omnibus- and car-

* «Der menschliche Wille,’ p. 489. The last sentence is rather freely
translated—the sense is unaltered.
+ Huxley’s ‘Elementary Lessons in Physiology,’ lesson x1.

HABIT. 121

horses, seem to be machines almost pure and simple, un-
doubtingly, unhesitatingly doing from minute to minute the
duties they have been taught, and giving no sign that the
possibility of an alternative ever suggests itself to their
mind. Men grown old in prison have asked to be read-
mitted after being once set free. In a railroad accident to
a travellmg menagerie in the United States some time in
1884, a tiger, whose cage had broken open, is said to have
emerged, but presently crept back again, as if too much
Pewildered by his new responsibilities, so that he was with-
out difficulty secured.

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most &
precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all
within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of
fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone
prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from
being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. It
keeps the fisherman and the deck-hand at sea through the
winter; it holds the miner in his darkness, and nails the
countryman to his log-cabin and his lonely farm through
all the months of snow ; it protects us from invasion by the
natives of the desert and the frozen zone. It dooms us all
to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture
or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that >
disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted,
and it is too late to begin again. It keeps different social
strata from mixing. Already at the age of twenty-five you
see the professional mannerism settling down on the young
commercial traveller, on the young doctor, on the young
minister, on the young counsellor-at-law. You see the little
lines of cleavage running througn the character, the tricks
of thought, the prejudices, the ways of the ‘shop,’ in a
word, from which the man can by-and-by no more escape
than his coat-sleeve can suddenly fall into a new set of
folds. On the whole, it is best he should not escape. It
is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty,
the character has set like plaster, and will never soften ¢
again. poe

If the period between twenty and thirty is the critical
one in the formation of intellectual and professional habits,

122 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

the period below twenty is more important still for the fix-
ing of personal habits, properly so called, such as vocaliza-
tion and pronunciation, gesture, motion, and address.
Hardly ever is a language learned after twenty spoken
without a foreign accent; hardly ever can a youth trans-
ferred to the society of his betters unlearn the nasality and
other vices of speech bred in him by the associations of
his growing years. Hardly ever, indeed, no matter how
much money there be in his pocket, can he even learn to
dress like a gentleman-born. The merchants offer their
wares as eagerly to him as to the veriest ‘swell,’ but he
simply cannot buy the right things. An invisible law, as
strong as gravitation, keeps him within his orbit, arrayed
this year as he was the last; and how his better-bred
acquaintances contrive to get the things they wear will be
for him a mystery till his dying day.

The great_thing, then, in all education, is to make our
nervous system our ally Fee of our enemy. Itis to fund
and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the
interest of the fund. For this we must make automatic and
habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can,
and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to
be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the
plague. The more of the details of our daily life we can
hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more
our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own
proper work. There is no more miserable human being
than one in whom “nothing i is habitual but indecision, and
for whom the Jighting’ of every cigar, the drinking of. Se ry
cup, | 1p, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and
the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express

yolitional deliberation. Full half the time of such a man
goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought
to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his
conscicusness at all. If there be such daily duties not yet
ingrained in any one of my readers, let him begin this very
hour 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_firgt

HABIT. 123

is that in the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off
of an. old one, we must take care to launch ourselves see as
strong and decided an initiative.aspossible. Accumulate all
the possible circumstances which shall re-enforce the right
motives; put yourself assiduously in conditions that en-
courage the new way; make engagements incompatible
with the old; take a public pledge, if the case allows; in
short, envelop your resolution with every aid you know.
This will give your new beginning such a momentum that
the temptation to break down will not occur as soon as it
otherwise might ; and every day during which a breakdown
is postponed adds to the chances of its not occurring at all.

The second maxim is: Never suffer an exception to.occur
till the new 0 habit as_securely rooted in your life. Each lapse
is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is care-
fully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great
many turns will wind again. Continuity of training is the
great means of making the nervous system act infallibly
right. As Professor Bain says:

‘‘The peculiarity of the moral habits, contradistinguishing them
from the intellectual acquisitions, is the presence of two hostile powers,
one to be gradually raised into the ascendant over the other. It is
necessary, above all things, in such a situation, never to lose a battle.
Every gain on the wrong side undoes the effect of many conquests on
the right. The essential precaution, therefore, is so to regulate the
two opposing powers that the one may have a series of uninterrupted
successes, until repetition has fortified it to such a degree as to enable
it to cope with the opposition, under any circumstances. This is the
theoretically best career of mental progress.”

Failure at first is “aes e dampen the energy of all Re
attempts, whereas past experience of success nerves one to
future vigor. Goethe says to a man who consulted him
about an enterprise but mistrusted his own powers: “Ach!
you need only blow on your hands!” And the remark
illustrates the effect on Goethe’s spirits of his own habitu-
ally successful career. Prof. Baumann, from whom IL bor-
row the anecdote,* says that the collapse of barbarian

* See the admirable passage about success at the outset, in his Handbuch
der Moral (1878), pp. 38-43.

124 PSYCHOLOGY.

nations when Europeans come among them is due to their
despair of ever succeeding as the new-comers do in the
larger tasks of life. Old ways are broken and new ones
not formed.

The question of ‘tapering-off, in abandoning such
habits as drink and opium-indulgence, comes in here, and
is a question about which experts differ within certain
limits, and in regard to what may be best for an individual
case. In the main, however, all expert opinion _y would
agree that abrupt acquisition of the new habit is the best
way, 3f there be a real possibility of carrying it out. We
must be careful not to give the will so stiff a task as is to i in-
sure its defeat at the very outset; but, provided one can
stand it, a sharp period of otene and then a free time,
is the best thing to aim at, whether in giving up a habit
like that of opium, or in simply changing one’s hours of
rising or of work. It is surprising how soon a desire will
die of inanition if it be never fed.

“One must first learn, unmoved, looking neither to the right nor
left, to walk firmly on the straight and narrow path, before one oan
begin ‘to make one’s self over again.’ He who every day makes a
fresh resolve is like one who, arriving at the edge of the ditch he is to
leap, forever stops and returns for a fresh run. Without wnbroken
advance there is no such thing as accumulation of the ethical forces
possible, and to make this possible, and to exercise us and habituate us
in it, is the sovereign blessing of regular work.” *

A third maxim may be added to the preceding pair:
Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolu-
tion you make, and on every emotional prompting you may
exper ‘ence in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain. It
is not in the moment of their forming, but in the moment
of their producing motor effects, that resolves and aspira-
tions communicate the new ‘set’ to the brain. As the
author last quoted remarks:

‘* The actual presence of the practical opportunity alone furnishes the
fulcrum upon which the lever can rest, by means of which the moral
will may multiply its strength, and raise itself aloft. He who has no
solid ground to press against will never get beyond the stage of empty
gesture-making.”

* J. Bahnsen : ‘ Beitriige zu Charakterologie ’ (1867), vol. 1. p. 209.

HABIT. 125

No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may poss
sess, and no matter how good one’s sentiments may be, if one
have not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to
act, one’s character may remain entirely unaffected for the
better. With mere good intentions, hell is proverbially
paved. And this is an obvious consequence of the prin-
ciples we have laid down. <A ‘character,’ as J.S. Mill says,
‘is a completely fashioned will’; and a will, in the sense in
which he means it, is an aggregate of tendencies to act in a
firm and prompt and definite way upon all the principal
emergencies of life. A tendency to act only becomes effec-
tively ingrained in us in proportion to the uninterrupted
frequency with which the actions actually occur, and the
brain ‘ grows ’ to their use. Every time a resolve or a fine
glow of feeling evaporates without bearing pr actical fruit is
worse than a chance lost; it works so as positively to
hinder future resolutions al emotions from taking the
nor jormal path of discharge. There is no more contemptible
type « pe of human character than that of the nerveless senti-
mentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering
sea sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly
concrete deed. Rousseau, inflaming all the mothers of
France, by his eloquence, to follow Nature and nurse their
babies themselves, while he sends his own children to the
foundling hospital, is the classical example of what I mean.
But every one of us in his measure, whenever, after glow-
ing for an abstractly formulated Good, he practically
ignores some actual case, among the squalid ‘ other partic-
ulars’ of which that same Good lurks disguised, treads
straight on Rousseau’s path. All Goods are disguised by
the vulgarity of their concomitants, in this work-a-day
world; but woe to him who can only recognize them when
he thinks them in their pure and abstract form! The habit
of excessive novel-reading and theatre-going will produce
true monsters in this line. The weeping of a Russian lady
over the fictitious personages in the play, while her coach-
man is freezing to death on his seat outside, is the sort of
thing that everywhere happens on a less glaring scale.
Even the habit of excessive indulgence in music, for those
who are neither performers themselves nor musically gifted

126 PSYCHOLOG Y.

enough to take it in a purely intellectual way, has probably
a relaxing effect upon the character. One becomes filled
with emotions which habitually pass without prompting to
any deed, and so the inertly sentimental condition is kept
up. The remedy would be, never to suffer one’s self to
have an emotion at a concert, without expressing it after-
ward in some active way.* Let the expression be the least
thing in the world—speaking genially to one’s aunt, or
giving up one’s seat in a horse-car, if nothing more heroic
offers—but let it not fail to take place.

These latter cases make us aware that it is not simply
particular lines of discharge, but also general forms of dis-
charge, that seem to be grooved out by habit in the brain.
Just as, if we let our emotions evaporate, they get into a
way of evaporating; so there is reason to suppose that if
we often flinch from making an effort, before we know it the
effort-making capacity will be gone; and that, if we suffer
the wandering of our attention, presently it will wander all
the time. Attention and effort are, as we shall see later,
but two names for the same psychic fact. To what brain-
processes they correspond we donot know. The strongest
reason for believing that they do depend on brain-processes
at all, and are not pure acts of the spirit, is just this fact,
that they seem in some degree subject to the Jaw of habit,
which is a material law. As a final practical maxim, rela-
tive to these habits of the will, we may, then, offer some-
thing like this: Keep | the Saculty of effort alive in you by a
little gratwtous exercise ever y day. That is, be systematic-
ally ascetic or heroic in littlé unnecessary points, do
every day or two something for no other reason than that
you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire
need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained
to stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insur-
ance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax
does him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring
him a return. But if the fire does come, his having paid it
will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has

* See for remarks on this subject a readable article by Miss V. Scudder
on ‘Musical Devotees and Morals,’ in the Andover Review for January
1887.

HABIT. 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 around
him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like
chaff in the blast.

The physiological study of mental conditions is thus the
most powerful ally of hortatory ethics. The hell to be
endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than
the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually
fashioning our characters in the wrong way. Could the
young but realize how soon they will become mere walking
bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their con-
duct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own
fates, good orevil, and never to be undone. Every smallest
stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar,
The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson’s play, excuses
himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, ‘I won’t count
this time!’ Well! he may not count it, and akind Heaven
may not count it; but it is being counted none the less.
Down among his nerve-cells and fibres the molecules are
counting it, registering and storing it up to be used against
him when the next temptation comes. Nothing we ever do
is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out. Of course, this
has its good side as well as its bad one. As we become
permanent drunkards by so many separate drinks, so we
become saints in the moral, and authorities and experts in
the practical and scientific spheres, by so many separate
acts and hours of work. Let no youth have any anxiety
about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may
be. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working-
day, he may safely leave the final result to itself. He can
with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morn-
ing, to find himself one of the competent ones of his gen-
eration, in whatever pursuit he may have singled out.
Silently, between all the details of his business, the power of
judging in all that class of matter will have built itself up
within him as a possession that will never pass away.

Young people should know this truth in advance. The |

ignorance of it has probably engendered more discourage-

ment and faint-heartedness in youths embarking on arduous |

zareers than all other causes put together.

CHAPTER V.
THE AUTOMATON-THEORY.

In describing the functions of the hemispheres a short
way back, we used language derived from both the bodily
and the mental life, saying now that the animal made inde-
terminate and unforeseeable reactions, and anon that he
was swayed by considerations of future good and evil;
treating his hemispheres sometimes as the seat of mem-
ory and ideas in the psychic sense, and sometimes talk-
ing of them as simply a complicated addition to his
reflex machinery. This sort of vacillation in the point of
view is a fatal incident of all ordinary talk about these
questions ; but I must now settle my scores with those
readers to whom I already dropped a word in passing (see
page 24, note) and who have probably been dissatisfied
with my conduct ever since.

Suppose we restrict our view to facts of one and the same
plane, and let that be the bodily plane: cannot all the out-
ward phenomena of intelligence still be exhaustively de-
scribed? Those mental images, those ‘ considerations,’
whereof we spoke,—presumably they do not arise without
neural processes arising simultaneously with them, and
presumably each consideration corresponds to a process swt
generis, and unlike all the rest. In other words, however
numerous and delicately differentiated the train of ideas
may be, the train of brain-events that runs alongside of it
must in both respects be exactly its match, and we must
postulate a neural machinery that offers a living counterpart
for every shading, however fine, of the history of its owner’s
mind. Whatever degree of complication the latter may
reach, the complication of the machinery must be quite as
extreme, otherwise we should have to admit that there

may be mental events to which no brain-events correspond,
128

THE AUTOMATON-THEORY. 129

But such an admission as this the physiologist is reluctant
to make. It would violate all his beliefs. ‘No psychosis
without neurosis,’ is one form which the principle of con-
tinuity takes in his mind.

But this principle forces the physiologist to make still
another step. If neural action is as complicated as mind ;
and if in the sympathetic system and lower spinal cord we
see what, so far as we know, is unconscious neural action
executing deeds that to all outward intent may be called
intelligent ; what is there to hinder us from supposing that
even where we know consciousness to be there, the still
more complicated neural action which we believe to be its
inseparable companion is alone and of itself the real agent
of whatever intelligent deeds may appear? ‘ As actions of
a certain degree of complexity are brought about by mere
mechanism, why may not actions of a still greater degree of
complexity be the result of a more refined mechanism ?”
The conception of reflex action is surely one of the best
conquests of physiological theory ; why not be radical with
it? Why not say that just as the spinal cord is a machine
with few reflexes, so the hemispheres are a machine with
many, and that that is all the difference? The principle of
continuity would press us to accept this view.

But what on this view could be the function of the con-
sciousness itself? Mechanical function it would have none.
The sense-organs would awaken the brain-cells; these
would awaken each other in rational and orderly sequence,
until the time for action came; and then the last brain-
vibration would discharge downward into the motor tracts.
But this would be a quite autonomous chain of occur-
rences, and whatever mind went with it would be there
only as an ‘epiphenomenon,’ an inert spectator, a sort of
‘foam, aura, or melody’ as Mr. Hodgson says, whose oppo-
sition or whose furtherance would be alike powerless over
the occurrences themselves. When talking, some time ago,
we ought not, accordingly, as physiologists, to have said any-
thing about ‘considerations’ as guiding the animal. We
ought to have said ‘paths left in the hemispherical cortex
by former currents,’ and nothing more.

Now so simple and attractive is this conception from the

130 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

consistently physiological point of view, that it is quite
wonderful to see how late it was stumbled on in philosophy,
and how few people, even when it has been explained to
them, fully and easily realize its import. Much of the
polemic writing against it is by men who have as yet failed
to take it into their imaginations. Since this has been the
case, it seems worth while to devote a few more words to
making it plausible, before criticising it ourselves.

To Descartes belongs the credit of having first been bold
enough to conceive of a completely self-sufficing nervous
mechanism which should be able to perform complicated
and apparently intelligent acts. By a singularly arbitrary
restriction, however, Descartes stopped short at man, and
while contending that in beasts the nervous machinery was
all, he held that the higher acts of man were the result
of the agency of his rational soul. The opinion that
beasts have no consciousness at all was of course too para-
doxical to maintain itself long as anything more than a
curious item in the history of philosophy. And with its
abandonment the very notion that the nervous system per se
might work the work of intelligence, which was an integral,
though detachable part of the whole theory, seemed also to
slip out of men’s conception, until, in this century, the
elaboration of the doctrine of reflex action made it possible
and natural that it should again arise. But it was not till
1870, I believe, that Mr. Hodgson made the decisive step,
by saying that feelings, no matter how intensely they may
be present, can have no causal efficacy whatever, and com-
paring them to the colors laid on the surface of a mosaic, of
which the events in the nervous system are represented by
the stones.* Obviously the stones are held in place by each
other and not by the several colors which they support.

About the same time Mr. Spalding, and a little later
Messrs. Huxley and Clifford, gave great publicity to an
identical! doctrine, though in their case it was packed by
less refined metaphysical considerations.t

* The Theory of Practice, vol. 1, p. 416 ff.

+ The present writer recalls how in 1869, when still a medical student,
he began to write an essay showing how almost every one who speculated
about brain-processes illicitly interpolated into his account of them linis

AUTOMATON-THEORY. , 13]

A few sentences from Huxley and Clifford may be sub-
joined to make the matter entirely clear. Professor Huxley
says:

‘¢The consciousness of brutes would appear to be related to the
mechanism of their body simply as a collateral product of its working,
and to be as completely without any power of modifying that working
as the steam-whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine
is without influence on its machinery. Their volition, if they have any,
is an emotion indicative ot physical changes, not a cause 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 when
it is struck. . . . Thus far I have strictly confined myself to the
automatism of brutes. ... It is quite true that, to the best of my
judgment, the argumentation which applies to brutes holds equally
good of men; and, therefore, that all states of consciousness in us, as
in them, are immediately caused by molecular changes of the brain-sub-
stance. It seems to me that in men, as in brutes, there is no proof that
any state of consciousness is the cause of change in the motion of the
matter of the organism. If these positions are well based, it follows
that our mental conditions are simply the symbols in consciousness of
the changes which take place automatically in the organism ; and that,
to take an extreme illustration, the feeling we call volition is not the
cause of a voluntary act, but the symbol of that state of the brain which
is 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 world
gets 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 the
train of physical facts which goes on in the brain, even when there is
no stimulus and no exertion,—these are perfectly complete physical
trains, and every step is fully accounted for by mechanical conditions.
. . . The two things are on utterly different platforms—the physical
facts go along by themselves, and the mental facts go along by them-
selves. There is a parallelism between them, but there is no interfer-
ence of one with the other. Again, if anybody says that the will
influences matter, the statement is not untrue, but it is nonsense. Such
an assertion belongs to the crude materialism of the savage. The only

derived from the entirely heterogeneous universe of Feeling. Spencer,
Hodgson (in his Time and Space), Maudsley, Lockhart Clarke, Bain, Dr.
Carpenter, and other authors were cited as having been guilty of the con-
fusion. The writing was soon stopped because he perceived that the view
which he was upholding against these authors was a pure conception. with
no proofs to be adduced of its reality. Later it seemed to him that what-
ever proofs existed really told in favor of their view.

132 PSYCHOLOGY.

thing which influences matter is the position of surrounding matter or
the motion of surrounding matter. . . . The assertion that another
man’s volition, a feeling in his consciousness that I cannot perceive, is
part of the train of physical facts which I may perceive,—this is neither
true nor untrue, but nonsense; it is a combination of words whose cor-
responding ideas will not go together. . . . Sometimes one series is
known better, and sometimes the other; so that in telling a story we
speak sometimes of mental and sometimes of material facts. <A feeling
of chill made a man run; strictly speaking, the nervous disturbance
which coexisted with that feeling of chill made him run, if we want to
talk about material facts ; or the feeling of chill produced the form of
sub-consciousness which coexists with the motion of legs, if we want
to talk about mental facts. . . . When, therefore, we ask: ‘ What is the
physical link between the ingoing message from chilled skin and the
outgoing message which moves the leg?’ and the answer is, ‘A man’s
will,’ we have as much right to be amused as if we had asked our friend
with the picture what pigment was used in painting the cannon in the
foreground, and received the answer, ‘ Wrought iron.’ It will be found
excellent practice in the mental operations required by this doctrine to.
imagine a train, the fore part of which is an engine and three carriages
linked with iron couplings, and the hind part three other carriages
linked with iron couplings ; the bond between the two parts being
made up out of the sentiments of amity subsisting between the stoker
and the guard.”

To comprehend completely the consequences of the
dogma so confidently enunciated, one should unflinchingly
apply it to the most complicated examples. The move-
ments of our tongues and pens, the flashings of our eyes in
conversation, are of course events of a material order, and as.
such their causal antecedents must be exclusively material.
If we knew thoroughly the nervous system of Shake-
speare, and as thoroughly all his environing conditions, we
should be able to show why at a certain period of his life
his hand came to trace on certain sheets of paper those
erabbed little black marks which we for shortness’
sake call the manuscript of Hamlet. We should under-
stand the rationale of every erasure and alteration therein,
and we should understand all this without in the slightest
degree acknowledging the existence of the thoughts in Shake-
speare’s mind. The words and sentences would be taken,
not as signs of anything beyond themselves, but as little
outward facts, pure and simple. In like manner we might
exhaustively write the biography of those two hundred

AUTOMATON-THEORY. 133

pounds, more or less, of warmish albuminoid matter called
Martin Luther, without ever implying that it felt.

But, on the other hand, nothing in all this could pre-
vent us from giving an equally complete account of either
Luther’s or Shakespeare’s spiritual history, an account im
which every gleam of thought and emotion should find its
place. The mind-history would run alongside of the body-
history of each man, and each point in the one would cor-
respond to, but not react upon, a point in the other. So
the melody floats from the harp-string, but neither checks
nor quickens its vibrations ; so the shadow runs alongside
the 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. Hodg-
son is the only writer who has explicitly drawn it. That
inference is that feelings, not causing nerve-actions, cannot
even cause each other. To ordinary common sense, felt
pain is, as such, not only the cause of outward tears and
cries, but also the cause of such inward events as sorrow,
compunction, desire, or inventive thought. So the con-
sciousness of good news is the direct producer of the feel-
ing of joy, the awareness of premises that of the belief in
conclusions. But according to the automaton-theory, each
of the feelings mentioned is only the correlate of some nerve-
movement whose cause lay wholly in a previous nerve-move-
ment. The first nerve-movement called up the second ;
whatever feeling was attached to the second consequently
found itself following upon the feeling that was attached
to the first. If, for example, good news was the conscious-
ness correlated with the first movement, then joy turned
out to be the correlate in consciousness of the second.
But all the while the items of the nerve series were the
only ones in causal continuity ; the items of the conscious
series, however inwardly rational their sequence, were
simply juxtaposed.

REASONS FOR THE THEORY.
The ‘ conscious automaton-theory,’ as this conception is
generally called, is thus a radical and simple conception of
the manner in which certain facts may possibly occur. But

134 PSYCHOLOG Y.

between conception and belief, proof ought to lie. And
when we ask, ‘What proves that all this is more than a
mere conception of the possible?’ it is not easy to get a
sufficient reply. If we start from the frog’s spinal cord
and reason by continuity, saying, as that acts so intelli-
gently, though unconscious, so the higher centres, though
conscious, may have the intelligence they show quite as
mechanically based; we are immediately met by the exact
counter-argument from continuity, an argument actually
urged by such writers as Pfliiger and Lewes, which starts
from the acts of the hemispheres, and says: “As these owe
their intelligence to the consciousness which we know to
be there, so the intelligence of the spinal cord’s acts must
really be due to the invisible presence of a consciousness
lower in degree.” All arguments from continuity work in
two ways: you can either level up or level down by their
means. And it is clear that such arguments as these can
eat each other up to all eternity.

There remains a sort of philosophic faith, bred like
most faiths from an esthetic demand. Mental and physical
events are, on all hands, admitted to present the strongest
contrast in the entire field of being. The chasm which
yawns between them is less easily bridged over by the
mind than any interval we know. Why, then, not call it an
absolute chasm, and say not only that the two worlds
are different, but that they are independent? This gives
us the comfort of all simple and absolute formulas, and it
makes each chain homogeneous to our consideration.
When talking of nervous tremors and bodily actions, we
may feel secure against intrusion from an irrelevant mental
world. When, on the other hand, we speak of feelings, we
may with equal consistency use terms always of one de-
nomination, and never be annoyed by what Aristotle calls
‘slipping into another kind.’ The desire on the part of men
educated in laboratories not to have their physical reason-
ings mixed up with such incommensurable factors as feelings
is certainly very strong. I have heard a most intelligent
biologist say: “It is high time for scientific men to protest
against the recognition of any such thing as consciousness
in a scientific investigation.” In a word, feeling constitutes

AUTOMATON-THEORY. 135

the ‘unscientific’ half of existence, and any one who enjoys
calling himself a ‘scientist’ will be too happy to purchase
an untrammelled homogeneity of terms in the studies of his
predilection, at the slight cost of admitting a dualism
which, in the same breath that it allows to mind an inde-
pendent status of being, banishes it to a limbo of causal
inertness, from whence no intrusion or interruption on its
part need ever be feared.

Over and above this great postulate that matters must
be kept simple, there is, it must be confessed, still another
highly abstract reason for denying causal efticacity to our
feelings. We can form no positive image of the modus
operandi of a volition or other thought affecting the cere-
bral molecules.

‘‘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 its
action? Does it assist the decomposition of the molecules of the gray
matter, or does it retard the process, or does it alter the direction in
which the shocks are distributed? Let us imagine the molecules of the
gray matter combined in such a way that they will fall into simpler
combinations on the impact of an incident force. Now suppose the in-
cident force, in the shape of a shock from some other centre, to impinge
upon these molecules. By hypothesis it will decompose them, and they
will fall into the simpler combination. How is the idea of food to pre-
vent this decomposition? Manifestly it can do so only by increasing
the force which binds the molecules together. Good! Try to imagine
the idea of a beefsteak binding two molecules together. It is impossi-
ble. Equally impossible is it to imagine a similar idea loosening the
attractive force between two molecules.” *

This passage from an exceedingly clever writer expresses
admirably the difficulty to which I allude. Combined with
a strong sense of the ‘chasm’ between the two worlds, and
with a lively faith in reflex machinery, the sense of this
difficulty can hardly fail to make one turn consciousness
out of the door as a superfluity so far as one’s explanations
go. One may bow her out politely, allow her to remain as
an ‘epiphenomenon’ (invaluable word !), but one insists that
matter shall hold all the power.

‘‘Having thoroughly recognized the fathomless abyss that separates
mind from matter, and having so blended the very notion into his very

* Chas. Mercier: The Nervous System and the Mind (1888), p. 9.

136 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

mature that there is no chance of his ever forgetting it or failing to
saturate with it all his meditations, the student of psychology has next
to appreciate the association between these two orders of phenomena.
. . . They are associated in a manner so intimate that some of the
greatest thinkers consider them different aspects of the same process.

.. When the rearrangement of molecules takes place in the higher
regions of the brain, a change of consciousness simultaneously occurs.
. . . The change of consciousness never takes place without the change
in the brain ; the change in the brain never . . . without the change
in consciousness. But why the two occur together, or what the link is
which connects them, we do not know, and most authorities believe
that we never shall and never can know. Having firmly and tena-
ciously grasped these two notions, of the absolute separateness of mind
and matter, and of the invariable concomitance of a mental change
with a bodily change, the student will enter on the study of psychology
with half his difficulties surmounted.” *

Half his difficulties ignored, I should prefer to say. For
this ‘concomitance ’ in the midst of ‘absolute separateness’
is an utterly irrational notion. It is to my mind quite in.
concelvable that consciousness should have nothing to do
with a business which it so faithfully attends. And the
question, ‘What has it to do?’ is one which psychology
has no right to ‘surmount,’ for it is her plain duty to con-
sider it. The fact is that the whole question of interaction
and influence between things is a metaphysical question,
and cannot be discussed at all by those who are unwilling
to go into matters thoroughly. It is truly enough hard to
imagine the ‘idea of a beefsteak binding two molecules
together ;’ but since Hume’s time it has been equally hard
to imagine anything binding them together. The whole
notion of ‘binding’ is a mystery, the first step towards the
solution of which is to clear scholastic rubbish out of the
way. Popular science talks of ‘ forces,’ ‘attractions’ or
‘affinities’ as binding the molecules; but clear science,
though she may use such words to abbreviate discourse, has
no use for the conceptions, and is satisfied when she can
express in simple ‘laws’ the bare space-relations of the
molecules as functions of each other and of time. To the
more curiously inquiring mind, however, this simplified
expression of the bare facts is not enough; there must

* Op. cit. p. 11.

AUTOMATON-.THEORY. 137

be a ‘reason’ for them, and something must ‘determine’
the laws. And when one seriously sits down to con-
sider what sort of a thing one means when one asks
for a ‘reason, one is led so far afield, so far away from
popular science and its scholasticism, as to see that even
such a fact as the existence or non-existence in the universe
of ‘the idea of a beefsteak’ may not be wholly indifferent
to other facts in the same universe, and in particular may
have something to do with determining the distance at
which two molecules in that universe shall lie apart. If
this is so, then common-sense, though the intimate nature
of causality and of the connection of things in the universe
lies beyond her pitifully bounded horizon, has the root and
gist of the truth in her hands when she obstinately holds
to it that feelings and ideas are causes. However inade-
quate our ideas of causal efficacy may be, we are less wide
of the mark when we say that our ideas and feelings have
it, than the Automatists are when they say they haven’t it.
As in the night all cats are gray, so in the darkness of meta-
physical criticism all causes are obscure. But one has no
right to pull the pall over the psychic half of the subject
only, as the automatists do, and to say that that causation
is unintelligible, whilst in the same breath one dogmatizes
about material causation as if Hume, Kant, and Lotze had
never been born. One cannot thus blow hot and cold. One
must be impartially naif or impartially critical. If the
latter, the reconstruction must be thorough-going or ‘ meta-
physical, and will probably preserve the common-sense
view that ideas are forces, in some translated form. But
Psychology is a mere natural science, accepting certain
terms uncritically as her data, and stopping short of
metaphysical reconstruction. Like physics, she must be
naive ; and if she finds that in her very peculiar field of
study ideas seem to be causes, she had better continue to
talk of them as such. She gains absolutely nothing by a
breach with common-sense in this matter, and she loses,
to say the least, all naturalness of speech. If feelings are
causes, of course their effects must be furtherances and
checkings of internal cerebral motions, of which in them-
selves we are entirely without knowledge. It is probable

138 PSYCHOLOGY.

that for years to come we shall have to infer what happens
in the brain either from our feelings or from motor effects
which we observe. The organ will be for us a sort of vat
in which feelings and motions somehow go on stewing
together, and in which innumerable things happen of which
we catch but the statistical result. Why, under these cir-
cumstances, we should be asked to forswear the language
of our childhood I cannot well imagine, especially as it is
perfectly compatible with the language of physiology. The
feelings can produce nothing absolutely new, they can only
reinforce and inhibit reflex currents which already exist,
and the original organization of these by physiological
forces must always be the ground-work of the psycho-
logical scheme.

My conclusion is that to urge the automaton-theory
upon us, as it is now urged, on purely a priori and quast-
metaphysical grounds, is an wnwarrantable impertinence im
the present state of psychology.

REASONS AGAINST THE THEORY.

But there are much more positive reasons than this why
we ought to continue to talk in psychology as if conscious-
ness had causal efficacy. The particulars of the distribu-
tion of consciousness, so far as we know them, point to its
being efficacious. Let us trace some of them.

It is very generally admitted, though the point would
be hard to prove, that consciousness grows the more com-
plex and intense the higher we rise in the animal kingdom.
That of a man must exceed that of an oyster. From this
point of view it seems an organ, superadded to the other
organs which maintain the animal in the struggle for exist-
ence; and the presumption of course is that it helps him
in some way in the struggle, just as they do. But it
cannot help him without being in some way efficacious and
influencing the course of his bodily history. If now it
could be shown in what way consciousness might help him,
and if, moreover, the defects of his other organs (where
consciousuess is most developed) are such as to make them
need just the kind of help that consciousness would bring
provided it were efficacious ; why, then the plausible infer-

AUTOMATON-THEORY. 139

ence would be that it came just because of its efficacy—in
other words, its efficacy would be inductively proved.

Now the study of the phenomena of consciousness which
we shall make throughout the rest of this book will show
us that consciousness is at all times primarily a selecting
agency.* Whether we take it in the lowest sphere of sense,
or in the highest of intellection, we find it always doing
one thing, choosing one out of several of the materials so
presented to its notice, emphasizing and accentuating that
and suppressing as far as possible all the rest. The item
emphasized is always in close connection with some interest
felt by consciousness to be paramount at the time.

But what are now the defects of the nervous system in
those animals whose consciousness seems most highly
developed? Chief among them must be instability. The
cerebral hemispheres are the characteristically ‘high’
nerve-centres, and we saw how indeterminate and unfore-
seeable their performances were in comparison with those
of the basal ganglia and the cord. But this very vague-
ness constitutes their advantage. They allow their pos-
sessor to adapt his conduct to the minutest alterations in
the environing circumstances, any one of which may be
for him a sign, suggesting distant motives more powerful
than any present solicitations of sense. It seems as if cer-
tain mechanical conclusions should be drawn from this
state of things. An organ swayed by slight impressions is
an organ whose natural state is one of unstable equilibrium.
We may imagine the various lines of discharge in the cere-
brum to be almost on a par in point of permeability—what
discharge a given small impression will produce may be
called accidental, in the sense in which we say it is a mat-
ter of accident whether a rain-drop falling on a moun-
tain ridge descend the eastern or the western slope. It
is in this sense that we may call it a matter of accident
whether a child be a boy ora girl. The ovum is so un-
stable a body that certain causes too minute for our appre-
hension may at a certain moment tip it one way or the
other. The natural law of an organ constituted after this

* See in particular the end of Chapter IX.

140 PSYCHOLOGY.

fashion can be nothing but a law of caprice. I do not see
how one could reasonably expect from it any certain pursu-
ance of useful lines of reaction, such as the few and fatally
determined performances of the lower centres constitute
within their narrow sphere. The dilemma in regard to the
nervous system seems, in short, to be of the following kind.
We may construct one which will react infallibly and cer-
tainly, but it will then be capable of reacting to very few
changes in the environment—it will fail to be adapted to all
the rest. We may, on the other hand, construct a nervous
system potentially adapted to respond to an infinite variety
of minute features in the situation; but its fallibility will
then be as great as its elaboration. We can never be sure
that its equilibrium will be upset in the appropriate direc-
tion. In short, a high brain may do many things, and may
do each of them at a very slight hint. But its hair-trigger
organization makes of it a happy-go-lucky, hit-or-miss
affair. It is as likely to do the crazy as the sane thing at
any given moment. <A low brain does few things, and in
doing them perfectly forfeits all other use. The perform-
ances of a high brain are like dice thrown forever on a
table. Unless they be loaded, what chance is there that
the highest number will turn up oftener than the lowest ?

All this is said of the brain as a physical machino pure
and simple. Can consciousness increase its efficiency by
loading its dice? Such is the problem.

Loading its dice would mean bringing a more or less
constant pressure to bear in favor of those of its perform-
ances which make for the most permanent interests of the
brain’s owner; it would mean a constant inhibition of the
tendencies to stray aside.

Well, just such pressure and such inhibition are what
consciousness seems to be exerting all the while. And the
interests in whose favor it seems to exert them are ifs inter-
ests and its alone, interests which it creates, and which, -
but for it, would have no status in the realm of being what-
ever. We talk, it is true, when we are darwinizing, as if
the mere body that owns the brain had interests; we speak
about the utilities of its various organs and how they help
or hinder the body’s survival; and we treat the survival as

AUTOMATON-THEORY. 14]

if it were an absolute end, existing as such in the physical
world, a sort of actual should-be, presiding over the animal
and judging his reactions, quite apart from the presence of
any commenting intelligence outside. We forget that in
the absence of some such superadded commenting intelli-
gence (whether it be that of the animal itself, or only ours
or Mr. Darwin’s), the reactions cannot be properly talked
of as ‘useful’ or ‘hurtful’ at all. Considered merely
physically, all that can be said of them is that 7f they occur
in a certain way survival will as a matter of fact prove to be
their incidental consequence. The organs themselves, and
all the rest of the physical world, will, however, all the time
be quite indifferent to this consequence, and would quite as
cheerfully, the circumstances changed, compass the animal’s
destruction. In a word, survival can enter into a purely
physiological discussion only as an hypothesis made by an
onlooker, about the future. But the moment you bring a
consciousness into the midst, survival ceases to be a mere
hypothesis. No longer is it, ‘7 survival is to occur, then
so and so must brain‘and other organs work.” It has now
become an imperative decree: “Survival shall occur, and
therefore organs must so work!” eal ends appear for the
first time now upon the world’s stage. The conception of
consciousness as a purely cognitive form of being, which
is the pet way of regarding it in many idealistic schools,
modern as well as ancient, is thoroughly anti-psychologi-
cal, as the remainder of this book will show. Every actu-
ally existing consciousness seems to itself at any rate tc
be a fighter for ends, of which many, but for its presence,
would not be ends at all. Its powers of cognition are
mainly subservient to these ends, discerning which facts
further 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 proper
ends. The movements of the brain per se yield the means
of attaining these ends mechanically, but only out of a lot of
other ends, if so they may be called, which are not the
proper ones of the animal, but often quite opposed. The
brain is an instrument of possibilities, but of no certainties.
But the consciousness, with its own ends present to it, and

142 PSYCHOLOG Y.

knowing also well which possibilities lead thereto and
which away, will, if endowed with causal efficacy, reinforce
the favorable possibilities and repress the unfavorable or
indifferent ones. The nerve-currents, coursing through the
cells and fibres, must in this case be supposed strengthened
by the fact of their awaking one consciousness and damp-
ened by awaking another. How such reaction of the con-
sciousness upon the currents may occur must remain at
present unsolved: it is enough for my purpose to have
shown that 1t may not uselessly exist, and that the matter
is less simple than the brain-automatists hold.

All the facts of the natural history of consciousness lend
color to this view. Consciousness, for example, is only
intense when nerve-processes are hesitant. In rapid,
automatic, habitual action it sinkstoa minimum. Nothing
could be more fitting than this, if consciousness have the
teleological function we suppose ; nothing more meaning-
less, if not. Habitual actions are certain, and being in no
danger of going astray from their eud, need no extraneous
help. In hesitant action, there seem many alternative pos-
sibilities of final nervous discharge. The feeling awakened
by the nascent excitement of each alternative nerve-tract
seems by its attractive or repulsive quality to determine
whether the excitement shall abort or shall become com-
plete. Where indecision is great, as before a dangerous
leap, consciousness is agonizingly intense. Feeling, from
this point of view, may be likened to a cross-section of the
chain of nervous discharge, ascertaining the links already
laid down, and groping among the fresh ends presented
to it for the one which seems best to fit the case.

The phenomena of ‘ vicarious function’ which we studied
in Chapter II seem to form another bit of circumstantial
evidence. A machine in working order acts fatally in
one way. Our consciousness calls this the right way.
Take out a valve, throw a wheel out of gear or bend a
pivot, and it becomes a different machine, acting just as
fatally in another way which we call the wrong way. But
the machine itself knows nothing of wrong or right: matter
has no ideals to pursue. A locomotive will carry its train

AUTOMATON-THEORY. 145

through an open drawbridge as cheerfully as to any other
destination.

A brain with part of it scooped out is virtually a new
machine, and during the first days after the operation
functions in a thoroughly abnormal manner. As a matter
of fact, however, its performances become from day to day
more normal, until at last a practised eye may be needed
to suspect anything wrong. Some of the restoration is un-
doubtedly due to ‘inhibitions’ passing away. But if the
consciousness which goes with the rest of the brain, be there
not only in order to take cognizance of each functional
error, but also to exert an efficient pressure to check it if it
be a sin of commission, and to lend a strengthening hand
if it be a weakness or sin of omission,—nothing seems
more natural than that the remaining parts, assisted in
this way, should by virtue of the principle of habit grow
back to the old teleological modes of exercise for which
they were at first incapacitated. Nothing, on the contrary,
seems at first sight more unnatural than that they should
vicariously take up the duties of a part now lost without
those duties as such exerting any persuasive or coercive
force. At the end of Chapter XXVII shail return to this
again.

There is yet another set of facts which seem explicable
on the supposition that consciousness has causal efficacy.
Tt is a well-known fact that pleasures are generally asso-
ciated with 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, the
effects of poison, are as disagreeable as filling the hungry
stomach, enjoying rest and sleep after fatigue, exercise after
rest, and a sound skin and unbroken bones at all times, are
pleasant. Mr. Spencer and others have suggested that
these coincidences are due, not to any pre-established
harmony, but to the mere action of natural selection which
would certainly kill off in the long-run any breed of crea-
tures to whom the fundamentally noxious experience seemed
enjoyable. An animal that should take pleasure in a feel-

144 PSYCHOLOG Y.

ing of suffocation would, if that pleasure were efficacious °
enough to make him immerse his head in water, enjoy a
longevity of four or five minutes. But if pleasures and
pains have no efficacy, one does not see (without some
such d@ priori rational harmony as would be scouted by the
‘scientific’ champions of the automaton-theory) why the
most noxious acts, such as burning, might not give thrills
of 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 vital
or not universal. Drunkenness, for instance, which though
noxious, is to many persons delightful, is a very exceptional
experience. But, as the excellent physiologist Fick re-
marks, if all rivers and springs ran alcohol instead of water,
either all men would now be born to hate it or our nerves
would have been selected so as to drink it with impunity.
The only considerable attempt, in fact, that has been made
to explain the distribution of our feelings is that of Mr. Grant
Allen in his suggestive little work Physiological Atsthetics ;
and his reasoning is based exclusively on that causal efficacy
of pleasures and pains which the ‘ double-aspect’ partisans
so strenuously deny.

Thus, then, from every point of view the circumstantial
evidence against that theory is strong. A priori analysis
of both brain-action and conscious action shows us that if
the latter were efficacious it would, by its selective emphasis,
make amends for the indeterminateness of the former; whilst
the study a posteriori of the distribution of consciousness
shows it to be exactly such as we might expect in an organ
added for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too
complex to regulate itself. The conclusion that it is use-
ful is, after all this, quite justifiable. But, if it is useful,
it must be so through its causal efficaciousness, and the
automaton-theory must succumb to the theory of common-
sense. I, at any rate (pending metaphysical reconstruc-
tions not yet successfully achieved), shall have no hesita-
tion in using the language of common-sense throughout this
book.

CHAPTER VI.
THE MIND-STUFF THEORY.

THE reader who found himself swamped with too much
metaphysics in the last chapter will have a still worse
time of it in this one, which is exclusively metaphysical.
Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate
effort to think clearly. The fundamental conceptions of
psychology are practically very clear to us, but theoreti-
cally they are very confused, and one easily makes the ob-
scurest assumptions in this science without realizing, until
challenged, what internal difficulties ‘they involve. When
these assumptions have once established themselves (as
they have a way of doing in our very descriptions of the
phenomenal facts) it is almost impossible to get rid of them
afterwards or to make any one see that they are not essen-
tial features of the subject. The only way to prevent this
disaster is to scrutinize them beforehand and make them
give an articulate account of themselves before letting them
pass. One of the obscurest of the assumptions of which
I speak is the assumption that our mental states are com-
posite in structure, made up of smaller states conjoined.
This hypothesis has outward advantages which make it
almost irresistibly attractive to the intellect, and yet it is
inwardly quite unintelligible. Of its unintelligibility, how-
ever, half the writers on psychology seem unaware. As
our own aim is to understand if possible, I make no apology
for singling out this particular notion for very explicit
treatment before taking up the descriptive part of our work.
The theory of ‘nind-stuff’ is the theory that our mental
states are compounds, expressed in its most radical form.

145

146 PSYCHOLOG Y.

EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY DEMANDS A MIND-DUST.

In a general theory of evolution the inorganic comes
first, then the lowest forms of animal and vegetable life,
then forms of life that possess mentality, and finally those
like ourselves that possess it in a high degree. As long as
we keep to the consideration of purely outward facts, even
the most complicated facts of biology, our task as evolution-
ists is comparatively easy. We are dealing all the time with
matter and its aggregations and separations; and although
our treatment must perforce be hypothetical, this does not
prevent it from being continuous. The point which as eyo-
lutionists we are bound to hold fast to is that all the new
forms of being that make their appearance are really noth-
ing more than results of the redistribution of the original
and unchanging materials. The self-same atoms which,
chaotically dispersed, made the nebula, now, jammed and
temporarily caught in peculiar positions, form our brains ;
and the ‘evolution’ of the brains, if understood, would be
simply the account of how the atoms came to be so caught
and jammed. In this story no new natures, no factors not
present at the beginning, are introduced at any later stage.

But with the dawn of consciousness an entirely new
nature seems to slip in, something whereof the potency was
not given in the mere outward atoms of the original chaos.

The enemies of evolution have been quick to pounce
upon this undeniable discontinuity in the data of the world,
and many of them, from the failure of evolutionary expla-
nations at this point, have inferred their general incapacity
all along the line. Every one admits the entire incommen-
surability of feeling as such with material motion as
such. ‘A motion became a feeling!’—no phrase that our
lips 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 repre-

sented side by side with a nervous shock [he means a mental shock],
and the two be recognized as one? No effort enables us to assimilate

THE MIND-STUFF THEORY: 147

them. That a unit of feeling has nothing in common with a unit of
motion becomes more than ever manifest when we bring the two into
juxtaposition.” *

And again:

‘Suppose it to have become quite clear that a shock in conscious-
ness and a molecular motion are the subjective and objective faces of
the same thing; we continue utterly incapable of uniting the two, so as
to conceive that reality of which they are the opposite faces.” t

In other words, incapable of perceiving in them any com-
mon character. So Tyndall, in that lucky paragraph
which has been quoted so often that every one knows it by
heart:

‘¢The passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding
facts of consciousness is unthinkable. Granted that a definite thought
and a definite molecular action in the brain occur simultaneously; we
do not possess the intellectual organ, nor apparently any rudiment of
the organ, which would enable us to pass, by a process of reasoning,
from one to the other.” ¢
Or in this other passage :

‘‘We can trace the development of a nervous system and correlate
with it the parallel phenomena of sensation and thought. We see with
undoubting certainty that they go hand in hand. But we try to soar
in a vacuum the moment we seek to comprehend the connection
between them. . . . There isno fusion possible between the two classes
of facts—no motor energy in the intellect of man to carry it without
logical rupture from the one to the other.” §

None the less easily, however, when the evolutionary
afflatus is upon them, do the very same writers leap over
the breach whose flagrancy they are the foremost to an-
nounce, and talk as if mind grew out of body in a con-
tinuous way. Mr. Spencer, looking back on his review of
mental evolution, tells us how “in tracing up the increase

* Psychol. § 62. t+ Ibid. § 272.

¢ Fragments of Science, 5th ed., p. 420.

§ Belfast Address, ‘Nature,’ August 20, 1874, p. 318. I cannot help
remarking that the disparity between motions and feelings on which these
authors lay so much stress, is somewhat less absolute than at first sight
it seems. There are categories common to the two worlds. Not only tem-
poral succession (as Helmholtz admits, Physiol. Optik, p. 445), but such
attributes as intensity, volume, simplicity or complication, smooth or im-
peded change, rest or agitation, are habitually predicated of both physical
facts and mental facts. Where such analogies obtain, the things do have
something in common.

148 PSYCHOLOG Y.

we found ourselves passing without break from the phenomena
of bodily life to the phenomena of mental life.’ * And Mr.
Tyndall, in the same Belfast Address from which we just
quoted, delivers his other famous passage :

‘* Abandoning all disguise, the confession that I feel bound to make
before you is that I prolong the vision backward across the boundary of
the experimental evidence, and discern in that matter which we, in our
ignorance and notwithstanding our professed reverence for its Creator,

have hitherto covered with opprobrium the promise and potency of
every form and quality of life.” t

—mental life included, as a matter of course.

So strong a postulate is continuity! Now this book will
tend to show that mental postulates are on the whole to be
respected. The demand for continuity has, over large tracts
of science, proved itself to possess true prophetic power.
We ought therefore ourselves sincerely to try every possible
mode of conceiving the dawn of consciousness so that it
may not appear equivalent to the irruption into the universe
of a new nature, non-existent until then.

Merely to call the consciousness ‘nascent’ will not
serve our turn.t It is true that the word signifies not yet

* Psychology, § 131. + ‘Nature,’ as above, 317-8.

t‘ Nascent’ is Mr. Spencer's great word. In showing how at a certain
point consciousness must appear upon the evolving scene this author fairly
outdoes himself in vagueness.

‘In its higher forms, Instinct is probably accompanied bya rudimen-
tary consciousness. There cannot be co-ordination of many stimuli without
some ganglion through which they are all brought into relation. In the
process of bringing them into relation, this ganglion must be subject to
the influence of each—must undergo many changes. And the quick suc-
cession of changes in a ganglion, implying as it does perpetual experiences
of ditferences and likenesses, constitutes the raw material of consciousness.
The implication is that as fast as Instinct is developed, some kind of con-
sciousness becomes nascent.”’ (Psychology, § 195.)

The words ‘raw material’ and ‘implication’ which I have italicized
are the words which do the evolving. They are supposed to have ail the
rigor 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 the
body. If they go no further than the places at which they are received, they
areuseless. Or if only some.of them are brought into relation with one an-
other, they are useless. That an effectual adjustment may be made, they must
be all brought into relation with one another. _ But this implies some centre
of communication common to them all, through which they severally pass ;

THE MIND-STUFF THEORY. 149

quite born, and so seems to form a sort of bridge between
existence and nonentity. But that is a verbal quibble.
The fact is that discontinuity comes in if a new nature
comes in at all. The quantity of the latter is quite imma-
terial. The girl in ‘ Midshipman Easy’ could not excuse the
illegitimacy of her child by saying, ‘it was a little small
one. And Consciousness, however little, is an illegiti-
mate birth in any philosophy that starts without it, and yet
professes to explain all facts by continuous evolution.

If evolution is to work smoothly, consciousness in some shape
must have been present at the very origin of things. Accord-
ingly we find that the more clear-sighted evolutionary phi-
losophers are beginning to posit it there. Each atom of the
nebula, they suppose, must have had an aboriginal atom
of consciousness linked with it; and, just as the material
atoms have formed bodies and brains by massing them-
selves together, so the mental atoms, by an analogous
process of aggregation, have fused into those larger con-
sciousnesses which we know in ourselves and suppose to
exist in our fellow-animals. Some such doctrine of
atomistic hylozoism as this is an indispensable part of a
thorough-going philosophy of evolution. According to it
there must be an infinite number of degrees of conscious-

and as they cannot pass through it simultaneously, they must pass through
it in succession. So that as the external phenomena responded to become
greater in number and more complicated in kind, the variety and rapidity
of the changes to which this common centre of communication is subject
must increase—there must result an unbroken series of these changes—
there must arise a consciousness.

‘‘Hence the progress of the correspondence between the organism and its
environment necessitates a gradual reduction of the sensorial changes to a
succession ; and by so doing evolves a distinct consciousness—a consciousness
that becomes higher as the succession becomes more rapid and the corre-
spondence more complete.” (Jizd. § 179.)

It is true that in the Fortnightly Review (vol. x1v. p. 716) Mr. Spencer
denies that he means by this passage to tell us anything about the origin of
consciousness at all. It resembles, however, too many other places in his
Psychology (e.g. §§ 48, 110, 244) not to be taken asa serious attempt to ex-
plain how consciousness must at a certain point be ‘evolved.’ That,
when a critic calls his attention to the inanity of his words, Mr. Spencer
should say he never meant anything particular by them, is simply an
example of the scandalous vagueness with which this sort of ‘chromo-
philosophy ’ is carried on.

150 PSYCHOLOGY.

ness, following the degrees of complication and aggrega-
tion of the primordial mind-dust. To prove the separate
existence of these degrees of consciousness by indirect evi-
dence, since direct intuition of them is not to be had, be-
comes therefore the first duty of psychological evolutionism.

SOME ALLEGED PROOFS THAT MIND-DUST EXISTS.

Some of this duty we find already performed by a num-
ber of philosophers who, though not interested at all in
evolution, have nevertheless on independent grounds con-
vinced themselves of the existence of a vast amount of
sub-conscious mental life. The criticism of this general
opinion and its grounds will have to be postponed for a
while. At present let us merely deal with the arguments
assumed to prove aggregation of bits of mind-stuff into
distinctly sensible feelings. They are clear and admit of a
clear reply.

The German physiologist A. Fick, in 1862, was, so far
as I know, the first to use them. He made experiments on
the discrimination of the feelings of warmth and of touch,
when only a very small portion of the skin was excited
through a hole in a card, the surrounding parts being pro-
tected by the card. He found that under these circum-
stances mistakes were frequently made by the patient,*
and concluded that this must be because the number of

* His own words are: “‘ Mistakes are made in the sense that he admits
having been touched, when in reality it was radiant heat that affected his
skin. In our own before-mentioned experiments there was never any de-
ception on the entire palmar side of the hand or on the face. On the back
of 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 the
upper arm 3 deceptions out of 48 stimulations were noticed, and in the case
of another individual, 1 out of 31. In one case over the spine 3 deceptions
in a series of 11 excitations were observed; in another, 4 out of 19. On
the lumbar spine 6 deceptions came among 29 stimulations, and again 4
out of 7. There is certainly not yet enough material on which to rest a
calculation of probabilities, but any one can easily convince himself that
on the back there is no question of even a moderately accurate discrimina-
tion between warmth and a light pressure so far as but small portions of
skin come into play. It has beenas yet impossible to make corresponding
experiments with regard to sensibility to cold.” (Lehrb. d. Anat u.
Physiol. d. Sinnesorgane (1862), p. 29.)

THE MIND-STUFF THEORY. 151

sensations from the elementary nerve-tips affected was too
small to sum itself distinctly into either of the qualities of
feeling in question. He tried to show how a different
manner of the summation might give rise in one case to the
heat and in another to the touch.

‘*A feeling of temperature,” he says, ‘‘ arises when the intensities
of the units of feeling are evenly gradated, so that between two
elements a and 6 no other unit can spatially intervene whose intensity
is not also between that of aand b. A feeling of contact perhaps arises
when this condition is not fulfilled. Both kinds of feeling, however, are
composed of the same units.”

But it is obviously far clearer to interpret such a grada-
tion of intensities as a brain-fact than as a mind-fact. If
in the brain a tract were first excited in one of the ways
suggested by Prof. Fick, and then again in the other, it
might very well happen, for aught we can say to the con-
trary, that the psychic accompaniment in the one case would
be heat, and in the other pain. The pain and the heat would,
however, not be composed of psychic units, but would each
be the direct result of one total brain-process. So long as
this latter interpretation remains open, Fick cannot be held
to have proved psychic summation.

Later, both Spencer and Taine, independently of each
other, took up the same line of thought. Mr. Spencer’s
reasoning is worth quoting in extenso. He writes:

‘¢ Although the individual sensations and emotions, real or ideal, of
which consciousness is built up, appear to be severally simple, homo-
geneous, 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 re-
solving it into its proximate components, we can scarcely help suspect-
ing that other apparently-elementary feelings are also compound, and
may have proximate components like those which we can in this one
instance identify.

‘¢ Musical sound is the name we give to this seemingly simple feeling
which is clearly resolvable into simpler feelings. Well known experi-
ments prove that when equal blows or taps are made one after anotber
at a rate not exceeding some sixteen per second, the effect of each is
perceived as a separate noise; but when the rapidity with which the
blows follow one another exceeds this, the noises are no longer identified
in separate states of consciousness, and there arises in place of them a
continuous state of consciousness, called a tone. In further increasing

152 PSYCHOLOGY.

the rapidity of the blows, the tone undergoes the change of quality dis-
tinguished as rise in piteh ; and it continues to rise in pitch as the blows
continue to increase in rapidity, until it reaches an acuteness beyond
which it is no longer appreciable as a tone. So that out of units of feel-
ing of the same kind, many feelings distinguishable from one another
in quality result, according as the units are more or less integrated.

** This is not all. The inquiries of Professor Helmholtz have shown
that when, along with one series of these rapidly-recurring noises, there
is generated another series in which the noises are more rapid though
not so loud, the effect is a change in that quality known as its timbre.
As yarious musical instruments show us, tones which are alike in pitch
and strength are distinguishable by their harshness or sweetness, their
ringing or their liquid characters; and all their specific peculiarities are
proved to arise from the combination of one, two, three, or more, sup-
plementary series of recurrent noises with the chief series of recurrent
noises. So that while the unlikenesses of feeling known as differences .
of pitch in tones are due to differences of integration among the recur-
rent noises of one series, the unlikenesses of feeling known as differ-
ences of timbre, are due to the simultaneous integration with this series
of other series having other degrees of integration. And thus an
enormous number of qualitatively-contrasted kinds of consciousness
that seem severally elementary prove to be composed of one simple
kind of consciousness, combined and recombined with itself in multi-
tudinous ways.

‘‘Can we stop short here? If the different sensations known as
sounds are built out of a common unit, is it not to be rationally inferred
that so likewise are the different sensations known as tastes, and the
different sensations known as odors, and the different sensations known
as colors? Nay, shall we not regard it as probable that there is a unit
common to all these strongly-contrasted classes of sensations? If the
unlikenesses among the sensations of each class may be due to unlike-
nesses among the modes of aggregation of a unit of consciousness com-
mon to them all; so too may the much greater unlikenesses between
the sensations of each class and those of other classes. There may be a
single primordial element of consciousness, and the countless kinds of
consciousness may be produced by the compounding of this element
with itself and the recompounding of its compounds with one another
in 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 composi-
tion of the sensation of musical tone, is allied to certain other simple
mental impressions differently originated. The subjective effect pro-
duced by a crack or noise that has no appreciable duration is little
else than a nervous shock. Though we distinguish such a nervous
shock as belonging to what we call sounds, yet it does not differ very
much from nervous shocks of other kinds. An electric discharge sent

THE MIND-STUFF THEORY. 155

through the body causes a feeling akin to that which a sudden loud re-
port causes. <A strong unexpected impression made through the eyes,
as by a flash of lightning, similarly gives rise to a start or shock ; and
though the feeling so named seems, like the electric shock, to have the
body at large for its seat, and may therefore be regarded as the correla:
tive rather of the efferent than of the afferent disturbance, yet on re-
membering the mental change that results from the instantaneous
transit of an object across the field of vision, I think it may be perceived
that the feeling accompanying the efferent disturbance is itself reduced
very nearly to the same form. The state of consciousness so generated
is, in fact. comparable in quality to the initial state of consciousness
caused by a blow (distinguishing it from the pain or other feeling that
commences the instant after); which state of consciousness caused by a
blow may be taken as the primitive and typical form of the nervous
shock. The fact that sudden brief disturbances thus set up by differ-
ent stimuli through different sets of nerves cause feelings scarcely
distinguishable in quality will not appear strange when we recollect that
distinguishableness of feeling implies appreciable duration; and that
when the duration is greatly abridged, nothing more is known than that
some mental change has occurred and ceased. To have a sensation of
redness, to know a tone as acute or grave, to be conscious of a taste as
sweet, implies in each case a considerable continuity of state. If the
state does not last long enough to admit of its being contemplated, it
cannot be classed as of this or that kind; and becomes a momentary
modification very similar to momentary modifications otherwise caused.

‘*It is possible, then—may we not even say probable ?—that some-
thing of the same order as that which we calla nervous shock is the
ultimate unit of consciousness ; and that all the unlikenesses among
our feelings result from unlike modes of integration of this ultimate
unit. I say of the same order, because there are discernible differences
among nervous shocks that are differently caused ; and the primitive
nervous shock probably differs somewhat from each of them. And I
say of the same order, for the further reason that while we may
ascribe to them a general likeness in nature, we must suppose a great
unlikeness in degree. The nervous shocks recognized as such are vio-
lent—must be violent before they can be perceived amid the proces-
sion of multitudinous vivid feelings suddenly interrupted by them.
But the rapidly-recurring nervous shocks of which the different forms
of feeling consist, we must assume to be of comparatively moderate, or
even of very slight intensity. Were our various sensations and emotions
composed of rapidly-recurring shocks as strong as those ordinarily
called shocks, they would be unbearable ; indeed life would cease at
once. We must think of them rather as successive faint pulses of sub-
jective change, each having the same quality as the strong pulse of
subjective change distinguished as a nervous shock.” *

* Principles of Psychology, § 60.

154 PSYCHOLOG Y.
INSUFFICIENCY OF THESE PROOFS.

Convincing as this argument of Mr. Spencer’s may
appear on a first reading, it is singular how weak it really
is.* We do, it is true, when we study the connection be-
tween a musical note and its outward cause, find the note
simple and continuous while the cause is multiple and dis-
crete. Somewhere, then, there zs a transformation, reduc-
tion, or fusion. The question is, Where ?—in the nerve-

x x x >< x x x x x

ee

One second of time.
Fie. 25.

world or in the mind-world? Really we have no experi-
mental proof by which to decide ; and if decide we must,

* Oddly enough, Mr. Spencer seems quite unaware of the general func-
tion of the theory of elementary units of mind-stuff in the evolutionary
philosophy. We have seen it to be absolutely indispensable, if that phi-
losophy is to work, to postulate consciousness in the nebula,—the simplest
way being, of course, to suppose every atom animated. Mr. Spencer, how-
ever, will have it (e.g. First Principles, § 71) that consciousness is only the
occasional result of the ‘ transformation ’ of a certain amount of ‘ physical
force’ to which it is ‘equivalent.’ Presumably a brain must already be there
before any such ‘transformation’ can take place; and so the argument
quoted in the text stands as a mere local detail, without general bearings.

THE MIND-STUFF THEORY. 155

analogy and a priori probability can alone guide us. Mr.
Spencer assumes that the fusion must come to pass in the
mental world, and that the physical processes get through
air and ear, auditory nerve and medulla, lower brain and
hemispheres, without their number being reduced. Figure
25, on the previous page, will make the point clear.

Let the line a—d represent the threshold of conscious-
ness: then everything drawn below that line will symbolize
a physical process, everything above it will mean a fact
of mind. Let the crosses stand for the physical blows, the
circles for the events in successively higher orders of nerve-
cells, and the horizontal marks for the factsS of feeling.
Spencer’s argument implies that each order of cells trans-
mits just as many impulses as it receives to the cells above
it; so that if the blows come at the rate of 20,000 in a second
the cortical cells discharge at the same rate, and one unit
of feeling corresponds to each one of the 20,000 discharges.
Then, and only then, does ‘integration’ occur, by the
20,000 units of feeling ‘compounding with themselves’ into
the ‘continuous state of consciousness’ represented by the
short line at the top of the figure.

Now such an interpretation as this flies in the face of
physical analogy, no less than of logical intelligibility.
Consider physical analogy first.

A pendulum may be deflected bya single blow, and swing
back. Willit swing back the more often the more we multi-
ply the blows? No; for if they rain upon the pendulum too
fast, it will not swing at all but remain deflected in a sensi-
bly stationary state. In other words, increasing the cause
numerically need not equally increase numerically the
effect. Blow through a tube: you get a certain musical
note ; and increasing the blowing increases for a certain time
the loudness of the note. Will this be true indefinitely ?
No; for when a certain force is reached, the note, instead of
growing louder, suddenly disappears and is replaced by its
higher octave. Turn on the gas slightly and light it: you
get a tiny flame. Turn on more gas, and the breadth of the
flame increases. Will this relation increase indefinitely ?
No, again; for at a certain moment up shoots the flame
into a ragged streamer and begins to hiss. Send slowly

156 PSYCHOLOGY.

through the nerve of a frog’s gastrocnemius muscle a suc.
cession of galvanic shocks: you get a succession of twitches.
Increasing the number of shocks does not increase the
twitching; on the contrary, it stops it, and we have the
muscle in the apparently stationary state of contraction
called tetanus. This last fact is the true analogue of what
must happen between the nerve-cell and the sensory fibre.
It is certain that cells are more inert than fibres, and that
rapid vibrations in the latter can only arouse relatively
simple processes or states in the former. The higher
cells may have even a slower rate of explosion than the
lower, and so the twenty thousand supposed blows of the
outer air may be ‘integrated’ in the cortex into a very
small number of cell-discharges in a second. This other
diagram will serve to contrast this supposition with
Spencer’s. In Fig. 26 all ‘integration’ occurs below the
threshold of consciousness. The frequency of cell-events
becomes more and more reduced as we approach the cells
to which feeling is most directly attached, until at last we
come to a condition of things symbolized by the larger
ellipse, which may be taken to stand for some rather
massive and slow process of tension and discharge in the
cortical centres, to which, as a whole, the feeling of musical
tone symbolized by the line at the top of the diagram
simply and totally corresponds. It is as if a long file
of men were to start one after

the other to reach a distant point.

F The road at first is good and
they keep their original distance

apart. Presently it is intersected

by bogs each worse than the last,

so that the front men get so re-

tarded that the hinder ones catch

up with them before the journey

Ga Gad 5) tine: is done, and all arrive together

Fi. 26. at the goal.*

*The compounding of colors may be dealt with in an identical way.
Helmholtz has shown that if green light and red light fall simultaneously
on the retina, we see the color yellow. The mind-stuff theory would in-
terpret this as acase where the feeling green and the feeling red ‘com-

THE MIND-STUFF THEORY. 157

On this supposition there are no unperceived units of
mind-stuff preceding and composing the full consciousness.
The latter is itself an immediate psychic fact and bears
an immediate relation to the neural state which is its un-
conditional accompaniment. Did each neural shock give
rise to its own psychic shock, and the psychic shocks then
combine, it would be impossible to understand why sever-
ing one part of the central nervous system from another
should break up the integrity of the consciousness. The
cut has nothing to do with the psychic world. The atoms
of mind-stuff ought to float off from the nerve-matter on
either side of it, and come together over it and fuse, just
as well as if it had not been made. We know, however,
that they do not; that severance of the paths of conduction
between a man’s left auditory centre or optical centre and
the rest of his cortex will sever all communication between
the words which he hears or sees written and the rest of
his ideas.

Moreover, if feelings can mix into a tertium quid, why
do we not take a feeling of greenness and a feeling of red-
ness, and make a feeling of yellowness out of them? Why
has optics neglected the open road to truth, and wasted
centuries in disputing about theories of color-composition
which two minutes of introspection would have settled
forever?* We cannot mix feelings as such, though we may
mix the objects we feel, and from their mixture get new
feelings. We cannot even (as we shall later see) have two
feelings in our mind at once. At most we can compare
together objects previously presented to us in distinct feel-
ings; but then we find each object stubbornly maintaining

bine’ into the tertéwm quid of feeling, yellow. What really occurs is no
doubt that a third kind of nerve-process is set up when the combined lights
impinge on the retina,—not simply the process of red plus the process of
green, but something quite different from both or either. Of course, then,
there are no feelings, either of red or of green, present to the mind at all ;
but the feeling of yellow which 7s there, answers as directly to the nerve-
process which momentarily then exists, as the feelings of green and red
would answer to their respective nerve-processes did the latter happen to be
taking place.
* Cf. Mill’s Logic, book v1. chap. Iv. § 3.

158 PSYCHOLOG Y.

its separate identity before consciousness, whatever the
verdict of the comparison may be.*

SELF-COMPOUNDING OF MENTAL FACTS IS INADMISSIBLE.

But there is a still more fatal objection to the theory of
mental units ‘compounding with themselves’ or ‘integrat-
ing.’ It is logically unintelligible ; it leaves out the es-
sential feature of all the ‘combinations’ we actually know.

All the ‘ combinations’ which we actually know are EFFECTS,
wrought by the units said to be ‘combined,’ UPON SOME ENTITY
OTHER THAN THEMSELVES. Without this feature of a medium
or vehicle, the notion of combination has no sense.

‘* A multitude of contractile units, by joint action, and by being all
connected, for instance, with a single tendon, will pull at the same, and
will bring about a dynamical effect which is undoubtedly the resultant
of their combined individual energies. . . . On the whole, tendons are
to muscular fibres, and bones are to tendons, combining recipients of
mechanical energies. A medium of composition is indispensable to the
summation of energies. To realize the complete dependence of mechan-
ical resultants on a combining substratum, one may fancy for a moment
all the individually contracting muscular elements severed from their
attachments. They might then still be capable of contracting with the
same energy as before, yet no co-operative result would be accomplished.
The medium of dynamical combination would be wanting. The mul-
tiple energies, singly exerted on no common recipient, would lose
themselves on entirely isolated and disconnected efforts.” +

In other words, no possible number of entities (call them
as you like, whether forces, material particles, or mental
elements) can sum themselves together. Each remains, in
the sum, what it always was; and the sum itself exists only
for a bystander who happens to overlook the units and to

* I find in my students an almost invincible tendency to think that we
can immediately perceive that feelings do combine. ‘‘ What!” they say,
‘is not the taste of lemonade composed of that of lemon plus that of
sugar?” This is taking the combining of objects for that of feelings.
The physical lemonade contains both the lemon and the sugar, but its
taste does not contain their tastes, for if there are any two things which
are certainly not present in the taste of lemonade, those are the lemon-sour
ou the one hand and the sugar-sweet on the other. These tastes are
absent utterly. The entirely new taste which is present resembles, it is true,
both those tastes; but in Chapter XIII we shali see that resemblance cap
not always ve held to involve partial identity.
+ E Montgomery, in ‘ Mind,’ v. 18-19. See also pp. 24-5.

THE MIND-STUFF THEORY. 159

apprehend the sum as such ; or else it exists in the shape
of some other effect on an entity external to the sum itself.
Let it not be objected that H, and O combine of themselves
into ‘water,’ and thenceforward exhibit new properties.
They do not. The ‘water’ is just the old atoms in the
new position, H-O-H; the ‘new properties’ are just their
combined effects, when in this position, upon external media,
such as our sense-organs and the various reagents on which
water may exert its properties and be known.

‘* Ageregations are organized wholes only when they behave as such
in the presence of other things. A statue is an aggregation of par-
ticles of marble; but as such it has no unity. For the spectator it is
one; in itself it is an aggregate; just as, to the consciousness of an ant
crawling over it, it may again appear a mere aggregate. No summing
up of parts can make an unity of a mass of discrete constituents, unless
this unity exist for some other subject, not for the mass itself.” *

Just so, in the parallelogram of forces, the ‘forces’
themselves do not combine into the diagonal resultant; a
body is needed on which they may impinge, to exhibit their
resultant effect. No more do musical sounds combine per
se into concords or discords. Concord and discord are
names for their combined effects on that external medium,
the ear.

* J. Royce, ‘ Mind,’ v1. p. 376. Lotze has set forth the truth of this law
more clearly and copiously than any other writer. Unfortunately he is too
lengthy to quote. See his Microcosmus, bk. m. ch. 1. § 5; Metaphysik,
§§ 242, 260; Outlines of Metaphysics, part 11. chap. 1. §§ 3,4, 5. Compare
also Reid’s Intellectual Powers, essay v, chap. 11 ad fin.,; Bowne’s Meta-
physics, 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,’ un. 57 (re:
printed in his ‘Lectures and Essays,’ m1. 71); G. T. Fechner, Psycho-
physik, Bd. 1. cap. xiv; H. Taine: on Intelligence, bk. 111; E. Haeckel:
‘Zellseelen u. Seelenzellen ’ in Gesammelte pop. Vortriige, Bd. 1. p. 143; W.
$. Duncan: Conscious Matter, passim, H. Zollner: Natur d. Cometen, pp.
820 ff.; Alfred Barratt: ‘ Physical Ethic ’ and ‘ Physical Metempiric,’ pas-
sum; J. Soury: ‘ Hylozoismus,’ in ‘ Kosmos,’ V. Jahrg., Heft x. p. 241; A.
Main: ‘ Mind,’ 1. 292, 481, 566; 11. 129, 402; Jd. Revue Philos., 1. 86, 88,
419; mr. 51, 502; 1v. 402; F. W. Frankland: ‘ Mind.’ vr. 116; Whittaker:
‘Mind,’ vr. 498 (historical); Morton Prince: The Nature of Mind and
Human Automatism (1885); A. Riehl: Der philosophische Kriticismus, Bd.
ui. Theil 2, 2ter Abschnitt, 2tes Cap. (1887). The clearest of all these
statements is, as far as it goes, that of Prince.

160 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

Where the elemental units are supposed to be feeliuys,
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 feel-
ing it always was, shut in its own skin, windowless, igno-
rant of what the other feelings are and mean. There would
be a hundred-and-first feeling there, if, when a group or
series of such feelings were set up, a consciousness belong-
ing to the group as such shouldemerge. And this 101st feel-
ing would be a totally new fact; the 100 original feelings
might, by a curious physical law, be a signal for its creation,
when they came together; but they would have no sub-
stantial identity with it, nor it with them, and one could
never deduce the one from the others, or (in any intelligible
sense) say that they evolved it.

Take a sentence of a dozen words, and take twelve men
and tell to each one word. Then stand the men in a row or
jam them in a bunch, and let each think of his word as
intently as he will; nowhere will there be a consciousness
of the whole sentence.* We talk of the ‘spirit of the age,’
and the ‘sentiment of the people,’ and in various ways we
hypostatize ‘public opinion.’ But we know this to be sym-
bolic speech, and never dream that the spirit, opinion,
sentiment, etc., constitute a consciousness other than, and
additional to, that of the several individuals whom the
words ‘age,’ ‘people,’ or ‘public’ denote. The private
minds do not agglomerate into a higher compound mind.
This has always been the invincible contention of the
spiritualists against the associationists in Psychology,—a
contention which we shall take up at greater length in
Chapter X. The associationists say the mind is constituted

* ««Someoue might say that although it is true that neither a blind
man nor a deaf man by himself can compare sounds with colors, yet
since one hears and the other sees they might do so both together. . . .
But whether they are apart or close together makes no difference; not even
if they permanently keep house together, no, not if they were Siamese
twins. or more than Siamese twins, and were inseparably grown together,
would it make the assumption any more possible. Only when sound and
color are represented in the same reality is it thinkable that they should
be compared.’”’ (Brentano: Psychologie, p. 209.)

THE MIND-STUFF THEORY. 161

by a multiplicity of distinct ‘ideas’ associated into a unity.
There is, they say, an idea of a, and also an idea of 0.
Therefore, they say, there is an idea of a+ 8, or of a and 6
together. Which is like saying that the mathematical
square of a plus that of 6 is equal to the square of a-L,
a palpable untruth. Idea of a-+ idea of 6 is not identical
with idea of (a+ 6). It is one, they are two; in it, what
knows a also knows 6; in them, what knows a is expressly
posited as not knowing |; ete. In short, the two separate
ideas can never by any logic be made to figure as one and
the same thing as the ‘associated’ idea.

This is what the spiritualists keep saying; and since we
do, as a matter of fact, have the ‘compounded’ idea, and do
know a and 6 together, they adopt a farther hypothesis to
explain that fact. The separate ideas exist, they say, but
affect a third entity, the soul. This has the ‘compounded’
idea, if you please so to callit; and the compounded idea
is an altogether new psychic fact to which the separate ideas
stand in the relation, not of constituents, but of occasions
of production.

This argument of the spiritualists against the association-
ists has never been answered by the latter. It holds good
against any talk about self-compounding amongst feelings,
against any ‘blending,’ or ‘complication,’ or ‘mental
chemistry, or ‘psychic synthesis,’ which supposes a re-
sultant consciousness to float off from the constituents per se,
in the absence of a supernumerary principle of conscious-
ness which they may affect. The mind-stuff theory, in
short, is unintelligible. Atoms of feeling cannot compose
higher feelings, any more than atoms of matter can compose
physical things! The ‘things,’ for a clear-headed ato-
mistic evolutionist, are not. Nothing is but the everlasting
atoms. When grouped in a certain way, we name them
this ‘thing’ or that; but the thing we name has no exist-
ence out of our mind. So of the states of mind which are
supposed to be compound because they know many differ-
ent things together. Since indubitably such states do exist,
they must exist as single new facts, effects, possibly, as
the spiritualists say, on the Soul (we will not decide that

162 PSYCHOLOGY.

point here), but at any rate independent and integral, and
not compounded of psychic atoms.*

CAN STATES OF MIND BE UNCONSCIOUS?

The passion for unity and smoothness is in some minds
so insatiate that, in spite of the logical clearness of these
reasonings and conclusions, many will fail to be influenced
by them. They establish a sort of disjointedness in things
which in certain quarters will appear intolerable. They

* The reader must observe that we are reasoning altogether about the
logic of the mind-stuff theory, about whether it can explain the constitution
of higher mental states by viewing them as ¢dentical with lower ones
summed together. We say the two sorts of fact are not identical: a higher
state zs not a lot of lower states; it is itself. When, however, a lot of
lower states have come together, or when certain brain-conditions occur
together which, 7 they occurred separately, would produce a lot of lower
states, we have not for a moment pretended that a higher state may not
emerge. In fact it does emerge under those conditions ; and our Chapter
1X will be mainly devoted to the proof of this fact. But such emergence
is that of a new psychic entity, and is toto cwlo 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 of
a certain theory about a fact for doubt of the fact itself. And yet the
confusion is made in high quarters enough to justify our remarks. Mr. J.
Ward, in his article Psychology in the Encyclopedia Britannica, speak-
ing of the hypothesis that ‘‘a series of feelings can be aware of itself as
a series,’’ says (p. 89): ‘‘ Paradox is too mild a word for it, even contradiction
will hardly suffice.” Whereupon, Professor Bain takes him thus to task:
‘As to ‘aseries of states being aware of itself, I confessI see no insur-
mountable difficulty. It may bea fact, or not a fact; it may be a very
clumsy expression for what it is applied to; but it is neither paradox nor
contradiction. A series merely contradicts an individual, or it may be
two or more individuals as coexisting ; but that is too general to exclude
the possibility of self-knowledge. It certainly does not bring the property
of self-knowledge into the foreground, which, however, is not the same
as denying it. An algebraic series might know itself, without any con-
tradiction : the only thing against it is the want of evidence of the fact.’
(‘ Mind,’ xr. 459). Prof. Bain thinks, then, that all the bother is about the
difticulty of seeing how a series of feelings can have the knowledge of
itself added toit!!! Asif anybody ever was troubled about that. That,
notoriously enough, is a fact: our consciousness is a series of feelings to
which every now and then is added a retrospective consciousness that they
have come and gone. What Mr. Ward and [are troubled about is merely
the silliness of the mind-stuifists and associationists continuing to say that
the ‘series of states’ 7s the ‘awareness of itself ;’ that if the states be posited
severally, their collective consciousness is eo ipso given ; and that we need
no farther explanation, or ‘evidence of the fact.’

THE MIND-STUFF THHORY. 163

sweep away all chance of ‘passing without break’ either
from the material to the mental, or from the lower to the
higher mental ; and they thrust us back into a pluralism of
consciousnesses—each arising discontinuously in the midst
of two disconnected worlds, material and mental—which is
even worse than the old notion of the separate creation of
each particular soul. But the malcontents will hardly try
to refute our reasonings by direct attack. It is more prob-
able that, turning their back upon them altogether, they
will devote themselves to sapping and mining the region
roundabout until it is a bog of logical liquefaction, into the
midst of which all definite conclusions of any sort may be
trusted ere long to sink and disappear.

Our reasonings have assumed that the ‘integration’ of
a thousand psychic units must be either just the units over
again, simply rebaptized, or else something real, but then
other than and additional to those units; that if a certain
existing fact is that of a thousand feelings, it cannot at the
same time be that of onE feeling; for the essence of feeling
is to be felt, and as a psychic existent feels, so it must be.
If the one feeling feels like no one of the thousand, in what
sense can it be said to be the thousand? These assumptions
are what the monists will seek to undermine. The Hegelizers
amongst them will take high ground at once, and say
that the glory and beauty of the psychic life is that init all
contradictions find their reconciliation ; and that it 1s just
because the facts we are considering are facts of the self
that they are both one and many at the same time. With
this intellectual temper I confess that I cannot contend.
As in striking at some unresisting gossamer with a club,
one bui cverreaches one’s self, and the thing one aims at
gets no harm. So I leave this school to its devices.

The other monists are of less deliquescent frame, and
try to break down distinctness among mental states by
making a distinction. This sounds paradoxical, but it is
only ingenious. The distinction is that between the wncon-
scious and the conscious being of the mental state. It is the
sovereign means for believing what one likes in psychology,
and of turning what might become a science into a tum-
bling-ground for whimsies. It has numerous champions,

164 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

and elaborate reasons to give for itself. We must there-
fore accord it due consideration. In discussing the question :

DO UNCONSCIOUS MENTAL STATES EXIST?

it will be best to give the list of so-called proofs as briefly
as possible, and to follow each by its objection, as in scho-
lastic books.*

First Proof. The minimum visibile, the minimum audibile,
are objects composed of parts. How can the whole affect
the sense unless each part does? And yet each part does
so without being separately sensible. Leibnitz calls the
total consciousness an ‘aperception,’ the supposed insensi-~
ble consciousness by the name of ‘petites perceptions.’

‘*To judge of the latter,” he says, ‘‘ I am accustomed to use the ex-
ample of the roaring of the sea with which one is assailed when near the
shore. To hear this noise as one does, one must hear the parts which
compose its totality, that is, the noise of each wave, . . . although this
noise would not be noticed if its wave were alone. One must be affected
a little by the movement cf one wave, one must have some perception
of each several noise, however small it be. Otherwise one would not
hear that of 100,000 waves, for of 100,000 zeros one can never make a.
quantity.” +

Reply. This is an excellent example of the so-called
‘fallacy of division,’ or predicating what is true only of a
collection, of each member of the collection distributively.
It no more follows that if a thousand things together cause
sensation, one thing alone must cause it, than it follows
that if one pound weight moves a balance, then one ounce
weight must move it too, in less degree. One ounce
weight does not move it at all; its movement begins with

* The writers about ‘unconscious cerebration ’ seem sometimes to mean
that and sometimes unconscious thought. The arguments which follow
are culled from various quarters. The reader will find them most sys-
tematically urged by E. von Hartmann: Philosophy of the Uncorscious, vol.
1, and by E. Colsenet: La vie Inconsciente de ]’Esprit (1880). Consult also
T. Laycock: Mind and Brain, vol. 1. chap. v (1860); W. B. Carpenter:
Mental Physiology, chap. xur; F. P. Cobbe: Darwinism in Morals and
other Essays, essay x1, Unconscious Cerebration (1872): F. Bowen: Mod-
ern Philosophy, 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. m. chap. x, and also Prob.
mr. chap. 1; D. G. Thompson: A System of Psychology, chap. XxXxXIII*
J. M. Baldwin, Hand-book of Psychology, chap. Iv.

+ Nouveaux Essais, Avant-propos.

THE MIND-STUFF THEORY. 165

the pound. At most we can say that each ounce affects
it in some way which helps the advent of that move-
ment. And so each infra-sensible stimulus to a nerve
no doubt affects the nerve and helps the birth of sensa-
tion when the other stimuli come. But this affection is
a nerve-affection, and there is not the slightest ground for
supposing it to be a ‘perception’ unconscious of itself.
“A certain quantity of the cause may be a necessary con-
dition to the production of any of the effect,’* when the
latter is a mental state.

Second Proof. In all acquired dexterities and habits,
secondarily automatic performances as they are called, we
do what originally required a chain of deliberately con-
scious perceptions and volitions. As the actions still keep
their intelligent character, intelligence must still preside
over their execution. But since our consciousness seems
all the while elsewhere engaged, such intelligence must
consist of unconscious perceptions, inferences, and volitions.

Reply. There is more than one alternative explanation
in accordance with larger bodies of fact. One is that the
perceptions and volitions in habitual actions may be per-
formed consciously, only so quickly and inattentively that
no memory of them remains. Another is that the conscious-
ness of these actions exists, but is split-off from the rest of
the consciousness of the hemispheres. We shall find in
Chapter X numerous proofs of the reality of this split-oft
condition of portions of consciousness. Since in man the
hemispheres indubitably co-operate in these secondarily
automatic acts, it will not do to say either that they occur
without consciousness or that their consciousness is that of
the lower centres, which we know nothing about. But
either lack of memory or split-off cortical consciousness
will certainly account for all of the facts.+

Third Proof. Thinking of A, we presently find our-
selves thinking of C. Now B is the natural logical link
between A and C, but we have no consciousness of having
thought of B. It must have been in our mind ‘ wncon-

* J.S. Mill, Exam. of Hamilton, chap. xv.
+ Cf. Dugald Stewart, Elements, chap. 11.

166 PSYCHOLOGY.

sciously,’ and in that state affected the sequence of our
ideas.

Reply. Here again we have a choice between more
plausible explanations. Hither B was consciously there,
but the next instant forgotten, or its brain-tract alone was
adequate to do the whole work of coupling A with C, with-
out the idea B being aroused at all, whether consciously
or ‘unconsciously.’

Fourth Proof. Problems unsolved when we go to bed
are found solved in the morning when we wake. Somnam-
bulists do rational things. We awaken punctually at an
hour predetermined overnight, ete. Unconscious thinking,
volition, time-registration, etc., must have presided over
these acts.

Reply. Consciousness forgotten, as in the hypnotic
trance.

Fifth Proof. Some patients will often, in an attack
of epileptiform unconsciousness, go through complicated
processes, such as eating a dinner in a restaurant and pay-
ing for 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, of
which the patient is wholly unaware on coming to.

Reply. Rapid and complete oblivescence is certainly
the explanation here. The analogue again is hypnotism.
Tell the subject of an hypnotic trance, during his trance,
that he will remember, and he may remember everything
perfectly when he awakes, though without your telling him
no memory would have remained. The extremely rapid
oblivescence of common dreams is a familiar fact.

Sixth Proof. Ina musical concord the vibrations of the
several notes are in relatively simple ratios. The mind
must unconsciously count the vibrations, and be pleased by
the simplicity which it finds.

Reply. The brain-process produced by the simple ratios
may be as directly agreeable as the conscious process of
comparing them would be. No counting, either conscious
or ‘unconscious,’ is required.

Seventh Proof. Every hour we make theoretic judgments
and emotional reactions, and exhibit practical tendencies,

THE MIND-STUFF THEORY. 167

for which we can give no explicit logical justification, but
which are good inferences from certain premises. We
know more than we can say. Our conclusions run ahead
of our power to analyze their grounds. A child, ignorant
of the axiom that two things equal to the same are equal to
each other, applies it nevertheless in his concrete judgments
unerringly. A boor will use the dictum de omni et nullo who
is unable to understand it in abstract terms.

‘‘We seldom consciously think how our house is painted, what the
shade of it is, what the pattern of our furniture is, or whether the door
opens to the right or left, or out or in. But how quickly should we
notice a change in any of these things! Think of the door you have
most often opened, and tell, if you can, whether it opens to the right or
left, out or in. Yet when you open the door you never put the hand
on the wrong side to find the latch, nor try to push it when it opens
with a pull. . . . What is the precise characteristic in your friend’s step
that enables you to recognize it when he is coming? Did you ever con-
sciously think the idea, ‘if I run into a solid piece of matter I shali get
hurt, or be hindered in my progress’? and do you avoid running into
obstacles because you ever distinctly conceived, or consciously acquired
and thought, that idea?” *

Most of our knowledge is at all times potential. We act
in accordance with the whole drift of what we have learned,
but few items rise into consciousness at the time. Many
of them, however, we may recall at will. All this co-
operation of unrealized principles and facts, of potential
knowledge, with our actual thought is quite inexplicable
unless we suppose the perpetual existence of an immense
mass of ideas in an unconscious state, all of them exerting a
steady pressure and influence upon our conscious thinking,
and many of them in such continuity with it as ever and
anon to become conscious themselves.

Reply. No such mass of ideas is supposable. But there
are all kinds of short-cuts in the brain; and processes not
aroused strongly enough to give any ‘idea’ distinct enough
to be a premise, may, nevertheless, help to determine just
that resultant process of whose psychic accompaniment the
said idea would be a premise, if the idea existed at all. A
certain overtone may be a feature of my friend’s voice. and

* J. KE. Maude: ‘The Unconscious in Education,’ in ‘Education’ vol.
L p. 401 (1882).

168 PSYCHOLOG Y.

may conspire with the other tones thereof to arouse in my
brain the process which suggests to my consciousness his
name. And yet I may be ignorant of the overtone per se,
and unable, even when he speaks, to tell whether it be there
or no. It leads me to the idea of the name; but it pro-
duces in me no such cerebral process as that to which the
idea of the overtone would correspond. And similarly of our
learning. Each subject we learn leaves behind it a modifi-
cation of the brain, which makes itimpossible for the latter
to react upon things just as it did before; and the result of
the difference may be a tendency to act, though with no idea,
much as we should 7f we were consciously thinking about
the subject. The becoming conscious of the latter at will
is equally readily explained as a result of the brain-modifi-
cation. This, as Wundt phrases it, is a ‘ predisposition’ to
bring forth the conscious idea of the original subject, a pre-
disposition which other stimuli and brain-processes may
convert into an actual result. But such a predisposition is
no ‘unconscious idea;’ it is only a particular collocation of
the molecules in certain tracts of the brain.

Eighth Proof. Instincts, as pursuits of ends by appro-
priate means, are manifestations of intelligence ; but as the
ends are not foreseen, the intelligence must be unconscious.

Reply. Chapter XXIV will show that all the phenomena
of instinct are explicable as actions of the nervous system,
mechanically discharged by stimuli to the senses.

Ninth Proof. In sense-perception we have results in
abundance, which can only be explained as conclusions
drawn by a process of unconscious inference from data
given to sense. A small human image on the retina is
referred, not to a pygmy, but to a distant man of normal
size. A certain gray patch is inferred to be a white object
seen in a dim light. Often the inference leads us astray:
e.g., pale gray against pale green looks red, because we
take a wrong premise to argue from. We think a green
film is spread over everything; and knowing that under
such a film a red thing would look gray, we wrongly infer
from the gray appearance that a red thing must be there.
Our study of space-perception in Chapter XVIII will give
abundant additional examples both of the truthful and illus

THE MIND-STUFF THEORY. 169

sory percepts which have been explained to result from
unconscious logic operations.

Reply. That chapter will also in many cases refute
this explanation. Color- and light-contrast are certainly
purely sensational affairs, in which inference plays no part.
This has been satisfactorily proved by Hering,* and shall
be treated of again in Chapter XVII. Our rapid judg-
ments of size, shape, distance, and the like, are best ex-
plained as processes vi simple cerebral association. Cer-
tain sense-impressions directly stimulate brain-tracts, of
whose activity ready-made conscious percepts are the
immediate psychic counterparts. They do this by a mech-
anism either connate or acquired by habit. It is to be
remarked that Wundt and Helmholtz, who in their earlier
writings did more than any one to give vogue to the notion
that unconscious inference is a vital factor in sense-percep-
tion, have seen fit on later occasions to modify their views
and to admit that results like those of reasoning may accrue
without any actual reasoning process unconsciously taking
place.t Maybe the excessive and riotous applications made
by Hartmann of their principle have led them to this
change. It would be natural to feel towards him as the
sailor in the story felt towards the horse who got his foot
into the stirrup,— If you’re going to get on, I must get off.”

Hartmann fairly boxes the compass of the universe with
the principle of unconscious thought. For him there is no
namable thing that does not exemplify it. But his logic
is so lax and his failure to consider the most obvious alter-
natives so complete that it would, on the whole, be a
waste of time to look at hisarguments in detail. The same
is true of Schopenhauer, in whom the mythology reaches
its climax. The visual perception, for example, of an
object in space results, according to him, from the intellect
performing the following operations, all unconscious. First,
it apprehends the inverted retinal image and turns it right
side up, constructing flat space as a preliminary operation ;

* Zur Lehre vom Lichtsinne (187s).

+ Cf. Wundt: Ueber den Einfluss der Philosophie, ete.— Antrittsrede
11876), pp. 10-11;—Helmholtz: Die Thatsachen in der Wahrnehmung,
1879), p. 27.

170 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

then it computes from the angle of convergence of the eye-
balls that the two retinal images must be the projection of
but a single object; thirdly, it constructs the third dimen-
sion and sees this object solid; fourthly, it assigns its dis-
tance; and fifthly, in each and all of these operations it gets
the objective character of what it ‘constructs’ by uncon-
sciously inferring it as the only possible cause of some sen-
sation which it unconsciously feels.* Comment on this
seems hardly called for. It is, as I said, pure mythology.

None of these facts, then, appealed to so confidently in
proof of the existence of ideas in an unconscious state,
prove anything of the sort. They prove either that con-
scious ideas were present which the next instant were
forgotten; or they prove that certain results, similar to
results of reasoning, may be wrought out by rapid brain-
processes to which no ideation seems attached. But there
is one more argument to be alleged, less obviously insuffi-
cient than those which we have reviewed, and demanding
a new sort of reply.

Tenth Proof. There is a great class of experiences in
our mental life which may be described as discoveries that
a subjective condition which we have been having is really
something different from what we had supposed. We sud-
denly find ourselves bored by a thing which we thought we
were enjoying well enough; or in love with a person whom
we imagined we only liked. Or else we deliberately ana-
lyze our motives, and find that at bottom they contain
jealousies and cupidities which we little suspected to be
there. Oar feelings towards people are perfect wells of
motivation, unconscious of itself, which introspection brings
to light. And our sensations likewise: we constantly dis-
cover new elements in sensations which we have been in
the habit of receiving all our days, elements, too, which
have been there from the first, since otherwise we should
have been unable to distinguish the sensations containing
them from others nearly allied. The elements must exist,
for we use them to discriminate by ; but they must exist in

=

* Cf. Satz vom Grunde, pp. 59-65. Compare also F. Zéllner’s Natur
der Kometen, pp. 342 ff., and 425

THE MIND-STUFF THEORY. 1 gst

an unconscious state, since we so completely fail to single
them out.* The books of the analytic school of psychol-
ogy abound in examples of the kind. Who knows the
countless associations that mingle with his each and every
thought? Who can pick apart all the nameless feelings
that stream in at every moment from his various internal
organs, muscles, heart, glands, lungs, etc., and compose in
their totality his sense of bodily life? Who is aware of the
part played by feelings of innervation and suggestions of
possible muscular exertion in all his judgments of distance,
shape, and size? Consider, too, the difference between a
sensation which we simply have and one which we attend to.
Attention gives results that seem like fresh creations; and
yet the feelings and elements of feeling which it reveals
must have been already there—in an unconscious state.
We all know practically the difference between the so-called
sonant and the so-called surd consonants, between D, B, Z,
G, V, and T, P, S, K, F, respectively. But comparatively few
persons know the difference theoretically, until their atten-
tion has been called to what ?t is, when they perceive it
readily enough. The sonants are nothing but the surds
plus a certain element, which is alike in all, superadded.
That elemeat is the laryngeal sound with which they are
uttered, svvds having no such accompaniment. When we
hear the sonant letter, both its component elements must
really be in our mind; but we remain unconscious of what
they relly are, and mistake the letter for a simple quality
of sound until an effort of attention teaches us its two com-
ponents. There exist a host of sensations which most men
pass through life and never attend to, and consequently
have only in an unconscious way. The feelings of opening
and closing the glottis, of making tense the tympanic mem-
brane, of accommodating for near vision, of intercepting the
passage from the nostrils to the throat, are instances of
what I mean. Every one gets these feelings many times an
hour; but few readers, probably, are conscious of exactly
what sensations are meant by the names I have just used.
All these facts, and an enormous number more, seem to

* Cf. the statements from Helmholtz to be found later in Chapter
XIII.

172 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

prove conclusively that, in addition to the fully conscious
way in which an idea may exist in the mind, there is also
an unconscious way; that it is unquestionably the same
identical idea which exists in these two ways; and that
therefere any arguments against the mind-stuff theory,
based on the notion that esse in our mental life is sentiri,
and that an idea must consciously be felt as what it is, fall
to 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 the
earlier, are described as the same state of mind, or ‘idea,’
published as it were in two editions; and then whatever
qualities of the second edition are found openly lacking in
the first are explained as having really been there, only in
an ‘unconscious’ way. It would be difficult to believe that
intelligont men could be guilty of so patent a fallacy, were
not the history of psychology there to give the proof. The
psychological stock-in-trade of some authors is the belief
that two thoughts «bout one thing are virtually the same
thought, and that this same thought may in subsequent
reflections become more and more conscious of what it really
was all along from the first. But once make the distinc-
tion between simply having an idea at the moment of its pres-
ence and subsequently ‘knowing all sorts of things about it ;
make moreover that between a state of mind itself, taken
as a subjective fact, on the one hand, and the objective
thing it knows, on the other, and one has no difficulty in
escaping from the labyrinth.

Take the latter distinction first: Immediately all the
arguments based on sensations and the new features in
them which attention brings to light fall to the ground.
The sensetions of the B and the V when we attend to these
sounds and analyze out the laryngeal contribution which
makes them differ from P and F respectively, are different
sensations from those of the B and the V taken in a simple
way. They stand, itis true, for the same letters, and thus
mean the same outer realities; but they are different mental
affections, and certainly depend on widely different processes
ef cerebral activity. It is unbelievable that two mental

THE MIND-STUFF THEORY. 173

states so different as the passive reception of a sound asa
whole, and the analysis of that whole into distinct ingre-
dients by voluntary attention, should be due to processes
at all similar. And the subjective difference does not con-
sist in that the first-named state 7s the second in an ‘un-
conscious’ form. It is an avsolute psychic difference, even
greater than that between the states to which two difierent
surds will give rise. The same is true of the other sensa-
tions chosen as examples. The man who learns for the
first time how the closure of his glottis feels, experiences in
this discovery an absolutely new psychic modification, the
like of which he never had before. He had another feeling
before, a feeling incessantly rerewed, and of which the same
glottis was the organic starting , oint; but that was not the
later feeling in an ‘unconscious state; it was a feeling swt
generis altogether, although it took cognizance of the same
bodily part, the glottis. We shall see, hereafter, that the
same reality can be cognized by an endless number of
psychic states, which may differ toto celo among themselves,
without ceasing on that account to refer to the reality in
question. Each of them is a conscious fact; none of them
has any mode of being whatever except a certain way of
being felt at the moment of being present. It is simply
unintelligible and fantastical to say, because they point to
the same outer reality, that they must therefore be so many
editions of the same ‘idea,’ now in a conscious and now in
an ‘unconscious’ phase. There is only one ‘phase’ in
which an idea can be, and that is a fully conscious condi-
tion. If it is not in that condition, then it is not at all.
Something else is, in its place. The something else may be
a merely physical brain-process, or it may be another con-
sciousidea. Hither of these things may perform much the
same function as the first idea, refer to the same object,
and roughly stand in the same relations to the upshot of
our thought. But that is no reason why we should throw
away the logical principle of identity in psychology, and
say that, however it may fare in the outer world, the mind
at any rate is a place in which a thing can be all kinds of
other things without ceasing to be itself as well.

Now take the other cases alleged, and the other distine-

174 PSYCHOLOGY.

tion, that namely between having a mental state and know-
ing all about it. The truth is here even simpler to unravel.
When I decide that I have, without knowing it, been for
several weeks in love, I am simply giving a name to a state
which previously f hav2 not named, but which was fully con-
scious; which had no residual mode of being except the
manner in which it was conscious ; and which, though it was
a feeling towards the same person for whom I now have a
much more inflamed feeling, and though it continuously led
into the latter, and is similar enough to be called by the
same name, is yet in no sense identical with the latter, and
least of all in an ‘unconscious’ way. Again, the feelings from
our viscera and other dimly-felt organs, the feelings of
innervation (if such there }e), and those of muscular exer-
tion which, in our spatial judgments, are supposed uncon-
sciously to determine what we shall perceive, are just exactly
what we feel them, perfectly determinate conscious states,
not vague editions of other conscious states. They may be
faint and weak; they may be very vague cognizers of the
same realities which other conscious states cognize and name
exactly ; they may be unconscious of much in the reality
which the other states are conscious of. But that does not
make them in themselves a whit dim or vague or uncon-
scious. They are eternally as they feel when they exist,
and can, neither actually nor potentially, be identified with
anything else than their own faint selves. A faint feeling
may be looked back upon and classified and understood in
its relations to what went before or after it in the stream of
thought. But it, on the one hand, and the later state of
mind 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 the
destiny of thought tha‘, on the whole, our early ideas are
superseded by later ones, giving fuller accounts of the same
realities. But none the less do the earlier and the later
ideas preserve their own several substantive identities as so
many several successive states of mind. To believe the con-
trary would make any definite science of psychology im-
possible. The only identity to be found among our suc-
cessive ideas is their similarity of cognitive or representa-

THE MIND-STUFF THEORY. 175

tive function as dealing with the same objects. Identity ot
being, there is none; and I believe that throughout the rest
of this volume the reader will reap the advantages of the
simpler way of formulating the facts which is here begun.*

So we seem not only to have ascertained the unintelli-
gibility of the notion that a mental fact can be two things
at once, and that what seems like one feeling, of blueness
for example, or of hatred, may really and ‘ unconsciously’
be ten thousand elementary feelings which do not resem-
ble blueness or hatred at all, but we find that we can
express all the observed facts in other ways. The mind-

* The text was written before Professor Lipps’s Grundtatsachen des See-
lenlebens (1883) came into my hands. In Chapter III of that book the
notion of unconscious thought is subjected to the clearest and most search-
ing criticism which it has yet received, Some passages are so sim*lar to
what I have myself written that I must quote them ina note. After
proving that dimness and clearness, incompleteness and completeness do
not pertain to a state of mind as sweh—since every state of mind must be
exactly what it is, and nothing else—but only pertain to the way in which
states of mind stand for objects, which they more or less dimly, more
or less clearly, represent ; Lipps takes the case of those sensations which
attention 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-
perception a, and that of the evening-perception a!. There will probably
be a considerable difference between a and a!. The colors of a@ will be
varied and intense, and will be sharply bounded by each other; those of
a' will be less luminous, and less strongly contrasted, and will approach
@ 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 of a' appear before my eye neither more nor less decidedly dark
and blurred than the colors of a appear bright and sharply bounded. But
now I know, or believe I know, that one and the same real Object A corre-
sponds to both @ and a!. I am convinced, moreover, that a@ represents A
better than does a'. Instead, however, of giving to my conviction this, its
only correct, expression, and keeping the content of my consciousness and
the real object, the representation and what it means, distinct from each
other, I substitute the real object for the content of the consciousness,
and talk of the experience asif it consisted in one and the same object
(namely, the surreptitiously introduced real one), constituting twice over
the content of my consciousness, once in a Clear and distinct, the other
time in an obscure and vague fashion. I talk now of a distincter and of a
less distinct consciousness of A, whereas I am only justified in talking of
two consciousnesses, a and a’, equally distinct 7m se, but to which the sup-
posed external object A corresponds with different degrees of distinctness.”
{P. 38-9 )

176 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

stuff theory, however, though scotched, is, we may be sure,
not killed. If we ascribe consciousness to unicellular
animalcules, then single cells can have it, and analogy
should make us ascribe it to the several cells cf the brain,
each individually taken. And what a convenience would it
not be for the psychologist if, by the adding together of vari-
ous doses of this separate-cell-consciousness, he could treat
thought as a kind of stuff or material, to be measured out
in great or small amount, increased and subtracted from,
and baled about at will! He feels an imperious craving
to be allowed to construct synthetically the successive
mental states which he describes. The mind-stuff theory
so easily admits of the construction being made, that it
seems certain that ‘man’s unconquerable mind’ will devote
much future pertinacity and ingenuity to setting it on its
legs again and getting it into some sort of piausible work-
ing-order. I will therefore conclude the chapter with some
consideration of the remaining difficulties which beset the
matter as it at present stands.

DIFFICULTY OF STATING THE CONNECTION BETWEEN MIND
AND BRAIN.

It will be remembered that in our criticism of the theory
of the integration of successive conscious units into a feel-
ing of musical pitch, we decided that whatever integration
there was was that of the air-pulses into a simpler and sim-
pler sort of physical effect, as the propagations of material
change got higher and higher in the nervous system. At
last, we said (p. 23), there results some simple and massive
process in the auditory centres of the hemispherical cortex,
to which, as a whole, the feeling of musical pitch directly
corresponds. Already, in discussing the localization of
functions in the brain, I had said (pp. 158-9) that conscious-
ness accompanies the stream of innervation through that
organ and varies in quality with the character of the cur-
rents, being mainly of things seen if the occipital lobes are
much involved, of things heard if the action is focalized in
the temporal lobes, etc., etc.; and I had added that a vague
formula like this was as much as one could safely venture
on in the actual state of physiology. The facts of mental]

THE MIND-STUFF THEORY. TT

deafness and blindness, of auditory and optica: aphasia,
show us that the whole brain must act together if certain
thoughts are to occur. The consciousness, which is itself
an integral thing not made of parts, ‘corresponds’ to the
entire activity of the brain, whatever that may be, at the
moment. This is a way of expressing the relation of mind
and brain from which I shall not depart during the re-
mainder of the book, because it expresses the bare
phenomenal fact with no hypothesis, and is exposed to ne
such logical objections as we have found to cling to the
theory of ideas in combination.

Nevertheless, this formula which is so unobjectionable
if taken vaguely, positivistically, or scientifically, as a
mere empirical law of concomitance between our thoughts
and our brain, tumbles to pieces entirely if we assume
to represent anything more intimate or ultimate by it.
The ultimate of ultimate problems, of course, in the
study of the relations of thought and brain, is to under-
stand why and how such disparate things are connected
at all. But before that problem is solvea (if it ever is
solved) there is a less ultimate problem which must first
be settled. Before the connection of thought and brain
can be explained, it must at least be stated in an elementary
form ; and there are great difficulties about so stating it.
To state it in elementary form one must reduce it to its
lowest terms and know which mental fact and which cerebral
fact are, so to speak, in immediate juxtaposition. We must
find the minimal mental fact whose being reposes directly
on a brain-fact; and we must similarly find the minimal
brain-event which will have a mental counterpart at all.
Between the mental and the physical minima thus found
there will be an immediate relation, the expression of
which, if we had it, would be the elementary psycho-puysic
law.

Our own formula escapes the unintelligibility of psychic
atoms by taking the entire thought (even of a complex
object) as the minimum with which it deals on the mental
side. But in taking the entire brain-process as its mini-
mal fact on the material side it confronts other difficulties
almost as bad.

178 PSYCHOLOG Y.

In the first place, it ignores analogies on which certain
critics will insist, those, namely, between the composition
of the total brain-process and that of the object of the
thought. The total brain-process is composed of parts, —
of simultaneous processes in the seeing, the hearing, the
feeling, and other centres. The object thought of is also
composed of parts, some of which are seen, others heard,
others perceived by touch and muscular manipulation.
‘‘ How then,” these critics will say, “should the thought
not itself be composed of parts, each the counterpart
of a part of the object and of a part of the brain-pro-
cess?” So natural is this way of looking at the matter
that it has given rise to what is on the whole the most
flourishing of all psychological systems—that of the Lock-
ian school of associated ideas—of which school the mind-
stuff theory 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 to
an onlooking mind of a multitude of physical facts. ‘ En-
tire brain’ is nothing but our name for the way in which a
million of molecules arranged in certain positions may
affect our sense. On the principles of the corpuscular or
mechanical philosophy, the only realities are the separate
molecules, or at most the cells. Their aggregation into
a ‘brain’ is a fiction of popular speech. Such a fiction
cannot serve as the objectively real counterpart to any
psychic state whatever. Only a genuinely physical fact can
so serve. But the molecular fact is the only genuine physi-
cal fact—whereupon we seem, if we are to have an elemen-
tary psycho-physic law at all, thrust right back upon some-
thing like the mind-stuff theory, tor the molecular fact,
being an element of the ‘brain,’ would seem naturally to
correspond, not to the total thoughts, but to elements in
the thought.

What shall we do? Many would find relief at this
point in celebrating the mystery of the Unknowable and the
‘awe’ which we should feel at having such a principle to
take final charge of our perplexities. Others would rejoice’
that the finite and separatist view of things with which we
started had at last developed its contradictions, and was

THE MIND-STUFF THEORY. 179

about to lead us dialectically upwards to some ‘higher
synthesis’ in which inconsistencies cease from troubling
and logic is at rest. It may be a constitutional infirmity,
but I can take no comfort in such devices for making a
luxury of intellectual defeat. They are but spiritual
chloroform. Better live on the ragged edge, better gnaw
the file forever!

THE MATERIAL-MONAD THEORY.

The most rational thing to do is to suspect that there
may be a third possibility, an alternative supposition which
we have not considered. Now there 7s an alternative sup-
position—a supposition moreover which has been fre-
quently made in the history of philosophy, and which is
freer from logical objections than either of the views we
have ourselves discussed. It may be called the theory of
polyzoism or multiple monadism ; and it conceives the matter
thus :

Every brain-cell has its own individual consciousness,
which no other cell knows anything about, all individual
consciousnesses being ‘ ejective’ to each other. There is,
however, among the cells one central or pontifical one to
which owr consciousness is attached. But the events of all the
other cells physically influence this arch-cell; and through
producing their joint effects on it, these other cells may be
said to ‘combine.’ The arch-cell is, in fact, one of those
‘external media’ without which we saw that no fusion or
integration of a number of things can occur. The physical
modifications of the arch-cell thus form a sequence of
results in the production whereof every other cell has a
share, so that, as one might say, every other cell is repre-
sented therein. And similarly, the conscious correlates to
these physical modifications form a sequence of thoughts
or feelings, each one of which is, as to its substantive
being, an integral and uncompounded psychic thing, but
each one of which may (in the exercise of its cognitive
function) be aware of THINGS many and complicated in
proportion to the number of other cells that have helped
to modify the central cell.

By a conception of this sort, one incurs neither of the

180 PSYCHOLOG Y.

internal contradictions which we found to beset the other
two theories. One has no unintelligible self-combining of
psychic units to account for on the one hand; and on the
other hand, one need not treat as the physical counterpart
of the stream of consciousness under observation, a ‘ total
brain-activity’’ which is non-existent as a genuinely physi-
cal fact. But, to offset these advantages, one has physio:
logical difficulties and improbabilities. There is no cell
or group of cells in the brain of such anatomical or func-
tional pre-eminence as to appear to be the keystone or centre
of gravity of the whole system. And even if there were
such a cell, the theory of multiple monadism would, in
strictness of thought, have no right to stop at it and treat
itasaunit. The cell is no more a unit, materially con-
sidered, than the total brain isa unit. It is a compound of
molecules, just as the brain is a compound of cells and fibres.
And the molecules, according to the prevalent physical theo-
ries, are In turn compounds of atoms. The theory in ques-
tion, therefore, if radically carried out, must set up for its
elementary and irreducible psycho-physic couple, not the
cell and its consciousness, but the primordial and eternal
atom and its consciousness. We are back at Leibnitzian
monadism, and therewith leave physiology behind us and
dive into regions inaccessible to experience and verification ;
and our doctrine, 2lthough not self-contradictory, becomes
so remote and unreal as to be almost as bad as if it were.
Speculative minds alone will take an interest in it; and
metaphysics, not psychology, will be responsible for its
career. That the career may be a successful one must be
admitted as a possibility—a theory which Leibnitz, Her-
bart, and Lotze have taken under their protection must
have some sort of a destiny.

THE SOUL-THEORY.

But is this my last word? By no means. Many
readers have certainly been saying to themselves for the
last few pages: “Why on earth doesn’t the poor man say
the Soul and have done with it?” Other readers, of anti-
spiritualistic training and prepossessions, advanced think-
ers, or popular evolutionists, will perhaps be a little sur-

THE MIND-STUFF THEORY. 181

prised to find this much-despised word now sprung upon
them at the end of so physiological a train of thought. But
the plain fact is that all the arguments for a ‘ pontifical cell’
or an ‘arch-monad’ are also arguments for that well-known
spiritual agent in which scholastic psychology and com-
mon-sense have always believed. And my only reason for
beating the bushes so, and not bringing it in earlier as a
possible solution of our difficulties, has been that by this
procedure I might perhaps force some of these materialistic
minds to feel the more strongly the logical respectability of
the spiritualistic position. The fact is that one cannot
attord to despise any of these great traditional objects of
belief. Whether we realize it or not, there is always a great
drift of reasons, positive and negative, towing us in their
direction. Ifthere be such entities as Souls in the universe,
they may possibly be affected by the manifold occurrences
that go on in the nervous centres. To the state of the en-
tire brain at a given moment they may respond by inward
modifications of their own. These changes of state may be
pulses of consciousness, cognitive of objects few or many,
simple or complex. The soul would be thus a medium
upon which (to use our earlier phraseology) the manifold
brain-processes combine their effects. Not needing to con-
sider it as the ‘inner aspect’ of any arch-molecule or brain-
cell, we escape that physiological improbability ; and as its
pulses of consciousness are unitary and integral affairs from
the outset, we escape the absurdity of supposing feelings
which exist separately and then ‘fuse together’ by them-
selves. The separateness is in the brain-world, on this
theory, and the unity in the soul-world; and the only
trouble that remains to haunt us is the metaphysical one of
understanding how one sort of world or existent thing can
affect or influence another at all. This trouble, however,
since it also exists inside of both worlds, and involves
neither physical improbability nor logical contradiction, is
relatively small.

I confess, therefore, that to posit a soul influenced in
some mysterious way by the brain-states and responding to
them by conscious affections of its own, seems to me the
line of least logical resistance, so far as we yet have attained.

182 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

If it does not strictly explain anything, it is at any rate
less positively objectionable than either mind-stuff or a
material-monad creed. The bare PHENOMENON, however, the
IMMEDIATELY KNOWN thing which on the mental side is in appo-
sition with the entire brain-process is the state of consciousness
and not the soul itself. Many of the stanchest believers in
the soul admit that we know it only as an inference from
experiencing its states. In Chapter X, accordingly, we must
return to its consideration again, and ask ourselves whether,
after all, the ascertainment of a blank unmediated correspond-
ence, term for term, of the succession of states of consciousness
with the succession of total brain-processes, be not the simplest
psycho-physic formula, and the last word of a psychology
which contents itself with verifiaite laws, and seeks only to
be clear, and to avoid unsafe hypotheses. Such a mere ad-
mission of the empirical parallelism will there appear the
wisest course. By keeping to it, our psychology will re-
main positivistic and non-metaphysical ; and although this
is certainly only a provisional halting-place, and things
must some day be more thoroughly thought out, we shall
abide there in this book, and just as we have rejected mind-
dust, we shall take no account of the soul. The spiritualis-
tic reader may nevertheless believe in the soul if he will;
whilst the positivistic one who wishes to give a tinge of
mystery to the expression of his positivism can continue to
say that nature in her unfathomable designs has mixed us
of clay and flame, of brain and mind, that the two things
hang indubitably together and determine each other’s being,
but how or why, no mortal may ever know.

CHAPTER VII.
THE METHODS AND SNARES OF PSYCHOLOGY

WE have now finished the physiological preliminaries of
our subject and must in the remaining chapters study the
mental states themselves whose cerebral conditions and
concomitants we have been considering hitherto, Beyond
the brain, however, thereis an outer world to which the
brain-states themselves ‘correspond.’ And it will be well,
ere we advance farther, to say a word about the relation of
the mind to this larger sphere of physical fact.

PSYCHOLOGY IS A NATURAL SCIENCE.

That is, the mind which the psychologist studies is the
mind of distinct individuals inhabiting definite portions of
areal space and of a real time. With any other sort of
mind, absolute Intelligence, Mind unattached to a particular
body, or Mind not subject to the course of time, the psychol-
ogist as such has nothing to do. ‘Mind,’ in his mouth, is
only a class name for minds. Fortunate will it be if his
more modest inquiry result in any generalizations which
the philosopher devoted to absolute Intelligence as such
can use.

To the psychologist, then, the minds he studies are
objects, in a world of other objects. Even when he intro-
spectively analyzes his own mind, and tells what he finds
there, he talks about it in an objective way. He says, for
instance, that under certain circumstances the color gray
appears to him green, and calls the appearance an illusion.
This implies that he compares two objects, a real color
seen under certain conditions, and a mental perception
which he believes to represent it, and that he declares the
relation between them to be of a certain kind. In making
this critical judgment, the psychologist stands as much out-
side of the perception which he criticises as he does of the

color. Both are his objects. And if thisis true of him when
183

184 PSYCHOLOGY.

he reflects on his own conscious states, how much truer is it
when he treats of those of others! In German philosophy
since Kant the word Erkenntnisstheorie, criticism of the
faculty of knowledge, plays a great part. Now the psychol-
ogist necessarily becomes such an Lrkenntnisstheoretiker.
But the knowledge he theorizes about is not the bare
function of knowledge which Kant criticises—he does not
inquire into the possibility of knowledge iiberhaupt. He
assumes it to be possible, he does not doubt its presence
in himself at the moment he speaks. The knowledge he
criticises is the knowledge of particular men about the
particular things that surround them. This he may, upon
occasion, in the light of his own unquestioned knowledge,
pronounce true or false, and trace the reasons by, which it
has become one or the other.

It is highly important that this natural-science point
of view should be understood at the outset. Otherwise
more may be demanded of the psychologist than he ought
to be expected to perform.

A diagram will exhibit more emphatically what the
assumptions of Psychology must be:

ee ee
H |

| |
1 2 3 4

The The Thought | The Thought’s | The Psycholo-
Psychologist Studied Object gist’s Reality

These four squares contain the irreducible data of
psychology. No. 1, the psychologist, believes Nos. 2, 3,
and 4, which together form his total object, to be realities,
and reports them and their mutual relations as truly as he
can without troubling himself with the puzzle of how he
can report them at Fi About such ultimate puzzles he in
the main need trouble himself no more than the geometer,
the chemist, or the botanist do, who make precisely the
same assumptions as he.*

Of certain fallacies to which the psychologist is exposed
by reason of his peculiar point of view—that of being a

* On the relation between Pyschology and General Philosophy, see G.
C. Robertson, ‘ Mind,’ vol. vur. p. 1, and J. Ward, zbid. p. 153; J. Dewey,
wid. vol. 1x. p. 1.

THE METHODS AND SNARES OF PSYCHOLOGY. 185

reporter of subjective as well as of objective facts, we must
presently speak. But not until we have considered the
methods he uses for ascertaining what the facts in question
are.

THE METHODS OF INVESTIGATION.

Introspective Observation is what we have to rely on first
and foremost and always. The word introspection need
hardly be defined—it means, of course, the looking into our
own minds and reporting what we there discover. Every
one agrees that we there discover states of consciousness. So
far as 1 know, the existence of such states has never been
doubted by any critic, however sceptical in other respects
he may have been. That we have cogitations of some sort is
the inconcussum in a world most of whose other facts have
at some time tottered in the breath of philosophic doubt.
All people unhesitatingly believe that they feel themselves
thinking, and that they distinguish the mental state as an
inward activity or passion, from all the objects with which
it may cognitively deal. J regard this belief as the most
Sundamental of all the postulates of Psychology, and shall dis-
card all curious inquiries about its certainty as too meta-
physical for the scope of this book.

A (Question of Nomenclature. We ought to have some
general term by which to designate all states of con-
sciousness merely as such, and apart from their par-
ticular quality or cognitive function. Unfortunately most
of the terms in use have grave objections. ‘Mental
state,’ ‘state of consciousness,’ ‘ conscious modification,’ are
cumbrous and have no kindred verbs. The same is true
of ‘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 as
its generic one, sometimes standing for pleasure and pain,
and being sometimes a synonym of ‘sensation’ as opposed
to thought ; whereas we wish a term to cover sensation and

186 PSYCHOLOGY.

thought indifferently. Moreover, ‘feeling’ has acquired in
the hearts of platonizing thinkers a very opprobrious set of
implications; and since one of the great obstacles to mutual
understanding in philosophy is the use of words eulogisti-
cally and disparagingly, impartial terms ought always, if
possible, to be preferred. The word psychosis has been
proposed by Mr. Huxley. It has the advantage of being
correlative to neurosis (the name applied by the same author
to the corresponding nerve-process), and is moreover tech-
nical and devoid of partial implications. But it has no
verb or other grammatical form allied to it. The expres-
sions ‘affection of the soul,’ ‘modification of the ego,’ are
clumsy, like ‘state of consciousness,’ and they implicitly
assert theories which it is not well to embody in terminol-
ogy before they have been openly discussed and approved.
‘Idea’ is a good vague neutral word, and was by Locke
employed in the broadest generic way ; but notwithstanding
his authority it has not domesticated itself in the language
so as to cover bodily sensations, and it moreover has no
verb. ‘Thought’ would be by far the best word to use if
it could be made to cover sensations. It has no opprobri-
ous connotation such as ‘feeling’ has, and it immediately
suggests the omnipresence of cognition (or reference to an
object other than the mental state itself), which we shall
soon see to be of the mental life’s essence. But can the
expression ‘thought of a toothache’ ever suggest to the
reader the actual present pain itself? It is hardly possi-
ble; and we thus seem about to be forced back on some
pair of terms like Hume’s ‘impression and idea,’ or Ham-
ilton’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, but
must, according to the convenience of the context, use
sometimes one, sometimes another of the synonyms that
have been mentioned. My own partiality is for either
FEELING or THOUGHT. I shall probably often use both words
in a wider sense than usual, and alternately startle two
classes of readers by their unusual sound; but if the con-
nection makes it clear that mental states at large, irrespec-

THE METHODS AND SNARES OF PSYCHOLOGY. 187

tive of their kind, are meant, this will do no harm, and may
even do some good.*

The inaccuracy of introspective observation has been made
a subject of debate. It is important to gain some fixed
ideas on this point before we proceed.

The commonest spiritualistic opinion is that the Soul
or Subject of the mental life is a metaphysical entity, inac-
cessible to direct knowledge, and that the various mental
states and operations of which we reflectively become
aware are objects of an inner sense which does not lay hold
of the real agent in itself, any more than sight or hear-
ing gives us direct knowledge of matter in itself. From
this point of view introspection is, of course, incompetent
to lay hold of anything more than the Soul’s phenomena.
But even then the question remains, How well can it know
the phenomena themselves ?

Some authors take high ground here and claim for it a
sort 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 con-
sciousness (in me) from its existence out of my consciousness (in itself) ;
for the object apprehended is, in this case, one which does not even
exist, as the objects of external perception do, in itself outside of my
consciousness. It exists only within me.” tf

And Brentano :

‘‘The phenomena inwardly apprehended are true in themselves,
As they appear—of this the evidence with which they are apprehended
is a warrant—so they are in reality. Who, then, can deny that in this
a great superiority of Psychology over the physical sciences comes to
light ?”

And again :

‘No one can doubt whether the psychic condition he apprehends in
himself be, and be so, as he apprehends it. Whoever should doubt this
would have reached that finished doubt which destroys itself in de-
stroying every fixed point from which to make an attack upon knowl-
edge.” +

Others have gone to the opposite extreme, and main-
tained that we can have no introspective cognition of our

* Compare some remarks in Mill’s Logic, bk. 1. chap. ut. §§ 2, 3.
+ Logic, § 40. t Psychologie, bk. 1. chap. ut. §§ 1, 2.

188 PSYCHOLOGY.

own minds at all. A deliverance of Auguste Comte to this
effect has been so often quoted as to be almost classical ;
and some reference to it seems therefore indispensable

here.
Philosophers, says Comte,* have

‘‘in these latter days imagined themselves able to distinguish, by a
very singular subtlety, two sorts of observation of equal importance,
one externa!, the other internal, the latter being solely destined for the
study of intellectual phenomena. . . . I limit myself to pointing out
the principal consideration which proves clearly that this pretended
direct contemplation of the mind by itself is a pure illusion. ...
It is in fact evident that, by an invincible neccessity, the human mind -
can observe directly all phenomena except its own proper states. For
by whom shall the observation of these be made? It is conceivable
that a man might observe himself with respect to the passions that
animate him, for the anatomical organs of passion are distinct from
those whose function is observation. Though we have all made suck
observations on ourselves, they can never have much scientific value,
and the best mode of knowing the passions will always be that of ob-
serving them from without; for every strong state of passion. . . is
necessarily incompatible with the state of observation. But, as for
observing in the same way intellectual phenomena at the time of their
actual presence, that is a manifest impossibility. The thinker cannot
divide himself into two, of whom one reasons whilst the other observes
him reason. The organ observed and the organ observing being, in
this case, identical, how could observation take place? This pretended
psychological method is then radically null and void. On the one
hand, they advise you to isolate yourself, as far as possible, from every
external sensation, especially every intellectual work,—for if you were
to busy yourself even with the simplest calculation, what would become
of internal observation ?—on the other hand, after having with the
utmost care attained this state of intellectual slumber, you must begin
to contemplate the operations going on in your mind, when nothing
there takes place! Our descendants will doubtless see such pretensions
some day ridiculed upon the stage. The results of so strange a proced-
ure harmonize entirely with its principle. For all the two thousand
years 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 there
are 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

* Cours de Philosophie Positive, 1. 34-8.

THE METHODS AND SNARES OF PSYCHOLOGY. 189

scholastic ones, such as principles of internal activity, the
faculties, the ego, the liberuwm arbitrium indifferentic, etc.
John Mill, in replying to him,* says:

‘Tt might have occurred to M. Comte that a fact may be studied
through the medium of memory, not at the very moment of our per-
ceiving it, but the moment after: and this is really the mode in which
our best knowledge of our intellectual acts is generally acquired. We
reflect on what we have been doing when the act is past, but when its
impression in the memory is still fresh. Unless in one of these ways,
we could not have acquired the knowledge which nobody denies us to
have, of what passes in our minds. M. Comte would scarcely have
affirmed that we are not aware of our own intellectual operations. We
know of our observings and our reasonings, either at the very time, or
by memory the moment after; in either case, by direct knowledge, and
not (like things done by us in a state of somnambulism) merely by
their results. This simple fact destroys the whole of M. Comte’s argu-
ment. Whatever we are directly aware of, we can directly observe.”

Where now does the truth lie? Our quotation from
Mill is obviously the one which expresses the most of
practical truth about the- matter. Even the writers who
insist upon the absolute veracity of our immediate inner
apprehension of a conscious state have to contrast with
this the fallibility of our memory or observation of it, a
moment later. No one has emphasized more sharply than
Brentano himself the difference between the immediate
feltness of a feeling, and its perception by a subsequent res
flective act. But which mode of consciousness of it is that
which the psychologist must depend on? If to have feel-
ings or thoughts in their immediacy were enough, babies
in the cradle would be psychologists, and infallible ones.
But the psychologist must not only have his mental states
in their absolute veritableness, he must report them and
write about them, name them, classify and compare them
and trace their relations to other things. Whilst alive they
are their own property ; it is only post-mortem that they be-
come his prey.t And as in the naming, classing, and know-

* Auguste Comte and Positivism, 3d edition (1882), p. 64.

+ Wundt says: ‘‘ The first rule for utilizing inward observation con-
sists in taking, as far as possible, experiences that are accidental, unex:
pected, and not intentionally brought about. . . . First it is best as far as
possible to rely on Memory and not on immediate Apprehension, . .

190 PSYCHOLOGY.

ing of things in general we are notoriously fallible, why not
also here? Comte is quite right in laying stress on the
fact that a feeling, to be named, judged, or perceived, must
be already past. No subjective state, whilst present, is its
own object; its object is always something else. There
are, it is true, cases in which we appear to be naming our
present feeling, and so to be experiencing and observing
the same inner fact at a single stroke, as when we say ‘I
feel tired, ‘i am angry,’ etc. But these are illusory, and
a little attention unmasks the illusion. The present con-
scious state, when I say ‘I feel tired,’ is not the direct
state of tire; when I say ‘I feel angry,’ it is not the direct
state of anger. It is the state of saying-I-feel-tired, of
saying-I-feel-angry,—entirely different matters, so different
that the fatigue and anger apparently included in them are
considerable modifications of the fatigue and anger directly
felt the previous instant. The act of naming them has
momentarily detracted from their force.*

The only sound grounds on which the infallible veracity
of the introspective judgment might be maintained are
empirical. If we had reason to think it has never yet
deceived us, we might continue to trust it. This is the
ground actually maintained by Herr Mohr.

‘¢ The illusions of our senses,” says this author, ‘‘ have undermined
our belief in the reality of the outer world; but in the sphere of inner
observation our confidence is intact, for we have never found ourselves
to be in error about the reality of an act of thought or feeling. We

Second, internal observation is better fitted to grasp clearly conscious
states, especially voluntary mental acts: such inner processes as are ob-
scurely conscious and involuntary will almost entirely elude it, because
the effort to observe interferes with them, and because they seldom abide
in memory.” (Logik, 11. 482.)

* In cases like this, where the state outlasts the act of naming it, exists
before it, and recurs when it is past, we probably run little practical risk
of error when we talk as if the state knew itself. The state of feeling and
the state of naming the feeling are continuous, and the infallibility of
such prompt introspective judgments is probably great. But even here the
certainty of our knowledge ought not to be argued on the a priori ground
that percipi and esse are in psychology the same. The states are really
two; the naming state and the named state are apart; ‘ percipi is esse’ is not
the principle that applies.

THE METHODS AND SNARES OF PSYCHOLOGY. 191

have never been misled into thinking we were vot in doubt or in anger
when these conditions were really states of our consciousness.” *

But sound as the reasoning here would be, were the
premises correct, I fear the latter cannot pass. However
it may be with such strong feelings as doubt or anger,
about weaker feelings, and about the relations to each other
of all feelings, we find ourselves in continual error and
uncertainty so soon as we are called on to name and class,
and not merely to feel. Who can be sure of the exact erder
of his feelings when they are excessively rapid? Who can
be sure, in his sensible perception of a chair, how much
comes from the eye and how much is supplied out of the
previous knowledge of the mind? Who can compare with
precision the quantities of disparate feelings even where the
feelings are verymuchalike? For instance, where an object
is felt now against the back and now against the ckeek,
which feeling is most extensive? Who can be sure that
two given feelings are or are not exactly the same? Who
ean tell which is briefer or longer than the other when
both occupy but an instant of time? Who knows, of many
actions, for what motive they were done, or if for any motive
at all? Who can enumerate all the distinct ingredients of
such a complicated feeling as anger? and who can tell off-
hand whether or no a perception of distance be a compound
or a simple state of mind? The whole mind-stuff contro-
versy would stop if we could decide conclusively by intro-
spection that what seem to us elementary feelings are
really elementary and not compound.

Mr. Sully, in his work on Illusions, has a chapter on
those of Introspection from which we might now quote.
But, since the rest of this volume will be little more than 2,
collection of illustrations of the difficulty of discovering by
direct introspection exactly what our feelings and their
relaticzs are, we need not anticipate our own future details,
but just state our general conclusion that introspection is
dificult and fallible; and that the difficulty is simply that
of all observation of whatever kind. Something is before

* J. Mohr: Grundlage der Empirischen Psychologie (Leipzig, 1882),
p 47.

192 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

us; we do our best to tell what it is, but in spite of our
good will we may go astray, and give a description more
applicable to some other sort of thing. The only safeguard
is in the final consensus of our farther knowledge about the
thing in question, later views correcting earlier ones, unti!
at last the harmony of a consistent system is reached.
Such a system, gradually worked out, is the best guarantee
the psychologist can give for the soundness of any partic-
ular psychologic observation which he may report. Sucha
system we ourselves must strive, as far as may be, to attain.

The English writers on psychology, and the school of
Herbart in Germany, have in the main contented them-
selves with such results as the immediate introspection of
single individuals gave, and shown what a body of doctrine
they may make. The works of Locke, Hume, Reid, Hart-
ley, Stewart, Brown, the Mills, will always be classics in
this line ; and in Professor Bain’s Treatises we have prob-
ably the last word of what this method taken mainly by
itself can do—the last monument of the youth of our science,
still untechnical and generally intelligible, like the Chem-
istry of Lavoisier, or Anatomy before the microscope was
used.

The Experimental Method. But psychology is passing
into a less simple phase. Within a few years what one may
call a microscopic psychology has arisen in Germany, car-
ried on by experimental methods, asking of course every
moment for introspective data, but eliminating their uncer-
tainty by operating on a large scale and taking statistical
means. This method taxes patience to the utmost, and
could hardly have arisen in a country whose natives
could be bored. Such Germans as Weber, Fechner,
Vierordt, and Wundt obviously cannot; and their success
has brought into the field an array of younger experi-
mental psychologists, bent on studying the elements of the
mental life, dissecting them out from the gross results in
which they are embedded, and as far as possible reducing
them to quantitative scales. The simple and open method
of attack having done what it can, the method of patience,
starving out, and harassing to death is tried; the Mind

THE METHODS AND SNARES OF PSYCHOLOGY. 193

must submit to a regular siege, in which minute advantages
gained night and day by the forces that hem her in must
sum themselves up at last into her overthrow. There is
little of the grand style about these new prism, pendulum,
and chronograph-philosophers. They mean business, not
chivalry. What generous divination, and that superiority
in virtue which was thought by Cicero to give a man the
best insight into nature, have failed to do, their spying
and scraping, their deadly tenacity and almost diabolic
cunning, will doubtless some day bring about.

No general description of the methods of experimental
psychology would be instructive to one unfamiliar with the
instances of their application, so we will waste no words
upon the attempt. The principal fields of experimentation
so far have been: 1) the connection of conscious states
with their physical conditions, including the whole of brain-
physiology, and the recent minutely cultivated physiology
of the sense-organs, together with what is technically known
as ‘psycho-physics,’ or the laws of correlation between
sensations and the outward stimuli by which they are
aroused ; 2) the analysis of space-perception into its sensa-
tional elements; 3) the measurement of the duration of the
simplest mental processes; 4) that of the accuracy of re-
production in the memory of sensible experiences and of
intervals of space and time; 5) that of the manner in
which simple mental states influence each other, call each
other up, or inhibit each other’s reproduction ; 6) that of
the number of facts which consciousness can simultaneously
discern; finally, 7) that of the elementary laws of obli-
vescence and retention. It must be said that in some of
these fields the results have as yet borne little theoretic
fruit commensurate with the great labor expended in their
acquisition. But facts are facts, and if we only get enough
of them they are sure to combine. New ground will from
year to year be broken, and theoretic results will grow.
Meanwhile the experimental method has quite changed the
face of the science so far as the latter is a record of mere
work done.

The comparative method, finally, supplements the intro<

194 PSYCHOLOGY.

spective and experimental methods. This method pre-
supposes a normal psychology of introspection to be estab-
lished in its main features. But where the origin of these
features, or their dependence upon one another, is in ques-
tion, it is of the utmost importance to trace the phenom-
enon considered through all its possible variations of type
and combination. So it has come to pass that instincts of
animals are ransacked to throw light on our own; and that
the reasoning faculties of bees and ants, the minds of savages,
infants, madmen, idiots, the deaf and blind, criminals, and
eccentrics, are all invoked in support of this or that special
theory about some part of our own mental life. The history
of sciences, moral and political institutions, and languages,
as types of mental product, are pressed into the same ser-
vice. Messrs. Darwin and Galton have set the example of
circulars of questions sent out by the hundred to those
supposed able to reply. The custom has spread, and it
will be well for us in the next generation if such cir-
culars be not ranked among the common pests of life.
Meanwhile information grows, and results emerge. There
are 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 per-
sonal equation of the investigator has things very much
its own way. A savage will be reported to have no
moral or religious feeling if his actions shock the ob-
server unduly. A child will be assumed without self-con-
sciousness because he talks of himself in the third person,
etc., etc. No rules can be laid down in advance. Com-
parative observations, to be definite, must usually be made
to test some pre-existing hypothesis ; and the only thing
then is to use as much sagacity as you possess, and to be
as candid as you can.

THE SOURCES OF ERROR IN PSYCHOLOGY.

The first of them arises from the Misleading Influence of
Speech. Language was originally made by men who were
not psychologists, and most men to-day employ almost
exclusively the vocabulary of outward things. The car-
dinal passions of our life, anger, love, fear, hate, hope,

THE METHODS AND SNARES OF PSYCHOLOGY. 195

and the most comprehensive divisions of our intellectual
activity, to remember, expect, think, know, dream, with
the broadest genera of esthetic feeling, joy, sorrow,
pleasure, pain, are the only facts of a subjective order
which 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 in
both an objective and a subjective sense. They stand for
outer qualities and for the feelings which these arouse. But
the objective sense is the original sense; and still to-day
we have to describe a large number of sensations by the
name of the object from which they have most frequently
been got. An orange color, an odor of violets, a cheesy
taste, a thunderous sound, a fiery smart, etc., will recall
what I mean. This absence of a special vocabulary for sub-
jective facts hinders the study of all but the very coarsest
of them. Empiricist writers are very fond of emphasizing
one great set of delusions which language inflicts on the
mind. Whenever we have made a word, they say, to denote
a certain group of phenomena, we are prone to suppose a
substantive entity existing beyond the phenomena, of which
the word shall be the name. But the lack of a word quite
as often leads to the directly opposite error. We are then
prone to suppose that no entity can be there; and so we
come to overlook phenomena whose existence would be
patent to us all, had we only grown up to hear it familiarly
recognized in speech.* It is hard to focus our attention on
the nameless, and so there results a certain vacuousness in
the descriptive parts of most psychologies.

But a worse defect than vacuousness comes from the
dependence of psychology on common speech. Naming
our thought by its own objects, we almost all of us assume
that as the objects are, so the thought must be. The
thought of several distinct things can only consist of several
distinct bits of thought, or ‘ideas;’ that of an abstract or
universal object can only be an abstract or universal idea.

*In English we have not even the generic distinction between the-
thing-thought-of and the-thought-thinking-it, which in German is expressed
by the opposition between Gedachtes and Gedunke, in Latin by that between
cogitatum and cogitatio.

196 PSYCHOLOGY.

As each object may come and go, be forgotten and then
thought of again, it is held that the thought of it has a pre-
cisely similar independence, self-identity, and mobility.
The thought of the object’s recurrent identity is regarded
as the identity of its recurrent thought; and the perceptions
of multiplicity, of coexistence, of succession, are severally
conceived to be brought about only through a multiplic-
ity, a coexistence, a succession, of perceptions. The con-
tinuous flow of the mental stream is sacrificed, and in its
place an atomism, a brickbat plan of construction, is
preached, for the existence of which no good introspective
grounds can be brought-forward, and out of which pres-
ently grow all sorts of paradoxes and contradictions, the
heritage of woe of students of the mind.

These words are meant to impeacu the entire English
psychology derived from Locke and Hume, and the entire
German psychology derived from Herbart, so far as they
both treat ‘ideas’ as separate subjective entities that come
and go. Examples will soon make the matter clearer.
Meanwhile our psychologic insight is vitiated by still other
snares.

‘The Psychologist’s Fallacy.’ The great snare of the psy-
chologist is the confusion of his own standpoint with that of the
mental fact about which he is making his report. I shall
hereafter 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 out-
side of the mental state he speaks of. Both itself and its
object are objects for him. Now when it is a cognitive state
(percept, thought, concept, etc.), he ordinarily has no other
way of naming it than as the thought, percept, etc., of that
object. He himself, meanwhile, knowing the self-same
object in his way, gets easily led to suppose that the
thought, which is of it, knows it in the same way in which
he knows it, although this is often very far from being the
case.* The most fictitious puzzles have been introduced
into our science by this means. The so-called question of
presentative or representative perception, of whether an

* Compare B. P. Bowne’s Metaphysics (1882), p. 408.

THE METHODS AND SNARES OF PSYCHOLOGY. 197

object is present to the thought that thinks it by a coun-
terfeit image of itself, or directly and without any interven-
ing image at all; the question of nominalism and concep-
tualism, of the shape in which things are present when only
a general notion of them is before the mind ; are compara-
tively easy questions when once the psychologist’s fallacy
is eliminated from their treatment,—as we shall ere long
see (in Chapter XII).

Another variety of the psychologist’s fallacy is the as-
sumption that the mental state studied must be conscious of it-
self as the psychologist is conscious of it. The mental state is
aware of itself only from within; it grasps what we call its
own content, and nothing more. The psychologist, on the
contrary, is aware of it from without, and knows its relations
with all sorts of other things. What the thought sees is
only its own object; what the psychologist sees is the
thought’s object, plus the thought itself, plus possibly all
the rest of the world. We must be very careful therefore,
in discussing a state of mind from the psychologist’s point
of view, to avoid foisting into its own ken matters that are
only there for ours. We must avoid substituting what we
know the consciousness 7s, for what it is a consciousness of,
and counting its outward, and so to speak physical, relations
with other facts of the world, in among the objects of which
we set it down as aware. Crude as such a confusion of
standpoints seeins to be when abstractly stated, it is never-
theless a snare into which no psychologist has kept himself
at all times from falling, and which forms almost the entire
stock-in-trade of certain schools. We cannot be too watch-
ful against its subtly corrupting influence.

Summary. Tosum up the chapter, Psychology assumes
that thoughts successively occur, and that they know objects
in a world which the psychologist also knows. These thoughts
are the subjective data of which he treats, and their relations to
their objects, to the brain, and to the rest of the world constitute
the subject-matter of psychologic science. Its methods are
introspection, experimentation, and comparison. But intro-
spection is no sure guide to truths about our mental states ;
and iv particular the poverty of the psychological vocabu.

198 PSYCHOLOGY,

lary leads us to drop out certain states from our consid-
eration, and to treat others as if they knew themselves and
their objects as the psychologist knows both, which is a
disastrous fallacy in the science.

CHAPTER VIII.
THE RELATIONS OF MINDS TO OTHER THINGS.

Since, for psychology, a mind is an object in a world of
other objects, its relation to those other objects must next
be surveyed. First of all, to its

TIME-RELATIONS.

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, are
questions to be decided by my general philosophy or the-
ology rather than by what we call ‘scientific facts ’"—I leave
out the facts of so-called spiritualism, as being still in dis-
pute. Psychology, as a natural science, confines itself to
the present life, in which every mind appears yoked to a
body through which its manifestations appear. In the
present world, then, minds precede, succeed, and coexist
with each other in the common receptacle of time, and of
their collective relations to the latter nothing more can be
said. The life of the individual consciousness in time seems,
however, to be an interrupted one, so that the question:

Are we ever wholly unconscious ?

becomes one which must be discussed. Sleep, fainting,
coma, epilepsy, and other ‘unconscious’ conditions are apt
to break in upon and occupy large durations of what we
nevertheless consider the mental history of a single man.
And, the fact of interruption being admitted, is it not
possible that it may exist where we do not suspect it, and
even perhaps in an incessant and fine-grained form ?

This might happen, and yet the subject himself never
know it. We often take ether and have operations per-
formed without a suspicion that our consciousness has suf.

199

200 PSYCHOLOG Y.

fered a breach. The two ends join each other smoothly
over the gap; and only the sight of our wound assures us
that we must have been living through a time which for
our immediate consciousness was non-existent. Even in
sleep this sometimes happens: We think we have had no
nap, and it takes the clock to assure us that we are wrong.*
We thus may live through a real outward time, a time
known by the psychologist who studies us, and yet not
Jeel the time, or infer it from any inward sign. The ques-
tion is, how often does this happen? Is consciousness
really discontinuous, incessantly interrupted and recom-
mencing (from the psychologist’s point of view)? and does
it only seem continuous to itself by an illusion analogous
to that of the zoetrope? Or is it at most times as continu-
ous outwardly as it inwardly seems ?

It must be confessed that we can give no rigorous
answer to this question. Cartesians, who hold that the
essence of the soul is to think, can of course solve it
a priori, and explain the appearance of thoughtless inter-
vals either by lapses in our ordinary memory, or by the
sinking of consciousness to a minimal state, In which per-
haps all that it feels is a bare existence which leaves no
particulars behind to be recalled. If, however, one have
no doctrine about the soul or its essence, one is free to take
the appearances for what they seem to be, and to admit
that the mind, as well as the body, may go to sleep.

Locke was the first prominent champion of this latter
view, and the pages in which he attacks the Cartesian belief
are as spirited as any in his Essay. “ Every drowsy nod
shakes their doctrine who teach that their soul is always
thinking.” He will not believe that men so easily forget.
M. Jouffroy and Sir W. Hamilton, attacking the question in
the same empirical way, are led to an opposite conclusion,
Their reasons, briefly stated, are these :

* Messrs. Payton Spence (Journal of Spec. Phil, x. 3838, x1v. 286)
and M. M. Garver (Amer. Jour. of Science, 3d series, xx. 189) argue, the
one from speculative, the other from experimental grounds, that, the physi-
cal condition of consciousness being neural vibration, the consciousness
must itself be incessantly interrupted by unconsciousness—about fifty times
a second, according to Garver.

THE RELATIONS OF MINDS TO OTHER THINGS. 201

In somnambulism, natural or induced, there is often a
great display of intellectual activity, followed by complete
oblivion of all that has passed.*

On being suddenly awakened from a sleep, however pro-
found, we always catch ourselves in the middle of a dream.
Common dreams are often remembered for a few minutes
after waking, and then irretrievably lost.

Frequently, when awake and absent-minded, we are
visited by thoughts and images which the next instant we
cannot recall.

Our insensibility to habitual noises, etc., whilst awake,
proves that we can neglect to attend to that which we never-
theless feel. Similarly in sleep, we grow inured, and sleep
soundly in presence of sensations of sound, cold, contact,
etc., which at first prevented our complete repose. We have
learned to neglect them whilst asleep as we should whilst
awake. ‘The mere sense-impressions are the same when the
sleep is deep as when it is light; the difference must lie in
a judgment on the part of the apparently slumbering mind
that they are not worth noticing.

This discrimination is equally shown by nurses of the
sick and mothers of infants, who will sleep through much
noise of an irrelevant sort, but waken at the slightest stir-
ring of the patient or the babe. This last fact shows the
sense-organ to be pervious for sounds.

Many people have a remarkable faculty of registering
when asleep the flight of time. They will habitually wake
up at the same minute day after day, or will wake punctu-
ally at an unusual hour determined upon overnight. How
can this knowledge of the hour (more accurate often than
anything the waking consciousness shows) be possible
without mental activity during the interval ?

Such are what we may call the classical reasons for ad-
mitting that the mind is active even when the person after-
wards ignores the fact.t Of late years, or rather, one may

* That the appearance of mental activity here is real can.be proved by
suggesting to the ‘hypnotized’ somnambulist that he shall remember when
he awakes. He will then often do so.

+ For more details, cf. Malebranche, Rech. de la Verité, bk. mr. chap.
1; J. Locke, Essay eonc. H. U., book u. ch. 1; C. Wolf, Psychol.

202 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

say, of late months, they have been reinforced by a lot of
curious observations made on hysterical and hypnotic
subjects, which prove the existence of a highly developed
consciousness in places where it has hitherto not been sus-
pected at all. These observations throw such a novel light
upon human nature that I must give them in some detail.
That at least four different and in a certain sense rival ob-
servers should agree in the same conclusion justifies us in
accepting the conclusion as true.

‘ Unconsciousness’ in Hysterics.

One of the most constant symptoms in persons suffer-
ing from hysteric disease in its extreme forms consists in
alterations of the natural sensibility of various parts and
organs of the body. Usually the alteration is in the direc-
tion of defect, or anesthesia. One or both eyes are blind,
or color-blind, or there is hemianopsia (blindness to one
half 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 anesthesias. The old
witch-finders looking for the ‘devil’s seals’ learned well
the existence of those insensible patches on the skin of
their victims, to which the minute physical examinations
of recent medicine have but recently attracted attention
again. They may be scattered anywhere, but are very
apt to affect one side of the body. Not infrequently they
affect an entire lateral half, from head to foot; and the
insensible skin of, say, the left side will then be found
separated from the naturally sensitive skin of the right by a
perfectly sharp line of demarcation down the middle of the
front and back. Sometimes, most remarkable of all, the
entire skin, hands, feet, face, everything, and the mucous
membranes, muscles and joints so far as they can be ex-

rationalis, § 59; Sir W. Hamilton, Lectures on Metaph., lecture xvir;
J. Bascom, Science of Mind, § 12; Th. Jouffroy, Mélanges Philos., ‘du
Sommeil’; H. Holland, Chapters on Mental Physiol., p. 80; B. Brodie,
Psychol. Researches, p. 147; E. M. Chesley, Journ. of Spec. Phil., vol. x1.
p. 72; Th. Ribot, Maladies de la Personnalité, pp. 8-10; H. Lotze, Meta-

physics, § 533.

THE RELATIONS OF MINDS TO OTHER THINGS. 203

plored, become completely insensible without the other vital
functions becoming gravely disturbed.

These hysterical anzsthesias can be made to disappear
more or less completely by various odd processes. It has
been recently found that magnets, plates of metal, or the
electrodes of a battery, placed against the skin, have this
peculiar power. And when one side is relieved in this way,
the anesthesia is often found to have transferred itself to
the opposite side, which until then was well. Whether these
strange effects of magnets and metals be due to their direct
physiological action, or to a prior effect on the patient’s
mind (‘expectant attention’ or ‘suggestion’) is still a
mooted question. A still better awakener of sensibility is
the hypnotic trance, into which many of these patients can
be very easily placed, and in which their lost sensibility not
infrequently becomes entirely restored. Such returns of
sensibility succeed the times of insensibility and alternate
with them. But Messrs. Pierre Janet* and A. Binet + have
shown that during the times of anesthesia, and coexisting
with it, sensibility to the anesthetic parts is also there, in the
form of a secondary consciousness entirely cut off from the
primary or normal one, but susceptible of being tapped and
made to testify to its existence in various odd ways.

Chief amongst these is what M. Janet calls ‘ the method
of distraction.’ These hysterics are apt to possess a very
narrow field of attention, and to be unable to think of more
than one thing at a time. When talking with any person
they forget everything else. “When Lucie talked directly
with any one,” says M. Janet, “she ceased to be able to hear
any other person. You may stand behind her, call her by
name, Shout abuse into her ears, without making her turn
round; or place yourself before her, show her objects,
touch her, etc., without attracting her notice. When finally
she becomes aware of you, she thinks you have just come
into the room again, and greets you accordingly. This
singular forgetfulness makes her liable to tell all her secrets
aloud, unrestrained by the presence of unsuitable auditors.”

* L’Automatisme Psychologique, Paris, 1889, passim.
+ See his articles in the Chicago Open Court, for July, August and
November, 1889. Also in the Revue Philosophique for 1889 and ’90.

204 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

Now M. Janet found in several subjects like this thatif he
came up behind them whilst they were plunged in conyersa-
tion with a third party, and addressed them in a whisper, tell-
ing them to raise their hand or perform other simple acts,
they would obey the order given, although their talk-
ing intelligence was quite unconscious of receiving it. Lead-
ing them from one thing to another, he made them reply by
signs to his whispered questions, and finally made them
answer in writing, if a pencil were placed in their hand.
The primary consciousness meanwhile went on with the
conversation, entirely unaware of these performances on the
hand’s part. The consciousness which presided over these
latter appeared in its turn to be quite as little disturbed by
the upper consciousness’s concerns. This proof by ‘auto-
matic’ writing, of a secondary consciousness’s existence, is
the most cogent and striking one ; but a crowd of other facts
prove the same thing. If Irun through them rapidly, the
reader will probably be convinced.

The apparently anesthetic hand of these subjects, for
one thing, will often adapt itself discriminatingly to what-
ever object may be put into it. With a pencil it will make
writing movements ; into a pair of scissors it will put its fin-
gers and will open and shut them, etc., etc. The primary con-
sciousness, so to callit, is meanwhile unable to say whether
or no anything is in the hand, if the latter be hidden from
sight. ‘I put a pair of eyeglasses into Léonie’s anesthetic
hand, this hand opens it and raises it towards the nose, but
half way thither it enters the field of vision of Léonie, who
sees it and stops stupetied : ‘Why,’ says she, ‘ I have an eye-
glass in my left hand!” M. Binet found a very curious sort
of connection between the apparently anesthetic skin and
the mind in some Salpétricre-subjects. Things placed in
the hand were not felt, but thought of (apparently in visual
terms) and in no wise referred by the subject to their start-
ing point in the hand’s sensation. A key, aknife, placed in
the hand occasioned ideas of a key or a knife, but the hand
felt nothing. Similarly the subject thought of the number
3, 6, etc., if the hand or finger was bent three or six times
by the operator, or if he stroked it three, six, etc., times.

In certain individuals there was found a still odder

THE RELATIONS OF MINDS TO OTHER THINGS, 20d

phenomenon, which reminds one of that curious idiosyncrasy
of ‘colored hearing’ of which a few cases have been lately
described with great care by foreign writers. These indi-
viduals, namely, saw the impression received by the hand,
but could not feel it; and the thing seen appeared by no
means associated with the hand, but more like an indepen-
dent vision, which usually interested and surprised the
patient. Her hand being hidden by a screen, she was
ordered to look at another screen and to tell of any visual
image which might project itself thereon. Numbers would
then come, corresponding to the number of times the in-
sensible member was raised, touched, ete. Colored lines
and figures would come, corresponding to similar ones
traced on 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 nothing would ever be
felt. Of course simulation would not be hard here; but
M. Binet disbelieves this (usually very shallow) explanation
to be a probable one in cases in question.*

The usual way in which doctors measure the delicacy
of our touch is by the compass-points. Two points are
normally felt as one whenever they are too close together
for discrimination ; but what is ‘too close’ on one part of
the skin may seem very far apart on another. In the
middle of the back or on the thigh, less than 3 inches may
be too close ; on the finger-tip a tenth of an inch is far
enough apart. Now, as tested in this way, with the appeal
made to the primary consciousness, which talks through
the mouth and seems to hold the field alone, a certain per-
son’s skin may be entirely anesthetic and not feel the com-
pass-points at all; and yet this same skin will prove to have
a perfectly normal sensibility if the appeal be made to that
other secondary or sub-consciousness, which expresses
itself automatically by writing or by movements of the hand.
M. Binet, M. Pierre Janet, and M. Jules Janet have all found
this. The subject, whenever touched, wonld signify ‘one

* This whole phenomenon shows how an idea which remains itself below
the threshold of a certain conscious self may occasion associative effects
therein. Theskin-sensations unfelt by the patient’s primary consciousness
awaken nevertheless their usual visual associates therein.

206 PSYCHOLOGY.

point’ or ‘two points,’ as accurately as if she were a nor
mal person. She would signify it only by these movements ;
and of the movements themselves her primary self would
be as unconscious as of the facts they signified, for what the
submerged consciousness makes the hand do automatically
is unknown to the consciousness which uses the mouth.

Messrs. Bernheim and Pitres have also proved, by ob-
servations too complicated to be yiven in this spot,
that the hysterical blindness is no real blindness at ali.
The eye of an hysteric which is totally blind when the
other or seeing eye is shut, will do its share of vision per-
fectly well when both eyes are open together. But even
where both eyes are semi-blind from hysterical disease,
the method of automatic writing proves that their percep-
tions exist, only cut off from communication with the upper
consciousness. M. Binet has found the hand of his patients
unconsciously writing down words which their eyes were
vainly endeavoring to ‘see,’ i.e., to bring to the upper con-
sciousness. Their submerged consciousness was of course
seeing 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 the
. normal consciousness. Pricks, burns, and pinches on the
anesthetic skin, all unnoticed by the upper self, are recol-
lected to have been suffered, and complained of, as soon
as the under self gets a chance to express itself by the
passage of the subject into hypnotic trance.

It must be admitted, therefore, that in certain persons,
at least, the total possible consciousness may be split into
parts which coexist but mutually ignore each other, and
share the objects of knowledge between them. More re-
markable still, they are complementary. Give an object
to one of the consciousnesses, and by that fact you remove
it from the other or others. Barring a certain common
fund of information, like the command of language, etce.,
what the upper self knows the under self is ignorant of,
and vice versa. M. Janet has proved this beautifully in his
subject Lucie. The following experiment will serve as the
type of the rest: In her trance he covered her lap with
cards, each bearing a number. He then told her that on

THE RELATIONS OF MINDS TO OTHER THINGS. 207

waking she should net see any card whose number was a
multiple of three. This is the ordinary so-called ‘ post-
hypnotic suggestion,’ now well known, and for which Lucie
was a well-adapted subject. Accordingly, when she was
awakened and asked about the papers on her lap, she
counted and said she saw those only whose number was
not a multiple of 3. To the 12, 18, 9, etc., she was blind.
But the hand, when the sub-conscious self was interrogated
by the usual method of engrossing the upper self in another
conversation, wrote that the only cards in Lucie’s lap were
those numbered 12, 18, 9, etc., and on being asked to pick
up all the cards which were there, picked up these and let
the others lie. Similarly when the sight of certain things
was suggested to the sub-conscious Lucie, the normal
Lucie suddenly became partially or totally blind. “ What
is the matter? I can’t see!” the normal personage sud-
denly. cried out in the midst of her conversation, when
M. Janet whispered to the secondary personage to make
use of her eyes. The anesthesias, paralyses, contractions
and other irregularities from which hysterics suffer seem
then to be due to the fact that their secondary personage
has enriched itself by robbing the primary one of a func-
tion which the latter ought to have retained The curative
indication is evident: get at the secondary personage, by
hypnotization or in whatever other way, and make her give
up the eye, the skin, the arm, or whatever the affected part
may be. The normal self thereupon regains possession, sees,
feels, or is able to move again. In this way M. Jules Janet
easily cured the well-known subject of the Salpétricre, Wit.,
of all sorts of afflictions which, until he discovered the
secret of her deeper trance, it had been difficult to subdue.
““Cessez cette mauvaise plaisanterie,” he said to the sec-
ondary self—and the latter obeyed. The way in which the
various personages share the stock of possible sensations
betwéen them seems to be amusingly illustrated in this
young woman. When awake, her skin is insensible every-
where except on a zone about the arm where she habitually
wears a gold bracelet. This zone has feeling; but in the
deepest trance, when all the rest of her body feels, this par-
ticular zone becomes absolutely anesthetic.

208 PSYCHOLOGY.

Sometimes the mutual ignorance of the selves leads ta
incidents which are strange enough. The acts and move-
ments performed by the sub-conscious self are withdrawn
from the conscious one, and the subject will do all sorts of
incongruous things of which he remains quite unaware.
“T order Lucie [by the method of distraction] to make a
pied de nez, and her hands go forthwith to the end of her
nose. Asked what she is doing, she replies that she is
doing nothing, and continues for a long time talking, with
no apparent suspicion that her fingers are moving in front
of her nose. I make her walk about the room; she con-
tinues to speak and believes herself sitting down.”

M. Janet observed similar acts in a man in alcoholic
delirium. Whilst the doctor was questioning him, M. J.
made him by whispered suggestion walk, sit, kneel, and even
lie down on his face on the floor, he all the while believing
himself to be standing beside his bed. Such bizarreries
sound incredible, until one has seen their like. Long ago,
without understanding it, I myself saw a smail example of
the way in which a person’s knowledge may be shared by
the two selves. A young woman who had been writing
automatically was sitting with a pencil in her hand, trying to
recall at my request the name of a gentleman whom she had
once seen. She could only recollect the first syllable. Her
hand meanwhile, without her knowledge, wrote down the
last two syllables. In a perfectly healthy young man who
can write with the planchette, I lately found the hand to
be entirely anesthetic during the writing act ; I could prick
it severely without the Subject knowing the fact. The writ-
ing on the planchette, however, accused me in strong terms
of hurting the hand. Pricks on the other (non-writing)
hand, meanwhile, which awakened strong protest from the
young man’s vocal organs, were denied to exist by the self
which made the planchette go.*

We get exactly similar results in the so-called post-hyp-
notic suggestion. It is a familiar fact that certain sub-
jects, when told during a trance to perform an act or to

* See Proceedings of American Soc. for Psych. Research, vol. I. p.
548.

THE RELATIONS OF MINDS TO OTHER THINGS. 209

experience an hallucination after waking, will when the time
comes, obey the command. How is the command regis-
tered? How is its performance so accurately timed?
These problems were long a mystery, for the primary per-
sonality remembers nothing of the trance or the suggestion,
and will often trump up an improvised pretext for yielding
to the unaccountable impulse which possesses the man so
suddenly and which he cannot resist. Edmund Gurney
was the first to discover, by means of automatic writing, that
the secondary self is awake, keeping its attention con-
stantly fixed on the command and watching for the signal
of its execution. Certain trance-subjects who were also
automatic writers, when roused from trance and put to the
planchette,—not knowing then what they wrote, and having
their upper attention fully engrossed by reading aloud, talk-
ing, or solving problems in anal arithmetic, —would in-
scribe the orden which they had received, together with
notes relative to the time elapsed and the time yet to run
before the execution.* It is therefore to no ‘automatism’
in the mechanical sense that such acts are due: a self pre-
sides over them, a split-off, limited and buried, but yet a
fully conscious, self. More than this, the buried self often
comes to the surface and drives out the other self whilst
the acts are performing. In other words, the subject
lapses into trance again when the moment arrives for exe.
cution, and has no subsequent recollection of the act which
he has done. Gurney and Beaunis established this fact,
which has since been verified on a large scale; and Gurney
also showed that the patient became suggestible again during
the brief time of the performance. M. Janet’s observa-
tions, in their turn, well illustrate the phenomenon.

‘*T tell Lucie to keep her arms raised after she shall have
awakened. Hardly is she in the normal state, when up go her arms
above her head. but she pays no attention to them. She goes, comes,
converses, holding her arms high in the air. If asked what her arms
are doing, she is surprised at such a question, and says very sincerely :
‘My hands are doing nothing; they are just like yours.’... I com-

* Proceedings of the (London) Soc. for Psych. Research, May, 1887, p.
268 ff.

210 PSYCHOLOGY.

mand her to weep, and when awake she really sobs, but continues ir
the 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 quite
sub-conscious.”

The primary self often has to invent an hallucination by
which to mask and hide from its own view the deeds which
the other self is enacting. Léonie 3* writes real letters,
whilst Léonie 1 believes that she is knitting; or Lucie 3
really comes to the doctor’s office, whilst Lucie 1 believes
herself to be at home. This is a sort of delirium. The
alphabet, or the series of numbers, when handed over to
the attention of the secondary personage may for the
time be lost to the normal self. Whilst the hand writes
the alphabet, obediently to command, the ‘subject,’ to
her great stupefaction, finds herself unable to recall it, ete.
Few things are more curious than these relations of mutual
exclusion, of which all gradations exist between the several
partial consciousnesses.

How far this splitting up of the mind into separate con-
sciousnesses may exist in each one of us isa problem. M.
Janet holds that it is only possible where there is abnormal
weakness, and consequently a defect of unifying or co-or-
dinating power. An hysterical woman abandons part of her
consciousness because she is too weak nervously to hold
it together. The abandoned part meanwhile may solidify
into a secondary or sub-conscious self. Ina perfectly sound
subject, on the other hand, what is dropped out of mind at
one moment keeps coming back at the next. The whole
fund of experiences and knowledges remains integrated, and
no split-off portions of it can get organized stably enough
to form subordinate selves. The stability, monotony, and
stupidity of these latter is often very striking. The post-
hypnotic sub-consciousness seems to think of nothing but
the order which it last received; the cataleptic sub-con-
sciousness, of nothing but the last position imprinted on the
limb. M. Janet could cause definitely circumscribed red-
dening and tumefaction of the skin on two of his subjects,

* M. Janet designates by numbers the different personalities which the
subject may display.

THE RELATIONS OF MINDS TO OTHER THINGS. 211

by suggesting to them in hypnotism the hallucination of a
mustard-poultice of any special shape. “J’ai tout le
temps pensé a votre sinapisme,” says the subject, when
put back into trance after the suggestion has taken effect.
A man N.,... whom M. Janet operated on at long in-
tervals, was betweenwhiles tampered with by another
operator, and when put to sleep again by M. Janet, said he
was ‘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 from
his trance, and the poor passive trance-personality had
stuck for weeks in the stagnant dream. Léonie’s sub-con-
scious performances having been illustrated to a caller, by
a ‘ pied de nez’ executed with her left hand in the course
of conversation, when, a year later, she meets him again,
up goes the same hand to her nose again, without Léonie’s
normal self suspecting the fact.

All these facts, taken togecher, form unquestionably the
beginning of an inquiry which is destined to throw a new
light into the very abysses of our nature. It is for that
reason that I have cited them at such length in this early
chapter of the book. They prove one thing conclusively,
namely, that we must never take a person’s testimony, how-
ever sincere, that he has felt nothing, as proof positive that
no feeling has been there. It may have been there as part of
the consciousness of a ‘secondary personage,’ of whose ex-
periences the primary one whom we are consulting can
naturally give no account. In hypnotic subjects (as we
shall see in a later chapter) just as it is the easiest thing in
the world to paralyze a movement or member by simple
suggestion, so it is easy to produce what is called a system
atized anesthesia by word of command. A systematized
anesthesia means an insensibility, not to any one element
of things, but to some one concrete thing or class of things.
The subject is made blind or deaf to a certain person in the
room and to no one else, and thereupon denies that that per-
son is present, or has spoken, etc. M. P. Janet’s Lucie, blind
to some of the numbered cards in her lap (p. 207 above), is
a case in point. Now when the object is simple, like a red

212 PSYCHOLOGY.

wafer or a black cross, the subject, although he denies that
he sees it when he looks straight at it, nevertheless gets a
‘negative after-image’ of it when he looks away again,
showing that the optical impression of it has been received.
Moreover reflection shows that such a subject must dis-
tinguish the object from others like it in order to be blind to
it. Make him blind to one person in the room, set all
the persons in a row, and tell him to count them. He will
count all but that one. But how can he tell which one not
to count without recognizing who he is? In like manner,
make a stroke on paper or blackboard, and tell him it is
not there, and he will see nothing but the clean paper or
board. Next (he not looking) surround the original stroke
with other strokes exactly like it, and ask him what he
sees. He will point out one by one all the new strokes, and
omit the original one every time, no matter how numerous
the new strokes may be, or in what order they are
arranged. Similarly, if the original single stroke to which
he is blind be doubled by a prism of some sixteen degrees
placed before one of his eyes (both being kept open), he
will say that he now sees one stroke, and point in the direc-
tion in which the image seen through the prism lies, ignor-
ing still the original stroke.

Obviously, then, he is not blind to the kind of stroke in
the least. He is blind only to one individual stroke of that
kind in a particular position on the board or paper—that
is to a particular complex object; and, paradoxical as it
may seem to say so, he must distinguish it with great ac-
curacy from others like it, in order to remain blind to it
when the others are brought near. Fle discriminates it, as
a preliminary to not seeing it at all.

Again, when by a prism before one eye a previously in-
visible line has been made visible to that eye, and the other
eye is thereupon closed or screened, z#s closure makes no
ditference ; the line still remains visible. But if then the
prism be removed, the line will disappear even to the eye
which a moment ago saw it, and both eyes will revert to
their original blind state.

We have, then, to deal in these cases neither with a blind-
ness of the eye itself, nor with a mere failure to notice, but

THE RELATIONS OF MINDS TO OTHER THINGS 213

with something much more complex; namely, an active
counting out and positive exclusion of certain objects. It
is as when one ‘ cuts’ an acquaintance, ‘ignores’ a claim,
or ‘refuses to be influenced’ by a consideration. But the
perceptive activity which works to this result is discon-
nected from the consciousness which is personal, so to
speak, to the subject, and makes of the object concerning
which the suggestion is made, its own private possession
and prey.* =

The mother who is asleep to every sound but the stir-
rings of her babe, evidently has the babe-portion of her au-
ditory sensibility systematically awake. Relatively to that,
the rest of her mind is in a state of systematized anzsthesia.
That department, split off and disconnected from the sleep-
ing part, can none the less wake the latter up in case of
need. So that on the whole the quarrel between Des-
cartes and Locke as to whether the mind ever sleeps is less
near to solution than ever. On a priori speculative grounds
Locke’s view that thought and feeling may at times wholly
disappear seems the more plausible. As glands cease to
secrete and muscles to contract, so the brain should some-
times cease to carry currents, and with this minimum of its
activity 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 may
sever its connections with other parts and yet continue to be.
On the whole it is best to abstain from a conclusion. The
science of the near future will doubtless answer this ques-
tion more wisely than we can now.

* How to conceive of this state of mind is not easy. It would be much
simpler to understand the process, if adding new strokes made the first one
visible. There would then be two different objects apperceived as totals,
—paper with one stroke, paper with many strokes ; and, blind to the for-
mer, he would see all that was in the latter, because he would have apper-
ceived it as a different total in the first instance.

A process of this sort occurs sometimes (not always) when the new
strokes, instead of being mere repetitions of the original one, are lines
which combine with it into a total object, say ahuman face. The sub-
ject of the trance then may regain his sight of the line to which he had
previously been blind, by seeing it as part of the face.

214 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

Let us turn now to consider the
RELATIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS TO SPACE.

This is the problem known in the history of philoso.
phy as the question of the seat of the soul. It has given
rise to much literature, but we must ourselves treat it very
briefly. Everything depends on what we conceive the soul
to be, an extended or an inextended entity. If the former,
it may occupy a seat. If the latter, it may not; though it
has been thought that even then it might still have a posi-
tion. Much hair-splitting has arisen about the possibility
of an inextended thing nevertheless being present through-
out a certain amount of extension. We must distinguish
the kinds of presence. In some manner our consciousness
is ‘present’ to everything with which it is in relation. I am
cognitively present to Orion whenever I perceive that con-
stellation, but 1am not dynamically present there, I work
no effects. To my brain, however, lam dynamically present,
inasmuch as my thoughts and feelings seem to react upon
the processes thereof. If, then, by the seat of the mind is
meant nothing more than the locality with which it stands
in immediate dynamic relations, we are certain to be
right in saying that its seat is somewhere in the cortex of
the brain. Descartes, as is well known, thought that the
inextended soul was immediately present to the pineal
gland. Others, as Lotze in his earlier days, and W. Volk-
mann, think its position must be at some point of the struc-
tureless matrix of the anatomical brain-elements, at which
point they suppose that all nerve-currents may cross and
combine. The scholastic doctrine is that the soul is to-
tally present, both in the whole and in each and every part
of the body. This mode of presence is said to be due to
the soul’s inextended nature and to its simplicity. Two ex-
tended entities could only correspond in space with one
another, part to part,—but not so does the soul, which has
no parts, correspond with the body. Sir Wm. Hamilton
and Professor Bowen defend something like this view. I.
H. Fichte, Ulrici, and, among American philosophers, Mr.
J. E. Walter,* maintain the soul to be a space-filling prin-

* Perception of Space and Matter, 1879, part 11. chap. 3

THE RELATIONS OF MINDS TO OTHER THINGS. 215

ciple. Fichte calls it the inner body, Ulrici likens it to a
fluid of non-molecular composition. These theories remind
us of the ‘theosophic’ doctrines of the present day, and
carry us back to times when the soul as vehicle of con-
sciousness was not discriminated, as it now is, from the
vital principle presiding over the formation of the body.
Plato gave head, breast, and abdomen to the immortal rea-
son, the courage, and the appetites, as their seats respec-
tively. Aristotle argues that the heart is the sole seat.
Elsewhere we find the blood, the brain, the lungs, the liver
the kidneys even, in turn assigned as seat of the whole or
part of the soul.*

The truth is that if the thinking principle is extended we
neither know its form nor its seat; whilst if unextended, it
is absurd to speak of its having any space-relations at all.
Space-relations we shall see hereafter to be sensible things.
The only objects that can have mutual relations of position
are objects that are perceived coexisting in the same felt
space. A thing not perceived at all, such as the inextended
soul must be, cannot coexist with any perceived objects in
this way. No lines can be felt stretching from it to the
other objects. It can form no terminus to any space-inter-
val. It can therefore in no intelligible sense enjoy position.
Its relations cannot be spatial, but must be exclusively
cognitive or dynamic, as we have seen. So far as they are
dynamic, to talk of the soul being ‘ present’ is only a figure
of speech. Hamilton’s doctrine that the soul is present to
the whole body is at any rate false: for cognitively its pres-
ence extends far beyond the body, and dynamically it does
not extend beyond the brain.t

* For a very good condensed history of the various opinions, see W.
Volkmann von Volkmar, Lehrbuch d. Psychologie, § 16, Anm. Complete
references to Sir W. Hamilton are given in J. E. Walter, Perception of
Space and Matter, pp. 65-6.

+ 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. Microcos.
mus, bk. mm. ch. 2. Metaphysic, bk. m1. ch. 5. Outlines of Psychol.
part 1. ch. 8. See also G. T. Fechner, Psychophysik, chap. xxxvit.

216 PSYCHOLOG Y.

THE RELATIONS OF MINDS TO OTHER OBJECTS

are either relations to other minds, or to material things. The
material things are either the mind’s own brain, on the one
hand, or anything else, on the other. The relations of a
mind to its own brain are of a unique and utterly mysteri-
ous sort; we discussed them in the last two chapters, and
can add nothing to that account.

The mind’s relations to other objects than the brain are
cognitive and emotional relations exclusively, so far as we
know. It knows them, and it inwardly welcomes or rejects
them, butit has no other dealings with them. When it seems
to act upon them, it only does so through the intermediary
of its own body, so that not it but the body is what acts on
them, and the brain must first act upon the body. The
same is true when other things seem to act on it—they only
act on the body, and through that on its brain.* All that
it can do directly is to know other things, misknow or
ignore them, and to find that they interest it, in this fashion
or in that.

Now the relation of knowing is the most mysterious thing
In the world. If we ask how one thing can know another
we are led into the heart of Erkenntnisstheorie and metaphys-
ics. The psychologist, for his part, does not consider the
matter so curiously as this. Finding a world before him
which he cannot but believe that he knows, and setting
himself to study his own past thoughts, or someone else’s
thoughts, of what he believes to be that same world; he
cannot but conclude that those other thoughts know it after
their fashion even as he knows it after his. Knowledge be-
comes for him an ultimate relation that must be admitted,
whether it be explained or not, just like difference or re-
semblance, which no one seeks to explain.

Were our topic Absolute Mind instead of being the con-
erete minds of individuals dwelling in the natural world,
we could not tell whether that Mind had the function of
knowing or not, as knowing is commonly understood. We

* I purposely ignore ‘clairvoyance’ and action upon distant things by
‘mediums,’ as not yet matters of common consent.

THE RELATIONS OF MINDS TO OTHER THINGS. 217

might learn the complexion of its thoughts; but, as we
should have no realities outside of it to compare them with,
—for if we had, the Mind would not be Absolute,—we could
not criticise them, and find them either right or wrong ; and
we should have to call them simply the thoughts, and not
the knowledge, of the Absolute Mind. Finite minds, how-
ever, can be judged in a different way, because the psychol-
ogist himself can go bail for the independent reality of the
objects of which they think. He knows these to exist out-
side as well as inside the minds in question ; he thus knows
whether the minds think and know, or only think; and
though his knowledge is of course that of a fallible mortal,
there is nothing in the conditions that should make it more
likely to be wrong in this case than in any other.

Now by what tests does the psychologist decide whether
the state of mind he is studying is a bit of knowledge, or
only a subjective fact not referring to anything ‘outside
itself ?

He uses the tests we all practically use. If the state of
mind resembles his own idea of a certain reality ; orif without
resembling his idea of it, it seems to imply that reality and
refer to it by operating upon it through the bodily organs ;
or even if it resembles and operates on some other reality
that implies, and leads up to, and terminates in, the first
one,—in either or all of these cases the psychologist admits
that the state of mind takes cognizance, directly or remotely,
distinctly or vaguely, truly or falsely, of the reality’s nature
and position in the world. If, on the other hand, the
mental state under examination neither resembles nor oper-
ates on any of the realities known to the psychologist, he calls
it a subjective state pure and simple, possessed of no cog-
nitive worth. If, again, it resemble a reality or a set of
realities as he knows them, but altogether fail to operate
on them or modify their course by producing bodily motions
which the psychologist sees, then the psychologist, like all
of us, may be in doubt. Let the mental state, for example,
occur during the sleep of its subject. Let the latter dream
of the death of a certain man, and let the man simulta-
neously die. Is the dream a mere coincidence, or a veri-
table cognition of the death? Such puzzling cases are

218 PSYCHOLOGY.

what the Societies for ‘Psychical Research’ are collect
ing and trying to interpret in the most reasonable way.

If the dream were the only one of the kind the subject
ever had in his life, if the context of the death in the dream
differed in many particulars from the real death’s context,
and if the dream led to no action about the death, unques-
tionably we should all call it a strange coincidence, and
naught besides. But if the death in the dream had a long
context, agreeing point for point with every feature that
attended the real death; if the subject were constantly
having such dreams, all equally perfect, and if on awaking
he had a habit of acting immediately as if they were true
and so getting ‘the start’ of his more tardily informed
neighbors,—we should probably all have to admit that he
had some mysterious kind of clairvoyant power, that his
dreams in an inscrutable way knew just those realities
which they figured, and that the word ‘coincidence’ failed
to touch the root of the matter. And whatever doubts any
one preserved would completely vanish if it should appear
that from the midst of his dream he had the power of inter-
fering with the course of the reality, and making the events
in it turn this way or that, according as he dreamed they
should. Then at least it would be certain that he and the
psychologist were dealing with the same. It is by such
tests as these that we are convinced that the waking minds
of our fellows and our own minds know the same external
world.

The psychologist’s attitude towards cognition will be so
important in the sequel that we must not leave it until it is
made perfectly clear. Jt 7s a thoroughgoing dualism. It
supposes two elements, mind knowing and thing known, and
treats them as irreducible. Neither gets out of itself or
into the other, neither in any way is the other, neither
makes the other. They just stand face to face in a common
world, and one simply knows, or is known unto, its counter-
part. This singular relation is not to be expressed in any
lower terms, or translated into any more intelligible name.
Some sort of signal must be given by the thing to the mind’s
brain, or the knowing will not occur—we find as a matter

THE RELATIONS OF MINDS TO OTHER THINGS. 219

of fact that the mere existence of a thing outside the brain
is not a sufficient cause for our knowing it: it must strike
the brain in some way, as well as be there, to be known.
But the brain being struck, the knowledge is constituted
by a new construction that occurs altogether in the mind.
The thing remains the same whether known or not.* And
when once there, the knowledge may remain there, what-
ever becomes of the thing.

By the ancients, and by unreflecting people perhaps to-
day, knowledge is explained as the passage of something
from without into the mind—the latter, so far, at least, as
its sensible affections go, being passive and _ receptive.
But even in mere sense-impression the duplication of the
object by an inner construction must take place. Consider,
with Professor Bowne, what happens when two people con-
verse together and know each other’s mind.

‘* No thoughts leave the mind of one and cross into the mind of the
other. When we speak of an exchange of thought, even the crudest
mind knows that this is a mere figure of speech. . . . To perceive
another’s thought,we must construct his thought within ourselves; .
this thought is our own and is strictly original with us. At the same
time we owe it to the other; and if it had not originated with him, it
would probably not have originated with us. But what has the other
done? .. . This: by an entirely mysterious world-order, the speaker
is enabled to produce a series of signs which are totally unlike [the]
thought, but which, by virtue of the same mysterious order, act as a
series of incitements upon the hearer, so that he constructs within
himself the corresponding mentalstate. The act of the speaker consists
in availing himself of the proper incitements. The act of the hearer is
immediately only the reaction of the soul against the incitement. ...
All communion between finite minds is of this sort. . . . Probably no
reflecting person would deny this conclusion, but when we say that
what is thus true of perception of another’s thought is equally true of
the perception of the outer world in general, many minds will be
disposed to question, and not a few will deny it outright. Yet there is
no alternative but to affirm that to perceive the universe we must
construct it in thought, and that our knowledge of the universe is but
the unfolding of the mind’s inner nature. . . . By describing the mind
as a waxen tablet, and things as impressing themselves upon it, we
seem to get great insight until we think to ask where this extended
tablet is, and how things stamp themselves on it, and how the percep-

* T disregard consequences which may later come to the thing from the
fact that itis known. The knowing per se in no wise affects the thing.

220 PSYCHOLOGY.

tive act would be explained even if they did... . The immediate
antecedents of sensation and perception area series of nervous changes
in the brain. Whatever we know of the outer world is revealed only
in and through these nervous changes. But these are totally unlike
the objects assumed to exist as their causes. If we might conceive the
mind as in the light, and in direct contact with its objects, the
imagination at least would be comforted; but when we conceive the
mind as coming in contact with the outer world only in the dark
chamber of the skull, and then not in contact with the objects per-
ceived, but only with a series of nerve-changes of which, moreover, it
knows nothing, it is plain that the object is a long way off. All talk
of pictures, impressions, etc., ceases because of the lack of all the
conditions to give such figures any meaning. It is not even clear that
we shall ever find our way out of the darkness into the world of light
and reality again. We begin with complete trust in physics and the
senses, and are forthwith led away from the object into a nervous
labyrinth, where the object is entirely displaced by a set of nervous
changes which are totally unlike anything but themselves. Finally,
we land in the dark chamber of the skull. The object has gone com-
pletely, and knowledge has not yet appeared. Nervous signs are the
raw material of all knowledge of the outer world according to the most
decided realism. But in order to pass beyond these signs into a
knowledge of the outer world, we must posit an interpreter who shall
read back these signs into their objective meaning. But that inter-
preter, again, must implicitly contain the meaning of the universe
within itself; and these signs are really but excitations which cause the
soul to unfold what is within itself. Inasmuch as by common consent
the soul communicates with the outer world only through these signs,
and never comes nearer to the object than such signs can bring it, it
follows that the principles of interpretation must be in the mind itself,
and that the resulting construction is primarily only an expression of the
mind’s own nature. All reaction is of this sort; it expresses the nature
of the reacting agent, and knowledge comes under the same head.
this fact makes it necessary for us either to admit a pre-established
harmony between the laws and nature of thought and the laws and
nature of things, or else to allow that the objects of perception, the
universe as it appears, are purely phenomenal, being but the way in
which the mind reacts against the ground of its sensations.” *

The dualism of Object and Subject and their pre-estab-
lished harmony are what the psychologist as such must
assume, whatever ulterior monistic philosophy he may, as
an individual who has the right also to be a metaphysician,
have in reserve. I hope that this general point is now

* B. P. Bowne: Metaphysics, pp. 407-10. Cf. also Lotze: Logik,
§§ 308, 326-7.

THE RELATIONS OF MINDS TO OTHER THINGS. 221

made clear, so that we may leave it, and descend to some
distinctions of detail.

There are two kinds of knowledge broadly and practically
distinguishable: we may call them respectively knowledge
of acquaintance and knowledge-about. Most languages ex-
press the distinction ; thus, yydvaz, eidévar; noscere, scire ;
kennen, wissen; connaitre, savoir.* I am acquainted with
many 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 a
pear when I taste it; I know an inch when I move my
finger through it; a second of time, when I feel it pass;
an effort of attention when I make it; a difference between
two things when I notice it; but about the inner nature of
these facts or what makes them what they are, I can say
nothing at all. I cannot impart acquaintance with them
to any one who has not already made it himself. I cannot
describe them, make a blind man guess what blue is like,
define to a child a syllogism, or tell a philosopher in just
what respect distance is just what it is, and differs from
other forms of relation. At most, I can say to my friends,
Go to certain places and act in certain ways, and these
objects will probably come. All the elementary natures of
the world, its highest genera, the simple qualities of matter
and mind, together with the kinds of relation that subsist
between them, must either not be known at all, or known
in this dumb way of acquaintance without knowledge-about.
In minds able to speak at all there is, it is true, some knowl-
edge about everything. Things can at least be classed, and
the times of their appearance told. But in general, the less
we analyze a thing, and the fewer of its relations we per-
ceive, the less we know about it and the more our famili-
arity with it is of the acquaintance-type. The two kinds
of knowledge are, therefore, as the human mind practi-
cally exerts them, relative terms. That is, the same thought
of a thing may be called knowledge-about it in comparison
with a simpler thought, or acquaintance with it in compari-

* Cf. John Grote: Exploratio Philosophica, p. 60% H. Helmholtz,
Popular Scientific Lectures, London, p. 808-9.

222 PSYCHOLOGY.

son with a thought of it that is more articulate and explicit
still.

The grammatical sentence expresses this. Its ‘subject’
stands for an object of acquaintance which, by the addition
of the predicate, is to get something known about it. We
may already know a good deal, when we hear the subject
named—its name may have rich connotations. But, know
we much or little then, we know more still when the sen-
tence is done. We can relapse at will into a mere condi-
tion of acquaintance with an object by scattering our
attention and staring at it In a vacuous trance-like way.
We can ascend to knowledge about it by rallying our wits
and proceeding to notice and analyze and think. What we
are only acquainted with is only present to our minds; we
have it, or the idea of it. But when we know about it, we
do more than merely have it; we seem, as we think over its
relations, to subject it to a sort of treatment and to operate
upon it with our thought. The words feeling and thought
give voice to the antithesis. Through feelings we become
acquainted with things, but only by our thoughts do we
know about them. Feelings are the germ and starting
point of cognition, thoughts the developed tree. The mini-
mum of grammatical subject, of objective presence, of reality
known about, the mere beginning of knowledge, must be
named by the word that says the least. Such a word is the
interjection, as lo! there! ecco! voila! or the article or
demonstrative pronoun introducing the sentence, as the, it,
that. In Chapter XII we shall see a little deeper into what
this distinction, between the mere mental having or feeling
of an object and the thinking of it, portends.

The mental states usually distinguished as feelings are
the emotions, and the sensations we get from skin, muscle,
viscus, eye, ear, nose, and palate. The ‘thoughts,’ as
recognized in popular parlance, are the conceptions and
judgments. When we treat of these mental states in par-
ticular we shall nave to say a word about the cognitive
function and value of each. It may perhaps be well to
notice now that our senses only give us acquaintance with
facts of body, and that of the mental states of other persons

THE RELATIONS OF MINDS TO OTHER THINGS. 223

we only have conceptual knowledge. Of our own past
states of mind we take cognizance in a peculiar way. They
are ‘objects of memory, and appear to us endowed with
a sort of warmth and intimacy that makes the perception
of them seem more like a process of sensation than like a
thought.

CHAPTER IX.*
THE STREAM OF THOUGHT.

WE now begin our study of the mind from within. Most
books start with sensations, as the simplest mental facts,
and proceed synthetically, constructing each higher stage
from those below it. But this is abandoning the empirical
method of investigation. No one ever had a simple sensa-
tion by itself. Consciousness, from our natal day, is of a
teeming multiplicity of objects and relations, and what we
call simple sensations are results of discriminative atten-
tion, pushed often to a very high degree. It is astonishing
what havoc is wrought in psychology by admitting at the
outset apparently innocent suppositions, that nevertheless
contain a flaw. The bad consequences develop themselves
later on, and are irremediable, being woven through the
whole texture of the work. The notion that sensations,
being the simplest things, are the first things to take up in
psychology is one of these suppositions. The only thing
which psychology has a right to postulate at the outset is
the fact of thinking itself, and that must first be taken up
and analyzed. If sensations then prove to be amongst the
elements of the thinking, we shall be no worse off as re-
spects them than if we had taken them for granted at the
start.

The first fact for us, then, as psychologists, is that thinking
of some sort goes on. LIuse the word thinking, in accordance
with what was said on p. 186, for every form of conscious-
ness indiscriminately. If we could say in English ‘it
thinks,’ as we say ‘it rains’ or ‘it blows,’ we should be

* A good deal of this chapter is reprinted from an article ‘On some
Omissions of Introspective Psychology’ which appeared in ‘ Mind’ for
January 1884,

224

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 225

stating the fact most simply and with the minimum of as-
sumption. As we cannot, we must simply say that thought
goes On.

FIVE CHARACTERS IN THOUGHT.

How does it go on? We notice immediately five impor-
tant characters in the process, of which it shall be the duty
of the present chapter to treat in a general way :

1) Every thought tends to be part of a personal con-
sciousness.

2) Within each personal consciousness thought is always
changing.

3) Within each personal consciousness thought is sen-
sibly continuous.

4) It always appears to deal with objects independent
of itself.

5) It is interested in some parts of these objects to the
exclusion of others, and welcomes or rejects—chooses from
among them, in a word—all the while.

In considering these five points successively, we shall
have to plunge in medias res as regards our vocabulary, and
use psychological terms which can only be adequately de-
fined in later chapters of the book. But every one knows
what the terms mean in a rough way ; and it is only ina
rough way that we are now to take them. This chapter is
like a painter’s first charcoal sketch upon his canvas, in
which no niceties appear.

1) Thought tends to Personal Form.

When I say every thought is part of a personal con-
sciousness, ‘personal consciousness’ is one of the terms in
question. Its meaning we know so long as no one asks us
to define it, but to give an accurate account of it is the most
difficult of philosophic tasks. This task we must confront
in the next chapter; here a preliminary word will suffice.

In this room—this lecture-room, say—there are a mul-
titude of thoughts, yours and mine, some of which cohere
mutually, and some not. They are as little each-for-itself
and reciprocally independent as they are all-belonging-
together. They are neither: no one of them is separate,

226 PSYCHOLOGY.

but each belongs with certain others and with none beside,
My thought belongs with my other thoughts, and your
thought with your other thoughts. Whether anywhere in
the room there be a mere thought, which is nobody’s
thought, we have no means of ascertaining, for we have no
experience of its like. The only states of consciousness
that we naturally deal with are found in personal con-
sciousnesses, minds, selves, concrete particular I’s and
you's.

Each of these minds keeps its own thoughts to itself.
There is no giving or bartering between them. No thought
even comes into direct sight of a thought in another per-
sonal consciousness than its own. Absolute insulation,
irreducible pluralism, is the law. It seems as if the ele-
mentary psychic fact were not thought or this thought or that
thought, but my thought, every thought being owned. Neither
contemporaneity, nor proximity in space, nor similarity of
quality and content are able to fuse thoughts together
which are sundered by this barrier of belonging to differ-
ent personal minds. The breaches between such thoughts
are the most absolute breaches in nature. Everyone will
recognize this to be true, so long as the existence of some-
thing corresponding to the term ‘ personal mind’ is all that
is insisted on, without any particular view of its nature
being implied. On these terms the personal self rather
than the thought might be treated as the immediate datum
in psychology. The universal conscious fact is not ‘feel-
ings and thoughts exist,’ but ‘I think’ and ‘I feel.” * No
psychology, at any rate, can question the existence of per-
sonal selves. The worst a psychology can do is so to
interpret the nature of these selves as to rob them of their
worth. A French writer, speaking of our ideas, says some-
where in a fit of anti-spiritualistic excitement that, misled
by certain peculiaritities which they display, we ‘end by
personifying’ the procession which they make,—such per-
sonification being regarded by him as a great philosophic
blunder on our part. It could only be a blunder if the
notion of personality meant something essentially different

* B. P. Bowne: Metaphysics, p. 362.

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 227

from anything to be found in the mental procession. But if
that procession be itself the very ‘ original’ of the notion of
personality, to personify it cannot possibly be wrong. It is
already personified. There are no marks of personality to
be gathered aliunde, and then found lacking in the train of
thought. It has them all already; so that to whatever
farther analysis we may subject that form of personal self-
hood under which thoughts appear, it is, and must remain,
true that the thoughts which psychology studies do contin-
ually tend to appear as parts of personal selves.

I say ‘tend to appear’ rather than ‘appear,’ on account
of those facts of sub-conscious personality, automatic writ-
ing, ete., of which we studied a few in the last chapter.
The buried feelings and thoughts proved now to exist in
hysterical anesthetics, in recipients of post-hypnotic sug-
gestion, etc., themselves are parts of secondary personal
selves. These selves are for the most part very stupid and
contracted, and are cut off at ordinary times from commu-
nication with the regular and normal self of the individual;
but still they form conscious unities, have continuous mem-
ories, speak, write, invent distinct names for themselves, or
adopt names that are suggested ; and, in short, are entirely
worthy of that title of secondary personalities which is now
commonly giventhem. According to M. Janet these second-
ary personalities are always abnormal, and result from the
splitting of what ought to be a single complete self into two
parts, of which one lurks in the background whilst the other
appears on the surface as the only self the man or woman
has. For our present purpose it is unimportant whether
this account of the origin of secondary selves is applicable
to all possible cases of them or not, for it certainly is true
of a large number of them. Now although the size of a
secondary self thus formed will depend on the number of
thoughts that are thus split-off from the main conscious-
ness, the form of it tends to personality, and the later
thoughts pertaining to it remember the earlier ones and
adopt them as their own. M. Janet caught the actual mo-
ment of inspissation (so to speak) of one of these secondary
personalities in his anesthetic somnambulist Lucie. He
found that when this young woman’s attention was absorbed

228 PSYCHOLOGY.

in conversation with a third party, her anesthetic hand
would write simple answers to questions whispered to her by
himself. “ Do you hear?” he asked. ‘“ No,” was the uncon-
sciously written reply. ‘But to answer you must hear.”
“ Yes, quite so.” “Then how do you manage?” “TJ don’t
know.” “There must be some one who hears me.” ‘“ Yes.”
“Who?” “Someone other than Lucie.” ‘ Ah! another per-
son. Shall we give her a name?” “No.” “Yes, it will
be more conyenient.” ‘“ Well, Adrienne, then.” ‘“ Once bap-
tized, the subconscious personage,” M. Janet continues,
“orows more definitely outlined and displays better her
psychological characters. In particular she shows us that
she is conscious of the feelings excluded from the conscious-
ness of the primary or normal personage. She it is who
tells us that Iam pinching the arm or touching the little
finger in which Lucie for so long has had no tactile sensa-
tions.”’ *

In other cases the adoption of the name by the second-
ary self is more spontaneous. I have seen a number of
incipient automatic writers and mediums as yet imperfectly
‘developed,’ who immediately and of their own accord
write and speak in the name of departed spirits. These
may be public characters, as Mozart, Faraday, or real per-
sons formerly known to the subject, or altogether imagi-
nary beings. Without prejudicing the question of real
‘spirit-control’ in the more developed sorts of trance-
utterance, I incline to think that these (often deplorably
unintelligent) rudimentary utterances are the work of an
inferior fraction of the subject’s own natural mind, set free
from control by the rest, and working after a set pattern
fixed by the prejudices of the social environment. In a
spiritualistic community we get optimistic messages, whilst
in an ignorant Catholic village the secondary personage
calls itself by the name of a demon, and proffers blas-
phemies and obscenities, instead of telling us how happy it
is in the summer-land.t

* L’ Automatisme Psychologique, p. 318.

+ Cf. A. Constans: Relation sur une Epidémie d’hystéro-démonopathie
en 1861. 2me ed. Paris, 1863.—Chiap e Franzolini: L’Epidemia d’istero-

demonopatie in Verzegnis. Reggio, 1879.—See also J. Kerner’s little
work : Nachricht von dem Vorkommen des Besessenseins, 1836.

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 229

Beneath these tracts of thought, which, however rudi-
mentary, are still organized selves with a memory, habits,
and sense cf their own identity, M. Janet thinks that the
facts of catalepsy in hysteric patients drive us to suppose
that there are thoughts quite unorganized and impersonal.
A patient in cataleptic trance (which can be produced arti-
ficially in certain hypnotized subjects) is without memory
on waking, and seems insensible and unconscious as long
as the cataleptic condition lasts. If, however, one raises
the arm of such a subject it stays in that position, and the
whole body can thus be moulded like wax under the hands
of the operator, retaining for a considerable time whatever
attitude he communicates to it. In hysterics whose arm,
for example, is anesthetic, the same thing may happen.
The anesthetic arm may remain passively in positions which
it is made to assume; or if the hand be taken and made to
hold a pencil and trace a certain letter, it will continue
tracing that letter indefinitely on the paper. These acts,
until recently, were supposed to be accompanied by no
consciousness at all: they were physiological reflexes. M.
Janet considers with much more plausibility that feeling
escorts them. The feeling is probably merely that of the
position or movement of the limb, and it produces no more
than its natural effects when it discharges into the motor
centres which keep the position maintained, or the movement
incessantly renewed.* Such thoughts as these, says M.
Janet, “are known by no one, for disaggregated sensations
reduced to a state of mental dust are not synthetized in
any personality.” + He admits, however, that these very
same unutterably stupid thoughts tend to develop memory,
—the cataleptic ere long moves her arm at a bare hint; so
that they form no important exception to the law that all
thought tends to assume the form of personal conscious-

Hess.

2) Thought is in Constant Change.
T do not mean necessarily that no one state of mind has
any duration—even if true, that would be hard to establish

* For the Physiology of this compare the chapter on the Will
+ Loc. cit. p. 316.

"230 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

The change which I have more particularly in view is that
which takes place in sensible intervals of time ; and the result
on which I wish to lay stress is this, that no state once gone
can recur and be identical with what it was before. Let us
begin with Mr. Shadworth Hodgson’s description :

‘‘T go straight to the facts, without saying I go to perception, or
sensation, or thought, or any special mode at all. What I find when I
look 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 a
sequence of different feelings. I may shut my eyes and keep perfectly
still, and try not to contribute anything of my own will; but whether
I think or do not think, whether I perceive external things or not, I
always have a succession of different feelings. Anything else that I may
have also, of a more special character, comes in as parts of this suc-
cession. Not to have the succession of different feelings is not to be
conscious at all. ... The chain of consciousness is a sequence of
differents.” *

Such a description as this can awaken no possible pro-
test from any one. We all recognize as different great
classes of our conscious states. Now we are seeing, now
hearing ; now reasoning, now willing; now recollecting, now
expecting ; now loving, now hating; and ina hundred other
ways we know our minds to be alternately engaged. But
all these are complex states. The aim of science is always
to reduce complexity to simplicity; and in psychological
science we have the celebrated ‘theory of ideas’ which,
admitting the great difference among each other of what
may be called concrete conditions of mind, seeks to show
how this is all the resultant effect of variations in the com-
dination of certain simple elements of consciousness that
always remain the same. These mental atoms or molecules
are what Locke called ‘simple ideas.’ Some of Locke’s
successors made out that the only simple ideas were the
sensations strictly so called. Which ideas the simple ones
may be does not, however, now concern us. It is enough
that certain philosophers have thought they could see
under the dissolving-view-appearance of the mind elemen-
tary facts of any sort that remained unchanged amid the
flow.

* The Philosophy of Reflection, 1. 248, 290.

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 231

And the view of these philosophers has been called little
into question, for our common experience seems at first
sight to corroborate it entirely. Are not the sensations we
get 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 grass
give us the same feeling of green, the same sky the same
feeling of blue, and do we not get the same olfactory sen-
sation no matter how many times we put our nose to the
same flask of cologne? It seems a piece of metaphysical
sophistry to suggest that we do not; and yet a close at-
tention to the matter shows that there is no proof that the
same bodily sensation is ever got by us twice.

What is got twice is the same OBJECT. We hear the same
note over and over again; we see the same quality of green,
or smell the same objective perfume, or experience the same
species of pain. The realities, concrete and abstract, physi-
cal and 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 time
later, to the chapter on Perception, we shall see how invet-
erate is our habit of not attending to sensations as subjec-
tive facts, but of simply using them as stepping-stones to
pass over to the recognition of the realities whose presence
they reveal. The grass out of the window now looks to me
of the same green in the sun as in the shade, and yet a
painter would have to paint one part of it dark brown,
arother part bright yellow, to give its real sensational effect.
We take no heed, asa rule, of the different way in which
the same things look and sound and smell at different dis-
tances and under different circumstances. The sameness
of the things is what we are concerned to ascertain; and
any sensations that assure us of that will probabiy be con-
sidered in a rough way to be the same with each other.
This is what makes off-hand testimony about the subjective
identity of different sensations well-nigh worthless as a
proof of the fact. The entire history of Sensation is a com-
mentary on our inability to tell whether two sensations
received apart are exactly alike. What appeals to our

232 PSYCHOLOGY.

attention far more than the absolute quality or quantity of
a given sensation is its ratio to whatever other sensations
we may have at the same time. When everything is dark
a somewhat less dark sensation makes us see an object
white. Helmholtz calculates that the white marble painted
in a picture representing an architectural view by moon-
light is, when seen by daylight, from ten to twenty thousand
times brighter than the real moonlit marble would be.*

Such a difference as this could never have been sensibly
learned ; it had to be inferred from a series of indirect con-
siderations. There are facts which make us believe that
our sensibility is altering all the time, so that the same
object cannot easily give us the same sensation over again.
The eye’s sensibility to light is at its maximum when the
eye is first exposed, and blunts itself with surprising rapid-
ity. A long night’s sleep will make it see things twice as
brightly on wakening, as simple rest by closure will make
it see them later in the day.t We feel things differently
according as we are sleepy or awake, hungry or full, fresh
or tired; differently at night and in the morning, differently
in summer and in winter, and above all things differently in
childhood, manhood, and old age. Yet we never doubt that
our feelings reveal the same world, with the same sensible
qualities and the same sensible things occupying it. The
difference of the sensibility is shown best by the difference
of our emotion about the things from one age to another, or
when we are in different organic moods. What was bright
and exciting becomes weary, flat, and unprofitable. The
bird’s song is tedious, the breeze is mournful, the sky is
sad.

To these indirect presumptions that our sensations, fol-
lowing the mutations of our capacity for feeling, are always
undergoing an essential change, must be added another
presumption, based on what must happen in the brain.
Every sensation corresponds to some cerebral action. For
an identical sensation to recur it would have to occur the
second time in an unmodified brain. But as this, strictly

* Populiire Wissenschaftliche Vortriige, Drittes Heft (1876). p. 72.
+ Fick, in L. Hermann’s Handb. d. Physiol., Bd. m1. Th. 1. p. 226.

*
THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 233

speaking, is a physiological impossibility, so is an un-:
modified feeling an impossibility ; for to every brain-modi-
fication, however small, must correspond a change of equal
amount in the feeling which the brain subserves.

All this would be true if even sensations came to us pure
and single and not combined into ‘things.’ Even then we
should have to confess that, however we might in ordinary
conversation speak of getting the same sensation again, we
never in strict theoretic accuracy could do so; and that
whatever was true of the river of life, of the river of elemen
tary feeling, 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 be
baseless, how much more baseless is the assumption of
immutability in the larger masses of our thought!

For there it is obvious and palpable that our state of
mind is never precisely the same. Every thought we have
of a given fact is, strictly speaking, unique, and only bears a
resemblance of kind with our other thoughts of the same
fact. When the identical fact recurs, we must think of it
in a fresh manner, see it under a somewhat different angle,
apprehend it in different relations from those in which it
last appeared. And the thought by which we cognize it is
the thought of it-in-those-relations, a thought suffused
with the consciousness of all that dim context. Often we
are ourselves struck at the strange differences. in our suc-
cessive views of the same thing. We wonder how we ever
could have opined as we did last month abont a certain
matter. We have outgrown the possibility of that state of
mind, we know not how. From one year to another we see
things in new lights. What was unreal has grown real,
and what was exciting is insipid. The friends we used to
care the world for are shrunken to shadows; the women,
once so divine, the stars, the woods, and the waters, how
now so dull and common! the young girls that brought an
aura of infinity, at present hardly distinguishable exist-
ences; the pictures so empty; and as for the books, what
was there to find so mysteriously significant in Goethe, or in
John Mill so full of weight? Instead of all this, more

234 PSYCHOLOG Y.

vestful than ever is the work, the work; and fuller and
deeper the import of common duties and of common goods.

But what here strikes us so forcibly on the flagrant
scale exists on every scale, down to the imperceptible
transition from one hour’s outlook to that of the next. Ex-
perience is remoulding us every moment, and our mental
reaction on every given thing is really a resultant of our
experience of the whole world up to that date. The analo-
gies of braim-physiology must again be appealed to to
corroborate our view.

Our earlier chapters have taught us to believe that,
whilst we think, our brain changes, and that, like the auro-
ra borealis, its whole internal equilibrium shifts with every
pulse of change. The precise nature of the shifting at a
given moment is a product of many factors. The acciden-
tal state of local nutrition or blood-supply may be among
them. But just as one of them certainly is the influence of
outward objects on the sense-organs during the moment,
so is another certainly the very special susceptibility in
which the organ has been left at that moment by all it
has gone through in the past. Every brain-state is partly
determined by the nature cf this entire past succession.
Alter the latter in any part, and the brain-state must be
somewhat different. Each present brain-state is a record
in which the eye of Omniscience might read all the fore-
gone history of its owner. It is out of the question, then,
that any total brain-state should identically recur. Some-
thing like it may recur; but to suppose 7 to recur would
be equivalent to the absurd admission that all the states
that had intervened between its two appearances had been
pure nonentities, and that the organ after their passage
was exactly as it was before. And (to consider shorter
periods) just as, in the senses, an impression feels very dif-
ferently according to what has preceded it; as one color
succeeding another is modified by the contrast, silence
sounds delicious after noise, and a note, when the scale is
sung up, sounds unlike itself when the scale is sung down ;
as the presence of certain lines in a figure changes the ap-
parent form of the other lines, and as in music the whole
zesthetic effect comes from the manner in which one set of

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 235

sounds alters our feeling of another; so, in thought, we
must admit that those portions of the brain that have just
been maximally excited retain a kind of soreness which is
a condition of our present consciousness, a codeterminant
of how and what we now shall feel.*

Ever some tracts are waning in tension, some waxing,
whilst others actively discharge. The states of tension
have as positive an influence as any in determining the
total condition, and in deciding what the psychosis shall be.
All we know of submaximal nerve-irritations, and of the
summation of apparently ineffective stimuli, tends to show
that no 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 of
equilibrium to another, like the gyrations of a kaleido-
scope, now rapid and now slow, is it likely that its faithful
psychic concomitant is heavier-footed than itself, and that
it cannot match each one of the organ’s irradiations by a
shifting inward iridescence of its own? But if it can do
this, its inward iridescences must be infinite, for the brain-
redistributions are in infinite variety. If so coarse a thing
as a telephone-plate can be made to thrill for years and
never reduplicate its inward condition, how much more
must this be the case with the infinitely delicate brain ?

IT am sure that this concrete and total manner of regard-
ing the mind’s changes is the only true manner, difficult as
it may be to carry it out in detail. If anything seems ob-
scure about it, it will grow clearer as we advance. Mean-
while, if it be true, it is certainly also true that no two
‘ideas’ are ever exactly the same, which is the proposition
we started to prove. The proposition is more important
theoretically than it at first sight seems. For it makes it

*It need of course not follow, because a total brain-state does not re-
cur, that no point 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-crest
should never come twice at the same point of space. What can hardly
come twice is an identical combination of wave-forms all with their crests
and hollows reoccupying identical places. For such a total combina-
tion as this is the analogue of the brain-state to which our actual conscious
ness at any moment is due.

236 PSYCHOLOGY.

already impossible for us to follow obediently in the foot-
prints of either the Lockian or the Herbartian school,
schools which have had almost unlimited influence in Ger-
many and among ourselves. No doubt it is often con-
venient to formulate the mental facts in an atomistic sort
of way, and to treat the higher states of consciousness as if
they were all built out of unchanging simple ideas. It is
convenient often to treat curves as if they were composed
of small straight lines, and electricity and nerve-force as if
they were fluids. But in the one case as in the other we
must never forget that we are talking symbolically, and
that there is nothing in nature to answer to our words. A
permanently existing ‘idea’ or ‘ Vorstellung’ which makes its
appearance before the footlights of consciousness at periodical
intervals, is as my hological an entity as the Jack of Spades.
What makes it convenient to use the mythological for-
mulas is the whole organization of speech, which, as was
remarked a while ago, was not made by psychologists, but
by men who were as a rule only interested in the facts their
mental states revealed. They only spoke of their states as
ideas of this or of that thing. What wonder, then, that the
thought is most easily conceived under the law of the thing
whose name it bears! If the thing is composed of parts,
then we suppose that the thought of the thing must be
composed of the thoughts of the parts. If one part of the
thing have appeared in the same thing or in other things on
former occasions, why then we must be having even now the
very same ‘idea’ of that part which was there on those occa-
sions. If the thing is simple, its thought is simple. If it
is multitudinous, it must require a multitude of thoughts
to think it. Ifa succession, only a succession of thoughts
can knowit. If permanent, its thought is permanent. And
so on ad libitum. What after all is so natural as to assume
that one object, called by one name, should be known by
one affection of the mind? But, if language must thus in-
fluence us, the agglutinative languages, and even Greek and
Latin with their declensions, would be the better guides.
Names did not appear in them inalterable, but changed
their shape to suit the context in which they lay. It must
have been easier then than now to conceive of the same

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 237

object as being thought of at different times in non-identical
conscious states.

This, too, will grow clearer as we proceed. Meanwhile
a necessary consequence of the belief in ae self-
identical psychic facts that absent themselves and recur
periodically is the Humian doctrine that our thought is
composed of separate independent parts and is not a sen-
sibly continuous stream. That this doctrine entirely mis-
represents the natural appearances is what I next shall try
to show.

3) Within each personal consciousness, thought is sensibly con-
tinuous.

T can only define ‘continuous’ as that which is with-
out breach, crack, or division. I have already said that
the breach from one mind to-another is perhaps the great-
est breach in nature. The only breaches that can well be
conceived to occur within the limits of a single mind would
either be interruptions, time-gaps during which the con-
“sciousness went out altogether to come into existence again
at a later moment; or they would be breaks in the quality,
or content, of the thought, so abrupt that the segment that
followed had no connection whatever with the one that
went before. The proposition that within each personal
consciousness thought feels continuous, means two things:

1. That even where there is a time-gap the conscious-
ness after it feels as if it belonged together with the con-
sciousness before it, as another part of the same self;

2. That the changes from one moment to another in the
quality of the consciousness are never absolutely abrupt.

The case of the time-gaps, as the simplest, shall be taken
first. And first of all a word about time-gaps of which the
consciousness may not be itself aware.

On page 200 we saw that such time-gaps existed, and
that they might be more numerous than is usually supposed.
If the consciousness is not aware of them, it cannot feel
them as interruptions. In the unconsciousness produced
by nitrous oxide and other anesthetics, in that of epilepsy
and fainting, the broken edges of the sentient life may

238 PSYCHOLOGY.

meet and merge over the gap, much as the feelings of space
of the opposite margins of the ‘blind spot’ meet and
merge over that objective interruption to the sensitiveness
of the eye. Such consciousness as this, whatever it be for
the onlooking psych: logist, is for itself unbroken. It feels
unbroken ; a waking day of it is sensibly a unit as long as
that day lasts, in the sense in which the hours themselves
are units, as having all their parts next each other, with no
intrusive alien substance between. ‘To expect the con-
sciousness to feel the interruptions of its objective con-
tinuity as gaps, would be like expecting the eye to feel a
gap of silence because it does not hear, or the ear to feel a
gap of darkness because it does not see. So much for the
gaps that are unfelt.

With the felt gaps the case is different. On waking from
sleep, we usually know that we have been unconscious,
_and we often have an accurate judgment of how long. The
judgment here is certainly an inference from sensible signs,
and its ease is due to long practice in the particular field.*
The result of it, however, is that the consciousness is, for.
itself, not what it was in the former case, but interrupted
and discontinuous, in the mere sense of the words. But
in the cther sense of continuity, the sense of the parts being
inwardly connected and belonging together because they
are parts of a common whole, the consciousness remains
sensibly continuous and one. What now is the common
whole? The natural name for it is myself, I, or me.

When Paul and Peter wake up in the same bed, and
recognize that they have been asleep, each one of them
mentally reaches back and makes connection with but one
of the two streams of thought which were broken by the
sleeping hours. As the current of an electrode buried in
the ground unerringly finds its way to its own similarly
buried mate, across no matter how much intervening earth ;
so Peter’s present instantly finds out Peter’s past, and never
by mistake knits itself on to that of Paul. Paul’s thought
in turn is as little liable to go astray. The past thought of
Peter is appropriated by the present Peter alone. He may

* The accurate registration of the ‘how long’ is still a little mysterious.

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 239

have a knowledge, and a correct one too, of what Paul’s
last drowsy states of mind were as he sank into sleep, but it
is an entirely different sort of knowledge from that which he
has ot his own last states. He remembers his own states,
whilst he only conceives Paul’s. Remembrance is like direct
feeling ; its object is suffused with a warmth and intimacy
to which no object of mere conception ever attains. This
quality of warmth and intimacy and immediacy is what
Peter’s present thought also possesses for itself. So sure
as this present is me, is mine, it says, so sure is anything
else that comes with the same warmth and intimacy and
immediacy, me and mine. What the qualities called
warmth and intimacy may in themselves be wiil have to be
matter for future consideration. But whatever past feel-
ings appear with those qualities must be admitted to re-
ceive the greeting of the present mental state, to be owned
by it, and accepted as belonging together with it in a com-
mon self. This community of self is what the time-gap
eannot break in twain, and is why a present thought, al-
though not ignorant of the time-gap, can still regard itself
as continuous witn certain chosen portions of the past.

Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped
up in bits. Such words as ‘chain’ or ‘train’ do not de-
seribe it fitly ac it presents itself in the first instance. It
is nothing jointed ; 3 it flows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are
the eebaphors t by which it is most naturally described. Jn
talking of tt hereafier, let us call it the stream of thought, of
consciousness, or of subjective life.

But now there appears, even within the limits of the
same self,and between thoughts all of which alike have
this same sense of belonging together, a kind of jointing and
separateness among the parts, of which this statement
seems to take no account. I refer to the breaks that are
produced by sudden contrasts in the quality of the successive
segments of the stream of thought. If the words ‘chain’
and ‘train’ had no natural fitness in them, how came such
words to be used at all? Does not a loud explosion rend
the consciousness upon which it abruptly breaks, in twain ?
Does not every sudden shock, appearance of a new object,

240 PS YCHOLOG Y.

or change in a sensation, create a real interruption, sensibly
felt as such, which cuts the conscious stream across at the
moment at which it appears? Do not such interruptions
smite us every hour of our lives, and have we the right, in
their presence, still to call our consciousness a continuous
stream ?

This objection is based partly on a confusion and partly
on a superficial introspective view.

The confusion is between the thoughts themselves, taken
as subjective facts, and the things of which they are aware.
It is natural to make this confusion, but easy to avoid it
when once put on one’s guard. The things are discrete
and discontinuous; they do pass before us in a train or
chain, making often explosive appearances and rending
each other in twain. But their comings and goings and
contrasts no more break the flow of the thought that thinks
them than they break the time and the space in which they
lie. A silence may be broken by a thunder-clap, and we
may be so stunned and confused for a moment by the shock
as to give no instant account to ourselves of what has hap-
pened. But that very confusion is a mental state, and a
state that passes us straight over from the silence to the
sound. The transition between the thought of one object
and the thought of another is no more a break in the thought
than a joint in a bamboo is a break in the wood. It is a
part o! the consciousness as much as the joint is a part of the
bamboo.

The superficial introspective view is the overlooking,
even when the things are contrasted with each other most
violently, of the large amount of affinity that may still re-
main between the thoughts by whose means they are
cognized. Into the awareness of the thunder itself the
awareness of the previous silence creeps and continues ; for
what we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder
pure, but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-
with-it.* Our feeling of the same objective thunder, com-
ing in this way, is quite different from what it would be

* Cf. Brentano; Psychologie, vol. 1. pp. 219-20. Altogether this
chapter of Brentano’s on the Unity of Consciousness is as good as anything
with which I am acquainted.

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 241

were the thunder a continuation of previous thunder. The
thunder itself we believe to abolish and exclude the silence ;
but the feeling of the thunder is also a feeling of the silence
as just gone; and it would be difficult to find in the actual
concrete consciousness of man a feeling so limited to the
present as not to have an inkling of anything that went be-
fore. Here, again, language works against our perception
of the truth. We name our thoughts simply, each after its
thing, 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 to
be named after all of them, but it never is. Some of them
are always things known a moment ago more clearly ; others
are things to be known more clearly a moment hence.* Our
own bodily position, attitude, condition, is one of the things
of which some awareness, however inattentive, invariably
accompanies the knowledge of whatever else we know. We

* Honor to whom honor is due! The most explicit acknowledgment I
have anywhere found of all this is in a buried and forgotten paper by the
Rey. Jas Wills, on ‘Accidental Association,’ in the Transactions of the
Royal Irish Academy, vol xxt. part 1 (1846). Mr. Wills writes:

‘“ At every instant of conscious thought there is a certain sum of per-
ceptions, or reflections, or both together, present, and together constituting
one whole state of apprehension. Of this some definite portion may be far
more distinct than all the rest; and the rest be in consequence propor-
tionably vague, even to the limit of obliteration. But still, within this
limit, the most dim shade of perception enters into, and in some infinites-
imal degree modifies, the whole existing state. This state will thus be in
some 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 is
capable of the utmost variation, according to the person or the occasion.
. .. To any portion of the entire scope here described there may be a
special direction of the attention, and this special direction is recognized
as strictly what is recognized as the idea present to the mind. This idea is
evidently not commensurate with the entire state of apprehension, and
much perplexity has arisen from not observing this fact. However deeply
Wwe may suppose the attention to be engaged by any thought, any consider-
able alteration of the surrounding phenomena would still be perceived; the
most abstruse demonstration in this room would not prevent a listener,
however absorbed, from noticing the sudden extinction of the lights. Our
mental states have always an essential unity, such that each state of appre-
hension, however variously compounded, is a single whole, of which every
component is, therefore, strictly apprehended (so far as it is apprehended)
as a part. Such is the elementary basis from which all our intellectual
operations commence.”

242 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

think; and as we think we feel our bodily selves as the seat
of the thinking. If the thinking be owr thinking, it must
be suffused through all its parts with that peculiar warmth
and intimacy that make it come as ours. Whether the
warmth and intimacy be anything more than the feeling of
the same old body always there, is a matter for the next
chapter to decide. Whatever the content of the ego may be,
it is habitually felt with everything else by us humans,
and must form a liaison between all the things of which we
become successively aware. *

On this gradualness in the changes of our mental con-
tent the principles of nerve-action can throw some more
light. When studying, in Chapter III, the summation of
nervous activities, we saw that no state of the brain can be
supposed instantly to die away. If a new state comes, the
inertia of the old state will still be there and modify the
result accordingly. Of course we cannot tell, in our igno-
rance, what in each instance the modifications ought to be.
The commonest modifications in sense-perception are
known as the phenomena of contrast. In esthetics they
are the feelings of delight or displeasure which certain
particular orders in a series of impressions give. In
thought, strictly and narrowly so called, they are unques-
tionably that consciousness of the whence and the whither
that always accompanies its flows. If recently the brain-
tract a was vividly excited, and then 0, and now vividly ec,
the total present consciousness is not produced simply by
e's excitement, but also by the dying vibrations of a and b
as well. If we want to represent the brain-process we
must write it thus: zc—three different processes coexist-

a

ing, and correlated with them a thought which is no one
of the three thoughts which they would have produced had
each of them occurred alone. But whatever this fourth
thought may exactly be, it seems impossible that it should
not be something like each of the three other thoughts
whose tracts are concerned in its production, though in a
fast-waning phase.

* Compare the charming passage in Taine on Intelligence (N. Y. ed.),
1. 83-4.

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 243

It all goes back to what we said in another connection
only a few pages ago (p. 233). As the total neurosis changes,
so does the total psychosis change. But as the changes of
neurosis are never absolutely discontinucus, so must the
successive psychoses shade gradually into each other,
although their rate of change may be much faster at one
moment than at the next.

This difference in the rate of change lies at the basis of
a difference of subjective states of which we ought immedi-
ately to speak. When the rate is slow we are aware of the
object of our thought in a comparatively restful and stable
way. When rapid, we are aware of a passage, a relation,
a transition from it, or between it and something else. As
we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of
our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different
pace of its parts. Like a bird’s life, it seems to be made of
an alternation of flights and perchings. The rhythm of
language expresses this, where every thought is expressed
in a sentence, and every sentence closed by a period. The
resting-places are usually occupied by sensorial imagina-
tions of some sort, whose peculiarity is that they can be
held before the mind for an indefinite time, and contem-
plated without changing ; the places of flight are filled with
thoughts of relations, static or dynamic, that for the most
part obtain between the matters contemplated in the
periods of comparative rest.

Let us call the resting-places the ‘ substantive parts,’ and
the places of flight the ‘transitive parts,’ of the stream of
thought. It then appears that the main end of our
thinking is at all times the attainment of some other sub-
stantive part than the one from which we have just been
dislodged. And we may say that the main use of the
transitive parts is to lead us from one substantive conclu-
sion to another.

Now it is very difficult, introspectively, to see the tran-
sitive parts for what they really are. If they are but flights
to a conclusion, stopping them to look at them before the
conclusion is reached is really annihilating them. Whilst
if we wait till the conclusion be reached, it so exceeds them

244 PSYCHOLOGY.

in vigor and stability that it quite eclipses and swallows
them up in its glare. Let anyone try to cut a thought
across in the middle and get a look at its section, and he
will see how difficult the introspective observation of the
transitive tracts is. The rush of the thought is so headlong
that it almost always brings us up at the conclusion before
we can arrest it. Orif our purpose is nimble enough and
we do arrest it, it ceases forthwith to be itself. As a snow-
flake crystal caught in the warm hand is no longer a crystal
but a drop, so, instead of catching the feeling of relation
moving to its term, we find we have caught some substantive
thing, usually the last word we were pronouncing, statically
taken, and with its function, tendency, and particular
meaning in the sentence quite evaporated. Tho attempt
at introspective analysis in these cases is in fact like seiz-
ing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up
the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks.
And the challenge to produce these psychoses, which is
sure to be thrown by doubting psychologists at aiyone
who contends for their existence, is as unfair as Zeno’s
treatment of the advocates of motion, when, asking them
to point out in what place an arrow is when it moves, he
argues the falsity of their thesis from their inability to
make 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’s
stream be so hard, then the great blunder to which all
schools are liable must be the failure to register them, and
the undue emphasizing of the more substantive parts of the
stream. Were we not ourselves a moment since in danger
of ignoring any feeling transitive between the silence and
the thunder, and of treating their boundary as a sort of
break in the mind? Now such ignoring as this has histor-
ically worked in two ways. One set of thinkers have been
led by it to Sensationalism. Unable to lay their hands on any
coarse feelings corresponding to the innumerable relations
and forms of connection between the facts of the world,
finding no named subjective modifications mirroring such
relations, they have for the most part denied that feelings
of relation exist, and many of them, like Hume, have gone

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 245

so far as to deny the reality of most relations oué of the
mind as well as in it. Substantive psychoses, sensations
and their copies and derivatives, juxtaposed like dominoes
in a game, but really separate, everything else verbal illu-
sion,—such is the upshot of this view.* The IJntellectual-
ists, on the other hand, unable to give up the reality of
relations extra mentem, but equally unable to point to any
distinct substantive feelings in which they were known, have
made the same admission that the feelings do not exist.
But they have drawn an opposite conclusion. The rela-
tions must be known, they say, in something that is no
feeling, no mental modification continuous and consub-
stantial with the subjective tissue out of which sensations
and other substantive states are made. They are known,
these relations, by something that les on an entirely
different plane, by an actus purus of Thought, Intellect, or
Reason, ail written with capitals and considered to mean
something unutterably superior to any fact of sensibility
whatever.

But from our point of view both Intellectualists and Sen-
sationalists are wrong. If there be such things as feelings
at all, then so surely as relations between objects exist in reruin
natura, so surely, and more surely, do feelings exist to which
these relations are known. There is not a conjunction ora
preposition, and hardly an adverbial phrase, syntactic form,
or inflection of voice, in human speech, that does not express
some shading or other of relation which we at some mo-
ment actually feel to exist between the larger objects of our
thought. If we speak objectively, it is the real relations
that appear revealed ; if we speak subjectively, it is the
stream of consciousness that matches each of them by an
inward coloring of its own. In either case the relations
are numberless, and no existing language is capable of do-
ing justice to all their shades.

We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of ij, a feeling
of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feel-

*K.g.: ‘* The stream of thought is not a continuous current, but a series
of distinct ideas, more or less rapid in their succession : the rapidity being
measurable by the number that pass through the mind in a given time.”
‘Bain: E. and W., p. 29.)

246 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

ing of blue or a feeling of cold. Yet we do not: so invetex
ate has our habit become of recognizing the existence of
the substantive parts alone, that language almost refuses
to lend itself to any other use. The Empiricists have al-
ways dwelt on its influence in making us suppose that
where we have a separate name, a separate thing must
needs be there to correspond with it; and they have right-
ly denied the existence of the mob of abstract entities,
principles, and forces, in whose favor no other evidence
than this could be brought up. But they have said noth-
ing of that obverse error. of which we said a word in Chap-
ter VIT, (see p. 195), of supposing that where there is no name
no entity can exist. All dwmb or anonymous psychic states
have, owing to this error, been coolly suppressed; or, if
recognized at all, have been named after the substantive
perception they led to, as thoughts ‘about’ this object or
‘about’ that, the stolid word about engulfing all their del-
icate idiosyncrasies in its monotonous sound. Thus the
greater and greater accentuation and isolation of the sub-
stantive parts have continually gone on.

Once more take a look at the brain. We believe the
brain to be an organ whose internal equilibrium is always
in a state of change,—the change affecting every part. The
pulses of change are doubtless more violent in one place
than in another, their rhythm more rapid at this time than
at that. Asin a kaleidoscope revolving at a uniform rate, al-
though the figures are always rearranging themselves, there
are instants during which the transformation seems minute
and interstitial and almost absent, followed by others when
it shoots with magical rapidity, relatively stable forms thus
alternating with forms we should not distinguish if seen
again; so in the brain the perpetual rearrangement must
result in some forms of tension lingering relatively long,
whilst others simply come and pass. But if consciousness
corresponds to the fact of rearrangement itself, why, if
the rearrangement stop not, should the consciousness ever
cease ? And if a lingering rearrangement brings with it
one kind of consciousness, why should not a swift rearrange-
ment bring another kind of consciousness as peculiar as
the rearrangement itself? The lingering consciousnesses,

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 247

if of simple objects, we call ‘sensations’ or ‘images,’ ac-
cording as they are vivid or faint; if of complex objects,
we call them ‘percepts’ when vivid, ‘concepts’ or
‘thoughts’ when faint. For the swift consciousnesses we
have only those names of ‘ transitive states,’ or ‘feelings of
relation, which we have used.* As the brain-changes

* 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. vir. p. 28): ‘“ No feeling, as such
or as felt, is [of ?]a relation. . . . Even a relation between feelings is not
itself a feeling or felt.” On the other hand, the sensationists have either
smuggled in the cognition without giving any account of it, or have denied
the relations to be cognized, or even to exist, at all. A few honorable ex-
ceptions, however, deserve to be named among the sensationists. Destutt
de Tracy, Laromiguiére, Cardaillac, Brown, and finally Spencer, have ex-
plicitly contended for feelings of relation, consubstantial with our feelings
or thoughts of the terms ‘ between’ which they obtain. Thus Destutt de
Tracy says (Eléments d’Idéologie, T. Ier, chap. tv): ‘‘The faculty of
judgment is itself a sort of sensibility, for it is the faculty of feeling the
relations among our ideas; and to feel relations is to feel.” Laromiguicre
writes (Lecons de Philosophie, IIme Partie, 8me Lecon):

«There is no one whose intelligence does not embrace simultaneously
many ideas, more or less distinct, more or less confused. Now, when we
have many ideas at once, a peculiar feeling arises in us: we feel, among
these ideas, resemblances, differences, relations. Let us call this mode of
feeling, common to us all, the feeling of relation, or relation-feeling
(sentiment rapport). One sees immediately that these relation-feelings, re-
sulting from the propinquity of ideas, must be infinitely more numerous
than the sensation-feelings (sentiments-sensations) or the feelings we have
of the action of our faculties. The slightest knowledge of the mathemat-
ical theory of combinations will prove this. . . . Jdeas of relation origi-
nate in feelings of relation. They are the effect of our comparing them and
reasoning about them.”

Similarly, de Cardaillac (Etudes flémentaires de Philosophie, Section I.
chap. VII):

‘By a natural consequence, we are led to suppose that at the same time
that we have several sensations or several ideas in the mind, we feel the rela-
tions which exist between these sensations, and the relations which exist be-
tween these ideas. . . . If the feeling of relations exists in us, . . . it is
necessarily 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 numerous
than the sensations whose presence gives rise to their formation; 2°, the
most fertile, for the relative ideas of which the feeling-of-relation is the
source . . . are more important than absolute ideas, if such exist. . . . If
we interrogate common speech, we find the feeling of relation expressed
there in a thousand different ways. If itis easy to seize a relation, we say

248 PSYCHOLOGY.

are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into
each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but
one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream.

that it is sensidle, to distinguish it from one which, because its terms are
too remote, cannot be as quickly perceived. A sensible difference, or re-

semblance. . . . What is taste in the arts, in intellectual productionst
What but the feeling of those relations among the parts which constitutes
their merit? . . . Did we not feel relations we should never attain to true
knowledge, . . . for almost all our knowledge is of relations... . We
never have an isolated sensation; . . . we are therefore never without the
feeling of relation. . . . An olject strikes our senses; we see in it only a
sensation. . .. The relative is so near the absolute, the relation-feeling so

near the sensation-feeling, the two are so intimately fused in the composi-
tion of the object, that the relation appears to us as part of the sensation
itself. It is doubtless to this sort of fusion between sensations and feelings
of relation that the silence of metaphysicians as to the latter is due; and
it is for the same reason that they have obstinately persisted in asking from
sensation alone those ideas of relation which it was powerless to give.”

Dr. Thomas Brown writes (Lectures, xiv. inét.): ‘‘ There is an exten-
sive order of our feelings which involve this notion of relation, and which
consist 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 or
many affections of the mind, the feeling of thisrelation . . . is what I term
a relative suggestion; that phrase being the simplest which it is possible to
employ. for expressing, without any theory, the mere fact of the rise of
certain feelings of relation, after certain other feelings which precede
them; and therefore, as involving no particular theory, and simply ex-
pressive of an undoubted fact... . . That the feelings of relation are states
of the mind essentially different from our simple perceptions, or concep-
tions of the objects, . . . that they are not what Condillac terms t7ans-
formed sensations, 1 proved in a former lecture, when I combated the ex-
cessive simplification of that ingenious but not very accurate philosopher.
There is an original tendency or susceptibility of the mind, by which, on
perceiving together different objects, we are instantly, without the inter-
vention of any other mental process, sensible of their relation in certain
respects, as truly as there isan original tendency or susceptibility by which,
when external objects are present and have produced a certain affection of
our sensorial organ, we are instantly affected with the primary elementary
feelings of perception; and, I may add, that as our sensations or percep-
tions are of various species, so are there various species of relations;—the
number of relations, indeed, even of external things, being almost infinite,
while the number of perceptions is, necessarily, limited by that of the ob-
jects which have the power of producing some affection of our organs of
sensation. . . . Without that susceptibility of the mind by which it has
the feeling of relation, our consciousness would be as truly limited toa
single point, as our body would become, were it possible to fetter it to a
single atom.”

Mr. Spencer is even more explicit. His philosophy is crude in that he

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 249

Feelings of Tendency.

So much for the transitive states. But there are other
unnamed states or qualities of states that are just as im-

seems to suppose that it is only in transitive states that outward relations
are known; whereas in truth space-relations, relations of contrast, etc., are
felt along with their terms, in substantive states as well as in transitive
states, as we shall abundantly see. Nevertheless Mr. Spencer’s passage is
so clear that it also deserves to be quoted in full (Principles of Psychology,
§ 65):

‘The proximate components of Mind are of two broadly-contrasted
kinds—Feelings and the relations between feelings. Among the members
of each group there exist multitudinous unlikenesses, many of which are
extremely strong; but such unlikenesses are small compared with those
which distinguish members of the one group from members of the other.
Let us, in the first place, consider what are the characters which all Feel-
ings have in common, and what are the characters which all Relations
between feelings have in common.

‘Each feeling, as we here define it, is any portion of consciousness
which occupies a place sufficiently large to give it a perceivable individ-
uality; which has its individuality marked off from adjacent portions of
consciousness by qualitative contrasts; and which, when introspectively
contemplated, appears to be homogeneous. These are the essentials.
Obviously if, under introspection, a state of consciousness is decomposable
into unlike parts that exist either simultaneously or successively, it is not
one feeling but two or more. Obviously if it is indistinguishable from an
adjacent portion of consciousness, it forms one with that portion—is not
an individual feeling, but part of one. And obviously if it does not
occupy in consciousness an appreciable area, or an appreciable duration, it
cannot be known as a feeling.

“©A Relation between feelings is, on the contrary, characterized by
occupying no appreciable part of consciousness. Take away the terms it
unites, and it disappears along with them; having no independent place,
no individuality of its own. Itis true that, under an ultimate analysis,
what we calla relation proves to be itself a kind of feeling—the momen-
tary fecling accompanying the transition from one conspicuous feeling to
an adjacent conspicuous feeling. And it is true that, notwithstanding its
extreme brevity, its qualitative character is appreciable; for relations are
(as we shall hereafter see) distinguishable from one another only by the
unlikenesses of the feelings which accompany the momentary transitions.
Each relational feeling may, in fact, be regarded as one of those nervous
shocks which we suspect to be the units of composition of feelings; and,
though instantaneous, it is known as of greater or less strength, and as
taking place with greater or less facility. But the contrast between these
relational feelings and what we ordinarily call feelings is so strong that
we must class them apart. Their extreme brevity, their small variety, and
their dependence on the terms they unite, differentiate them in an unmis-
takable way.

‘* Perhaps it will be well to recognize more fully the truth that this dis

250 PSYCHOLOGY.

portant and just as cognitive as they, and just as much
unrecognized by the traditional sensationalist and intellect-
ualist philosophies of mind. The first fails to find them
at all, the second finds their cognitive function, but denies
that anything in the way of feeling has a share in bringing
it about. Examples will make clear what these inarticu-
late psychoses, due to waxing and waning excitements of
the brain, are like.*

Suppose three successive persons say to us: ‘ Wait!’
‘Hark!’ ‘Look!’ Our consciousness is thrown into

tinction cannot be absolute. Besides admitting that, as an element of
consciousness, a relation is a momentary feeling, we must also admit that
just as a relation can have no existence apart from the feelings which form
its terms, soa feeling can exist only by relations to other feelings which
limit it in space or time or both. Strictly speaking, neither a feeling nor
a relation is an independent element of consciousness: there is throughout
a dependence such that the appreciable areas of consciousness occupied by
feelings can no more possess individualities apart from the relations which
link them, than these relations can possess individualities apart from the
feelings they link. The essential distinction between the two, then,
appears to be that whereas a relational feeling is a portion of consciousness
inseparable into parts, a feeling, ordinarily so called, is a portion of con-
sciousness that admits imaginary division into like parts which are related
to one another in sequence or coexistence. A feeling proper is either
made up of like parts that occupy time, or it is made up of like parts that
occupy space, or both. In any case, a feeling proper is an aggregate of
related like parts, while a relational feeling is undecomposable. And this
is exactly the contrast between the two which must result if, as we have
inferred, feelings are composed of units of feelings, or shocks.”

* M. Paulhan (Revue Philosophique, xx. 455-6), after speaking of the
faint mental images of objects and emotions, says: ‘‘ We find other vaguer
states still, upon which attention seldom rests, except in persons who by
nature or profession are addicted to internal observation. It is even diffi-
cult to name them precisely, for they are little known and not classed ;
but we may cite as an example of them that peculiar impression which we
feel when, strongly preoccupied by a certain subject, we nevertheless are
engaged with, and have our attention almost completely absorbed by, mat-
ters quite disconnected therewithal. We do not then exactly think of the
object of our preoccupation; we do not represent it in a clear manner; and
yet our mind is not as it would be without this preoccupation. Its object,
absent from consciousness, is nevertheless represented there by a peculiar
unmistakable impression, which often persists long and is a strong feeling,
although so obscure for our intelligence.” ‘‘A mental sign of the kind is
the unfavorable disposition left in our mind towards an individual by pain-
ful incidents erewhile experienced and now perhaps forgotten. The sign
remains, but is not understood; its definite meaning is lost.” (P. 458.)

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 251

three quite different attitudes of expectancy, although no
definite object is before it in any one of the three cases.
Leaving out different actual bodily attitudes, and leay-
ing out the reverberating images of the three words, which
are of course diverse, probably no one will deny the exist-
ence of a residual conscious affection, a sense of the direc-
tion from which an impression is about to come, although
no positive impression is yet there. Meanwhile we have
no names for the psychoses in question but the names
hark, look, and wait.

Suppose we try to recall a forgotten name. The state
of our consciousness is peculiar. There is a gap therein;
but no mere gap. Itis a gap that is intensely active. A
sort of wraith of the name is in it, beckoning us in a given
direction, making us at moments tingle with the sense of
our closeness, and then letting us sink back without the
longed-for term. If wrong names are proposed to us, this
singularly definite gap acts immediately so as to negate
them. They do not fit into its mould. And the gap of one
word does not feel like the gap of another, all empty of
content as both might seem necessarily to be when described
as gaps. When I vainly try to recall the name of Spalding,
my consciousness is far removed from what it is when I
vainly try to recall the name of Bowles. Here some ingen-
ious persons will say: “ How can the two consciousnesses
be different when the terms which might make them differ-
ent are not there? All that is there, so long as the effort
to recall is vain, is the bare effort itself. How should that
differ in the two cases? You are making it seem to differ
by 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 them
after facts not yet existent, and you'll be quite unable to
designate any point in which they differ.” Designate, truly
enough. We can only designate the difference by borrow-
ing the names of objects not yet in the mind. Which is to
say that our psychological vocabulary is wholly inadequate
to name the differences that exist, even such strong differ-
ences as these. But namelessness is compatible with
existence. There are innumerable consciousnesses of

252 PSYCHOLOGY.

emptiness, no one of which taken in itself has a name,
but all different from each other. The ordinary way is to
assume that they are all emptinesses of consciousness, and
so the same state. But the feeling of an absence is toto celo
other than the absence of a feeling. It is an intense feel-
ing. The rhythm of a lost word may be there without a
sound to clothe it; or the evanescent sense of something
which is the initial vowel or consonant may mock us fit-
fully, without growing more distinct. Every one must
know the tantalizing effect of the blank rhythm of some
forgotten verse, restlessly dancing in one’s mind, striving
to be filled out with words.

Again, what is the strange difference between an expe-
rience tasted for the first time and the same experience
recognized 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 feeling
of their familiarity so deep into our consciousness that we
are fairly shaken by its mysterious emotional power. But
strong and characteristic as this psychosis is—it probably
is due to the submaximal excitement of wide-spreading
associational brain-tracts—the only name we have for all
its shadings is ‘sense of familiarity.’

When we read such phrases as ‘naught but,’ ‘either
one or the other,’ ‘a is 0b, but,’ ‘although it is, neverthe-
less, ‘it is an excluded middle, there is no tertiwm quid,
and a host of other verbal skeletons of logical relation, is it
true that there is nothing more in our minds than the
words themselves as they pass? What then is the mean-
ing of the words which we think we understand as we read ?
What makes that meaning different in one phrase from
what it is in the other? ‘Who?’ ‘When?’ ‘Where?’
Is the difference of felt meaning in these interrogatives
nothing more than their difference of sound? And is it
not (just like the difference of sound itself) known and
understood in an affection of consciousness correlative to
it, though so impalpable to. direct examination? Is not
the same true of such negatives as ‘no,’ ‘never,’ ‘ not
yet’?

The truth is that large tracts of human speech are noth:

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 253

ing but signs of direction in thought, of which direction we
nevertheless have an acutely discriminative sense, though
no definite sensorial image plays any part in it whatsoever.
Sensorial images are stable psychic facts; we can hold
them still and look at them as long as we like. These bare
images of logical movement, on the contrary, are psychic
transitions, always on the wing, so to speak, and not to be
glimpsed except in flight. Their function is to lead from
one set of images to another. As they pass, we feel both
the waxing and the waning images in a way altogether
pecular and a way quite different from the way of their
full presence. If we try to hold fast the feeling of direc-
tion, the full presence comes and the feeling of direction is
lost. The blank verbal scheme of the logical movement
gives us the fleeting sense of the movement as we read it,
quite as weil as does a rational sentence awakening defi-
nite imaginations by its words.

What is that first instantaneous glimpse of some one’s
meaning which we have, when in vulgar phrase we say we
‘twig’ it? Surely an altogether specific affection of our
mind. And has the reader never asked himself what kind
of a mental fact is his intention of saying a thing before he
has said it? It is an entirely definite intention, distinct
from all other intentions, an absolutely distinct state of
consciousness, therefore ; and yet how much of it consists of
definite sensorial images, either of words or of things?
Hardly anything! Linger, and the words and things come
into the mind; the anticipatory intention, the divination is
there no more. But as the words that replace it arrive, it
welcomes them successively and calls them right if they
agree with it, it rejects them and calls them wrong if they
do not. It has therefore a nature of its own of the most
positive sort, and yet what can we say about it without
using words that belong to the later mental facts that
replace it? The intention to-say-so-and-so is the only name
it can receive. One may admit that a good third of our
psychic life consists in these rapid premonitory perspective
views of schemes of thought not yet articulate. How
comes it about that a man reading something aloud for the
first time is able immediately to emphasize all his words

254 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

aright, unless from the very first he have a sense of at
least the form of the sentence yet to come, which sense is
fused with his consciousness of the present word, and modi-
fies its emphasis in his mind so as to make him give it
the proper accent as he utters it? Emphasis of this kind
is 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 sentence
it is a ‘yet,’ a ‘still,’ or a ‘nevertheless,’ that we expect.
A noun in a certain position demands a verb ina certain
mood and number, in another position it expects a relative
pronoun. Adjectives call for nouns, verbs for adverbs,
ete., etc. And this foreboding of the coming grammatical
scheme combined with each successive uttered word is so
practically accurate that a reader incapable of understanding
four ideas of the book he is reading aloud, can nevertheless
read it with the most delicately modulated expression of
intelligence.

Some will interpret these facts by calling them all cases
in which certain images, by laws of association, awaken
others so very rapidly that we think afterwards we felt the
very tendencies of the nascent images to arise, before they were
actually there. For this school the only possible materials
of consciousness are images of a perfectly definite nature.
Tendencies exist, but they are facts for the outside psychol-
ogist rather than for the subject of the observation. The
tendency is thus a psychical zero ; only its results are felt.

Now what I contend for, and accumulate examples to
show, is that ‘tendencies’ are not only descriptions from
without, but that they are among the objects of the stream,
which is thus aware of them from within, and must be
described as in very large measure constituted of feelings of
tendency, often so vague that we are unable to name them
at all. It is, in short, the re-instatement of the vague to its
proper place in our mental life which I am so anxious to
press on the attention. Mr. Galton and Prof. Huxley have,
as we shall see in Chapter X VIII, made one step in advance
in exploding the ridiculous theory of Hume and Berkeley
that we can have no images but of perfectly definite things.
Another is made in the overthrow of the equally ridiculous

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 255

notion that, whilst simple objective qualities are revealed
to 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 tra-
ditional psychology form but the very smallest part of our
minds as they actually live. The traditional psychology
talks like one who should say a river consists of nothing
but pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other
moulded forms of water. Even were the pails and the pots
all actually standing in the stream, stil] between them the
free water would continue to flow. It is just this free water
of consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook.
Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in
the free water that Hows round it. With it goes the sense
of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence
it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead.
The significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo
or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it,—or rather that
is fused into one with it and has become bone of its bone
and flesh of its flesh ; leaving it, it is true, an image of the
same thing it was before, but making it an image of that
thing newly taken and freshly understood.

What is that shadowy scheme of the ‘form’ of an
opera, play, or book, which remains in our mind and on
which 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 schemes
of relation between terms, which hardly even as verbal
images enter the mind, so rapid is the whole process.* We
all of us have this permanent consciousness of whither our
thought is going. It is a feeling like any other, a feeling

* Mozart describes thus his manner of composing: First bits and crumbs
of the piece come and gradually join together in his mind ; then the soul
getting warmed to the work, the thing grows more and more, ‘‘and I
spread it out broader and clearer, and at last it gets almost finished in my
head, even when it is a long piece, so that I can see the whole of it at a
single glance in my mind, as if it were a beautiful painting or a handsome
human being ; in which way I do not hear it in my imagination at all as
a succession—the way it must come later—but all at once, as it were. It
isa rare feast! All the inventing and making goes on in me as in a beau-
tiful strong dream. But the best of allis the hearing of it all at once.”

256 PSYCHOLOGY ¥:

of what thoughts are next to arise, before they have arisen.
This field of view of consciousness varies very much in
extent, depending largely on the degree of mental freshness
or fatigue. When very fresh, our minds carry an immense
horizon with them. The present image shoots its perspec-
tive far before it, irradiating in advance the regions in which
lie the thoughts as yet unborn. Under ordinary conditions
the halo of felt relations is much more circumscribed. And
in states of extreme brain-fag the horizon is narrowed
almost to the passing word,—the associative machinery,
however, providing for the next word turning up in orderly
sequence, until at last the tired thinker‘is led to some kind
of a conclusion. At certain moments he may find himself
doubting whether his thoughts have not come to a full stop ;
but the vague sense of a plus ultra makes him ever struggle
.on 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 our definite thought has come to #
stop is an entirely different thing from the awareness that
our thought is definitively completed. The expression of
the latter state of mind is the falling inflection which be-
tokens that the sentence is ended, and silence. The ex-
pression of the former state is ‘hemming and hawing,’ or
else such phrases as ‘et cetera,’ or ‘and so forth.’ But
notice that every part of the sentence to be left incomplete
feels differently as it passes, by reason of the premonition
we have that we shall be unable to end it. The ‘and so
forth’ casts its shadow back, and is as integral a part of
the object of the thought as the distinctest of images
would be.

Again, when we use a common noun, such as man, In a
universal sense, as signifying all possible men, we are fully
aware of this intention on our part, and distinguish it care-
fully from our intention when we mean a certain group of
men, or a solitary individual before us. In the chapter on
Conception we shall see how important this difference of
intention is. It casts its influence over the whole of the
sentence, both before and after the spot in which the word
man is used.

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 257

Nothing is easier than to symbolize all these facts in
terms of brain-action. Just as the echo of the whence, the
sense of the starting point of our thought, is probably
due to the dying excitement of processes but a moment
since vividly aroused ; so the sense of the whither, the fore-
taste of the terminus, must be due to the waxing excite-
ment of tracts or processes which, a moment hence, will be
the cerebral correlatives of some thing which a moment
hence will be vividly present to the thought. Represented
by a curve, the neurosis underlying consciousness must at
any moment be like this:

Fie 27.

Each point of the horizontal line stands for some
brain-tract or process. The height of the curve above
the line stands for the intensity of the process. All the
processes are present, in the intensities shown by the
curve. But those before the latter’s apex were more in-
tense a moment ago; those after it will be more intense a
moment hence. If I recite a, b, c, d,e, f, g, at the moment
of uttering d, neither a, b, c, nor e, f,g, are out of my
consciousness altogether, but both, after their respective
fashions, ‘mix their dim lights’ with the stronger one of
the d, because their neuroses are both awake in some
degree.

There is a common class of mistakes which shows how
brain-processes begin to be excited before the thoughts
attached to them are due—due, that is, in substantive and
vivid form. I mean those mistakes of speech or writing
by which, in Dr. Carpenter’s words, “we mispronounce or
misspell a word, by introducing into it a letter or syllable
of some other, whose turn is shortly to come ; or, it may be,
the whole of the anticipated word is substituted for the one

258 PSYCHOLOGY.

which ought to have been expressed.”* In these cases
one of two things must have happened: either some local
accident of nutrition blocks the process that is due, so that
other processes discharge that ought as yet to be but nas-
cently aroused; or some opposite local accident furthers
the latter processes and makes them explode before their
time. In the chapter on Association of Ideas, numerous
instances will come before us of the actual effect on con-
sciousness of neuroses not yet maximally aroused.

It is just like the ‘overtones’ in music. Different in-
struments give the ‘same note,’ but each in a different
voice, because each gives more than that note, namely, vari-
ous upper harmonies of it which differ from one instrument
to another. They are not separately heard by the ear;
they blend with the fundamental note, and suffuse it, and
alter it; and even so do the waxing and waning brain-
processes at every moment blend with and suffuse and alter
the psychic effect of the processes which are at their cul-
minating point.

Let us use the words psychic overtone, suffusion, or fringe,
to designate the influence of a faint brain-process upon our
thought, as it makes it aware of relations and objects but
dimly perceived.t

If we then consider the cognitive function of different

* Mental Physiology, § 236. Dr. Carpenter’s explanation differs materi-
ally from that given in the text.

+ Cf. also S. Stricker: Vorlesungen iiber allg. u. exp. Pathologie (1879),
pp. 462-3, 501, 547; Romanes: Origin of Human Faculty, p. 82. It is so
hard to make one’s self clear that I may advert to a misunderstanding of
my views by the late Prof. Thos. Maguire of Dublin (Lectures on Philoso-
phy, 1885). This author considers that by the ‘ fringe’ I mean some sort
of psychic material by which sensations in themselves separate are made
to cohere together, and wittily says that I ought to ‘‘ see that uniting sensa-
tions by their ‘ fringes’ is more vague than to construct the universe out
of oysters by platting their beards” (p. 211). But the fringe, as I use the
word, means nothing like this ; it is part of the object cognized,—substantive
qualities and things appearing to the mind in a fringe of relations. Some parts
—the transitive parts—of our stream of thought cognize the relations rather
than the things; but both the transitive and the substantive parts form one
continuous stream, with no discrete ‘sensations’ in it such as Prof. Ma-
guire supposes, and supposes me to suppose, to be there.

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 259

states of mind, we may feel assured that the difference be-
tween those that are mere ‘acquaintance,’ and those that
are ‘knowledges-about’ (see p. 221) is reducible almost
entirely to the absence or presence of psychic fringes or
overtones. Knowledge about a thing is knowledge of its
relations. Acquaintance with it is limitation to the bare
impression which it makes. Of most of its relations we are
only aware in the penumbral nascent way of a ‘fringe’ of
unarticulated affinities about it. And, before passing to the
next topic in order, I must say a little of this sense of
affinity, as itself one of the most interesting features of the
subjective stream.

In all our voluntary thinking there is some topic or
subject about which all the members of the thought revolve.
Half the time this topic is a problem, a gap we cannot
yet fill with a definite picture, word, or phrase, but which, in
the manner described some time back, influences us in an
intensely active and determinate psychic way. Whatever
may be the images and phases that pass before us, we feel
their relation to this aching gap. To fill it up is our
thoughts’ destiny. Some bring us nearer to that consum-
mation. Some the gap negates as quite irrelevant. Hach
swims in a felt fringe of relations of which the aforesaid
gap is the term. Or instead of a definite gap we may
merely 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 representa-
tions, entering the mind, as suit it, and tingeing with the
feeling of tediousness or discord all those with which it
has no concern.

Relation, then, to our topic or interest is constantly felt
in the fringe, and particularly the relation of harmony and
discord, of furtherance or hindrance of the topic. When
the sense of furtherance is there, we are ‘all right;’ with
the sense of hindrance we are dissatisfied and perplexed,
and cast about us for other thoughts. Now any thought
the quality of whose fringe lets us feel ourselves ‘all right,’
is an acceptable member of our thinking, whatever kind of
thought it may otherwise be. Provided we only feel it
to have a place in the scheme of relations in which the in-

260 PSYCHOLOGY.

teresting topic also lies, that is quite sufficient to make of
it a relevant and appropriate portion of our train of ideas.

For the important thing about a train of thought is its
conclusion. That is the meaning, or, as we say, the topic of
the thought. That is what abides when all its other mem-
bers have faded from memory. Usually this conclusion is
a word or phrase or particular image, or practical attitude
or resolve, whether rising to answer a problem or fill a
pre-existing gap that worried us, or whether accidentally
stumbled on in revery. In either case it stands out from
the other segments of the stream by reason of the peculiar
interest attaching to it. This interest arrests it, makes a
sort of crisis of it when it comes, induces attention upon it
and makes us treat it in a substantive way.

The parts of the stream that precede these substantive
conclusions are but the means of the latter’s attainment.
And, provided the same conclusion be reached, the means
may beas mutable as we like, for the ‘ meaning’ of the stream
of thought will be the same. What difference does it make
what the means are? “Qwimporte le flacon, pourvu quwon
ait [ivresse?” The relative unimportance of the means
appears from the fact that when the conclusion is there, we
have always forgotten most of the steps preceding its attain-
ment. When we have uttered a proposition, we are rarely
able a moment afterwards to recall our exact words, though
we can express it in different words easily enough. The
practical upshot of a book we read remains with us, though
we may not recall one of its sentences.

The only paradox would seem to lie in supposing that
the fringe of felt affinity and discord can be the same in
two heterogeneous sets of images. Take a train of words
passing through the mind and leading to a certain conclu-
sion on the one hand, and on the other hand an almost
wordless set of tactile, visual and other fancies leading to
the same conclusion. Can the halo, fringe, or scheme in
which we feel the words to lie be the same as that in which
we feel the images to lie? Does not the discrepancy of .
terms involve a discrepancy of felt relations among them?

If the terms be taken gud mere sensations, it assur-
edly does. For instance, the words may rhyme with each

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 261

other,—the visual images can have no such affinity as that.
But qua thoughts, gud sensations understood, the words have
contracted by long association fringes of mutual repugnance
or affinity with each other and with the conclusion, which
run exactly parallel with like fringes in the visual, tactile
and other ideas. The most important element of these
fringes is, I repeat, the mere feeling of harmony or discord,
of a right or wrong direction in the thought. Dr. Camp-
bell has, so far as I know, made the best analysis of this
fact, and his words, often quoted, deserve to be quoted again.
The chapter is entitled “What is the cause that nonsense
so often escapes being detected, both by the writer and by
the reader?” The author, in answering this question, makes
(inter alia) the following remarks :*

‘*That connection [he says] or relation which comes gradually to sub-
sist among the different words of a language, in the minds of those who
speak it, . . . is merely consequent on this, that those words are
employed as signs of connected or related things. It is an axiom in
geometry that things equal to the same thing are equal to one another.
It may, in like manner, be admitted as an axiom in psychology that
ideas associated by the same idea will associate one another. Hence it
will happen that if, from experiencing the connection of two things,
there results, as infallibly there will result, an association between the
ideas or notions annexed to them, as each idea will moreover be asso-
ciated by its sign, there will likewise be an association between the ideas
of the signs. Hence the sounds considered as signs will be conceived to
have a connection analogous to that which subsisteth among the things
signified; I say, the sounds considered as signs; for this way of consid-
ering them constantly attends us in speaking, writing, hearing, and
reading. When we purposely abstract from it, and regard them merely
as sounds, we are instantly sensible that they are quite unconnected, and
have no other relation than what ariseth from similitude of tone or
accent. But to consider them in this manner commonly results from
previous design, and requiresa kind of effort which is not exerted in the
ordinary use of speech. In ordinary use they are regarded solely as
signs, or, rather, they are confounded with the things they signify; the
consequence of which is that, in the manner just now explained, we come
insensibly to conceive a connection among them of a very different sort
from that of which sounds are naturally susceptible.

‘Now this conception, habit, or tendency of the mind, call it which
you please, is considerably strengthened by the frequent use of language
and by the structure of it. Language is the sole channel through which

* George Campbell: Philosophy of Rhetoric, book 1. chap. vIt.

262 PSYCHOLOGY.

we communicate our knowledge and discoveries to others, and through
which the knowledge and discoveries of others are communicated to us.
By reiterated recourse to this medium, it necessarily happens that
when things are related to each other, the words signifying those
things are more commonly brought together in discourse. Hence the
words and names by themselves, by customary vicinity, contract in the
fancy a relation additional to that which they derive purely from being
the symbols of related things. Farther, this tendency is strengthened
by the structure of language. All languages whatever, even the most
barbarous, as far as hath yet appeared, are of a regular and analogical
make. The consequence is that similar relations in things will be ex-
pressed similarly ; that is, by similar inflections, derivations, composi-
tions, arrangement of words, or juxtaposition of particles, according to
the genius or grammatical form of the particular tongue. Now as, by
the habitual use of a language (even though it were quite irregular),
the signs would insensibly become connected in the imagination wher-
ever the things signified are connected in nature, so, by the regular
structure of a language, this connection among the signs is conceived
as analogous to that which subsisteth among their archetypes.”

If we know English and French and begin a sentence in
French, all the later words that come are French ; we hardly
ever drop into English. And this affinity of the French
words for each other is not something merely operating me-
chanically as a brain-law, itis something we feel at the time.
Our understanding of a French sentence heard never falls
to so low an ebb that we are not aware that the words lin-
guistically belong together. Our attention can hardly so
wander that if an English word be suddenly introduced we
shall not start at the change. Such a vague sense as this
of the words belonging together is the very minimum of
fringe that can accompany them, if ‘thought’ at all.
Usually the vague perception that all the words we hear
belong to the same language and to the same special vocab-
ulary in that language, and that the grammatical sequence
is familiar, is practically equivalent to an admission that
what we hearis sense. But if an unusual foreign word
be introduced, if the grammar trip, or if a term from an
incongruous vocabulary suddenly appear, such as ‘ rat-
trap’ or ‘ plumber’s bill’ in a philosophical discourse, the
sentence detonates, as it were, we receive a shock from the
incongruity, and the drowsy assent is gone. The feeling of
rationality in these cases seems rather a negative than a

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 263

positive thing, being the mere absence of shock, or sense
of discord, between the terms of thought.

So delicate and incessant is this recognition by the
mind of the mere fitness of words to be mentioned together
that the slightest misreading, such as ‘casualty’ for
‘causality, or ‘perpetual’ for ‘perceptual,’ will be cor-
rected by a listener whose attention is so relaxed that he
gets no idea of the meaning of the sentence at all.

Conversely, if words do belong to the same vocabulary,
and if the grammatical structure is correct, sentences with
absolutely no meaning may be uttered in good faith and
pass unchallenged. Discourses at prayer-meetings, re-
shuffling the same collection of cant phrases, and the whole
genus of penny-a-line-isms and newspaper-reporter’s
flourishes give illustrations of this. “The birds filled the
tree-tops with their morning song, making the air moist,
cool, and pleasant,” is a sentence [ remember reading once
in a report of some athletic exercises in Jerome Park. It
was probably written unconsciously by the hurried re-
porter, and read uncritically by many readers. An entire
volume of 784 pages lately published in Boston* is com-
posed of stuff like this passage picked out at random :

‘The flow of the efferent fluids of all these vessels from their out-
lets at the terminal loop of each culminate link on the surface of the
nuclear organism is continuous as their respective atmospheric fruitage
up to the altitudinal limit of their expansibility, whence, when atmos-
phered by like but coalescing essences from higher altitudes,—those
sensibly expressed as the essential qualities of external forms,—they

descend, and become assimilated by the afferents of the nuclear organ-
ism.” t

* Substantialism or Philosophy of Knowledge, by ‘ Jean Story’ (1879).

+ M. G. Tarde, quoting (in Delbceuf, Le Sommeil et les Réves (1885), p.
226) some nonsense-verses from a dream, says they show how prosodic
forms may subsist ina mind from which logical rules are effaced
I was able, in dreaming, to preserve the faculty of finding two words which
rhymed, to appreciate the rhyme, to fill up the verse as it first presented
itself 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 the
extraordinary fact that the words called each other up, without calling up
their sense. . . . Even when awake, it is more difficult to ascend to the
meaning of a word than to pass from one word to another ; or to put it
otherwise, zt 7s harder to be a thinker than to be a rhetorician, and on the
whole nothing is commoner than trains of words not understood.”

264 PSYCHOLOG Y.

There are every year works published whose contents
show them to be by real lunatics. To the reader, the
book quoted from seems pure nonsense from beginning to
end. It is impossible to divine, in such a case, just what
sort of feeling of rational relation between the words may
have appeared to the author’s mind. The border line
between objective sense and nonsense is hard to draw;
that between subjective sense and nonsense, impossible.
Subjectively, any collocation of words may make sense—
even the wildest words in a dream—if one only does not
doubt their belonging together. Take the obscurer pas-
sages in Hegel: it is a fair question whether the rationality
included in them be anything more than the fact that the
words all belong to a common vocabulary, and are strung
together on a scheme of predication and relation,—imme-
diacy, self-relation, and what not,—which has habitually
recurred. Yet there seems no reason to doubt that the
subjective feeling of the rationality of these sentences was
strong in the writer as he penned them, or even that some
readers by straining may have reproduced it in themselves.

To sum up, certain kinds of verbal associate, certain
grammatical expectations fulfilled, stand for a good part of
our impression that a sentence has a meaning and is
dominated by the Unity of one Thought. Nonsense in
grammatical form sounds half rational; sense with gram-
matical sequence upset sounds nonsensical ; e.g., “ Elba the
Napoleon English faith had banished broken to he Saint
because Helena at.” Finally, there is about each word the
psychic ‘overtone’ of feeling that it brings us nearer to a
forefelt 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 will
admit the sentence to be an expression of thoroughly
continuous, unified, and rational thought.*

* We think it odd that young children should listen with such rapt
attention to the reading of stories expressed in words half of which they
do not understand, and of none of which they ask the meaning. But
their thinking is in form just what ours is when it is rapid. Both‘of us
make flying leaps over large portions of the sentences uttered and we give

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 265

Each word, in such a sentence, is felt, not only as a
word, but as having a meaning. The ‘meaning’ of a word
taken thus dynamically in a sentence may be quite differ-
ent from its meaning when taken statically or without con-
text. The dynamic meaning is usually reduced to the bare
fringe we have described, of felt suitability or unfitness to
the context and conclusion. The static meaning, when the
word is concrete, as ‘table,’ ‘ Boston,’ consists of sensory
images awakened ; when it is abstract, as ‘ criminal legisla-
tion,’ ‘ fallacy,’ the meaning consists of other words aroused,
forming the so-called ‘ definition.’

Hegel’s celebrated dictum that pure being is identical
with pure nothing results from his taking the words stati-
cally, or without the fringe they wear in a context. Taken
in isolation, they agree in the single point of awakening no
sensorial images. But taken dynamically, or as significant,
—as thought,—their fringes of relation, their affinities and
repugnances, their function and meaning, are felt and
understood to be absolutely opposed.

Such considerations as these remove all appearance of
paradox from those cases of extremely deficient visual im-
agery of whose existence Mr. Galton has made us aware (see
below). An exceptionally intelligent friend informs me that
he can frame no image whatever of the appearance of his
breakfast-table. When asked how he then remembers it at
all, he says he simple ‘knows’ thatit seated four people, and
was covered with a white cloth on which were a butter-
dish, a coffee-pot, radishes, and so forth. The mind-stuff
of which this ‘ knowing’ is made seems to be verbal images
exclusively. But if the words ‘coffee,’ ‘bacon,’ ‘ muftins,’
and ‘eggs’ lead a man to speak to his cook, to pay his
bills, and to take measures for the morrow’s meal exactly as
visual and gustatory memories would, why are they not,

attention only to substantive starting points, turning points, and conclu-
sions hereand there. All ine rest, ‘ substantive ’ and separately intelligible
as it may potenteally be, actually serves only asso much transitive material.
It is internodal consciousness, giving us the sense of continuity, but having
no significance apart from its mere gap-filling function. The children
probably feel no gap when through a lot of unintelligible words they are
swiftly carried to a familiar and intelligible terminus.

266 PSYCHOLOGY.

for all practical intents and purposes, as good a kind of
material in which to think? In fact, we may suspect them
to be for most purposes better than terms with a richer
imaginative coloring. The scheme of relationship and the
conclusion being the essential things in thinking, that kind
of mind-stuff which is handiest will be the best for the
purpose. Now words, uttered or unexpressed, are the
handiest mental elements we have. Not only are they very
rapidly revivable, but they are revivable as actual sen-
sations more easily than any other items of our ex-
perience. Did they not possess some such advantage as
this, it would hardly be the case that the older men are and
the more effective as thinkers, the more, as a rule, they
have lost their visualizing power and depend on words.
This was ascertained by Mr. Galton to be the case with
members of the Royal Society. The present writer ob-
serves it in his own person most distinctly.

On the other hand, a deaf and dumb man can weave
his tactile and visual images into a system of thought quite
as effective and rational as that of a word-user. The
question whether thought is possible without language has
been a favorite topic of discussion among philosophers.
Some interesting reminiscences of his childhood by Mr.
Ballard, a deaf-mute instructor in the National College at
Washington, show it to be perfectly possible. A few
paragraphs may be quoted here.

‘‘In consequence of the loss of my hearing in infancy, I was de-
barred from enjoying the advantages which children in the full pos-
session of their senses derive from the exercises of the common primary
school, from the every-day talk of their school-fellows and playmates,
and from the conversation of their parents and other grown-up persons.

‘“T could convey my thoughts and feelings to my parents and
brothers by natural signs or pantomime, and I could understand what
they said to me by the same medium; our intercourse being, however,
confined to the daily routine of home affairs and hardly going beyond
the circle of my own observation. .

‘“My father adopted a course which he thought would, in some
measure, compensate me for the loss of my hearing. It was that of
taking me with him when business required him to ride abroad ; and
ne took me more frequently than he did my brothers; giving, as the
reason for his apparent partiality, that they could acquire information

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 267

through the ear, while I depended solely upon my eye for acquaintance
with affairs of the outside world... .

‘*T have a vivid recollection of the delight I felt in watching the
different scenes we passed through, observing the various phases of
nature, both animate and inanimate ; though we did not, owing to my
infirmity, engage in conversation. It was during those delightful rides,
some two or three years before my initiation into the rudiments of
written language, that I began to ask myself the question: How came
the world into being 2. When this question occurred to my mind, | set
myself to thinking it over a long time. My curiosity was awakened as
to what was the origin of human life in its first appearance upon the
earth, and of vegetable life as well, and also the cause of the existence
of the earth, sun, moon, and stars.

‘*T remember at one time when my eye fell upon a very large old
stump which we happened to pass in one of our rides, I asked myself,
‘Ts it possible that the first man that ever came into the world rose out
of that stump? But that stump is only a remnant of a once noble mag.
nificent tree, and how came that tree? Why, it came only by beginning
to grow out of the ground just like those little trees now coming up.’
And I dismissed from my mind, as an absurd idea, the connection
between the origin of man and a decaying old stump... .

“‘T have no recollection of what it was that first suggested to me the
question as to the origin of things. I had before this time gained ideas
of the descent from parent to child, of the propagation of animals, and
of the production of plants from seeds. The question that occurred to
my mind was: whence came the first man, the first animal, and the
first plant, at the remotest distance of time, before which there was no
man, no animal, no plant ; since I knew they all had a beginning and
an end.

‘‘Tt is impossible to state the exact order in which these different
questions arose, i.e., about men, animals, plants, the earth, sun, moon,
ete. The lower animals did not receive so much thought as was bestowed
upon man and the earth ; perhaps because I put man and beast in the
same class, since I believed that man would be annihilated and there was
no resurrection beyond the grave,—though Iam told by my mother that,
in answer to my question, in the case of a deceased uncle who looked
to me like a person in sleep, she had tried to make me understand that
he would awake in the far future. It was my belief that man and
beast derived their being from the same source, and were to be laid
down in the dust in a state of annibilation. Considering the brute
animal as of secondary importance, and allied to man on a lower level,
man and the earth were the two things on which my mind dwelled
most.

‘‘T think I was five years old, when I began to understand the de-
scent from parent to child and the propagation of animals. I was
nearly eleven years old, when I entered the Institution where I was ed-

268 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

ucated ; and I remember distinctly that it was at least two years before
this time that I began to ask myself the question as to the origin of the
universe. My age was then about eight, not over nine years.

‘*Of the form of the earth, I had no idea in my childhood, except
that, from a look at a map of the hemispheres, I inferred there were
two immense disks of matter lying near each other. Ialso believed the
sun and moon to be round, flat plates of illuminating matter ; and for
those luminaries I entertained a sort of reverence on account of their
power of lighting and heating the earth. I thought from their coming
up and going down, travelling across the sky in so regular a manner
that there must be a certain something having power to govern their
course. I believed the sun went into a hole at the west and came out
of another at the east, travelling through a great tube in the earth, de-
scribing the same curve as it seemed to describe in the sky. The stars
seemed to me to be tiny lights studded in the sky.

‘‘ The source from which the universe came was the question about
which my mind revolved ina vain struggle to grasp it, or rather to
fight the way up to attain toa satisfactory answer. When I had occupied
myself with this subject a considerable time, I perceived that it was a
matter much greater than my mind could comprehend ; and I remem-
ber well that I became so appalled at its mystery and so bewildered at
my inability to grapple with it that I laid the subject aside and out of
my mind, gtad to escape being, as it were, drawn into a vortex of inex-
tricable confusion. Though I felt relieved at this escape, yet I could not
resist the desire to know the truth ; and I returned to the subject ; but
as before, I left it, after thinking it over for some time. In this state of
perplexity, I hoped all the time to get at the truth, still believing that
the more I gave thought to the subject, the more my mind would pene-
trate the mystery. Thus I was tossed like a shuttlecock, returning to
the subject and recoiling from it, till I came to school.

‘‘T 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 coun-
tenance. Ido not recall the circumstance which led to this communica-
tion. When she mentioned the mysterious being up in the sky, I was
eager to take hold of the subject, and plied her with questions concern-
ing the form and appearance of this unknown being, asking if it was
the sun, moon, or one of the stars. I knew she meant that there was a
living one somewhere up in the sky ; but when I realized that she could
not answer my questions, I gave it up in despair, feeling sorrowful that
I could not obtain a definite idea of the mysterious living one up in the
sky.
‘‘One day, while we were haying in a field, there was a series of heavy
thunder-claps. I asked one of my brothers where they came from. He
pointed to the sky and made a zigzag motion with his finger, signifying
lightning. JI imagined there was a great man somewhere in the blue
vault, who made a loud noise witb his voice out of it; and each time I

LHE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 269

heard * a thunder-clap I was frightened, and looked up at the sky, fear-
ing he was speaking a threatening word.” +

Here we may pause. The reader sees by this time that
it makes little or no difference in what sort of mind-stuff, in
what quality of imagery, his thinking goes on. The only
images intrinsically important are the halting-places, the
substantive conclusions, provisional or final, of the thought.
Throughout all the rest of the stream, the feelings of rela-
tion are everything, and the terms related almost naught.
These feelings of relation, these psychic overtones, halos,
suffusions, or fringes about the terms, may be the same
in very different systems of imagery. A diagram may help
to accentuate this indifference of the mental means where
the end is the same. Let A be some experience from
which a number of thinkers start. Let Z be the practical
conclusion rationally inferrible from it. One gets to the
conclusion by one line, another by another; one follows a
course of English, another of
German, verbal imagery.
With one, visual images pre-
dominate ; with another, tac-
tile. Some trains are tinged
with emotions, others not;
some are very abridged, syn-
thetic and rapid, others, hesi- Fia. 28.
tating and broken into many steps. But when the penul-
timate terms of all the trains, however differing inter se,
finally shoot into the same conclusion, we say and rightly
say, that all the thinkers have had substantially the same
thought. It would probably astound each of them beyond

N

A

* Not literally Heard, of course. Deaf mutes are quick to perceive
shocks and jars that can be felt, even when so slight as to be unnoticed by
those who can hear.

+ 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 11; G. J. Romanes :
Mental Evolution in Man, pp. 81-83, and references therein made. Prof.
Max Miller givesa very complete history of this controversy in pp. 80-64 of
his ‘Science of Thought’ (1887). His own view is that Thought and Speech
are inseparable ; but under speech he includes any conceivable sort of sym-
bolism or even mental imagery, and he makes no allowance for the word.
less summary glimpses which we have of systems of relation and direction.

270 PSYCHOLOGY.

measure to be let into his neighbor’s mind and to find now
different the scenery there was from that in his own.

Thought is in fact a kind of Algebra, as Berkeley long ago
said, ‘‘in which, though a particular quantity be marked by
each letter, yet to proceed right, it 1s not requisite that in
every step each letter suggest to your thoughts that par-
ticular quantity it was appointed to stand for.” Mr. Lewes
has developed this algebra-analogy so well that I must
quote his words :

‘The leading characteristic of algebra is that of operation on rela-
tions. This also is the leading characteristic of Thought. Algebra can-
not exist without values, nor Thought without Feelings. The operations
are so many blank forms till the values are assigned. Words are va-
cant sounds, ideas are blank forms, unless they symbolize images and
sensations which are their values. Nevertheless it is rigorously true,
and of the greatest importance, that analysts carry on very extensive
operations with blank forms, never pausing to supply the symbols with
values until the calculation is completed; and ordinary men, no less
than philosophers, carry on long trains of thought without pausing to
translate their ideas (words) into images. . . . Suppose some one from
a 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 has
seen and heard of lions, capable of recalling various experiences, but is
also capable of taking its place in a connected series of thoughts without
recalling any of those experiences, without reviving an image, however
faint, of the lion—simply as a sign of a certain relation Included in the
complex so named. Like an algebraic symbol it may be operated on
without conveying other significance than an abstract relation: it is a
sign of Danger, related to fear with all its motor sequences. Its logical
position suffices. . . . Ideas are substitutions which require a secondary
process when what is symbolized by them is translated into the images
and experiences it replaces; and this secondary process is frequently not
performed at all, generally only performed to a very small extent. Let
anyone closely examine what has passed in his mind when he has con-
structed a chain of reasoning, and he will be surprised at the fewness
and faintness of the images which have accompanied the ideas. Sup-
pose you inform me that ‘the blood rushed violently from the man’s
heart, quickening his pulse at the sight of his enemy.’ Of the many la-
tent images in this phrase, how many were salient in your mind and in
mine? Probably two—the man and his enemy—and these images were
faint. Images of blood, heart, violent rushing, pulse, quickening, and
sight, were either not revived at all, or were passing shadows. Had
any such images arisen, they would have hampered thought, retarding
the logical process of judgment by irrelevant connections. The symbols
had substituted relations for these values. . . . There are no images of

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 271

two things and three things, when I say ‘two and three equal five;’
there are simply familiar symbols having precise relations. . . . The
verbal symbol ‘ horse,’ which stands for all our experiences of horses,
serves all the purposes of Thought, without recalling one of the images
clustered in the perception of horses, just as the sight of a horse’s form
serves all the purposes cf recognition without recalling the sound of its
neighing,or its tramp, its qualities as an animal of draught, and so
forth.*

It need only be added that as the Algebrist, though the
sequence of his terms is fixed by their relations rather than
by their several values, must give a real value to the final one
he reaches; so the thinker in words must let his conclud-
ing word or phrase be translated into its full sensible-image-
value, under penalty of the thought being left unrealized
and pale.

This is all I have to say about the sensible continuity
and unity of our thought as contrasted with the apparent
discreteness of the words, images, and other means by
which it seems to be carried on. Between all their sub-
stantive elements there is ‘ transitive’ consciousness, and
the words and images are ‘ fringed,’ and not as discrete as
to a careless view they seem. Let us advance now to the
next head in our description of Thought’s stream.

4, Human thought appears to deal with objects independent
of itself ; that is, it is cognitive, or possesses the function of
knowing.

For Absolute Idealism, the infinite Thought and its ob-
jects are one. The Objects are, through being thought;
the eternal Mind is, through thinking them. Were a
human thought alone in the world there would be no
reason for any other assumption regarding it. Whatever
it might have before it would be its vision, would be there,
in its ‘there,’ or then, in its ‘then’ ; and the question would
never arise whether an extra-mental duplicate of it existed or
not. The reason why we all believe that the objects of our
thoughts have a duplicate existence outside, is that there
are many human thoughts, each with the same objects, as

* Problems of Life and Mind, 3d Series, Problem trv, chapter 5. Com-
pare also Victor Egger : La Parole Intérieure (Paris, 1881), chap. vI.

aie PSYCHOLOGY.

we cannot helpsupposing. The judgment that my thought
has the same object as dis thought is what makes the
psychologist call my thought cognitive of an outer reality.
The judgment that my own past thought and my own pres-
ent thought are of the same object is what makes me take
the object out of either and project it by a sort of triangu-
lation into an independent position, from which it may
appear to. both. Sameness in a multiplicity of objective
appearances is thus the basis of our belief in realities
outside of thought.* In Chapter XII we shall have to take
up the judgment of sameness again.

To show that the question of reality being extra-mental
or not is not likely to arise in the absence of repeated ex-
periences of the same, take the example of an altogether
unprecedented experience, such as a new taste in the throat.
Is it a subjective quality of feeling, or an objective quality
felt? You do not even ask the question at this point. It
is simply that taste. Butif a doctor hears you describe it,
and says: “Ha! Now you know what heartburn is,” then
it becomes a quality already existent extra mentem tuam,
which you in turn have come upon and learned. The first
spaces, times, things, qualities, experienced by the child
probably appear, like the first heartburn, in this absolute
way, as simple beings, neither in nor out of thought. But
later, by having other thoughts than this present one, and
making repeated judgments of sameness among their ob-
jects, he corroborates in himself the notion of realities,
past and distant as well as present, which realities no one
single thought either possesses or engenders, but which all
may contemplate and know. This, as was stated in the last
chapter, is the psychological point of view, the relatively
uncritical non-idealistic point of view of all natural science,
beyond which this book cannot go. A mind which has
become conscious of its own cognitive function, plays what
we have called ‘the psychologist’ upon itself. It not only
knows the things that appear before it; it knows that it

*If but one person sees an apparition we consider it his private halluci-
nation. If more than one, we begin to think it may be a real external
presence.

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 273

knows them. This stage of reflective condition is, more or
less explicitly, our habitual adult state of mind.

It cannot, however, be regarded as primitive. The con-
sciousness of objects must come first. “We seem to lapse
into this primordial condition when consciousness is re-
duced to a minimum by the inhalation of anesthetics or
during a faint. Many persons testify that at a certain stage
of the anesthetic process objects are still cognized whilst
the thought of self is lost. Professor Herzen says: *

‘* During the syncope there is absolute psychic annihilation, the ab-
sence of all consciousness ; then at the beginning of coming to, one has
at a certain momenta vague, limitless, infinite feeling—a sense of eaist-
ence in general without the least trace of distinction between the me and
the not-me.”

Dr. Shoemaker of Philadelphia describes during the
deepest conscious stage of ether-intoxication a vision of

‘‘two endless parallel lines in swift longitudinal motion . . . ona uni-

form misty background . . . together with a constant sound or whirr,
not loud but distinct . . . which seemed to be connected with the paral-
lel lines. . . . These phenomena occupied the whole field. There were

present no dreams or visions in any way connected with human affairs,
no ideas or impressions akin to anything in past experience, no emo-
tions, of course no idea of personality. There was no conception as to
what being it was that was regarding the two lines, or that there existed
any such thing as such a being; the lines and waves were all.” +

Similarly a friend of Mr. Herbert Spencer, quoted by
him in ‘Mind’ (vol. m1. p. 556), speaks of “an undisturbed
empty quiet everywhere except that a stupid presence lay
like a heavy intrusion somewhere—a blotch on the calm.”
This sense of objectivity and lapse of subjectivity, even
when the object is almost indefinable, is, it seems to me, a
somewhat familiar phase in chloroformization, though in
my own case it is too deep a phase for any articulate after-
memory to remain. I only know that as it vanishes I
seem to wake to a sense of my own existence as something
additional to what had previously been there.t

* Revue Philosophique, vol. xx1. p. 671.

+ Quoted from the Therapeutic Gazette, by the N. Y. Semi-weekly
Evening Post for Nov. 2, 1886.

tIn half-stunned states self-consciousness may lapse. A friend writes
me: ‘‘ We were driving back from —— in a wagonette. The door flew

274 PSYCHOLOGY.

Many philosophers, however, hold that the reflective
consciousness of the self is essential to the cognitive func-
tion of thought. They hold that a thought, in order to know
a thing at all, must expressly distinguish between the thing
and its own self.* This is a perfectly wanton assumption,
and not the faintest shadow of reason exists for supposing
it true. As well might I contend that I cannot dream
without dreaming that I dream, swear without swearing
that I swear, deny without denying that I deny, as main-
tain that I cannot know without knowing that I know. I
may have either acquaintance-with, or knowledge-about,
an object O without think about myself at all. It suffices
for this that I think O, and that it exist. If, in addition
to 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, does
not prevent me from having already known O a good deal.
O per se, or O plus P, are as good objects of knowledge as
O plus meis. The philosophers in question simply substi-
tute one particular object for all others, and call it the ob-
ject par excellence. It is a case of the ‘psychologist’s fal-
lacy’ (see p. 197). They know the object to be one thing

open 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’t
exactly remember the words. When told that Baldy fell out, he said, ‘ Did
Baldy fall out? Poor Baldy!’”’

* Kant originated this view. I subjoin a few English statements of it.
J. Ferrier, Institutes of Metaphysic, Proposition 1: ‘‘ Along with what-
ever any intelligence knows it must, as the ground or condition of its
knowledge, have some knowledge of itself.” Sir Wm. Hamilton, Discus.
sions, p. 47: ‘“* We know, and we know that we know,—these propositions,
logically distinct, are really identical ; each implies the other. . . . So true
is the scholastic brocard : non sentimus nist sentiamus nos sentire.’ H. L.
Mansel, Metaphysics, p. 58: ‘‘ Whatever variety of materials may exist
within reach of my mind, I can become conscious of them only by recog-
nizing them as mine. . . . Relation to the conscious self is thus the perma-
nent and universal feature which every state of consciousness as such must
exhibit.” T. H. Green, Introduction to Hume, p. 12: ‘‘A consciousness
by the man... . of himself, in negative relation to the thing that is his
object, and this consciousness must be taken to go along with the percep-
tive act itself. Not less than this indeed can be involved in any act that is
to be the beginning of knowledge at all. It is the minimum of possible
thought or intelligence,”

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 210

and the thought another; and they forthwith foist their
own knowledge into that of the thought of which they pre-
tend to give a true account. To conclude, then, thought may,
but need not, in knowing, discriminate between its object and
itself.

We have been using the word Object. Something must
now be said about the proper use of the term Object in Psy-
chology.

In popular parlance the word object is commonly taken
without reference to the act of knowledge, and treated as
synonymous with individual subject of existence. Thus
if anyone ask what is the mind’s object when you say
‘Columbus discovered America in 1492,’ most people will
reply ‘Columbus,’ or ‘ America,’ or, at most, ‘the discovery
of America.’ They will name a substantive kernel or nu-
cleus of 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 grammatical
object, or more likely the grammatical subject, of your sen-
tence. Itisat most your ‘fractional object ;’ or you may call
it the ‘topic’ of your thought, or the ‘subject of your dis-
course. But the Object of your thought is really its entire
content or deliverance, neither more nor less. It is a vicious
use of speech to take out a substantive kernel from its con-
tent and call that its object ; and it is an equally vicious use
of speech to add a substantive kernel not articulately in-
cluded in its content, and to call that its object. Yet either
one of these two sins we commit, whenever we content our-
selves with saying that a given thought is simply ‘about’ a
certain topic, or that that topic is its ‘object.’ The object of
my thought in the previous sentence, for example, is strictly
speaking neither Columbus, nor America, nor its discovery.
It is nothing short of the entire sentence, ‘Columbus-dis-
covered-America-in-1492.’ And if we wish to speak of it
substantively, we must make a substantive of it by writing
1t out thus with hyphens between all its words. Nothing
but this can possibly name its delicate idiosyncrasy. And
if we wish to feel that idiosyncrasy we must reproduce the
thought as it was uttered, with every word fringed and the

276 PSYCHOLOGY.

whole sentence bathed in that original halo of obscure rela-
tions, which, like an horizon, then spread about its meaning.

Our psychological duty is to cling as closely as possible
to the actual constitution of the thought we are studying.
We may err as much by excess as by defect. If the kernel
or ‘topic,’ Columbus, is in one way less than the thought’s
object, so in another way it may be more. That is, when
named by the psychologist, it may mean much more than
actually 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 would
not hesitate to say that the object of your thought was still
‘Columbus.’ True, your thought is about Columbus. It
‘terminates’ in Columbus, leads from and to the direct
idea of Columbus. But for the moment it is not fully and
immediately Columbus, it is only ‘he,’ or rather ‘ he-was-
a-daring-genius ;’ which, though it may be an unimportant
difference for conversational purposes, is, for introspective
psychology, as great a difference as there can be.

The object of every thought, then, is neither more nor
less than all that the thought thinks, exactly as the thought
thinks it, however complicated the matter, and however
symbolic the manner of the thinking may be. It is need-
less to say that memory can seldom accurately reproduce
such an object, when once it has passed from before the
mind. It either makes too little or too much of it. Its
best plan is to repeat the verbal sentence, if there was
one, in which the object was expressed. But for inarticu-
late thoughts there is not even this resource, and intro-
spection must confess that the task exceeds her powers.
The mass of our thinking vanishes for ever, beyond hope
of recovery, and psychology only gathers up a few of the
crumbs that fall from the feast.

The next point to make clear is that, however complex the
object may be, the thought of it is one undivided state of con-
sciousness. As Thomas Brown says :*

‘*T have already spoken too often to require again to caution you
against the mistake into which, I confess, that the terms which the

* Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, Lecture 45.

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 277

poverty of our language obliges us to use might of themselves very
naturally lead you; the mistake of supposing that the most complex
states of mind are not truly, in their very essence, as much one and
indivisible as those which we term simple—the complexity and seem-
ing coexistence which they involve being relative to our feeling * only,
not to their own absolute nature. I trust I need not repeat to you
that, in itself, every notion, however seemingly complex, is, and must
be, truly simple—being one state or affection, of one simple substance,
mind. Our conception of a whole army, for example, is as truly this
one mind existing in this one state, as our conception of any of the
individuals that compose an army. Our notion of the abstract num-
bers, eight, four, two, is as truly one feeling of the mind as our notion
of simple unity.”

The ordinary associationist-psychology supposes, in
contrast with this, that whenever an object of thought con-
tains many elements, the thought itself must be made up
of just as many ideas, one idea for each element, and all
fused together in appearance, but really separate.t The
enemies of this psychology find (as we have already seen)
little trouble in showing that such a bundle of separate
ideas would never form one thought at all, and they con-
tend that an Ego must be added to the bundle to give it
unity, and bring the various ideas into relation with each
other.t We will not discuss the ego just yet, but it is ob-
vious that if things are to be thought in relation, they must
be thought together, and in one something, be that something
ego, psychosis, state of consciousness, or whatever you
please. If not thought with each other, things are ‘not
thought in relation at all. Now most believers in the ego
make the same mistake as the associationists and sensa-
tionists whom they oppose. Both agree that the elements
of the subjective stream are discrete and separate and con-
stitute what Kant calls a ‘manifold.’ But while the asso-

* Instead of saying to our feeling only, he should have said, to the object
only.

+ ‘‘There can be no difficulty in admitting that association does form
the 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 formed
into one idea?” (Jas. Mill’s Analysis of the Human Mind (J. S. Mill’s
Edition), vol. 1. p. 264.)

} For their arguments, see above, pp.

278 PSYCHOLOG Y.

ciationists think that a ‘manifold’ can form a single know)-
edg2, the egoists deny this, and say that the knowledge
comes only when the manifold is subjected to the synthe-
tizing activity of an ego. Both make an identical initial
hypothesis; but the egoist, finding it won’t express the
facts, adds another hypothesis to correct it. Now I do not
wish just yet to ‘commit myself’ about the existence or non-
existence of the ego, but I do contend that we need not
invoke it for this particular reason—namely, because the
manifold of ideas has to be reduced to unity. There is no
manifold of coexisting ideas ; the notion of such a thing is
a chimera. Whatever things are thought in relation are
thought from the outset in a unity, in a single pulse of subjec-
tivity, a single psychosis, feeling, or state of mind.

The reason why this fact is so strangely garbled in the
books seems to be what on an earlier page (see p. 196 ff.) I
called the psychologist’s fallacy. We have the inveterate
habit, whenever we try introspectively to describe one of
our thoughts, of dropping the thought as it is in itself and
talking of something else. We describe the things that
appear to the thought, and we describe other thoughts
about those things—as if these and the original thought
were the same. If, for example, the thought be ‘ the pack
of cards is on the table,’ we say, “ Well, isn’t it a thought of
the pack of cards? Isn’t it of the cards as included in the
pack? Isn’tit of the table? And of the legs of the table
as well? The table has legs—how can you think the table
without virtually thinking its legs? Hasn’t our thought
then, all these parts—one part for the pack and another for
the table? And within the pack-part a part for each card,
as within the table-part a part for each leg? And isn’t
each of these parts an idea? And can our thought, then,
be anything but an assemblage or pack of ideas, each
answering to some element of what it knows?”

Now not one of these assumptions is true. The thought
taken as an example is, in the first place, not of ‘a pack of
cards.’ It is of ‘the-pack-of-cards-is-on-the-table,’ an en-
tirely different subjective phenomenon, whose Object implies
the pack, and every one of the cards in it, but whose conscious
constitution bears very little resemblance to that of the

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 279

thought of the pack per se. What a thought 7s, and what it
may be developed into, or explained to stand for, and be
equivalent to, are two things, not one.*

An analysis of what passes through the mind as we utter
the phrase the pack of cards is on the table will, I hope, make
this clear, and may at the same time condense into a con-
crete example a good deal of what has gone before.

4°

7) Zl 2 3 a a
The pack of cards is on the table
Fic. 29.—The Stream of Consciousness.

It takes time to utter the phrase. Let the horizontal
line in Fig. 29 represent time. Every part of it will then
stand for a fraction, every point for an instant, of the time.
Of course the thought has time-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 one
of them so short that it will not after some fashion or other
be a thought of the whole object ‘the pack of cards is on
the table.’ They melt into each other like dissolving views,
and no two of them feel the object just alike, but each feels
the total object in a unitary undivided way. This is what
I mean by denying that in the thought any parts can be
found corresponding to the object’s parts. Time-parts are
not such parts.

* T know thereare readers whom nothing can convince that the thought
of a complex object has not as many parts as are discriminated in the ob-
ject itself. Well, then, let the word parts pass. Only observe that these
parts are not the separate ‘ideas’ of traditional psychology. No one of
them can live out of that particular thought, any more than my head can
live off of my particular shoulders. In asense asoap-bubble has parts; it is
a sum of juxtaposed spherical triangles. But these triangles are not sepa-
rate realities; neither are the ‘ parts’ of the thought separate realities.
Touch the bubble and the triangles are no more. Dismiss the thought
and 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 triangles,
Each bubble, each thought, is a fresh organic unity, sud generis.

280 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

Now let the vertical dimensions of the figure stand for
the objects or contents of the thoughts. A line vertical to
any point of the horizontal, as 1-1’, will then symbolize the
object in the mind at the instant 1; a space above the hori-
zontal, as 1-1’—2’-2, will symbolize all that passes through
the mind during the time 1-2 whose line it covers. The
entire diagram from 0 to 0’ represents a finite length of
thought’s stream.

Can we now define the psychic constitution of each ver-
tical section of this segment? We can, though in a very
rough way. Immediately after 0, even before we have
opened our mouths to speak, the entire thought is present to
our mind in the form of an intention to utter that sentence.
This intention, though it has no simple name, and though
it is a transitive state immediately displaced by the first
word, is yet a perfectly determinate phase of thought,
unlike anything else (see p. 253). Again, immediately
before 0’, after the last word of the sentence is spoken, all
will admit that we again think its entire content as we
inwardly realize its completed deliverance. All vertical
sections made through any other parts of the diagram will
be respectively filled with other ways of feeling the sen-
tence’s meaning. Through 2, for example, the cards will
be the part of the object most emphatically present to the
mind ; through 4, the table. The stream is made higher in
the drawing at its end than at its beginning, because the
final way of feeling the content is fuller and richer than the
initial way. As Joubert says, ‘‘ we only know just what we
meant to say, after we have said it.” And as M. V. Egger
remarks, “ before speaking, one barely knows what one in-
tends to say, but afterwards one is filled with admiration
and surprise at having said and thought it so well.”

This latter author seems to me to have kept at much
closer quarters with the facts than any other analyst of con-
sciousness.* But even he does not quite hit the mark, for,
as I understand him, he thinks that each word as it ocecu-
pies the mind displaces the rest of the thought’s content.
He distinguishes the ‘idea’ (what I have called the total

*In his work, La Parole Intérieure (Paris, 1881), especially chapters
VI and vil.

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 281

object or meaning) from the consciousness of the words,
calling the former a very feeble state, and contrasting it
with the liveliness of the words, even when these are only
silently rehearsed. “The feeling,” he says, “of the words
makes ten or twenty times more noise in our consciousness
than the sense of the phrase, which for consciousness is a
very slight matter.” * And having distinguished these two
things, he goes on to separate them in time, saying that the
idea may either precede or follow the words, but that it is
a ‘pure illusion’ to suppose them simultaneous.t Now I
believe that in all cases where the words are understood, the
total idea may be and usually is present not only before
and after the phrase has been spoken, but also whilst each
separate word is uttered.t Itis the overtone, halo, or fringe
of the word, as spoken in that sentence. It is never absent;
no word in an understood sentence comes to consciousness
as amere noise. We feel its meaning as it passes; and
although our object differs from one moment to another as
to its verbal kernel or nucleus, yet it is similar throughout
the entire segment of the stream. The same object is
known everywhere, now from the point of view, if we may
so call it, of this word, now from the point of view of that.
And in our feeling of each word there chimes an echo or
foretaste of every other. The consciousness of the ‘Idea’

* Page 301.

+ Page 218. To prove this point, M. Egger appeals to the fact that we
often hear some one speak whilst our mind is preoccupied, but do not under-
stand him until some moments afterwards, when we suddenly ‘realize’
what he meant. Also to our digging out the meaning ofa sentence in an
unfamiliar tongue, where the words are present to us long before the idea
is 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 express
ourselves with effort, as in a foreign tongue, or in an unusual field of intel-
lectual invention. Both sets of cases, however, are exceptional, and M.
Egger would probably himself admit, on reflection, that in the former class
there 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 mean-
ing. And he would probably admit that in the second class of cases the
idea persists after the words that came with so much effort are found. In
normal cases the simultaneity, as he admits, is obviously there.

¢t A good way to get the words and the sense separately is to inwardly
articulate word for word the discourse of another. One then finds that
the meaning will often come to the mind in pulses, after clauses or sen;
tences are finished.

282 PSYCHOLOGY.

and that of the words are thus consubstantial. They
are made of the same ‘mind-stuff, and form an un-
broken stream. Annihilate a mind at any instant, cut
its thought through whilst yet uncompleted, and examine
the object present to the cross-section thus suddenly
made; you will find, not the bald word in process of ut-
terance, but that word suffused with the whole idea. The
word may be so loud, as M. Egger would say, that we
cannot fell just how its suffusion, as such, feels, or how it
differs from the suffusion of the next word. But it does
differ ; and we may be sure that, could we see into the brain,
we should find the same processes active through the entire
sentence in different degrees, each one in turn becoming
maximally excited and then yielding the momentary verbal
‘kernel,’ to the thought’s content, at other times being only
sub-excited, and then combining with the other sub-excited
processes to give the overtone or fringe.*
We may illustrate this by a farther
development of the diagram on p. 279.
Let the objective content of any ver-
: tical section through the stream be
The pack of cards is on the table. ;
Fi. 30. represented no longer by a line, but by
a plane figure, highest opposite whatever part of the object
is most prominent in consciousness
at the moment when the section is
made. This part, in verbal thought,
will usually be some word. A series
The pack of cardsis onthe table. Of sections 1-1’, taken at the moments
Fig. 31. 1, 2, 3, would then look like this:
The horizontal breadth stands for the entire object
in each of the figures; the height
of the curve above each part of
that object marks the relative
prominence of that part in the
The pack of cards isonthetable. thought. At the moment symbol-
Sa ized by the first figure pack is the
prominent part; in the third figure it is table, ete.

* The nearest approach (with which I am acquainted) to the doctrine
set forth here is in O. Liebmann’s Zur Analysis der Wirklichkeit, pp.
427-438.

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 283

We can easily add all these plane sections together to
make a solid, one of whose solid dimensions will represent
time, whilst a cut across this at right angles will give the
thought’s content at the moment when the cut is made.

Fie. 33.

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 and
examine how the last pulsation of his consciousness was
made, we find that it was an awareness of the whole content
with same most prominent, and the other parts of the thing
known relatively less distinct. With each prolongation of
the scheme in the time-direction, the summit of the curve
of section would come further towards the end of the sen-
tence. If we make a solid wooden frame with the sentence
written on its front, and the time-scale on one of its sides,
if we spread flatly a sheet of India rubber over its top, on
which rectangular co-ordinates are painted, and slide a
smooth ball under the rubber in the direction from 0 to
‘yesterday,’ the bulging of the membrane along this diagonal
at successive moments will symbolize the changing of the
thought’s content in a way plain enough, after what has
been said, to call for no more explanation. Or to express
it in cerebral terms, it will show the relative intensities, at
successive moments, of the several nerve-processes to
which the various parts of the thought-object correspond.

The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention
is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream
is that

284 PSYCHOLOGY.

5) It is always interested more in one part of its object than in
another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while
at thinks.

The phenomena of selective attention and of delibera-
tive will are of course patent examples of this choosing
activity. But few of us are aware how incessantly it is at
work in operations not ordinarily called by these names.
Accentuation and Emphasis are present in every perception
we have. We find it quite impossible to disperse our
attention impartially over a number of impressions. A
monotonous succession of sonorous strokes is broken up
into rhythms, now of one sort, now of another, by the dif-
ferent accent which we place on different strokes. The
simplest of these rhythms is the double one, tick-tock, tick-
tock, tick-tock. Dots dispersed on a surface are perceived
in rows and groups. Lines separate into diverse figures.
The ubiquity of the distinctions, this and that, here and
there, now and then, in our minds is the result of our laying
the same selective emphasis on parts of place and time.

But we do far more than emphasize things, and unite
some, and keep others apart. We actually ignore most of the
things before us. Let me briefly show how this goes on.

To begin at the bottom, what are our very senses them-
selves but organs of selection? Out of the infinite chaos
of movements, of which physics teaches us that the outer
world consists, each sense-organ picks out those which fall
within certain limits of velocity. To these it responds, but
ignores the rest as completely as if they did not exist. It
thus accentuates particular movements in a manner for
which objectively there seems no valid ground; for, as
Lange says, there is no reason whatever to think that the
gap in Nature between the highest sound-waves and the
lowest heat-waves is an abrupt break like that of our sen-
sations; or that the difference between violet and ultra-
violet rays has anything like the objective importance sub-
jectively represented by that between light and darkness.
Out of what is initself an undistinguishable, swarming
continuum, devoid of distinction or emphasis, our senses
make for us, by attending to this motion and ignoring that,

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 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 have
their causes thus picked out for us by the conformation of
the organ’s termination, Attention, on the other hand, out
of all the sensations yielded, picks out certain ones as
worthy of its notice and suppresses all the rest. Helm-
holtz’s work on Opties 1s little more than a study of those
visual sensations of which common men never become
aware—blind spots, musce volitantes, after-images, irradia-
tion, chromatic fringes, marginal changes of color, double
images, astigmatism, movements of accommodation and
convergence, retinal rivalry, and more besides. We do not
even know without special training on which of our eyes an
image falls. So habitually ignorant are most men of this
that one may be blind for years of a single eye and never
know the fact.

Helmholtz says that we notice only those sensations
which are signs to us of things. But what are things? Noth-
ing, as we shall abundantly see, but special groups of sen-
sible qualities, which happen practically or zsthetically to
interest us, to which we therefore give substantive names, and
which we exalt to this exclusive status of independence and
dignity. But in itself, apart from my interest, a particular
dust-wreath on a windy day is just as much of an individual
thing, and just as much or as little deserves an individual
name, aS my own body does.

And then, among the sensations we get from each sepa-
rate thing, what happens? The mind selects again. It
chooses certain of the sensations to represent the thing
most truly, and considers the rest as its appearances, modi-
fied by the conditions of the moment. Thus my table-top
is named square, after but one of an infinite number of
retinal sensations which it yields, the rest of them being
sensations of two acute and two obtuse angles; but I call
the latter perspective views, and the four right angles the
true form of the table, and erect the attribute squareness
into the table’s essence, for esthetic reasons of my own.
In like manner, the real form of the circle is deemed to be
the sensation it gives when the line of vision is perpendicu-

286 PSYCHOLOG Y.

lar to its centre—all its other sensations are signs of this
sensation. The real sound of the cannon is the sensation
it makes when the ear is close by. The real color of the
brick is the sensation it gives when the eye looks squarely
at it from a near point, out of the sunshine and yet not in
the gloom ; under other circumstances it gives us other
color-sensations which are but signs of this—we then see
it looks pinker or blacker than it really is. The reader
knows no object which he does not represent to himself by
preference 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 to-
gether form for us the genuine objectivity of the thing and
are contrasted with what we call the subjective sensations
it may yield us at a given moment, are mere sensations like
the latter. The mind chooses to suit itself, and decides
what particular sensation shall be held more real and valid
than all the rest.

Thus perception involves a twofold choice. Out of all
present sensations, we notice mainly such as are significant
of absent ones; and out of all the absent associates which
these suggest, we again pick out a very few to stand for the
objective reality par excellence. We could have no more
exquisite example of selective industry.

That industry goes on to deal with the things thus given
in perception. A man’s empirical thought depends on the
things he has experienced, but what these shall be is to a
large extent determined by his habits of attention. A thing
may be present to him a thousand times, but if he persist-
ently fails to notice it, it cannot be said to enter into his ex-
perience. We are all seeing flies, moths, and beetles by the
thousand, but to whom, save an entomologist, do they say
anything distinct? On the other hand, a thing met only once
in a lifetime may leave an indelible experience in the mem-
ory. Let four men make atourin Europe. One will bring
home only picturesque impressions—costumes and colors,
parks and views and works of architecture, pictures and stat-
ues. To another all this will be non-existent; and distances
and prices, populations and drainage-arrangements, door-
and window-fastenings, and other useful statistics will take

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 287

their place. A third will give a rich account of the theatres,
restaurants, and public balls, and naught beside; whilst
the fourth will perhaps have been so wrapped in his own
subjective broodings as to tell little more than afew names
of places through which he passed. Each has selected, out
of the same mass of presented objects, those which suited
his private interest and has made his experience thereby.

If, now, leaving the empirical combination of objects,
we ask how the mind proceeds rationally to connect them,
we find selection again to be omnipotent. In a future
chapter we shall see that all Reasoning depends on the
ability of the mind to break up the totality of the phe-
nomenon reasoned about, into parts, and to pick out from
among these the particular one which, in our given emer-
gency, may lead to the proper conclusion. Another pre-
dicament will need another conclusion, and require another
element to be picked out. The man of genius is he who
will always stick in his bill at the right point, and bring it
out with the right element—‘reason’ if the emergency be
theoretical, ‘means’ if it be practical—transfixed upon it.
I here confine myself to this brief statement, but it may
suffice to show that Reasoning is but another form of the
selective activity of the mind.

If now we pass to its zsthetic department, our law is
still more obvious. The artist notoriously selects his items,
rejecting all tones, colors, shapes, which do not harmonize
with 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 superiority
over works of nature, is wholly due to elimination. Any
natural subject will do, if the artist has wit enough to
pounce upon some one feature of it as characteristic, and
suppress all merely accidental items which do not harmon-
ize with this.

Ascending still higher, we reach the plane of Ethics,
where choice reigns notoriously supreme. An act has no
ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several
all equally possible. To sustain the arguments for the
good course and keep them ever before us, to stifle our

288 PSYCHOLOG Y.

longing for more flowery ways, to keep the foot unflinch-
ingly on the arduous path, these are characteristic ethical
energies. But more than these; for these but deal with
the means of compassing interests already felt by the man
to be supreme. The ethical energy par excellence has to go
farther and choose which interest out of several, equally
coercive, shall become supreme. ‘The issue here is of the
utmost pregnancy, for it decides a man’s entire career.
When he debates, Shall I commit this crime? choose that
profession ? accept that office, or marry this fortune ?—his
choice really lies between one of several equally possible
future Characters. What he shall become is fixed by the
conduct of this moment. Schopenhauer, who enforces his
determinism by the argument that with a given fixed charac-
ter only one reaction is possible under given circumstances,
forgets that, in these critical ethical moments, what con-
sciously seems to be in question is the complexion of the
character itself. The problem with the man is less what
act he shall now choose to do, than what being he shall
now resolve to become.

Looking back, then, over this review, we see that the mind
is at every stage a theatre of simultaneous possibilities.
Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each
other, the selection of some, and the suppression of the rest
by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention. The
highest and most elaborated mental products are filtered
from the data chosen by the faculty next beneath, out of
the mass offered by the faculty below that, which mass in
turn was sifted from a still larger amount of yet simpler
material, and so on. The mind, in short, works on the
data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block
of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity.
But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and
the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one
from the rest. Just so the world of each of us, howsoever
different our several views of it may be, all lay embedded
in the primordial chaos of sensations, which gave the mere
matter to the thought of all of us indifferently. We may,
if we like, by our reasonings unwind things back to that

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 289

black and jointless continuity of space and moving clouds
of swarming atoms which science calls the only real world.
But all the while the world we feel and live in will be that
which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative strokes
of choice, have extricated out of this, like sculptors, by
simply rejecting certain portions of the given stuff. Other
sculptors, other statues from the same stone! Other minds,
other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpressive
chaos! My world is but one in a million alike embedded,
alike real to those who may abstract them. How different
must be the worlds in the consciousness of ant, cuttle-fish,
or crab!

But in my mind and your mind the rejected portions and
the selected portions of the original world-stuff are to a
great extent the same. The human race as a whole largely
agrees as to what it shall notice and name, and what not.
And among the noticed parts we select in much the same
way for accentuation and preference or subordination and
dislike. There is, however, one entirely extraordinary case
in which no two men ever are known to choose alike. One
ereat splitting of the whole universe into two halves is
made by each of us; and for each of us almost all of the
interest attaches to one of the halves; but we all draw
the 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’ re-
spectively, it will at once be seen what I mean. The alto-
gether unique kind of interest which each human mind
feels in those parts of creation which it can call me or mine
may be a moral riddle, but it is a fundamental psychologi-
cal fact. No mind can take the same interest in his neigh-
bor’s me as in his own. The neighbor’s me falls together
with all the rest of things in one foreign mass, against which
his own me stands out in startling relief. Even the trodden
worm, as Lotze somewhere says, contrasts his own suffer-
ing self with the whole remaining universe, though he have
no clear conception either of himself or of what the uni-
verse may be. He is for me a mere part of the world;

290 PSYCHOLOGY.

for him it is I who am the mere part. Each of us dichoto-
mizes the Kosmos in a different place.

Descending now to finer work than this first general
sketch, let us in the next chapter try to trace the psy-
chology of this fact of self-consciousness to which we have
thus once more been led.

CHAPTER X.
THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF.

Ler us begin with the Self in its widest acceptation,
and follow it up to its most delicate and subtle form, ad-
vancing from the study of the empirical, as the Germans
call it, to that of the pure, Ego.

THE EMPIRICAL SELF OR ME.

The Empirical Self of each of us is all that he is
tempted to call by the name of me. But it is clear that
between what a man calls me and what le simply calls
mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about
certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act
about ourselves. Our fame, our children, the work of our
hands, may be as dear to us as our bodies are, and arouse
the same feelings and the same acts of reprisal if attacked.
And our bodies themselves, are they simply ours, or are
they us? Certainly men have been ready to disown their
very bodies and to regard them as mere vestures, or even
as prisons of clay from which they should some day be glad
to escape.

We see then that we are dealing with a fluctuating
material. The same object being sometimes treated as a
part of me, at other times as simply mine, and then again
as if I had nothing to do with it at all. In its widest
possible sense, however, a man’s Self is the sum total of all
that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers,
but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his
ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands
and horses, and yacht and bank-account. All these things
give him the same emotions. If they wax and prosper, he
feels triumphant; if they dwindle and die away, he feels
cast down,—not necessarily in the same degree for each

291

292 PSYCHOLOGY.

thing, but in much the same way for all. Understanding
the Self in this widest sense, we may begin by dividing the
history 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 and
Self-preservation.

1. The constituents of the Self may be divided into two
classes, those which make up respectively—

(a) The material Self;

(6) The social Self;

(c) The spiritual Self; and -

(d) The pure Ego.

(a) The body is the innermost part of the material Self
in each of us; and certain parts of the body seem more
intimately ours than the rest. The clothes come next.
The old saying that the human person is composed of
three parts—soul, body and clothes—is more than a joke.
We so appropriate our clothes and identify ourselves with
them that there are few of us who, if asked to choose
between having a beautiful body clad in raiment perpetu-
ally shabby and unclean, and having an ugly and blemished
form always spotlessly attired, would not hesitate a moment
before making a decisive reply.* Next, our immediate
family is a part of ourselves. Our father and mother, our
wife and babes, are bone of our bone and flesh of our
flesh. When they die, a part of our very selves is gone.
If they do anything wrong, it is our shame. If they are
insalted, our anger flashes forth as readily as if we stood in
their place. Our home comes next. Its scenes are part
of our life; its aspects awaken the tenderest feelings of
affection; and we do- not easily forgive the stranger who,
in visiting it, finds’ fault with its arrangements or treats it
with contempt. All these different things are the objects
of instinctive preferences coupled with the most impor-
tant practical interests of life. We all have a blind im-
pulse to watch over our body, to deck it with clothing of

* See, for a charming passage on the Philosophy of Dress, H. Lotze’s
Microcosmus, Eng. tr. vol. 1. p. 592 ff.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SHLF. 293

an ornamental sort, to cherish parents, wife and babes,
and to find for ourselves a home of our own which we may
live in and ‘improve.’

An equally instinctive impulse drives us to collect prop-
erty ; and the collections thus made become, with different
degrees of intimacy, parts of our empirical selves. The
parts of our wealth most intimately ours are those which
are saturated with our labor. There are few men who
would not feel personally annihilated if a life-long con-
struction of their hands or brains—say an entomological
collection or an extensive work in manuscript—were
suddenly swept away. The miser feels similarly towards
his gold, and although it is true that a part of our depres-
sion at the loss of possessions is due to our feeling that we
must now go without certain goods that we expected the
possessions to bring in their train, yet in every case there
remains, over and above this, a sense of the shrinkage of
our personality, a partial conversion of ourselves to
nothingness, which is a psychological phenomenon by
itself. Weare all at once assimilated to the tramps and
poor devils whom we so despise, and at the same time re-
moved farther than ever away from the happy sons ol
earth who lord it over land and sea and men in the full-
blown lustihooud that wealth and power can give, and
before whom, stiffen ourselves as we will by appealing to
anti-snobbish first principles, we cannot escape an emo-
tion, open or sneaking, of respect and dread.

(b) A man’s Social Self is the recognition which he gets
from his mates. We are not only gregarious animals, liking
to be in sight of our fellows, but we have an innate propen-
sity to get ourselves noticed, and noticed favorably, by our
kind. No more fiendish punishment could be devised,
were such a thing physically possible, than that one should
be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed
by all the members thereof. If no one turned round when
we entered, answered when we spoke, or minded what we
did, but if every person we met ‘cut us dead,’ and acted as
if we were non-existing things, a kind of rage and impotent
despair would ere long well up in us, from which the

294 PSYCHOLOGY,

cruellest bodily tortures would be a relief ; for these would
make us feel that, however bad might be our plight, we had
not sunk to such a depth as to be unworthy of attention
at all.

Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as
there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image
of him in their mind. To wound any one of these his
images 1s to wound him.* But as the individuals who
carry the images fall naturally into classes, we may practi-
cally say that he has as many different social selves as
there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion
he cares. He generally shows a different side of himself
to each of these different groups. Many a youth who is
demure enough before his parents and teachers, swears
and 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 em-
ploy, to our own masters and employers as to our intimate
friends. From this there results what practically is a
division of the man into several selves; and this may be a
discordant splitting, as where one is afraid to let one set of
his acquaintances know him as he is elsewhere ; or it may”
be a perfectly harmonious division of labor, as where one
tender to his children is stern to the soldiers or prisoners
under his command.

The most peculiar social self which one is apt to have
is in the mind of the person one is in love with. The
good or bad fortunes of this self cause the most intense
elation and dejection—unreasonable enough as measured
by every other standard than that of the organic feeling of
the individual. To his own consciousness he 7s not, so long
as this particular social self fails to get recognition, and
when it is recognized his contentment passes all bounds.

A man’s fame, good or bad, and his honor or dishonor,
are names for one of his social selves. The particular
social self of a man called his honor is usually the result
of one of those splittings of which we have spoken. It is
his image in the eyes of his own ‘set,’ which exalts or con-

* « Who filches from me my good name,”’’ etc.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 295

demus him as he conforms or not to certain requirements
that may not be made of one in another walk of life. Thus
a layman may abandon a city infected with cholera; but a
priest or a doctor would think such an act incompatible
with his honor. A soldier’s honor requires him to fight or
to die under circumstances where another man can apolo-
gize or run away with no stain upon his social self. <A
judge, a statesman, are in like manner debarred by the
honor of their cloth from entering into pecuniary relations
perfectly honorable to persons in private life. Nothing is
commoner than to hear people discriminate between their
different selves of this sort: “As a man I pity you, but as
an official I must show you no mercy; as a politician I
regard him as an ally, but as a moralist I loathe him ;” etc.,
etc. What may be called ‘ club-opinion’ is one of the very
strongest forces in life.* The thief must not steal from
other thieves ; the gambler must pay his gambling-debts,
though he pay no other debts in the world. The code of
honor of fashionable society has throughout history been
full of permissions as well as of vetoes, the only reason for
following either of which is that so we best serve one of

*«We who imagines commendation and disgrace not to be strong
motives on men . . . seems little skilled in the nature and history of man-
kind; 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 keeps
them in reputation with their company, little regard the laws of God or the
magistrate. 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 te the punishments due
from the laws of the commonwealth, they frequently flatter themselves
with the hope of impunity. But no man escapes the punishment of their
censure and dislike who offends against the fashion and opinion of the
company he keeps, and would recommend himself to. Nor is there one
in ten thousand who is stiff and insensible enough to bear up under the
constant dislike and condemnation of his own club. He must be of a
strange and unusual constitution who can content himseif to live in con-
stant disgrace and disrepute with his own particular society. Solitude many
men have sought and been reconciled to; but nobody that has the least
thought or sense of a man about him can live in society under the
constant dislike and ill opinion of his familiars and those he converses
with. This is a burden too heavy for human sufferance: and he must be
made up of irreconcilable contradictions who can take pleasure in com-
pany and yet be insensible of contempt and disgrace from his companions. ”
(Locke’s Essay, book 11, ch. xxvirt. § 12.)

296 PSYCHOLOGY.

our social selves. You must not lie in general, but you
may lie as much as you please if asked about your relations
with a lady; you must accept a challenge from an equal,
but if challenged by an inferior you may laugh him to
scorn: these are examples of what is meant.

(c) By the Spiritual Self, so far as it belongs to the
Empirical Me, I mean a man’s inner or subjective being, his
psychic faculties or dispositions, taken concretely ; not the
bare principle of personal Unity, or ‘pure’ Ego, which
remains still to be discussed. These psychic dispositions
are the most enduring and intimate part of the self, that
which we most verily seem to be. We take a purer self-
satisfaction when we think of our ability to argue and dis-
criminate, of our moral sensibility and conscience, of our
indomitable will, than when we survey any of our other
possessions. Only when these are altered is a man said to
be alienatus a se.

Now this spiritual self may be considered in various
ways. We may divide it into faculties, as just instanced,
isolating them one from another, and identifying ourselves
with either in turn. This is an abstract way of dealing with
consciousness, in which, as it actually presents itself, a
plurality of such faculties are always to be simultaneously
found ; or we may insist on a concrete view, and then the
spiritual self in us will be either the entire stream of our
personal consciousness, or the present ‘segment’ or ‘ sec-
tion’ * of that stream, according as we take a broader or a
narrower view—both the stream and the section being con--
crete existences in time, and each being a unity after its
own peculiar kind. But whether we take it abstractly or
concretely, our considering the spiritual self at all is a
reflective process, is the result of our abandoning the out-
ward-looking point of view, and of our having become able
to think of subjectivity as such, to think ourselves as thinkers.

This attention to thought as such, and the identification
of ourselves with it rather than with any of the objects
which it reveals, is a momentous and in some respects a
rather mysterious operation, of which we need here only
say that as a matter of fact it exists; and that in everyone,
at an early age, the distinction between thought as such,

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 297

and what it is ‘of’ or ‘about, has become familiar to the
mind. The deeper grounds for this discrimination may
possibly be hard to find; but superficial grounds are plenty
and near at hand. Almost anyone will tell us that thought
is a different sort of existence from things, because many
sorts of thought are of no things—e.g., pleasures, pains,
and emotions ; others are of non-existent things—errors
and fictions ; others again of existent things, but in a form
that is symbolic and does not resemble them—abstract
ideas and concepts; whilst in the thoughts that do resem-
ble the things they are ‘of’ (percepts, sensations), we can
feel, alongside of the thing known, the thought of it going
on as an altogether separate act and operation in the mind.

Now this subjective life of ours, distinguished as such
so clearly from the objects known by its means, may, as
aforesaid, be taken by usin a concrete or in an abstract
way. Of the concrete way I will say nothing just now, ex-
cept that the actual ‘section’ of the stream will ere long,
in our discussion of the nature of the principle of unity in
consciousness, play a very important part. The abstract
way claims our attention first. If the stream as a whole is
identified with the Self far more than any outward thing, a
certain portion of the stream abstracted from the rest is so
identified in an altogether peculiar degree, and is felt by all
men as a sort of innermost centre within the circle, of sanc-
tuary within the citadel, constituted by the subjective life
as a whole. Compared with this element of the stream,
the other parts, even of the subjective life, seem transient
external possessions, of which each in turn can be disowned,
whilst that which disowns them remains. Now, what is
this self of all the other selves ?

Probably all men would describe it in much the same
way up to a certain point. They would call it the active
element in all consciousness ; saying that whatever quali-
ties a man’s feelings may possess, or whatever content his
thought may include, there is a spiritual something in
him which seems to go out to meet these qualities and
contents, whilst they seem to come in to be received by it.
It is what welcomes or rejects. It presides over the per-
ception of sensations, and by giving or withholding its

998 PSYCHOLOGY.

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 to
which pleasure and pain, the pleasant and the painful, speak.
It is the source of effort and attention, and the place from
which appear to emanate the fiats of the will. A physiol-
ogist who should reflect upon it in his own person could
hardly help, I should think, connecting it more or less
vaguely with the process by which ideas or incoming sensa-
tions are ‘reflected’ or pass over into outward acts. Not
necessarily that it should be this process or the mere feel-
ing of this process, but that it should be in some close way
related to this process ; for it plays a part analogous to it in
the psychic lite, being a sort of junction at which sensory
ideas terminate and from which motor ideas proceed, and
forming a kind of link between the two. Being more in-
cessantly there than any other single element of the mental
life, the other elements end by seeming to accrete round it
and to belong to it. It become opposed to them as the per-
manent is opposed to the changing and inconstant.

One may, I think, without fear of being upset by any
future Galtonian circulars, believe that all men must single
out from the rest of what they call themselves some central
principle of which each would recognize the foregoing to be
a fair general description, —accurate enough, at any rate, to
denote what is meant, and keep it unconfused with other
things. The moment, however, they came to closer quarters
with it, trying to define more accurately its precise nature,
we should find opinions beginning to diverge. Some would
say that it is a simple active substance, the soul, of which
they are thus conscious; others, that it is nothing but a
fiction, the imaginary being denoted by the pronoun I; and
between these extremes of opinion all sorts of intermediaries
would be found.

Later we must ourselves discuss them all, and sufficient
to that day will be the evil thereof. Now, let us try to
settle for ourselves as definitely as we can, just how this
central nucleus of the Self may feel, no matter whether it be
a spiritual substance or only a delusive word.

For this central part of the Selfis fe/t. It may be all that

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 299

Transcendentalists say it is, and all that Empiricists say it
is into the bargain, but itis at any rate no mere ens rationis,
cognized only in an intellectual way, and no mere summation
of memories or mere sound of a word in our ears. Itis some-
thing with which we also have direct sensible acquaintance,
and which is as fully present at any moment of conscious-
ness in which it 7s present, as in a whole lifetime of such
moments. When, just now, it was called an abstraction,
that did not mean that, like some general notion, it could
not be presented ina particular experience. It only meant
that in the stream of consciousness it never was found all
alone. But when it is found, it is felt; just as the body is
felt, the feeling of which is also an abstraction, because never
is the body felt all alone, but always together with other
things. Now can we tell more precisely in what the feeling of
this central active self consists,—not necessarily as yet what
the active self 7s, as a being or principle, but what we feel
when we become aware of its existence ?

I think I can in my own case; and as what I say will
be likely to meet with opposition if generalized (as indeed
it may be in part inapplicable to other individuals), I had
better continue in the first person, leaving my description
to be accepted by those to whose introspection it may com-
mend itself as true, and confessing my inability to meet the
demands of others, if others there be.

First of all, 1 amaware of a constant play of furtherances
and hindrances in my thinking, of checks and releases, ten-
dencies which run with desire, and tendencies which run the
other way. Among the matters I think of, some range them-
selves on the side of the thought’s interests, whilst others
play an unfriendly part thereto. The mutual inconsisten-
cies and agreements, reinforcements and obstructions, which
obtain amonst these objective matters reverberate back-
wards and produce what seem to be incessant reactions of
my spontaneity upon them, welcoming or opposing, appro-
priating or disowning, striving with or against, saying yes
or no. This palpitating inward life is, in me, that central
nucleus which I just tried to describe in terms that all men
might use.

But when I forsake such general descriptions and grap-

300 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

ple with particulars, coming to the closest possible quarters
with the facts, it is difficult for me to detect in the activity any
purely spiritual element at all. Whenever my introspective
glance succeeds in turning round quickly enough to catch one of
these manifestations of spontaneity in the act, all it can ever feel
distinctly is some bodily process, for the most part taking place
within the head. Omitting for a moment what is obscure in
these introspective results, let me try to state those particu-
lars which to my own consciousness seem indubitable and
distinct. .

In the first place, the acts of attending, assenting, ne-
gating, making an effort, are felt as movements of some-
thing in the head. In many cases itis possible to describe
these movements quite exactly. In attending to either an
idea or a sensation belonging to a particular sense-sphere,
the movement is the adjustment of the sense-organ, felt as
it occurs. I cannot think in visual terms, for example,
without feeling a fluctuating play of pressures, converg-
ences, divergences, and accommodations in my eyeballs.
The direction in which the object is conceived to lie deter-
mines the character of these movements, the feeling of
which becomes, for my consciousness, identified with the
manner in which I make myself ready to receive the visible
thing. My brain appears to me asif all shot across with
lines of direction, of which I have become conscious as my
attention has shifted from one sense-organ to another, in
passing to successive outer things, or in following trains of
varying sense-ideas.

When I try to remember or reflect, the movements in
question, instead of being directed towards the periphery,
seem to come from the periphery inwards and feel like a
sort of withdrawal from the outer world. As far as I can
detect, these feelings are due to an actual rolling outwards
and upwards of the eyeballs, such as I believe occurs in
me in sleep, and is the exact opposite of their action in fix-
ating a physical thing. In reasoning, I find that I am apt
to have a kind of vaguely localized diagram in my mind,
with the various fractional objects of the thought disposed
at particular points thereof; and the oscillations of my at-
tention from one of them to another are most distinctly felt

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 301

as alternations of direction in movements occurring inside
the head.*

In consenting and negating, and in making a mental
effort, the movements seem more complex, and I find them
harder to describe. The opening and closing of the glottis
play a great part in these operations, and, less distinctly,
the movements of the soft palate, etc., shutting off the pos-
terior nares from the mouth. My glottis is like a sensitive
valve, intercepting my breath instantaneously at every
mental hesitation or felt aversion to the objects of my
thought, and as quickly opening, to let the air pass through
my throat and nose, the moment the repugnance is over-
come. The feeling of the movement of this air is, in me,
one strong ingredient of the feeling of assent. The move-
ments of the muscles of the brow and eyelids also respond
very sensitively to every fluctuation in the agreeableness
or disagreeableness of what comes before my mind.

In effort of any sort, contractions of the jaw-muscles and
of those of respiration are added to those of the brow and
glottis, and thus the feeling passes out of the head proper-
ly so called. It passes out of the head whenever the wel-
coming or rejecting of the object is strongly felt. Then a
set of feelings pour in from many bodily parts, all ‘expres-
sive” of my emotion, and the head-feelings proper are
swallowed up in this larger mass.

In a sense, then, it may be truly said that, in one per-
son at least, the ‘Self of selves, when carefully examined,
is found to consist mainly of the collection of these peculiar
motions in the head or between the head and throat. I do
not fora moment say that this is all it consists of, for I
fully realize how desperately hard is introspection in this
field. But I feel quite sure that these cephalic motions are
the portions of my innermost activity of which I am most
distinctly aware. Tf the dim portions which I cannot yet
define should prove to be like unto these distinct portions
in me, and I like other men, it would follow that our entire
feeling of spiritual activity, or what commonly passes by that

* For some farther remarks on these feelings of movement see the
next chapter.

302 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

name, is really a feeling of bodily activities whose exact nature
is by most men overlooked.

Now, without pledging ourselves in any way to adopt this
hypothesis, let us dally with it for a while to see to what
consequences it might lead if it were true.

In the first place, the nuclear part of the Self, inter-
mediary between ideas and overt acts, would be a collection
of activities physiologically in no essential way different
from the overt acts themselves. If we divide all possible
physiological acts into adjustments and executions, the
nuclear self would be the adjustments collectively consid-
ered; and the less intimate, more shifting self, so far as
it was active, would be the executions. But both adjust-
ments and executions would obey the reflex type. Both
would be the result of sensorial and ideational processes
discharging either into each other within the brain, or into
muscles and other parts outside. The peculiarity of the
adjustments would be that they are minimal reflexes, few
in number, incessantly repeated, constant amid great fluc-
tuations in the rest of the mind’s content, and entirely
unimportant and uninteresting except through their uses
in furthering or inhibiting the presence of various things,
and actions before consciousness. ‘These characters would
naturally keep us from introspectively paying much atten-
tion to them in detail, whilst they would at the same time
make us aware of them as a coherent group of processes,
strongly contrasted with all the other things consciousness
contained,—even with the other constituents of the ‘ Self,’
material, social, or spiritual, as the case might be. They
are reactions, and they are primary reactions. Everything
arouses them; for objects which have no other effects
will for a moment contract the brow and make the glottis
close. It is as if all that visited the mind had to stand an
entrance-examination, and just show its face so as to be
either approved or sent back. These primary reactions
are like the opening or the closing of the door. In the
midst of psychic change they are the permanent core
of turnings-towards and turnings-from, of yieldings and
arrests, which naturally seem central and interior in com-

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 303

parison with the foreign matters, apropos to which they
occur, and hold a sort of arbitrating, decisive position, quite
unlike that held by any of the other constituents of the Me.
It would not be surprising, then, if we were to feel them as
the birthplace of conclusions and the starting point of acts,
or if they came to appear as what we called a while back
the ‘sanctuary within the citadel’ of our personal life.*

* Wundt’s account of Self-consciousness deserves to be compared with
this. What I have called ‘adjustments’ he calls processes of ‘ Appercep-
tion.’ ‘‘In this development (of consciousness) one particular group of per-
cepts claims a prominent significance, namely, those of which the spring
lies in ourselves. The images of feelings we get from our own body, and
the representations of our own movements distinguish themselves from all
others by forming a permanent group. As there are always some muscles
in a state either of tension or of activity it follows that we never lack a
sense, either dim or clear, of the positions or movements of our body. . . .
This permanent sense, moreover, has this peculiarity, that we are aware of
our power at any moment voluntarily to arouse any one of its ingredients.
We excite the sensations of movement immediately by such impulses of the
will as shall arouse the movements themselves; and we excite the visual
and tactile feelings of our body by the voluntary movement of our organs
of sense. So we come to conceive this permanent mass of feeling as
immediately or remotely subject to our will, and call it the consciousness of
ourself. This self-consciousness is, at the outset, thoroughly sensational,

. only gradually the second-named of its characters, its subjection to
eur will, attains predominance. In proportion as the apperception of all
our mental objects appears to us as an inward exercise of will, does our
self-consciousness begin both to widen itself and to narrow itself at the
same time. It widens itself in that every mental act whatever comes to
stand in relation to our will; and it narrows itself in that it concentrates
itself more and more upon the inner activity of apperception, over against
which our own body and all the representations connected with it appear
as external objects, different from our proper self. This consciousness,
contracted down to the process of apperception, we call our Ego ; and the
apperception of mental objects in general, may thus, after Leibnitz, be
designated as the raising of them into our self-consciousness. Thus the
natural development of self-consciousness implicitly involves the most
abstract forms in which this faculty has been described in philosophy; only
philosophy is fond of placing the abstract ego at the outset, and so revers-
ing the process of development. Nor should we overlook the fact that the
completely abstract ego [as pure activity], although suggested by the
natural development of our consciousness, is never actually found therein.
The most speculative of philosophers is incapable of disjoining his ego
from those bodily feelings and images which form the incessant back-
ground of his awareness of himself. The notion of his ego as such is, like
every notion, derived from sensibility, for the process of apperception itself
comes to our knowledge chiefly through those feelings of tension [what I
have above called inward adjustments] which accompany it.” (Physiolo-
gische Psychologie, 2te Aufl. Bd. 1. pp 217-19.)

304 PSYCHOLOG Y.

If they really were the innermost sanctuary, the witi-
mate one of all the selves whose being we can ever directly
experience, it would follow that all that is experienced is,
strictly considered, objective; that this Objective falls asun-
der into two contrasted parts, one realized as ‘Self,’ the
other as ‘ not-Self;’ and that over and above these parts
there is nothing save the fact that they are known, the fact
of the stream of thought being there as the indispensable
subjective condition of their being experienced at all. But
this condition of the experience is not one of the things ex
perienced at the moment; this knowing is not immediately
known. It is only known in subsequent reflection. Instead,
then, of the stream of thought being one of con-sciousness,
“thinking its own existence along with whatever else it
thinks,” (as Ferrier says) it might be better called a stream
of Sciousness pure and simple, thinking objects of some of
which 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 scious-
ness or knowledge of this sort, including and contemplat-
ing its ‘me’ and its ‘not-me’ as objects which work out their
drama together, but not yet including or contemplating its
own subjective being. ‘The sciousness in question would be
the Thinker, and the existence of this thinker would be given
to us rather as a logical postulate than as that direct inner
perception of spiritual activity which we naturally believe
ourselves to have. ‘ Matter,’ as something behind physical
phenomena, is a postulate of this sort. Between the postu-
lated Matter and the postulated Thinker, the sheet of phe-
nomena would then swing, some of them (the ‘ realities’)
pertaining more to the matter, others (the fictions, opinions,
and errors) pertaining more to the Thinker. But who the
Thinker would be, or how many distinct Thinkers we ought
to suppose in the universe, would all be subjects for an
ulterior metaphysical inquiry.

Speculations like this traverse common-sense; and not
only do they traverse common sense (which in philosophy
is no insuperable objection) but they contradict the funda-
mental assumption of every philosophic school. Spiri-
tualists, transcendentalists, and empiricists alike admit in

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 305

us a continual direct perception of the thinking activity in
the concrete. However they may otherwise disagree, they
vie with each other in the cordiality of their recognition of
our thoughts as the one sort of existent which skepticism
cannot touch.* I will therefore treat the last few pages as
a parenthetical digression, and from now to the end of the
volume revert to the path of common-sense again. I mean
by this that I will continue to assume (as I have assumed
all along, especially in the last chapter) a direct awareness
of the process of our thinking as such, simply insisting on
the fact that it is an even more inward and subtle phenome-
non than most of us suppose. At the conclusion of the
volume, however, I may permit myself to revert again to the
doubts here provisionally mooted, and will ‘ndulge in some
metaphysical reflections suggested by them.

At present, then, the only conclusion I come to is the
following: That (in some persons at least) the part of the
innermost Self which is most vividly felt turns out to con-
sist for the most part of a collection of cephalic. move-
ments of ‘adjustments’ which, for want of attention and
reflection, usually fail to be perceived and classed as what
they are ; that over and above these there is an obscurer
feeling of something more; but whether it be of fainte~
physiological processes, or of nothing objective at all, but
rather of subjectivity as such, of thought become ‘its own
object,’ must at present remain an open question,—like the
question whether it be an indivisible active soul-substance,
or the question whether it be a personification of the pronoun
J, or any other of the guesses as to what its nature may
be.

Farther than this we cannot as yet go clearly in our
analysis of the Self’s constituents. So let us proceed to the
emotions of Self which they arouse.

2. SELF-FEELING.

These are primarily self-complacency and_self-arssatis-

faction. Of what is called ‘self-love,’ I will treat a little

*The only exception I know of is M. J. Souriau, in his important
article in the Revue Philosophique, vol. xxi. p. 449. _M. Souriau’s con-
clusion is ‘ que la conscience n’existe pas’ (p. 472).

306 PSYCHOLOGY.

farther on. Language has synonyms enough for both pri-
mary feelings. Thus pride, conceit, vanity, self-esteem,
arrogance, vainglory, on the one hand; and on the other
modesty, humility, confusion, diffidence, shame, mortifica-
tion, contrition, the sense of obloquy and personal despair.
These two opposite classes of affection seem to be direct and
elementary endowments of our nature. Associationists
would have it that they are, on the other hand, secondary
phenomena arising from a rapid computation of the sensi-
ble pleasures or pains to which our prosperous or debased
personal predicament is likely to lead, the sum of the repre-
sented pleasures forming the self-satisfaction, and the sum
of the represented pains forming the opposite feeling of
shame. No doubt, when we are self-satisfied, we do fondly
rehearse all possible rewards for our desert, and when in a
fit of self-despair we forebode evil. But the mere expecta-
tion of reward zs not the self-satisfaction, and the mere
apprehension of the evil is not the self-despair, for there is
a certain average tone of self-feeling which each one of us
carries about with him, and which is independent of the
objective reasons we may have for satisfaction or disgontent.
That is, a very meanly-conditioned man may abound in
unfaltering conceit, and one whose success in life is secure
and who is esteemed by all may remain diffident of his
powers to the end.

One may say, however, that the normal provocative of
self-feeling is one’s actual success or failure, and the good
or bad actual position one holds in the world. “He putin
his thumb and pulled out a plum, and said what a good boy
am I.” A man with a broadly extended empirical Ego,
with powers that have uniformly brought him success, with
place and wealth and friends and fame, is not likely to be
visited by the morbid diffidences and doubts about himself
which he had when he was a boy. “Is not this great
Babylon, which I have planted?” * Whereas he who has
made one blunder after another, and still lies in middle life
among the failures at the foot of the hill, is liable to grow

*See the excellent remarks by Prof. Bain on the ‘Emotion of Power’
in his ‘Emotions and the Will.’

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 307

all sicklied o’er with self-distrust, and to shrink from trials
with which his powers can really cope.

The emotions themselves of self-satisfaction and abase-
ment are of a unique sort, each as worthy to be classed as
@ primitive emotional species as are, for example, rage or
pain. Each has its own peculiar physiognomical expres-
sion. In self-satisfaction the extensor muscles are inner-
vated, the eye is strong and glorious, the gait rolling and
elastic, the nostril dilated, and a peculiar smile plays upon
the lips. This whole complex of symptoms is seen in an
exquisite way in lunatic asylums, which always contain
some patients who are literally mad with conceit, and
whose fatuous expression and absurdly strutting or swag-
gering gait is in tragic contrast with their lack of any
valuable personal quality. It is in these same castles of
despair that we find the strongest examples of the opposite
physiognomy, in good people who think they have com-
mitted ‘the unpardonable sin’ and are lost forever, who
crouch and cringe and slink from notice, and are unable to
speak aloud or look us in the eye. Like fear and like
anger, in similar morbid conditions, these opposite feelings
of Self may be aroused with no adequate exciting cause.
And in fact we ourselves know how the barometer of our
self-esteem and confidence rises and falls from one day to
another through causes that seem to be visceral and organic
rather than rational, and which certainly answer to no cor-
responding variations in the esteem in which we are held
by our friends. Of the origin of these emotions in the race,
we can speak better when we have treated of—

3. SELF-SEEKING AND SELF-PRESERVATION.

These words cover a large number of our fundamental
instinctive impulses. We have those of bodily self-seeking,
those of social self-seeking, and those of spiritual self-seeking.

All the ordinary useful reflex actions and movements
of alimentation and defence are acts of bodily self-preser-
vation. Fear and anger prompt to acts that are useful
in the same way. Whilst if by self-seeking we mean
the providing for the future as distinguished from main-
taining the present, we must class both anger and fear

308 PSYCHOLOG Y.

with the hunting, the acquisitive, the home-constructing
and the tool-constructing instincts, as impulses to self-
seeking of the bodily kind. Really, however, these latter
instincts, with amativeness, parental fondness, curiosity
and emulation, seek not only the development of the
bodily Self, but that of the material Self in the widest pos-
sible sense of the word.

Our social self-seeking, in turn, is carried on directly
through our amativeness and friendliness, our desire to
please and attract notice and admiration, our emulation
and jealousy, our love of glory, influence, and power,
and indirectly through whichever of the material self-
seeking impulses prove serviceable as means to social
ends. That the direct social self-seeking impulses are
probably pure instincts is easily seen. The noteworthy
thing about the desire to be ‘recognized’ by others is that
its strength has so little to do with the worth of the recog-
nition computed in sensational or rational terms. We are
crazy to get a visiting-list which shall be large, to be able
to say when any one is mentioned, “ Oh! I know him well,”
and to be bowed to in the street by half the people we
meet. Of course distinguished friends and admiring
recognition are the most desirable—Thackeray somewhere
asks his readers to confess whether it would not give
each of them an exquisite pleasure to be met walking down
Pall Mall with a duke on either arm. But in default of
dukes and envious salutations almost anything will do for
some of us; and there is a whole race of beings to-day
whose 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. Guitean,
Garfield’s assassin, is an example of the extremity to which
this sort of craving for the notoriety of print may go ma
pathological case. The newspapers bounded his mental
horizon; and in the poor wretch’s prayer on the scaffold,
one of the most heartfelt expressions was: “ The newspaper
press of this land has a big bill to settle with thee, O Lord !”

Not only the people but the places and things I know
enlarge my Self in a sort of metaphoric social way. ‘Ca

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 309

me connait,’ as the French workman says of the implement
he can use well. So that it comes about that persons for
whose opinion we care nothing are nevertheless persons
whose notice we woo; and that many a man truly great,
many a woman truly fastidious in most respects, will take a
deal of trouble to dazzle some insignificant cad whose
whole personality they heartily despise.

Under the head of spiritual self-seeking ought to be
included every impulse towards psychic progress, whether
intellectual, moral, or spiritual in the narrow sense of the
term. It must be admitted, however, that much that com-
monly passes for spiritual self-seeking in this narrow sense
is only material and social self-seeking beyond the grave.
In the Mohammedan desire for paradise and the Christian
aspiration not to be damned in hell, the materiality of the
goods sought is undisguised. In the more positive and
refined view of heaven many of its goods, the fellowship of
the saints and of our dead ones, and the presence of God,
are but social goods of the most exalted kind. It is only
the search of the redeemed inward nature, the spotlessness
from sin, whether here or hereafter, that can count ag
spiritual self-seeking pure and undefiled.

But this broad external review of the facts of the life o1
the Self will be incomplete without some account of the

RIVALRY AND CONFLICT OF THE DIFFERENT SELVES.

With most objects of desire, physical nature restricts our
choice to but one of many represented goods, and even so it
is here. I am often confronted by the necessity of stand-
ing by one of my empirical selves and relinquishing the rest.
Not that I would not, if I could, be both handsome and
fat and well dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million
a year, be a wit, a bon-vivant, and a lady-killer, as well as a
philosopher; a philanthropist, statesman, warrior, and
African explorer, as well as a ‘tone-poet’ and saint. But
the thing is simply impossible. The millionaire’s work
would run counter tothe saint’s; the bon-vivant and the
philanthropist would trip each other up; the philosopher
and the lady-killer could not well keep house in the same

310 PSYCHOLOGY.

tenement of clay. Such different characters may conceiv-
ably at the outset of life be alike possible toa man. But
to make any one of them actual, the rest must more or less
be suppressed. So the seeker of his truest, strongest,
deepest self must review the list carefully, and pick out the
one on which to stake his salvation. All other selves
thereupon become unreal, but the fortunes of this self are
real. Its failures are real failures, its triumphs real tri-
umphs, carrying shame and gladness with them. This is
as strong an example as there is of that selective industry
of the mind on which I insisted some pages back (p. 284 ff).
Our thought, incessantly deciding, among many things of
a kind, which ones for it shall be realities, here chooses
one of many possible selves or characters, and forthwith
reckons it no shame to fail in any of those not adopted
expressly as its own.

I, who for the time have staked my all on being a
psychologist, am mortified if others know much more
psychology than I. But I am contented to wallow in the
grossest ignorance of Greek. My deficiencies there give me
no sense of personal humiliation at all. Had I‘ pretensions’
to be a linguist, it would have been just the reverse. So
we have the paradox of a man shamed todeath because he
is only the second pugilist or the second oarsman in the
world. That he is able to beat the whole population of the
globe minus one is nothing; he has ‘pitted’ himself to
beat that one ; and as long as he doesn’t do that nothing
else counts. He is to his own regard as if he were not, in-
deed he is not.

Yonder puny fellow, however, whom every one can beat,
suffers no chagrin about it, for he has long ago abandoned
the attempt to ‘carry that line,’ as the merchants say, of
self at all. With no attempt there can be no failure ; with
no failure no humiliation. So our self-feeling in this world
depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.
It is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our sup-
posed potentialities ; a fraction of which our pretensions
are the denominator and the numerator our success: thus,

Success

5: Such a fraction may be increased
Pretensions

Self-esteem =

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 311

as well by diminishing the denominator as by increasing the
numerator.* ‘To give up pretensions isas blessed a relief as
to 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 of
sin, its self-despair, and its abandonment of salvation by
works, is the deepest of possible examples, but we meet
others in every walk of life. There is the strangest light-
ness about the heart when one’s nothingness in a particular
line is once accepted in good faith. All is not bitterness in
the lot of the lover sent away by the final inexorable ‘ No.’
Many Bostonians, crede experto (and inhabitants of other
cities, too, I fear), would be happier women and men to-day,
if they could once for all abandon the notion of keeping up
a Musical Self, and without shame let people hear them
calla symphony anuisance. How pleasant is the day when
we give up striving to be young,—or slender! Thank God!
we say, those illusions are gone. Everything added to the
Self is a burden as well as a pride. A certain man who
lost every penny during our civil war went and actually
rolled in the dust, saying he had not felt so free and happy
since he was born.

Once more, then, our self-feeling is in our power. As
Carlyle says: “ Make thy claim of wages a zero, then hast
thou the world under thy feet. Well did the wisest of our
time write, it 1s only with renunciation that life, properly
speaking, can be said to begin.”

Neither threats nor pleadings can move a man unless
they touch some one of his potential or actual selves. Only
thus can we, as a rule, get a ‘purchase’ on another’s will.
The first care oi diplomatists and monarchs and all who wish
to rule or influence is, accordingly, to find out their victim’s
strongest principle of self-regard, so as to make that the

* Cf. Carlyie: Sartor Resartus, ‘The Everlasting Yea.’ ‘‘I tell thee,
blockhead, it all comes of thy vanity; of what thou fanciest those same
deserts of thine to be. Fancy that thou deservest to be hanged (as is most
likely), thou wilt feel it happiness to be only shot: fancy that thou deserv-
est to be hanged in a hair halter, it will be a luxury to die in hemp... .
What act of legislature was there that tow shouldst be happy? A little
while ago thou hadst no right to deat all,” etc., ete.

312 PSYCHOLOG Y.

fulcrum of all appeals. But if a man has given up those
things which are subject to foreign fate, and ceased to
regard them as parts of himself at all, we are well-nigh
powerless over him. The Stoic receipt for contentment
was to dispossess yourself in advance of all that was out of
your own power,—then fortune’s shocks might rain down
unfelt. Epictetus exhorts us, by thus narrowing and at the
same time solidifying our Self to make itinvulnerable: “I
must die ; well, but must I die groaning too? I will speak
what appears to be right, and if the despot says, then I
will put you to death, I will reply, ‘When did I ever tell
you that I was immortal? You will do your part and I
mine; it is yours to kill and mine to die intrepid; yours to
banish, mine to depart untroubled.’ How do we act ina
voyage ? We choo:e the pilot, the sailors, the hour. After-
wards comes a storm. What have I to care for? My part
is performed. This matter belongs to the pilot. But the
ship is sinking; what then have Itodo? That which alone
I can do—submit to being drowned without fear, without
clamor or accusing of God, but as one who knows that
what is born must likewise die.” *

This Stoic fashion, though efficacious and heroic enough
in its place and time, is, it must be confessed, only possible
as an habitual mood of the soul to narrow and unsympa-
thetic characters. It proceeds altogether by exclusion. If
I am a Stoic, the goods I cannot appropriate cease to be my
goods, and the temptation lies very near to deny that they
are goods at all. We find this mode of protecting the Self
by exclusion and denial very common among people who
are in other respects not Stoics. All narrow people intrench
their Me, they retract it,—from the region of what they can-
not securely possess. People who don’t resemble them, or
who treat them with indifference, people over whom they
gain no influence, are people on whose existence, however
meritorious it may intrinsically be, they look with chill
negation, if not with positive hate. Who will not be mine
I will exclude from existence altogether; that is, as far as

*T, W. Higginson’s translation (1866), p. 105.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 313

I can make it so, such people shall be as if they were not.*
Thus may a certain absoluteness and definiteness in the
outline of my Me console me for the smallness of its con-
tent.

Sympathetic people, on the contrary, proceed by-.the
entirely opposite way of expansion and inclusion. The out-
line of their self often gets uncertain enough, but for this
the spread of its content more than atones. Nil humani a
me alienum. Let them despise this little person of mine,
and treat me like a dog, J shall not negate them so long as
I have a soul in my body. They are realities as much as I
am. What positive good is in them shall be mine too, ete.,
etc. The magnanimity of these expansive natures is often
touching indeed. Such persons can feel a sort of delicate
rapture in thinking that, however sick, ill-favored, mean-
conditioned, and generally forsaken they may be, they yet
are integral parts of the whole of this brave world, have a
fellow’s share in the strength of the dray-horses, the happi-
ness of the young people, the wisdom of the wise ones,
and are not altogether without part or lot in the good for-
tunes of the Vanderbilts and the Hohenzollerns themselves.
Thus either by negating or by embracing, the Ego may
seek to establish itself in reality. He who, with Marcus
Aurelius, can truly say, “O Universe, I wish all that thou
wishest,” has a self from which every trace of negativeness
and obstructiveness has been removed—no wind can blow
except to fill its sails.

A tolerably unanimous opinion ranges the different
selves of which a man may be ‘seized and possessed,’ and
the consequent different orders of his self-regard, in an
luerarchical scale, with the bodily Self at the bottom, the
spiritual Self at top, and the extracorporeal material selves
and the various social selves between. Our merely natural
self-seeking would lead us to aggrandize all these selves ;
we give up deliberately only those among them which we

* «<The usual mode of lessening the shock of disappointment or dises-
teem is to contract, if possible, a low estimate of the persons that inflict it.
Th?s is our remedy for the unjust censures of party spirit, as well as of
personal malignity.”. (Bain: Emotion and Will, p. 209.)

314 PSYCHOLOG Y,

find we cannot keep. Our unselfishness is thus apt to be a
‘virtue of necessity’; and it is not without all show of rea-
son that cynics quote the fable of the fox and the grapes in
describing our progress therein! But this is the moral
education of the race; and if we agree in the result that
on the whole the selves we can keep are the intrinsically
best, we need not complain of being led to the knowledge
of their superior worth in such a tortuous way.

Of course this is not the only way in which we learn
to subordinate our lower selves to our higher. A direct
ethical judgment unquestionably also plays its part, and last,
not least, we apply to our own persons judgments originally
called forth by the acts of others. It is one of the strangest
laws of our nature that many things which we are well sat-
isfied with in ourselves disgust us when seen in others.
With another man’s bodily ‘hoggishness’ hardly anyone
has any sympathy ;—almost as little with his cupidity, his
social vanity and eagerness, his jealousy, his despotism,
and his pride. Left absolutely to myself I should probably
allow all these spontaneous tendencies to luxuriate in me
unchecked, and it would be long before I formed a distinct
notion of the order of their subordination. But having
constantly to pass judgment on my associates, I come ere
long to see, as Herr Horwicz says, my own lusts in the
mirror of the lusts of others, and to think about them in a
very different way from that in which I simply feel. Of
course, the moral generalities which from childhood have
been instilled into me accelerate enormously the advent of
this reflective judgment on myself.

So it comes to pass that, as aforesaid, men have arranged
the various selves which they may seek in an hierarchical
scale according to their worth. A certain amount of bodily
selfishness is required as a basis for all the other selves.
But too much sensuality is despised, or at best condoned
on account of the other qualities of the individual. The
wider material selves are regarded as higher than the
immediate body. He is esteemed a poor creature who is
unable to forego a little meat and drink and warmth and
sleep for the sake of getting on in the world. The social
self as a whole, again, ranks higher than the material self

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 315

as a whole. We must care more for our honor, our friends,
our human ties, than for a sound skin or wealth. And the
spiritual self is so supremely precious that, rather than
lose it, a man ought to be willing to give up friends and
good fame, and property, and life itself.

In each kind of self, material, social, and spiritual, men
distinguish between the immediate and actual, and the re-
mote and potential, between the narrower and the wider
view, to the detriment of the former and advantage of the
latter. One must forego a present bodily enjoyment for
the sake of one’s general health; one must abandon the
dollar in the hand for the sake of the hundred dollars to
come ; che must make an enemy of his present interlocutor
if thereby one makes friends of a more valued circle; one
must go without learning and grace, and wit, the better to
compass one’s soul’s salvation.

Of all these wider, more potential selves, the potential
social self is the most interesting, by reason of certain
apparent paradoxes to which it leads in conduct, and by
reason of its connection with our moral and religious life.
When for motives of honor and conscience I brave the con-
demnation of my own family, club, and ‘set’; when, as a
protestant, I turn catholic; as a catholic, freethinker; as a
‘regular practitioner, homceopath, or what not, Iam always
inwardly strengthened in my course and steeled against the
loss of my actual social self by the thought of other and
better possible social judges than those whose verdict goes
against me now. ‘The ideal social self which I thus seek
in appealing to their decision may be very remote: it may
be represented as barely possible. I may not hope for its
realization during my lifetime; I may even expect the
future generations, which would approve me if they knew
me, to know nothing about me when I am dead and gone.
Yet still the emotion that beckons me on is indubitably
the pursuit of an ideal social self, of a self that is at least
worthy of approving recognition by the highest possible
judging companion, if such companion there be.* This

*Tt must be observed that the qualities of the Self thus ideally consti-
tuted are all qualities approved by my actual fellows in the first instance ;
and that my reason for now appealing from their verdict to that of the

316 PSYCHOLOGY.

self is the true, the intimate, the ultimate, the perma-
nent Me which I seek. This judge is God, the Absolute
Mind, the ‘Great Companion.’ We hear,in these days of
scientific enlightenment, a great deal of discussion about
the efficacy of prayer; and many reasons are given us why
we should not pray, whilst others are given us why we
should. But in all this very little is said of the reason why
we do pray, which is simply that we cannot help praying.
It seems probable that, in spite of all that‘ science’ may do
to the contrary, men will continue to pray to the end of time,
unless their mental nature changes in a manner which
nothing we know should lead us to expect. ‘he impulse -
to pray is a necessary consequence of the fact that whilst
the innermost of the empirical selves of a man is a Self of
the social sort, it yet can find its only adequate Soczus in an
ideal world.

All progress in the social Self is the substitution of
higher tribunals for lower ; this ideal tribunal is the high-
est; and most men, either continually or occasionally,
carry a reference to it in their breast. The humblest out-
cast on this earth can feel himself to be real and valid by
means of this higher recognition. And, on the other hand,
for most of us, a world with no such inner refuge when the
outer social self failed and dropped from us would be the
abyss of horror. I say ‘for most of us,’ because it is
probable that individuals differ a good deal in the degree
in which they are haunted by this sense of an ideal specta-
tor. Itis a much more essential part of the consciousness
of some men than of others. Those who have the most of
it are possibly the most religious men. But I am sure that
even those who say they are altogether without it deceive
themselves, and really have it in some degree. Only a
non-gregarious animal could be completely without it.
Probably no one can make sacrifices for ‘right,’ without

ideal judge lies in some outward peculiarity of the immediate case. What
ouce was admired in me as courage has now become in the eyes of men
‘jmpertinence’; what was fortitude is obstinacy; what was fidelity is
now fanaticism. The ideal judge alone, I now believe, can read my
qualities, my willingnesses, my powers, for what they truly are. My
fellows, misled by interest and prejudice, have gone astray.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 317

to some degree personifying the principle of right for
which the sacrifice is made, and expecting thanks from it.
Complete social unselfishness, in other words, can hardly
exist ; complete social suicide hardly occur to a man’s mind.
Even such. texts as Job’s, “Though He slay me yet will I
trust Him,” or Marcus Aurelius’s, “If gods hate me and
my children, there is a reason for it,’ can least of all be
cited to prove the contrary. For beyond all doubt Job
revelled in the thought of Jehovah’s recognition of the wor-
ship after the slaying should have been done ; andthe Roman
emperor felt sure the Absolute Reason would not be all
indifferent to his acquiescence in the gods’ dislike. The
old test of piety, “Are you willing to be damned for the
glory of God?” was probably never answered in the aflir-
mative except by those who felt sure in their heart of hearts
that God would ‘credit’ them with their willingness, and
set more store by them thus than if in His unfathomable
scheme He had not damned them at all.

All this about the impossibility of suicide is said on the
supposition of positive motives. When possessed by the
emotion of fear, however, we are in a negative state of mind ;
that is, our desire is limited to the mere banishing of some-
thing, without regard to what shall take its place. In this
state of mind there can unquestionably be genuine thoughts,
and genuine acts, of suicide, spiritual and social, as well as
bodily. Anything, anything, at such times, so as to escape
and not to be! But such conditions of suicidal frenzy are
pathological in their nature and run dead against every-
thing that is regular in the life of the Self in man.

WHAT SELF IS LOVED IN ‘SELF-LOVE’?

We must now try to interpret the facts of self-love and
self-seeking a little more delicately from within.

A man in whom self-seeking of any sort is largely
developed is said to be selfish.* He is on the other hand

* The kind of selfishness varies with the self that is sought. If it be
the mere bodily self; if a man grabs the best food, the warm corner, ‘the
vacant seat; if he makes room for no one, spits about, and belches in our
faces,—we call it hoggishness. If it be the social self, in the form of popu-
larity or influence, for which he is greedy, he may in material ways subor-

318 PSYCHOLOGY.

called unselfish if he shows consideration for the interests of
other selves than hisown. Now what is the intimate nature
of the selfish emotion in him? and what is the primary
object of its regard? We have described him pursuing and
fostering as his self first one set of things and then another;
we have seen the same set of facts gain or lose interest in his
eyes, leave him indifferent, or fill him either with triumph
or despair according as he made pretensions to appropriate
them, treated them as if they were potentially or actually
parts of himself, or not. We know how little it matters to
us whether some man, a man taken at large and in the
abstract, prove a failure or succeed in life,—he may be
hanged for aught we care,—but we know the utter momen-
tousness and terribleness of the alternative when the man
is the one whose name we ourselves bear. J must not be
a failure, is the very loudest of the voices that clamor in
each of our breasts: let fail who may, J at least must suc-
ceed. Now the first conclusion which these facts suggest
is that each of usis animated by a direct feeling of regard
for his own pure principle of individual existence, whatever
that may be, taken merely as such. It appears as if all our
concrete manifestations of selfishness might be the conclu-
sions of as many syllogisms, each with this principle as the
subject of its major premiss, thus: Whatever is me is
precious; this is me; therefore this is precious; whatever
is mine must not fail; this is mine; therefore this must
not fail, etc. It appears, I say, as if this principle inocu-
lated all it touched with its own intimate quality of worth;
as if, previous to the touching, everything might be matter
of indifference, and nothing interesting in its own right; as
if my regard for my own body even were an interest not
simply in this body, but in this body only so far as it is
mine.

But what is this abstract numerical principle of identity,

dinate himself to others as the best means to his end; and in this case he is
very apt to pass for a disinterested man. If it be the ‘other-worldly ’ self
which he seeks, and if he seeks it ascetically,—even though he would
rather see all mankind damned eternally than lose his individual soul.—
‘saintliness’ will probably be the name by which his selfishness will he
called.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 319

this ‘ Number One’ within me, for which, according to pro-
yerbial philosophy, I am supposed to keep so constant a
‘lookout’? Is it the inner nucleus of my spiritual self, that
collection of obscurely felt ‘adjustments,’ plus perhaps that
still more obscurely perceived subjectivity as such, of which
we recently spoke? Or is it perhaps the concrete stream
of my thought in its entirety, or some one section of the
same? Or may it be the indivisible Soul-Substance, in
which, according to the orthodox tradition, my faculties
inhere? Or, finally, can it be the mere pronounl? Surely
it is none of these things, that self for which I feel such hot
regard. Though all of them together were put within me,
I should still be cold, and fail to exhibit anything worthy
of the name of selfishness or of devotion to ‘Number One.’
To have a self that I can care for, nature must first present
me with some object interesting enough to make me instinc-
tively wish to appropriate it for its own sake, and out of it
to manufacture one of those material, social, or spiritual
selves, which we have already passed in review. We shall
find that all the facts of rivalry and substitution that have
so struck us, all the shiftings and expansions and contrac-
tions of the sphere of what shall be considered me and
mine, are but results of the fact that certain things appeal
to primitive and instinctive impulses of our nature, and
that we follow their destinies with an excitement that owes
nothing to a reflective source. These objects our con-
sciousness treats as the primordial constituents of its Me.
Whatever other objects, whether by association with the
fate of these, or in any other way, come to be followed with
the same sort of interest, form our remoter and more sec-
ondary self. The words ME, then, and SELF, so far as they
arouse feeling and connote emotional worth, are OBJECTIVE
designations, meaning ALL THE THINGS which have the power
to produce in a stream of consciousness excitement of a
certain peculiar sort. Let us try to justify this proposition
in detail.

The most palpable selfishness of a man is his bodily
selfishness ; and his most palpable self is the body to which
that selfishness relates. Now I say that he identifies him-
self with this body because he loves it, and that he does

820 PSYCHOLOG Y.

not love it because he finds it to be identified with himself.
Reverting to natural history-psychology will help us to see
the truth of this. In the chapter on Instincts we shall
learn that every creature has a certain selective interest in
certain portions of the world, and that this interest is as
often connate as acquired. Our interest in things means
the attention and emotion which the thought of them will
excite, and the actions which their presence will evoke.
Thus every species is particularly interested in its own
prey or food, its own enemies, its own sexual mates, and
its own young. These things fascinate by their intrinsic
power to do so; they are cared for for their own sakes.
Well, it stands not in the least otherwise with our bod-
ies. They too are percepts in our objective field—they are
simply the most interesting percepts there. What happens
to them excites in us emotions and tendencies to action
more energetic and habitual than any which are excited by
other portions of the ‘field.’ What my comrades call my
bodily selfishness or self-love, is nothing but the sum of
all the outer acts which this interest in my b »dy spontane-
ously draws from me. My ‘selfishness’ is here but a de-
scriptive name for grouping together the outward symp-
toms which I show. When I am led by self-love to keep
my seat whilst ladies stand, or to grab something first and
cut out my neighbor, what I really love is the comfortable
seat, is the thing itself which I grab. I love them prima-
rily, as the mother loves her babe, or a generous man an
heroic deed. Wherever, as here, self-seeking is the out-
come of simple instinctive propensity, it is but a name for
certain reflex acts. Something rivets my attention fatally,
and fatally provokes the ‘selfish’ response. Could an au-
tomaton be so skilfully constructed as to ape these acts, it
would be called selfish as properly as I. It is true that I
am no automaton, but a thinker. But my thoughts, like
my acts, are here concerned only with the outward things.
They need neither know nor care for any pure principle
within. In fact the more utterly ‘selfish’ I am in this
primitive way, the more blindly absorbed my thought will
be in the objects and impulses of my lusts, and the more
devoid of any inward looking glance. A baby, whose con-

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 321

sciousness of the pure Ego, of himself as a thinker, is not
usually supposed developed, is, in this way, as some Ger-
man has said, ‘ der vollendeteste Egoist.. His corporeal per-
son, and what ministers to its needs, are the only self he
can possibly be said to love. His so-called self-love is but
a name for his insensibility to all but this one set of things.
It may be that he needs a pure principle of subjectivity, a
soul or pure Ego (he certainly needs a stream of thought)
to make him sensible at all to anything, to make him dis-
criminate and love iéberhaupt,—how that may be, we shall
see ere long; but this pure Ego, which would then be the
condition of his loving, need no more be the object of his
love than it need be the object of his thought. If his in-
terests lay altogether in other bodies than his own, if all
his instincts were altruistic and all his acts suicidal, still he
would need a principle of consciousness just as he does now.
Such a principle cannot then be the principle of his bodily
selfishness any more than it is the principle of any other ten-
dency he may show.

So much for the bodily self-love. But my social self-
love, my interest in the images other men have framed of
me, is also an interest in a set of objects external to my
thought. These thoughts in other men’s minds are out of
my mind and ‘ejective’ to me. They come and go, and
grow and dwindle, and I am puffed up with pride, or blush
with shame, at the result, just as at my success or failure
in the pursuit of a material thing. So that here again, just
as in the former case, the pure principle. seems out of the
game as an object of regard, and present only as the general
form or condition under which the regard and the thinking
go on in me at all.

But, it will immediately be objected, this is giving a
mutilated account of the facts. Those images of me in the
minds of other men are, it is true, things outside of me,
whose changes I perceive just as I perceive any other out-
ward change. But the pride and shame which I feel are
not concerned merely with those changes. I feel as if some-
thing else had changed too, when I perceive my image in
your mind to have changed for the worse, something in me
to which that image belongs, and which a moment ago I felt

322 PSYCHOLOG Y.

inside of me, big and strong and lusty, but now weak, con:
tracted, and collapsed. Is not this latter change the change
I feel the shame about? Is not the condition of this thing
inside of me the proper object of my egoistic concern, of my
self-regard? And is it not, after all, my pure Ego, my bare
numerical principle of distinction from other men, and no
empirical part of me at all?

No, it is no such pure principle, it is simply my total
empirical selfhood again, my historic Me, a collection ot
objective facts, to which the depreciated image in your mind
‘belongs.’ In what capacity is it that I claim and demand
a respectful greeting from you instead of this expression of
disdain? It is not as being a bare I that I claim it; it is
as being an I who has always been treated with respect,
who belongs to a certain family and ‘set,’ who has certain
powers, possessions, and public functions, sensibilities,
duties, and purposes, and merits and deserts. All this is
what your disdain negates and contradicts ; this is ‘the
thing inside of me’ whose changed treatment I feel the
shame about; this is what was lusty, and now, in conse-
quence of your conduct, is collapsed; and this certainly is
an empirical objective thing. Indeed, the thing that is felt
modified and changed for the worse during my feeling of
shame is often more concrete even than this,—it is simply
my bodily person, in which your conduct immediately and
without any reflection at all on my part works those
muscular, glandular, and vascular changes which together
make up the ‘expression’ of shame. In this instinctive,
reflex sort of shame, the body is just as much the entire
vehicle ci the self-feeling as, in the coarser cases which we
first took up, it was the vehicle of the self-seeking. As, in
simple ‘ hoggishness,’ a succulent morsel gives rise, by the
reflex mechanism, to behavior which the bystanders find
‘oreedy, and consider to flow from a certain sort of ‘self-
regard ;’ so here your disdain gives rise, by a mechanism
quite as reflex and immediate, to another sort of behavior,
which the bystanders call ‘shame-faced’ and which they
consider due to another kind of self-regard. But in both
eases there may be no particular self regarded at all by the
mind ; and the name self-regard may be only a descriptive

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 323

title imposed from without the reflex acts themselves, and
the 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? My
Soul-substance? my ‘transcendental Ego, or Thinker’?
my pronoun I? my subjectivity as such? my nucleus of
cephalic adjustments ? or my more phenomenal and perish-
able powers, my loves and hates, willingnesses and sensibil-
ities, and the like? Surely the latter. But they, relatively
to the central principle, whatever it may be, are external
and objective. They come and go, and it remains—“so
shakes the magnet, and so stands the pole.” It may indeed
have to be there for them to be loved, but being there is
not identical with being loved itself.

To sum up, then, we see no reason to suppose that self-love’
ts primarily, or secondarily, or ever, love for one’s mere princi-
ple of conscious identity. It is always love for something
which, as compared with that principle, is superficial, tran-
sient, liable to be taken up or dropped at will.

And zoological psychology again comes to the aid of
our understanding and shows us that this must needs be
so. In fact, in answering the question what things it is that
a man loves in his self-love, we have implicitly answered the
farther question, of why he loves them.

Unless his consciousness were something more than
cognitive, unless it experienced a partiality for certain of
the objects, which, in succession, occupy its ken, it could
not long maintain itself in existence ; for, by an inscrutable
necessity, each human mind’s appearance on this earth is
conditioned upon the integrity of the body with which it
belongs, upon the treatment which that body gets from
others, and upon the spiritual dispositions which use it as
their tool, and lead it either towards longevity or to destruc-
tion. Its own body, then, first of all, its friends next, and
finally its spiritual dispositions, must be the supremely in-
‘eresting OBJECTS for each human mind. Each mind, to
begin with, must have a certain minimum of selfishness in
the shape of instincts of bodily self-seeking in order to exist.
This minimum must be there as a basis for all farther con-
scious acts, whether of self-negation or of a selfishness

324 PSYCHOLOGY.

more subtle still. All minds must have come, by the way
of the survival of the fittest, if by no directer path, to take
an intense interest in the bodies to which they are yoked,
altogether apart from any interest in the pure Ego which
they also possess.

And similarly with the images of their person in the
minds of others. I should not be extant now had I not be-
come sensitive to looks of approval or disapproval on the
faces among which my life is cast. Looks of contempt cast
on other persons need affect me in no such peculiar way.
Were my mental life dependent exclusively on some other
person’s welfare, either directly or in an indirect way, then
natural selection would unquestionably have brought it
about that I should be as sensitive to the social vicissitudes
of that other person as I now am to my own. Instead of
being egoistic I should be spontaneously altruistic, then.
But in this case, only partially realized in actual human
conditions, though the self I empirically love would have
changed, my pure Ego or Thinker would have to remain
just what it is now.

My spiritual powers, again, must interest me more than
those of other people, and for the same reason. I should
not be here at all unless I had cultivated them and kept
them from decay. And the same law which made me once
care for them makes me care for them still.

My own body and what ministers to its needs are thus the
primitive object, instinctively determined, of my egorstic interests.
Other objects may berome interesting derivatively through
association with any of these things, either as means or as
habitual concomitants ; and so in a thousand ways the primi-
tive sphere of the egoistic emotions may enlarge and change
its boundaries.

This sort of interest is really the meaning of the word
‘my. Whatever has it is eo ipso a part of me. My child,
my friend dies, and where he goes I feel that part of my-
self now 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 CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 325

The fact remains, however, that certain special sorts of
thing tend primordially to possess this interest, and form
the natural me. But all these things are objects, properly
so called, to the subject which does the thinking.* And
this latter fact upsets at once the dictum of the old-fash-
ioned sensationalist psychology, that altruistic passions
and interests are contradictory to the nature of things, and
that if they appear anywhere to exist, it must be as second-
ary products, resolvable at bottom into cases of selfishness,
taught by experience a hypocritical disguise. If the zoolog-
ical and evolutionary point of view is the true one, there is
no reason why any object whatever might not arouse passion
and 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 the
same, whatever be the target upon which it is discharged ;
and what the target actually happens to be is solely a ques-
tion of fact. I might conceivably be as much fascinated,
and as primitively so, by the care of my neighbor’s body
as by the care of my own. The only check to such exuber-
ant altruistic interests is natural selection, which would
weed out such as were very harmful to the individual or to
his tribe. Many such interests, however, remain unweeded
out—the interest in the opposite sex, for example, which
seems in mankind stronger than is called for by its utili-
tarian need ; and alongside of them remain interests, like
that 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 thus
co-ordinate. They arise, so far as we can tell, on the same
psychologic 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 the
question whether the ‘pure Ego,’ per se, can be an object
of regard, is Herr Horwicz, in his extremely able and acute
Psychologische Analysen. He too says that all self-regard
is regard for certain objective things. He disposes so well

* Lotze, Med. Psych. 498-501 ; Microcosmos, bk. 1. chap. v. §§ 3, 4

326 PSYGHOLOG Y.

of one kind of objection that I must conclude by quoting a
part of his own words:
First, the objection :

‘*The fact is indubitable that one’s own children always pass for
the prettiest and brightest, the wine from one’s own cellar for the best
—at least for its price,—one’s own house and horses for the finest.
With what tender admiration do we con over our own little deed of
penevolence ! our own frailties and misdemeanors, how ready we are to
acquit ourselves for them, when we notice them at all, on the ground of
‘extenuating circumstances’! How much more really comic are our
own jokes than those of others, which, unlike ours, will not bear being
repeated 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 than
in anyone else. The sad chapter of artists’ and authors’ conceit and
vanity belongs here.

‘*The prevalence of this obvious preference which we feel for every-
thing of our own is indeed striking. Does it not look asif our dear Ego
must first lend its color and flavor to anything in order to make it please
us?.. . Is it not the simplest explanation for all these phenomena, so
consistent among themselves, to suppose that the Ego, the self, which
forms the origin and centre of our thinking life, is at the same time the
original and central object of our life of feeling, and the ground both
of whatever special ideas and of whatever special feelings ensue ?”

Herr Horwicz goes on to refer to what we have already
noticed, that various things which disgust us in others do
not disgust us at all in ourselves.

‘*To most of us even the bodily warmth of another, for example the
chair warm from another’s sitting, is felt unpleasantly, whereas there
is nothing disagreeable in the warmth of the chair in which we have
been sitting ourselves.”

After some further remarks, he replies to these facts
and reasonings as follows:

‘* We may with confidence affirm that our own possessions in most
cases please us better [not because they are ours], but simply because we
know them better, ‘realize’ them more intimately, feel them more
deeply. We learn to appreciate what is ours in all its details and shad-
ings, whilst the goods of others appear to us in coarse outlines and rude
averages. Here are some examples: A piece of music which one plays
one’s self is heard and understood better than when it is played by an-
other. We get more exactly all the details, penetrate more deeply into
the musical thought. We may meanwhile perceive perfectly well that
the other person is the better performer, and yet nevertheless—at times
—get more enjoyment from our own playing because it brings the

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 327

melody and harmony so much nearer home tous. This case may almost
be taken as typical for the other cases of self-love. On close examina-
tion, we shall almost always find that a great part of our feeling about
what is ours is due to the fact that we live closer to our own things, and
so feel them more thoroughly and deeply. As a friend of mine was
about to marry, he often bored me by the repeated and minute way in
which he would discuss the details of his new household arrangements.
I wondered that so intellectual a man should be so deeply interested in
things of so external a nature. But as I entered, a few years later, the
same condition myself, these matters acquired for me an entirely differ-
ent interest, and it became my turn to turn them over and talk of them
unceasingly. . . . The reason was simply this, that in the first instance
I understood nothing of these things and their importance for domestic
comfort, whilst in the latter case they came home to me with irresistible
urgency, and vividly took possession of my fancy. So it is with many
a 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 in
the mirror is so peculiarly interesting a thing to contemplate . . . not on
account of any absolute ‘c’est moi,’ but just as with the music played
by ourselves. What greets our eyes is what we know best, most deeply
understand; because we ourselves have felt it and lived through it. We
know what has ploughed these furrows, deepened these shadows,
blanched this hair; and other faces may be handsomer, but none can
speak to us or interest us like this.” *

Moreover, this author goes on to show that our own
things are fuller for us than those of others because of the
memories they awaken and the practical hopes and expecta
tions they arouse. This alone would emphasize them, apart
from any value derived from their belonging to ourselves.
We may conclude with him, then, that an original central
self-feeling can never explain the passionate warmth of our self-
regarding emotions, which must, on the contrary, be addressed
directly to special things less abstract and empty of content. To
these things the name of ‘self’ may be given, or to our conduct
towards them the name of ‘ selfishness,’ but neither in the self
nor the selfishness does the pure Thinker play the ‘title-réle.’

Only one more point connected with our self-regard need
be mentioned. We have spoken of it so far as active in-
stinct oremotion. It remains to speak of it as cold intel-
lectual self-estimation. We may weigh our own Me ia the

* Psychologische Analysen auf Physiologischer Grundlage. Theil 1,
ute Hiilfte, § 11. The whole section ought to be read.

328 PSYCHOLOGY.

balance of praise and blame as easily as we weigh other
people,—though with difficulty quite as fairly. The just
man is the one who can weigh himself impartially. Impar-
tial weighing presupposes a rare faculty of abstraction from
the vividness with which, as Herr Horwicz has pointed out,
things known as intimately as our own possessions and
performances appeal to our imagination; and an equally
rare power of vividly representing the affairs of others. But,
granting these rare powers, there is no reason why a man
should not pass judgment on himself quite as objectively
and well as on anyone else. No matter how he feels about
himself, unduly elated or unduly depressed, he may still
truly know his own worth by measuring it by the outward
standard he applies to other men, and counteract the injus-
tice of the feeling he cannot wholly escape. This self-
measuring process has nothing to do with the instinctive
self-regard we have hitherto been dealing with. Being
merely one application of intellectual comparison, it need
no longer detain us here. Please note again, however, how
the pure Ego appears merely as the vehicle in which the
estimation is carried on, the objects estimated being all of
them facts of an empirical sort, * one’s body, one’s credit,

* Professor Bain, in his chapter on ‘ Emotions of Self,’ does scant jus-
tice to the primitive nature of a large part of our self-feeling, and seems to
reduce it to reflective self-estimation of this sober intellectual sort, which
certainly most of it is not. He says that when the attention is turned
inward upon self as a Personality, ‘‘ we are putting forth towards ourselves
she kind of exercise that properly accompanies our contemplation of other
persons. We are accustomed to scrutinize the actions and conduct of those
about us, to set a higher va/we upon one man than upon another, by com-
paring the two; to pity on in distress; to feel complacency towards a par.
ticular individual; to congratulate a man on some good fortune that it
pleases us to see him gain; to admire greatness or excellence as displayed
xy any of our fellows. All these exercises are intrinsically social, like
Love and Resentinent; an isolated individual could never attain to them,
nor exercise them. By what means, then, through what fiction [!] can we
turn round «nd play them off upon self? Or how comes it that we obtain .
any satisfactiou L, putting self in the place of the other party? Perhaps
the simplest form of the reflected act is that expressed by Self-worth and
Self-estimation, based auc begun upon observation of the ways and con-
duct of our fellow-beings. We soon make comparisons among the indi-
viduals about us; we see that one is stronger and does more work than
another, and, in consequence perhaps, receives more pay. We see one
putting forth perhaps more kindness than another, and in consequence

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 329

one’s fame, one’s intellectual ability, one’s goodness, or
whatever the case may be.

The empirical life of Self is divided, as below, into
MATERIAL. SoOcIAL. SPIRITUAL.

Bodily Appetites|Desire to please, be|Intellectual, Moral

and Instincts noticed, admired,| and Religious
S Love of Adorn-| ete. Aspiration, Con-
saul F Sociability, Emula-| scienti
aan ment, Foppery,|Sociability, Emula-| scientiousness
Acquisitiveness, tion, Envy, Love,
Constructiveness, | Pursuit of Honor,
Love of Home, etc. | Ambition, etc.
Personal Vanity,/Social and Family|Sense of Moral or
SELF- Modesty, ete. Pride, Vainglory,| Mental Superior-
Estimation.|Pride of Wealth,| Snobbery, Humil-| ity, Purity, etc.

Fear of Poverty ity, Shame, etc. |Sense of Inferiority
or of Guilt

THE PURE EGO.

Having summed up in the above table the principal
results of the chapter thus far, I have said all that need

receiving more love. We see some individuals surpassing the rest in aston-
ishing feats, and drawing after them the gaze and admiration of a crowd.
We acquire a series of fixed associations towards persons so situated; favor-
able in the case of the superior, and unfavorable to the inferior. To the
strong and laborious man we attach an estimate of greater reward, and feel
that 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 respect
for such exertion and a wish that it might be ours. We know that we also
put 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 our-
selves, which comparisons derive their interest from the substantial conse-
quences. Having thus once learned to look at other persons as per-
,orming labors, greater or less, and as realizing fruits to accord; being,
moreover, in all respects like our fellows,—we find it an exercise neither
difficult nor unmeaning to contemplate self as doing work and receiving
the reward. . . . As we decide between one man and another,—which is
worthier, . . . so we decide between self and all other men; being, how-
ever, in this decision under the bias of our own desires.” A couple of pages
farther on we read: ‘‘ By the terms Self-complacency, Self-gratulation, is
indicated a positive enjoyment in dwelling upon our own merits and
belongings. As in other modes, so here, the starting point is the contem-
plation of excellence or pleasing qualities in another person, accompanied
more or less with fondness orlove.” Self-pity is also regarded by Professor

330 PSYCHOLOGY.

be said of the constituents of the phenomenal self, and
of the nature of self-regard. Our decks are consequently
cleared for the struggle with that pure principle of personal
identity which has met us all along our preliminary expo-
sition, but which we have always shied from and treated as
a difficulty to be postponed. Ever since Hume’s time, it
has been justly regarded as the most puzzling puzzle with
which psychology has to deal; and whatever view one may
espouse, 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 positive
account of what that may be. And if, with the Humians,
one deny such a principle and say that the stream of pass-
ing thoughts is all, one runs against the entire common-
sense of mankind, of which the belief in a distinct principle
of selfhood seems an integral part. Whatever solution be
adopted in the pages to come, we may as well make up our
minds in advance that it will fail to satisfy the majority of
those to whom itis addressed. The best way of approach-
ing the matter will be to take up first—

The Sense of Personal Identity.

In the last chapter it was stated in as radical a way as
possible that the thoughts which we actually know to exist
do not fly about loose, but seem each to belong to some one

Bain. in this place, as an emotion diverted to ourselves from a more im-
mediate object, ‘‘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 towards
it the emotion of pity called forth by others in our situation.”

This account of Professor Bain’s is, it will be observed, a good specimen
of the old-fashioned mode of explaining the several emotions as rapid cal-
culations of results, and the transfer of feeling from one object to another,
associated by contiguity or similarity with the first. Zoological evolu-
tionism, which came up since Professor Bain first wrote, has made us see, on
the contrary. that many emotions must be primitwely aroused by special
objects. None are more worthy of being ranked primitive than the self-
gratulation and humiliation attendant on our own successes and failures in
the main functions of life. We need no borrowed reflection for these feel-
ings. Professor Bain’s account applies to but that small fraction of our
self-feeling which reflective criticism can add to, or subtract from, the
total mass.—Lotze has some pages on the modifications of our self-regard
by universal judgments, in Microcosmus, book v. chap. v § 5.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 331

thinker and not to another. Each thought, out of a multi-
tude of other thoughts of which it may think, is able to
distinguish those which belong to its own Ego from those
which do not. The former have a warmth and intimacy
about them of which the latter are completely devoid, being
merely conceived, in a cold and foreign fashion, and not
appearing as blood-relatives, bringing their greetings to us
from out of the past.

Now this consciousness of personal sameness may be
treated either as a subjective phenomenon or as an objec-
tive deliverance, as a feeling, or as a truth. We may ex-
plain how one bit of thought can come to judge other bits
to belong to the same Ego with itself; or we may criticise
its judgment and decide how far it may tally with the
nature of things.

Asa mere subjective phenomenon the judgment presents
no difficulty or mystery peculiar to itself. It belongs to
the great class of judgments of sameness; and there is
nothing more remarkable in making a judgment of same-
ness in the first person than in the second or the third.
The intellectual operations seem essentially alike, whether
I say ‘I am the same,’ or whether I say ‘the pen is the
same, as yesterday.’ It is as easy to think this as to think
the opposite and say ‘neither I nor the pen is the same.’

This sort of bringing of things together into the object of a
single judgment is of course essential to all thinking. The
things are conjoined in the thought, whatever may be the
relation in which they appear to the thought. The thinking
them is thinking them together, even if only with the result
of judging that they do not belong together. This sort of
subjective synthesis, essential to knowledge as such (when-
ever it has a complex object), must not be confounded with
objective synthesis or union instead of: difference or discon-
nection, known among the things.* ‘the subjective syn-

* « Also nur dadurch, dass ich ein Mannigfaltiges gegebener Vorstel-
lungen in edénem Bewusstsein verbinden kann, ist es médglich dass ich die
Identitét des Bewusstseins in diesen Vorstellungen selbst vorstelle, d. h. die
analytische Einheit der Apperception ist nur unter der Voraussetzung irgend
einer synthetischen médglich.” In this passage (Kritik der reinen Ver-
nunft, 2te Aufl. § 16) Kant calls by the names of analytic and synthetic

332 PSYCHOLOGY.

thesis is involved in thought’s mere existence. Even a
really disconnected world could only be known to be such
by having its parts temporarily united in the Object of some
pulse of consciousness.*

The sense of personal identity is not, then, this mere
synthetic form essential to all thought. It is the sense of a
sameness perceived by thought and predicated of things
thought-about. These things are a present self and a self
of yesterday. The thought not only thinks them both, but
thinks that they are identical. The psychologist, looking on
and playing the critic, might prove the thought wrong, and
show there was no real identity,—there might have been no
yesterday, or, at any rate, no self of yesterday; or, if there
were, the sameness predicated might not obtain, or might
be predicated on insufficient grounds. In either case the
personal identity would not exist as a fact; but it would
exist as a feeling all the same; the consciousness of it by
the thought would be there, and the psychologist would
still have to analyze that, and show where its illusoriness
lay. Let us now be the psychologist and see whether it be
right or wrong when it says, J am the same self that I was
yesterday.

We may immediately call it right and intelligible so far
as it posits a past time with past thoughts or selves con-
tained therein—these were data which we assumed at the
outset of the book. Right also and intelligible so far as it
thinks of a present self—that present self we have just
studied in its various forms. The only question for us is
as to what the consciousness may mean when it calls the

—

apperception what we here mean by objective and subjective synthesis
respectively. It were much to be desired that some one might invent a
good pair of terms in which to record the distinction—those used in the
text are certainly very bad, but Kant’s seem to me still worse. ‘Categorical
unity’ and ‘transcendental synthesis’ would also be good Kantian, but
hardly good human, speech.

* So that we might say, by asort of bad pun, ‘‘only a connected world
can be known as disconnected.” I say bad pun, because the point of view
shifts between the connectedness and the disconnectedness. The discon-
nectedness is of the realities known; the connectedness is of the knowl.
edge of them; and reality and knowledge of it are, from the psychological
point of view held fast to in these pages, two different facts.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 333

present seif the same with one of the past selves which it
has in mind.

We spoke a moment since of warmth and intimacy.
This leads us to the answer sought. For, whatever the
thought we are criticising may think about its present self,
that self comes to its acquaintance, or is actually felt, with
warmth and intimacy. Of course this is the case with the
bodily part of it; we feel the whole cubic mass of our body
all the while, it gives us an unceasing sense of personal
existence. Equally do we feel the inner ‘nucleus of the
spiritual self,’ either in the shape of yon faint physiological
adjustments, or (adopting the universal psychological be-
lief), in that of the pure activity of our thought taking
place as such. Our remoter spiritual, material, and social
selves, so far as they are realized, come also with a glow
and a warmth; for the thought of them infallibly brings
some degree of organic emotion in the shape of quickened
heart-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, re-
duces itself to either of two things,—something in the feel-
ing which we have of the thought itself, as thinking, or else
the feeling of the body’s actual existence at the moment,—
or finally to both. We cannot realize our present self with-
out simultaneously feeling one or other of these two things.
Any other fact which brings these two things with it into
consciousness will be thought with a warmth and an inti-
macy like those which cling to the present self.

Any distant self which fulfils this condition will be
thought with such warmth and intimacy. But which
distant selves do fulfil the condition, when represented ?

Obviously those, and only those, which fulfilled it when
they were alive. Zhem we shall imagine with the animal
warmth upon them, to them may possibly cling the aroma,
the echo of the thinking taken in the act. And bya natural
consequence, we shall assimilate them to each other and
to the warm and intimate self we now feel within us as we
think, and separate them as a collection from whatever
selves have not this mark, much as out of a herd of cattle
let loose for the winter on some wide western prairie the

334 PSYCHOLOGY.

owner picks out and sorts together when the time for the
round-up comes in the spring, all the beasts on which he
finds his own particular brand.

The various members of the collection thus set apart
are felt to belong with each other whenever they are
thought at all. The animal warmth, etc.,is their herd-mark,
the brand from which they can never more escape. It
runs through them all like a thread through a chaplet and
makes them into a whole, which we treat as a unit, no
matter how much in other ways the parts may differ inter
se. Add to this character the farther one that the distant
selves appear to our thought as having for hours of time
been continuous with each other, and the most recent ones
of them continuous with the Self of the present moment,
melting into it by slow degrees; and we get a still stronger
bond of union. As we think we see an identical bodily
thing when, in spite of changes of structure, it exists con-
tinuously before our eyes, or when, however interrupted its
presence, its quality returns unchanged; so here we think
we experience an identical Self whem it appears to us in an
analogous way. Continuity makes us unite what dissimi-
larity might otherwise separate ; similarity makes us unite
what 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 to
sleep, reidentifies and appropriates the ‘warm’ ideas as his,
and is never tempted to confuse them with those cold and
pale-appearing ones which he ascribes to Paul. As well
might he confound Paul’s body, which he only sees, with
his own body, which he sees but also feels. Each of us
when he awakens says, Here’s the same old self again, just
as he says, Here’s the same old bed, the same old room, the
same old world.

The sense of our own personal identity, then, is exactly like
any one of our other perceptions of sameness among phenomena.
It is a conclusion grounded either on the resemblance ina funda-
mental respect, or on the continuity before the mind, of the phe-
nomena compared.

And it must not be taken to mean more than these
grounds warrant, or treated as a sort of metaphysical or

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 335

absolute Unity in which all differences are overwhelmed.
The past and present selves compared are the same just so
far as they are the same, and no farther. A uniform feeling
of ‘warmth,’ of bodily existence (or an equally uniform feel-
ing of pure psychic energy ?) pervades them all; and this is
what gives them a generic unity, and makes them the same
in kind. But this generic unity coexists with generic differ-
ences just as real as the unity. And if from the one point
of view they are one self, from others they are as truly
not one but many selves. And similarly of the attribute of
continuity ; it gives its own kind of unity to the self—that
of mere connectedness, or unbrokenness, a perfectly definite
phenomenal thing—but it gives not a jot or tittle more.
And this unbrokenness in the stream of selves, like the
unbrokenness in an exhibition of ‘dissolving views,’ in no
wise implies any farther unity or contradicts any amount
of plurality in other respects.

And accordingly we find that, where the resemblance and
the continuity are no longer felt, the sense of personal iden-
tity goes too. We hear from our parents various anecdotes
about our infant years, but we do not appropriate them as
we do our own memories. Those breaches of decorum
awaken no blush, those bright sayings no self-complacency.
That child is a foreign creature with which our present
self is no more identified in feeling than it is with some
stranger’s living child to-day. Why? Partly because
great time-gaps break up all these early years—we cannot
ascend to them by continuous memories; and partly be-
cause no representation of how the child felé comes up with
the stories. We know what he said and did; but no senti-
ment of his little body, of his emotions, of his psychic striv-
ings as they felt to him, comes up to contribute an element
of warmth and intimacy to the narrative we hear, and the
main bond of union with our present self thus disappears.
It is the same with certain of our dimly-recollected experi-
ences. We hardly know whether to appropriate them or
to disown them as fancies, or things read or heard and not
lived through. Their animal heat has evaporated ; the feel-
ings that accompanied them are so lacking in the recall, or

306 PSYCHOLOG Y.

so different from those we now enjoy, that no judgment of
identity can be decisively cast.

Resemblance among the parts of a continuum of feelings
(especially bodily feelings) experienced along with things
widely different in all other regards, thus constitutes the real
and verifiable ‘personal identity’ which we feel. There is
no other identity than this in the ‘stream’ of subjective
consciousness which we described in the last chapter. Its
parts differ, but under all their differences they are knit
in these two ways ; and if either way of knitting disappears,
the sense of unity departs. If a man wakes up some fine
day unable to recall any of his past experiences, so that
he has to learn his biography afresh, or if he only recalls
the facts of it in a cold abstract way as things that he is sure
once happened; or if, without this loss of memory, his
bodily and spiritual habits all change during the night, each
organ giving a different tone, and the act of thought becom-
ing aware of itself in a different way; he feels, and he says,
that he is a changed person. He disowns his former me,
gives himself a new name, identifies his present life with
nothing from out of the older time. Such cases are not
rare in mental pathology ; but, as we still have some rea-
soning to do, we had better give no concrete account of
them until the end of the chapter.

This description of personal identity will be recognized
by the instructed reader as the ordinary doctrine professed
by the empirical school. Associationists in England and
France, Herbartians in Germany, all describe the Self as
an aggregate of which each part, as to its being, is a separate
fact. So far so good, then; thus much is true whateve1
farther things may be true; and itis to the imperishable
glory of Hume and Herbart and their successors to have
taken so much of the meaning of personal identity out of
the clouds and made of the Self an empirical and verifia-

ble thing.

But in leaving the matter here, and saying that this sum
of passing things is all, these writers have neglected certain
more subtle aspects of the Unity of Consciousness, to which
we next must turn.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 337

Our recent simile of the herd of cattle will help us. It
will be remembered that the beasts were brought together
into one herd because their owner found on each of them
his brand. ‘The ‘owner’ symbolizes here that ‘section’ of
consciousness, or pulse of thought, which we have all along
represented as the vehicle of the judgment of identity ; and
the ‘brand’ symbolizes the characters of warmth and con-
tinuity, by reason of which the judgment is made. There
is found a se/f-brand, just as there is found a herd-brand.
Each brand, so far, is the mark, or cause of our know-
ing, that certain things belong-together. But if the brand
is the ratio cognoscendi of the belonging, the belonging,
in the case of the herd, is in turn the ratio existendi of
the brand. No beast would be so branded unless he be-
longed to the owner of the herd. They are not his because
they are branded; they are branded because they are his.
So that it seems as if our description of the belonging-
together of the various selves, as a belonging-together which
is merely represented, in a later pulse of thought, had
knocked the bottom out of the matter, and omitted the
most characteristic one of all the features found in the herd
—a feature which common-sense finds in the phenomenon
of personal identity as well, and for our omission of which
she will hold us to a strict account. For common-sense
insists that the unity of all the selves is not a mere ap-
pearance of similarity or continuity, ascertained after the
fact. She is sure that it involves a real belonging to a real
Owner, to a pure spiritual entity of some kind. Relation
_ to this entity is what makes the self’s constituents stick to-
gether as they do for thought. The individual beasts do
not stick together, for all that they wear the same brand.
Each wanders with whatever accidental mates it finds. The
herd’s unity is only potential, its centre ideal, like the
‘centre of gravity’ in physics, until the herdsman or owner
comes. He furnishes a real centre of accretion to which
the beasts are driven and by which they are held. The
beasts stick together by sticking severally to him. Just so,
common-sense insists, there must be a real proprietor in
the case of the selves, or else their actual accretion into a
‘personal consciousness’ would never have taken place.

338 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

To the usual empiricist explanation of personal conscious.
ness this is a formidable reproof, because all the individual
thoughts and feelings which have succeeded each other ‘up
to date’ are represented by ordinary Associationism as in
some inscrutable way ‘integrating’ or gumming themselves
together on their own account, and thus fusing into a stream.
All the incomprehensibilities which in Chapter VI we saw
to attach to the idea of things fusing without a medium
apply 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 among
the things collected, but superior to them all, namely, the
real, present onlooking, remembering, ‘judging thought’
or identifying ‘section’ of the stream. This is what col-
lects, —‘ owns’ some of the past facts which it surveys, and
disowns the rest,—and so makes a unity that is actualized
and anchored and does not merely float in the blue air of
possibility. And the reality of such pulses of thought, with
their function of knowing, it will be remembered that we
did not seek to deduce or explain, but simply assumed them
as the ultimate kind of fact that the psychologist must ad-
mit to exist.

But this assumption, though it yields much, still does
not yield all that common-sense demands. The unity into
which the Thought—as I shall for a time proceed to call,
with a capital T, the present mental state—binds the indi-
vidual past facts with each other and with itself, does not
exist until the Thought is there. It is as if wild cattle were
lassoed by a newly-created settler and then owned for the
first time. But the essence of the matter to common-sense
is that the past thoughts never were wild cattle, they were
always owned. The Thought does not capture them, but
as soon as it comes into existence it finds them already its
own. How is this possible unless the Thought have a
substantial identity with a former owner,—not a mere con-
tinuity or a resemblance, as in our account, but a real unity ?
Common-sense in fact would drive us to admit what we
may for the moment call an Arch-Ego, dominating the en-,
tire stream of thought and all the selves that may be
represented in it, as the ever self-same and changeless

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 333

principle implied in their union. The ‘Soul’ of Meta-
physics and the ‘Transcendental Ego’ of the Kantian
Philosophy, are, as we shall soon see, but attempts to sat-
isfy this urgent demand of common-sense. But, for a time
at least, we can still express without any such hypotheses
that appearance of never-lapsing ownership for which com-
mon-sense contends.

For how would it be if the Thought, the present judg-
ing Thought, instead of being in any way substantially or
transcendentally identical with the former owner of the
past self, merely inherited his ‘title,’ and thus stood as
his legal representative now? It would then, if its birth
coincided exactly with the death of another owner, jind
the past self already its own as soon as it found it at all,
and the past self would thus never be wild, but always
owned, by a title that never lapsed. We can imagine a
long succession of herdsmen coming rapidly into possession
of the same cattle by transmission of an original title by
bequest. May not the ‘title’ of a collective self be passed
from one Thought to another in some analogous way ?

It is a patent fact of consciousness that a transmission
like this actually occurs. Each pulse of cognitive conscious-
ness, each Thought, dies away and is replaced by another.
The other, among the things it knows, knows its own prede-
cessor, and finding it ‘warm,’ in the way we have de-
scribed, greets it, saying: “Thou art mine, and part of the
same self with me.” Hach later Thought, knowing and in-
eluding thus the Thoughts which went before, is the final
receptacle—and appropriating them is the final owner—
of all that they contain and own. Each Thought is thus
born an owner, and dies owned, transmitting whatever it
realized as its Self to its own later proprietor. As Kant
says, it is as if elastic balls were to have not only motion
but knowledge of it, and a first ball were to transmit both
its motion and its consciousness to a second, which took
both up into ifs 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 nas-
cent thought has of immediately taking up the expiring
thought and ‘adopting’ it, which is the foundation of the

340 PSYCHOLOG Y.

appropriation of most of the remoter constituents of the
self. Who owns the last self owns the self before the last,
for what possesses the possessor possesses the possessed.

It is impossible to discover any verifiable features in
personal identity, which this sketch does not contain, im-
possible to imagine how any transcendent non-phenomenal
sort of an Arcn-Ego, were he there, could shape matters to
any 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 to
itself and adopt, all those that went before,—thus standing
as the representative of the entire past stream; and which
should similarly adopt the objects already adopted by
any portion of this spiritual stream. Such standing-as-
representative, and such adopting, are perfectly clear phe-
nomenal relations. The Thought which, whilst it knows
another Thought and the Object of that Other, appro-
priates the Other and the Object which the Other appro-
priated, is still a perfectly distinct phenomenon from that
Other; it may hardly resemble it; it may be far removed
from it in space and time.

The only point that is obscure is the act of appropria-
Vion itself. Already in enumerating the constituents of the
self 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 disowned
and another one held fast to and espoused, that the phrase
was meaningless unless the constituents were objects in the
hands of something else. A thing cannot appropriate itself ;
it 7s itself; and still less can it disown itself. There must
be an agent of the appropriating and disowning ; but that
agent we have already named. It is the Thought to whom
the various ‘constituents’ are known. That Thought is a
vehicle of choice as well as of cognition; and among the
choices it makes are these appropriations, or repudiations,
of its ‘own.’ But the Thought never is an object in its own
hands, it never appropriates or disowns itself. It appro-
priates to itself, it is the actual focus of accretion, the hook
from which the chain of past selves dangles, planted firmly

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 341

in the Present, which alone passes for real, and thus keep-
ing the chain from being a purely ideal thing. Anon the
hook itself will drop into the past with all it carries, and
then be treated as an object and appropriated by a new
Thought in the new present which will serve as living
hook in turn. The present moment of consciousness is
thus, as Mr. Hodgson says, the darkest in the whole series.
It may feel its own immediate existence—we have all along
admitted the possibility of this, hard as it is by direct in-
trospection to ascertain the fact—but nothing can be known
about it till it be dead and gone. Its appropriations are
therefore less to itself than to the most intimately felt part
of its present Object, the body, and the central adjustments,
which accompany the act of thinking, in the head. These
are the real nucleus of our personal identity, and it is their
actual existence, realized as a solid present fact, which
makes us say ‘as sure as J exist, those past facts were part
of myself.’ They are the kernel to which the represented
parts of the Self are assimilated, accreted, and knit on;
and even were Thought entirely unconscious of itself in
the act of thinking, these ‘warm’ parts of its present
object would be a firm basis on which the consciousness
of personal identity would rest.* Such consciousness, then,

* Some subtle reader will object that the Thought cannot call any part
of its Object ‘I’ and knit other parts on to it, without first knitting that
part on to Jtself ; and that it cannot knit iton to Itself without knowing
Itself ;—so that our supposition (above, p. 304) that the Thought may con-
ceivably have no immediate knowledge of Itself 1s thus overthrown. To
which the reply is that we must take care not to be duped by words. The
words Jand me signify nothing mysterious and unexampled—they are at
bottom only names of emphasis ; and Thought is always emphasizing
something. Within a tract of space which it cognizes, it contrasts a here
with a there ; within a tract of time a now with a then ; of a pair of things
it calls one this, the other that. I and thou, I and #t, are distinctions exactly
on a par with these,—distinctions possible in an exclusively objective field of
knowledge, the ‘I’ meaning for the Thought nothing but the bodily life
which it momentarily feels. The sense of my bodily existence, however
obscurely recognized as such, may then be the absolute original of my con-
scious selfhood, the fundamental perception that Jam. All appropriations
may be made to it, by a Thought not at the moment immediately cognized
by itself. Whether these are not only logical possibilities but actual facts
is something not yet dogmatically decided in the text.

342 | PSYCHOLOGY.

as a psychologic fact, can be fully described withont sup-
posing any other agent than a succession of perishing
thoughts, endowed with the functions of appropriation and
rejection, and of which some can know and appropriate or
reject objects already known, appropriated, or rejected by
the rest.

To illustrate by diagram, let A, B, and C stand for three

Dn LX ee

Fig. 34.

successive thoughts, each with its object inside of it. If B’s
object be A, and C’s object be B; then A, B, and C would
stand for three pulses in a consciousness of personal iden-
tity. Each pulse would be something different from the
others ; but B would know and adopt A, and C would
know and adopt A and B. Three successive states of the
same brain, on which each experience in passing leaves its
mark, might very well engender thoughts differing from
each other in just such a way as this.

The passing Thought then seems to be the Thinker;
and though there may be another non-phenomenal Thinker
behind that, so far we do not seem to need him to express
the facts. But we cannot definitively make up our mind
about him until we have heard the reasons that have his-
torically been used to prove his reality.

THE PURE SELF OR INNER PRINCIPLE OF PERSONAL UNITY.

To a brief survey of the theories of the Ego let us then
next proceed. They are three in number, as follows:

1) The Spiritualist theory ;

2) The Associationist theory ;

3) The Transcendentalist theory.

The Theory of the Soul.

In Chapter VI we were led ourselves to the spiritualist
theory of the ‘Soul,’ as a means of escape from the unin-
telligibilities of mind-stuff ‘integrating’ with itself, and from

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 343

the physiological improbability of a material monad, with
thought attached to it, in the brain. But at the end of the
chapter we said we should examine the ‘Soul’ critically in
a later place, to see whether it had any other advantages
as a theory over the simple phenomenal notion of a stream
of thought accompanying a stream of cerebral activity, by
a law yet unexplained.

The theory of the Soul is the theory of popular philoso-
phy and of scholasticism, which is only popular philosophy
made systematic. It declares that the principle of individ-
uality within us must be substantial, for psychic phenomena
are activities, and there can be no activity without a con-
crete agent. This substantial agent cannot be the brain but
must be something immaterial ; for its activity, thought, is
both immaterial, and takes cognizance of immaterial things,
and of material things in general and intelligible, as well as
in particular and sensible ways,—all which powers are in-
compatible with the nature of matter, of which the brain
is composed. Thought moreover is simple, whilst the ac-
tivities of the brain are compounded of the elementary ac-
tivities of each of its parts. Furthermore, thought is spon-
taneous or free, whilst all material activity is determined
ab extra ; and the will can turn itself against all corporeal
goods and appetites, which would be impossible were it a
corporeal function. For these objective reasons the prin-
ciple of psychic life must be both immaterial and simple as
well as substantial, must be what is called a Sow. The
same consequence follows from subjective reasons. Our
consciousness of personal identity assures us of our essen-
tial simplicity : the owner of the various constituents of the
self, as we have seen them, the hypothetical Arch-Ego
whom we provisionally conceived as possible, is a real en-
tity of whose existence self-consciousness makes us directly
aware. No material agent could thus turn round and grasp
itself—material activities always grasp something else than
the agent. And if a brain could grasp itself and be self-
conscious, it would be conscious of itself as a brain and
not as something of an altogether different kind. The Soul
then exists as a simple spiritual substance in which the
various psychic faculties, operations, and affections inhere.

844 PSYCHOLOGY.

If we ask what a Substance is, the only answer is that
it is a self-existent being, or one which needs no other sub-
ject in which to inhere. At bottom its only positive deter-
mination is Being, and this is something whose meaning
we all realize even though we find it hard to explain. The
Soul is moreover an individual being, and if we ask what
that is, we are told to look in upon our Self, and we shall
learn by direct intuition better than through any abstract
reply. Our direct perception of our own inward being is
in fact by many deemed to be the original prototype out
of which our notion of simple active substance in general is
fashioned. The consequences of the simplicity and substan-
tiality of the Soul are its incorruptibility and natural im-
mortality—nothing but God’s direct fiat can annihilate it—
and its responsibility at all times for whatever it may have
ever done.

This substantialist view of the soul was essentially the
view of Plato and of Aristotle. It received its completely
formal elaboration in the middle ages. It was believed in
by Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Leibnitz, Wolf, Berkeley, and
is now defended by the entire modern dualistic or spirit-
ualistic or common-sense school. Kant held to it while
denying its fruitfulness as a premise for deducing conse-
quences verifiable here below. Kant’s successors, the abso-
lute idealists, profess to have discarded it,—how that may
be we shall inquire ere long. Let us make up our minds
what to think of it ourselves.

It is at all events needless for expressing the actual sub-
jective phenomena of consciousness as they appear. We
have formulated them all without its aid, by the supposi-
tion of a stream of thoughts, each substantially different
from the rest, but cognitive of the rest and ‘appropriative ’
of each other’s content. At least, if I have not already
succeeded in making this plausible to the reader, I am
hopeless of convincing him by anything I could add now.
The unity, the identity, the individuality, and the immateri-
ality that appear in the psychic life are thus accounted for
as phenomenal and temporal facts exclusively, and with no
need of reference to any more simple or substantial agent
than the present Thought or ‘section’ of the stream. We

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 345

have seen it to be single and unique in the sense of having
no separable parts (above, p. 239 ff.)—perhaps that is the only
kind of simplicity meant to be predicated of the soul. The
_ present Thought also has being,—at least all believers in
the Soul believe so—and if there be no other Being in
which it ‘inheres,’ it ought itself to be a ‘substance.’ If
this kind of simplicity and substantiality were all that is
predicated of the Soul, then it might appear that we had
been talking of the soul all along, without knowing it, when
we treated the present Thought as an agent, an owner, and
the like. But the Thought is a perishing and not an im-
mortal or incorruptible thing. Its successors may contin-
uously succeed to it, resemble it, and appropriate it, but
they are not it, whereas the Soul-Substance is supposed to
be a fixed unchanging thing. By the Soul is always meant
something behind the present Thought, another kind of
substance, existing on a non-phenomenal plane.

When we brought in the Soul at the end of Chapter VI,
as an entity which the various brain-processes were sup-
posed to affect simultaneously, and which responded to
their combined influence by single pulses of its thought, it
was to escape integrated mind-stuff on the one hand, and
an improbable cerebral monad on the other. But when
(as now, after all we have been through since that earlier
passage) we take the two formulations, first of a brain to
whose processes pulses of thought simply correspond, and
second, of one to whose processes pulses of thought in a
Soul correspond, and compare them togetier, we see that at
bottom the second formulation is only a more roundabout
way than the first, of expressing the same bald fact.
That bald fact is that when the brain acts, a thought occurs.
The spiritualistic formulation says that the brain-processes
knock the thought, so to speak, out of a Soul which stands
there to receive their influence. The simpler formulation
says that the thought simply comes. But what positive
meaning has the Soul, when scrutinized, but the ground of
possibility of the thought? And what is the ‘knocking’ but
the determining of the possibility to actuality 2? And whatis this
after all but giving a sort of concreted form to one’s belief
that the coming of the thought, when the brain-processes

346 PSYCHOLOGY.

occur, has some sort of ground in the nature of things? If
the world Soul be understood merely to express that claim,
itis a good word to use. But if it be held to do more,
to gratify the claim,—for instance, to connect rationally the
thought which comes, with the processes which occur, and
to mediate intelligibly between their two disparate natures,
—then it is an illusory term. It is, in fact, with the word
Soul as with the word Substance in general. To say that
phenomena inhere in a Substance is at bottom only to
record one’s protest against the notion that the bare exist-
ence of the phenomena is the total truth. A phenomenon
would not itself be, we insist, unless there were something
more than the phenomenon. ‘To the more we give the pro-
visional name of Substance. So, in the present instance,
we ought certainly to admit that there is more than the
bare fact of coexistence of a passing thought with a
passing 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 more explains
nothing; and when we are once,trying metaphysical ex-
planations we are foolish not to go as far as we can, For my
own part I confess that the moment I become metaphysical
and try to define the more, I find the notion of some sort of
an anima mundi thinking in all of us to be a more promis-
ing hypothesis, in spite of all its difficulties, than that of a
lot of absolutely individual souls. Meanwhile, as psycholo-
gists, we need not be metaphysical at all. The phenomena
are enough, the passing Thought itself is the only verifiable
thinker, and its empirical connection with the brain-process
is the ultimate known law.

To the other arguments which would prove the need of
a soul, we may also turn a deaf ear. The argument from
free-will can convince only those who believe in free-will;
and even they will have to admit that spontaneity is just as
possible, to say the least, in a temporary spiritual agent
like our ‘Thought’ as in a permanent one like the supposed
Soul. The same is true of the argument from the kinds of
things cognized. Even if the brain could not cognize uni-
versals, immaterials, or its ‘Self,’ still the ‘Thought’ which
we have relied upon in our account 7s not the brain, closely

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 347

as it seems connected with it; and after all, if the brain could
cognize at all, one does not well see why it might not cog-
nize one sort of thing as well as another. The great diffi-
culty is in seeing how a thing can cognize anything. This
difficulty is not in the least removed by giving to the thing
that cognizes the name of Soul. The Spiritualists do not
deduce any of the properties of the mental life from
otherwise known properties of the soul. They simply find
various characters ready-made in the mental life, and
these they clap into the Soul, saying, “Lo! behoid the
source from whence they flow!” The merely verbal charac-
ter of this ‘explanation’ is obvious. The Soul invoked, far
from making the phenomena more intelligible, can only be
made intelligible itself by borrowing their form,—it must
be represented, if at all, as a transcendent stream of con-
sciousness duplicating the one we know.

Altogether, the Soul is an outbirth of that sort of phi-
losophizing whose great maxim, according to Dr. Hodgson,
is: “ Whatever you are totally ignorant of, assert to be the
explanation of everything else.”

Locke and Kant, whilst still believing in the soul, began
the work of undermining the notion that we know anything
about it. Most modern writers of the mitigated spiritual-
istic, or dualistic philosophy—the Scotch school, as it is
often called among us—are forward to proclaim this igno-
rance, and to attend exclusively to the verifiable phenomena
of self-consciousness, as we have laid them down. Dr.
Wayland, for example, begins his Elements of Intellectual
Philosophy with the phrase ‘Of the essence of Mind we
know nothing,” and goes on: “ All that we are able to aftirm
of it is that it is something which perceives, reflects, remem-
bers, imagines, and wills; but what that something is
which exerts these energies we know not. It is only as we
are conscious of the action of these energies that we are
conscious of the existence of mind. It is only by the exer-
tion of its own powers that the mind becomes cognizant of
their existence. The cognizance of its powers, however,
gives us no knowledge of that essence of which they are
predicated. In these respects our knowledge of mind is

348 PYSCHOLOGY.

precisely analogous to our knowledge of matter.” This
analogy of our two ignorances is a favorite remark in the
Scotch school. It is but a step to lump them together
into a single ignorance, that of the ‘Unknowable’ to which
any one fond of superfluities in philosophy may accord the
hospitality of his belief, if it so please him, but which any
one else may as freely ignore and reject.

The Soul-theory is, then, a complete superfluity, so far
as accounting for the actually verified facts of conscious
experience goes. So far, no one can be compelled to sub-
scribe to it for definite scientific reasons. The case would
rest 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 is Immortality, for which the simpli-
city and substantiality of the Soul seem to offer a solid
guarantee. A ‘stream’ of thought, for aught that we see
to be contained in its essence, may come to a full stop at
any moment; but a simple substance is incorruptible, and
will, by its own inertia, persist in Being so long as the Cre-
ator does not by a direct miracle snuff it out. Unques-
tionably this is the stronghold of the spiritualistic belief,—
as indeed the popular touchstone for all philosophies is the
question, ‘‘ What is their bearing on a future life?”

The Soul, however, when closely scrutinized, guarantees
no immortality of a sort we care for. The enjoyment of the
atom-like simplicity of their substance in sa@cula saculorum
would not to most people seem a consummation devoutly
to be wished. The substance must give rise to a stream of
consciousness continuous with the present stream, in order
to arouse our hope, but of this the mere persistence of the
substance per se offers no guarantee. Moreover, in the
general advance of our moral ideas, there has come to be
something rediculous in the way our forefathers had of
grounding their hopes of immortality on the simplicity of
their substance. The demand for immortality is nowadays
essentially teleological. We believe ourselves immortal
because we believe ourselves fit for immortality. A ‘sub-
stance’ ought surely to perish, we think, if not worthy
to survive; and an insubstantial ‘stream’ to prolong itself,
provided it be worthy, if the nature of Things is organized

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 349

in the rational way in which we trust it is. Substance or
no substance, soul or ‘stream,’ what Lotze says of immor-
tality is about all that human wisdom can say :

‘‘ We have no other principle for deciding it than this general ideal-
istic belief : that every created thing will continue whose continuance
belongs 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 tran-
sitory phase of the world’s course. That this principle admits of no
further application in human hands need hardly be said. We surely
know not the merits which may give to one being a claim on eternity,
nor the defects which would cut others off.” *

A second alleged necessity for a soul-substance is our
forensic responsibility before God, Locke caused an up-
roar when he said that the unity of consciousness made a
man the same person, whether supported by the same sub-
stance or 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 might
thus deprive God of the chance of certain retributions,
which otherwise would have enhanced his‘ glory.’ This is
certainly a good speculative ground for retaining the Soul—
at least for those who demand a plenitude of retribution.
The mere stream of consciousness, with its lapses of mem-
ory, cannot possibly be as ‘responsible’ as a soul which is
at the judgment day all that it ever was. To modern read-
ers, however, who are less insatiate for retribution than
their grandfathers, this argument will hardly be as con-
vincing as it seems once to have been.

One great use of the Soul has always been to account
for, and at the same time to guarantee, the closed individu-
ality of each personal consciousness. ‘The thoughts of one
soul must unite into one self, it was supposed, and must be
eternally insulated from those of every cthersoul. But we
have already begun to see that, although unity is the rule of
each man’s consciousness, yet in some individuals, at least,
thoughts may split away from the others and form sepa-

* Metaphysik, § 245 fin. This writer, who in his early work, the Medi-
zinische Psychologie, was (to my reading) a strong defender of the Soul-
Substance theory, has written in §§ 243-5 of his Metaphysik the most beau-
tiful criticism of this theory which exists.

350 -SYCHOLOGY.

rate selves. As for insulation, it would be rash, in view of
the phenomena of thought-transference, mesmeric influence
and spirit-control, which are being alleged nowadays on
better authority than ever before, to be too sure about
that point either. The definitively closed nature of our
personal consciousness is probably an average statistical
resultant of many conditions, but not an elementary force
or fact; so that, if one wishes to preserve the Soul, the less
he draws his arguments from that quarter the better. So
long as our self, on the whole, makes itself good and prac-
tically maintains itself as a closed individual, why, as Lotze
says, is not that enough? And why is the being-an-individ-
ual in some inaccessible metaphysical way so much prouder
an achievement ? *

My final conclusion, then, about the substantial Soul is
that it explains nothing and guarantees nothing. Its suc-
cessive thoughts are the only intelligible and verifiable
things about it, and definitely to ascertain the correlations
of these with brain-processes is as much as psychology can
empirically do. From the metaphysical point of view, it is
true that one may claim that the correlations have a ra-
tional ground; and if the word Soul could be taken to mean
merely some such vague problematic ground, it would be
unobjectionable. But the trouble is that it professes to
give the ground in positive terms of a very dubiously cred-
ible sort. [I therefore feel entirely free to discard the word
Soul from the rest of this book. If I ever use it, it will be
in the vaguest and most popular way. The reader who
finds any comfort in the idea of the Soul, is, however, per-
fectly free to continue to believe in it; for our reasonings
have not established the non-existence of the Soul; they
have only proved its superfluity for scientific purposes.

The next theory of the pure Self to which we pass is

The Associationist Theory.

Locke paved the way for it by the hypothesis he sug-
gested of the same substance having two successive con-

* On the empirical and transcendental conceptions of the self’s unity.
see Lotze, Metaphysic, § 244.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 301

sciousnesses, or of the same consciousness being supported
by more than one substance. He made his readers feel
that the important unity of the Self was its verifiable and
felt unity, and that a metaphysical or absolute unity would
be insignificant, so iong as a consciousness of diversity might
be there.

Hume showed how great the consciousness of diversity
actually 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 moment
intimately conscious of what we call our SELF; that we feel its exist-
ence and its continuance in existence, and are certain, beyond the evi-
dence of a demonstration, both of its perfect identity and simplicity.

. Unluckily all these positive assertions are contrary to that very
perience which is pleaded for them, nor have we any idea of Self,
after the manner it is here explained. . . . It must be some one im-
pression that gives rise to every real idea. . . . If any impression gives
rise to the idea of Self, that impression must continue invariably
the same through the whole course of our lives, since self is supposed
to exist after that manner. But there is no impression constant and
invariable. Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations
succeed each other, and never all exist at the same time. . .. For my
part, when I enter mozt intimately into what I call myself, I always
stumble on some particular perception or other of heat or cold, light or
shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at
any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the
perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by
sound sleep, so long am I insensible of myse/7, and may truly be said
not to exist. And were all my perceptions removed by death, and could
I neither think, nor feel, norsee, aor love, nor hate after the dissolution
of my body, I should be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is
farther requisite to make me a pertect non-entity. If anyone, upon
serious and unprejudiced reflection, thinks he has a different notion of
himself, 1 must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I cap
allow him is, that he may be in the right as eral as I, and that we are
essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive
something simple and continued which he calls himself; though I am
certain there is no such principle in me.

‘* But setting aside some metaphysicians of this kind, I may venture
to affirm of the rest of mankind that they are nothing but a bundle or
collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an
inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. Our
eyes cannot turn in their sockets without varying our perceptions. Our
thought is still more variable than our sight; and all our other senses
and faculties contribute to this change; nor is there any single power of

852 PSYCHOLOGY.

the soul which remains unalterably the same, perhaps for one moment,
The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively
make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away and mingle in an infi-
nite variety of postures and situations. here is properly no simplicity
in it at one time, nor identity in different ; whatever natural propension
we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity. The comparison
of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive percep-
tions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant
notion of the place where these scenes are represented, nor of the ma-
terial of which it is composed.”

But Hume, after doing this good piece of introspective
work, proceeds to pour out the child with the bath, and to
fly to as great an extreme as the substantialist philosophers.
As they say the Self is nothing but Unity, unity abstract and
absolute, so Hume says it is nothing but Diversity, diversity
abstract and absolute; whereas in truth it is that mixture
of unity and diversity which we ourselves have already
found so easy to pick apart. We found among the objects
of the stream certain feelings that hardly changed, that
stood out warm and vivid in the past just as the present
feeling does now; and we found the present feeling to be
the centre of accretion to which, de proche en proche, these
other feelings are, by the judging Thought, felt to cling. Hume
says nothing of the judging Thought; and he denies this
thread of resemblance, this core of sameness running
through the ingredients of the Self, to exist even as a phe-
nomenal thing. To him there is no tertium quid between
pure unity and pure separateness. A succession of ideas
‘connected by a close relation affords to an accurate view
as perfect a notion of diversity as if there was no manner
of relation” at all.

‘* All our distinct perceptions are distinct existences, and the mind
never perceives any real connection among distinct existences. Did our
perceptions either inhere in something simple or individual, or did the
mind perceive some real connection among them, there would be no
difficulty in the case. For my part, I must plead the privilege of a
seceptie 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 con:
tradictions.” *

* Appendix to book 1 of Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 353

Hume is at bottom as much of a metaphysician as
Thomas Aquinas. No wonder he can discover no ‘ hypoth-
esis.’ The unity of the parts of the stream is just as ‘real’
a connection as their diversity is a real separation; both
connection and separation are ways in which the past
thoughts appear to the present Thought;—unlike each
other in respect of date and certain qualities—this is the
separation ; alike in other qualities, and continuous in time
—this is the connection. In demanding a more ‘ real’ con-
nection than this obvious and verifiable likeness and con-
tinuity, Hume seeks ‘the world behind the looking-glass,’
and gives a striking example of that Absolutism which is
the great disease of philosophic Thought.

The chain of distinct existences into which Hume thus
chopped up our ‘stream’ was adopted by all of his succes-
sors as a complete inventory of the facts. The association-
ist Philosophy was founded. Somehow, out of ‘ideas,’ each
separate, each ignorant of its mates, but sticking together
and calling each other up according to certain laws, all the
higher forms of consciousness were to be explained, and
among them the consciousness of our personal identity.
The task was a hard one, in which what we called the
psychologist’s fallacy (p. 196 ff.) bore the brunt of the
work. Two ideas, one of ‘A,’ succeeded by another of ‘ B,’
were transmuted into a third idea of ‘B after A.’ An idea
from last year returning now was taken to be an idea of last
year ; two similar ideas stood for an idea of similarity, and
the like; palpable confusions, in which certain facts about
the ideas, possible only to an outside knower of them, were
put into the place of the ideas’ own proper and limited de-
liverance and content. Out of such recurrences and resem-
blances in a series of discrete ideas and feelings a knowl-
edge was somehow supposed to be engendered in each
feeling that it was recurrent and resembling, and that it
helped to form a series to whose unity the name J came to
be joined. In the same way, substantially, Herbart,* in

* Herbart believed in the Soul, too; but for him the ‘ Self’ of which we
are ‘conscious’ is the empirical Self—not the soul.

354 PSYCHOLOGY.

Germany, tried to show how a conflict of ideas would fuse
into a manner of representing itself for which J was the con-
secrated name.*

The defect of all these attempts is that the conclusion
pretended to follow from certain premises is by no means
rationally involved in the premises. <A feeling of any kind,
if it simply returns, ought to be nothing else than what it
was at first. If memory of previous existence and all sorts
of other cognitive functions are attributed to it when it re-
turns, it is no longer the same, but a widely diiterent feel-
ing, and ought to be so described. We have so described
it with the greatest explicitness. We have said that feel-
ings never do return. We have not pretended to explain
this; we have recorded it as an empirically ascertained
law, analogous to certain laws of brain-physiology ; and,
seeking to define the way in which new feelings do differ
from the old, we have found them to be cognizant and ap-
propriative of the old, whereas the old were always cogni-
zant and appropriative of something else. Once more, this
account pretended to be nothing more than a complete
description of the facts. It explained them no more than
the associationist account explains them. But the latter
both assumes to explain them and in the same breath falsi-
fies them, and for each reason stands condemned.

It is but just to say that the associationist writers as a
rule 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 shy
about openly tackling the problem of how it comes to be
aware of itself. Neither Bain nor Spencer, for example,
directly touch this problem. As a rule, associationist
writers keep talking about ‘the mind’ and about what ‘we’
do; and so, smuggling in surreptitiously what they ought
avowedly to have postulated in the form of a present
‘judging Thought,’ they either trade upon their reader’s
lack of discernment or are undiscerning themselves.

Mr. D. G. Thompson is the only associationist writer I
know who perfectly escapes this confusion, and postulates

* Compare again the remarks on pp. 158-162 above.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 395

openly what he needs. “All states of consciousness,” he
says, “imply and postulate a subject Ego, whose sub-
stance is unknown and unknowable, to which [why not say
by which ?] states of consciousness are referred as attri-
butes, but which in the process of reference becomes ob:
jectified and becomes itself an attribute of a subject Ego
which lies still beyond, and which ever eludes cognition
though ever postulated for cognition.’* This is exactly
our judging and remembering present ‘Thought,’ described
in less simple terms.

After Mr. Thompson, M. Taine and the two Mills deserve
credit for seeking to be as clear as they can. Taine tells us
in the first volume of his ‘Intelligence’ what the Ego is,—
a continuous web of conscious events no more really dis-
tinct from each other+t than rhomboids, triangles, and
squares marked with chalk on a plank are really distinct,
for the plank itself is one. In the second volume he says
all these parts have a common character embedded in them,
that of being internal [thisis our character of ‘ warmness,’
otherwise named]. This character is abstracted and iso-
lated by a mental fiction, and is what we are conscious of as
our self—‘ this stable within is what each of us calls J or
me. Obviously M. Taine forgets to tell us what this ‘each
of us’ is, which suddenly starts up and performs the ab-
straction and ‘calls’ its product Ior me. The character
does not abstract itself. Taine means by ‘each of us’
merely the present ‘judging Thought’ with its memory and
tendency to appropriate, but he does not name it distinctly
enough, and lapses into the fiction that the entire series of
thoughts, the entire ‘plank,’ is the reflecting psychologist.

James Mill, after defining Memory as a train of associ-
ated ideas beginning with that of my past self and ending
with that of my present self, defines my Self as a train of
ideas of which Memory declares the first to be continuously
connected with the last. The successive associated ideas

* System of Psychology (1884). vol. r. p. 114.

+ ‘ Distinct only to observation,’ he adds. To whose observation ? the
outside psychologist’s, the Ego’s, their own, or the plank’s? Darauf
kommt es an!

356 PSYCHOLOGY.

‘run, as it were, into a single point of consciousness.’ *
John Mill, annotating this account, says :

‘The phenomenon of Self and that of Memory are merely two sides
of the same fact, or two different modes of viewing the same fact. We
may, as psychologists, set out from either of them, and refer the other
to it... . Butit is hardly allowable to do both. At least it must
be said that by doing so we explain neither. We only show that the
two things are essentially the same; that my memory of having as-
cended Skiddaw on a given day, and my consciousness of being the
same person who ascended Skiddaw on that day, are two modes of stat-
ing the same fact : a fact which psychology has as yet failed to resolve
into anything more elementary. In analyzing the complex phenomena
of consciousness, we must come to something ultimate ; and we seem
to have reached two elements which have a good prima facie claim to
that title. There is, first, . . . the difference between a fact and the
Thought of that fact : a distinction which we are able to cognize in the
past, and which then constitutes Memory, and in the future, when it
constitutes Expectation ; but in neither case can we give any account
of it except that it exists. . . . Secondly, in addition to this, and
setting out from the belief... that the idea I now have was de-
rived from a previous sensation . . . there is the further conviction
that this sensation . . . was my own; that it happened to my self.
In other words, I am aware of a long and uninterrupted succession
of past feelings, going back as far as memory reaches, and terminating
with the sensations I have at the present moment, all of which are con-
nected by an inexplicable tie, that distinguishes them not only from any
succession or combination in mere thought, but also from the parallel
successions of feelings which I believe, on satisfactory evidence, to have
happened to each of the other beings, shaped like myself, whom I per-
ceive around me. This succession of feelings, which I call my memory
of the past, is that by which I distinguish my Self. Myself is the
person who had that series of feelings, and I know nothing of myself,
by direct knowledge, except that Ihad them. But there is a bond of
some sort among all the parts of the series, which makes me say that
they were feelings of a person who was the same person throughout
[according to us this istheir * warmth’ and resemblance to the ‘ central
spiritual self’ now actually felt] and a different person from those who
had any of the parallel successions of feelings ; and this bond, to me,
constitutes my Ego. Here I think the question must rest, until some
psychologist succeeds better than anyone else has done, in showing a
mode in which the analysis can be carried further.” +

* Analysis. etc., J. S. Mill’s Edition, vol. 1. p. 331. The ‘as it were’
is delightfully characteristic of the school.
+ J. Mill’s Analysis, vol. 1. p. 179.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 357

The reader must judge of our own success in carrying
the analysis farther. The various distinctions we have
made are all parts of an endeavor so to do. John Mill him-
self, in a later-written passage, so far from advancing in the
line of analysis, seems to tail back upon something peril-
ously near to the Soul. He says:

‘The fact of recognizing a sensation, . . . remembering that it
has been felt before, is the simplest and most elementary fact of mem-
ery: and the inexplicable tie . . . which connects the present con-
sciousness with the past one of which it reminds me, is as nearas I
think we can get to a positive conception of Self. That there is some-
thing real in this tie, real as the sensations themselves, and not a mere
product of the laws of thought without any fact corresponding to it, I
hold to be indubitable. . . . This original element, . . . to which we
cannot give any name but its own peculiar one, without implying some
false or ungrounded theory, is the Ego, or Self. Assuch I ascribe a
reality to the Ego—to my own mind—different from that real existence
as a Permanent Possibility, which is the only reality I acknowledge in
Matter. . . . We are forced to apprehend every part of the series as
linked with the other parts by something in common which is not the
feelings themselves, any more than the succession of the feelings is the
feelings themselves ; and as that which is the same in the first as in the
second, 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 com-
mon element isa permanent element. But beyond this we can affirm
nothing of it except the states of consciousness themselves. The feel-
ings or consciousnesses which belong or have belonged to it, and its
possibilities of having more, are the only facts there are to be asserted
of Self—the only positive attributes, except permanence, which we can
ascribe to it.” *

Mr. Mill’s habitual method of philosophizing was to
affirm boldly some general doctrine derived from his father,
and then make so many concessions of detail to its enemies
as practically to abandon it altogether.t In this place the

* Examination of Hamilton, 4th ed. p. 268.

+ His chapter on the Psychological Theory of Mind is a beautiful case in
point, and his concessions there have become so celebrated that they must
be 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 series
of feelings, with a background of possibilities of feeling, can effectually
withstand the most invidious of the arguments directed against it. But
groundless as are the extrinsic objections, the theory has intrinsic difticul-

358 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

concessions amount, so far as they are intelligible, to the
admission of something very like the Soul. This ‘inex-
plicable tie’ which connects the feelings, this ‘something
in common’ by which they are linked and which is not the
passing feelings themselves, but something ‘ permanent,’ of —
which we can ‘affirm nothing’ save its attributes and its
permanence, what is it but metaphysical Substance come
again to life? Much as one must respect the fairness of
Mill’s temper, quite as much must one regret his failure
of acumen at this point. At bottom he makes the same
blunder as Hume: the sensations per se, he thinks, have
no ‘tie.’ The tie of resemblance and continuity which the
remembering Thought finds among them is not a ‘real tie’
but ‘a mere product of the laws of thought; and the
fact that the present Thought ‘appropriates’ them is also

ties which we have not set forth, and which it seems to me beyond the
power of metaphysical analysis to remove. . . .

«The thread of consciousness which composes the mind’s phenomena!
life consist not only of present sensations, but likewise, in part, of mem-
ories and expectations. Now what are these? In themselves, they are
present feelings, states of present consciousness, and in that respect not dis-
tinguished from sensations. They ali, moreover, resemble some given sen-
sations or feelings, of which we have previously had experience. But they
are attended with the peculiarity that each of them involves a belief in
more than its own present existence. A sensation involves only this ; but
aremembrance of sensation, even if not referred to any particular date, in-
volves the suggestion and belief that a sensation, of which it is acopy or
representation, actually existed in the past ; and an expectation involves
the belief, more or less positive, that a sensation or other feeling to which
it directly refers will exist in the future. Nor can the phenomena in-
volved in these two states of consciousness be adequately expressed, with-
out saying that the belief they include is, that I myself formerly had, or
that I myself, and no other, shall hereafter have, the sensations remembered
or expected. The fact believed is, that the sensations did actually form, or
will hereafter form, part of the seif-same series of states, or thread of con-
sciousness, of which the remembrance or expectation of those sensations is
the part ncw present. If, therefore, we speak of the mind asa series of
feelings we are obliged to compiete the statement by calling it a series of
feelings which is aware of itself as past and future ; and we are reduced to
the alternative of believing that the mind, or Ego, is something different
from any series of feelings, or possibilities of them, or of accepting the
paradox that something which ex hypothesi is but aseries of feelings, can
be aware of itself as a series.

‘«The truth is. that we are here face to face with that final inexplica

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 309

no real tie. But whereas Hume was contented to say that
there might after all be no ‘real tie,’ Mill, unwilling to ad-
mit this possibility, is driven, like any scholastic, to place it
in a non-phenomenal world.

John Mill’s concessions may be regarded as the defini-
tive bankruptcy of the associationist description of the con-
sciousness of self, starting, as it does, with the best
intentions, and dimly conscious of the path, but ‘ perplexed
in the extreme’ at last with the inadequacy of those ‘simple
feelings,’ non-cognitive, non-transcendent of themselves,
which were the only baggage it was willing to take along.
One must beg memory, knowledge on the part of the feel-
ings of something outside themselves. That granted, every
other true thing follows naturally, and it is hard to go
astray. The knowledge the present feeling has of the past

bility, at which, as Sir W. Hamilton observes, we inevitably arrive when
we reach ultimate facts ; and in general, one mode of stating it only appears
more incomprehensible than another, because the whole of human lan-
guage is accommodated to the one. and is so incongruous with the other
that it cannot be expressed in any terms which do not deny its truth. The
real stumbling-block is perhaps not in any theory of the fact. but in the fact
itself. The true incomprehensiblity perhaps is, that something which has
teased, or is not yet in existence, can still be, in a manner, present; that a
series of feelings, the infinitely greater part of which is past or future, can
be gathered up, as it were, into a simple present conception, accompanied
by a beliet of reality. I think by far the wisest thing we can do is to accept
the inexplicable fact, without any theory of how it takes place ; and when
we are obliged to speak of it in terms which assume a theory, to use them
with a reservation as to their meaning.”

In a later place in the same book (p. 561) Mill, speaking of what may
rightly be demanded of a theorist, says: ‘‘ He is not entitled to frame a
theory from one class of phenomena, extend it to another clase which
it 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 phenomena
which the associationist school takes to frame its theory of the Ego are feel-
ings unaware of each other. Theclass of phenomena the Ego presents are
feelings of which the later onesare intensely aware of those that went be-
fore. The two classes do not ‘fit,’ and no exercise of ingenuity can ever
make them fit. No shuffling of unaware feelings can make them aware-
To get the awareness we must openly beg it by postulating a new feel
ing which 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 the
present passing Thought as a psychic integer, with its knowledge of so
much that has gone before.

360 PSYCHOLOGY.

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 judging
Thought of every moment, the only place where disconnec-
tions could be realized, did they exist. Hume and Mill
both imply that a disconnection can be realized there, whilst
a tie cannot. But the ties and the disconnections are ex-
actly on a par, in this matter of self-consciousness. The
way in which the present Thought appropriates the past is
a real way, so long as no other owner appropriates it in a
more real way, and so long as the Thought has no grounds
for repudiating it stronger than those which lead to its
appropriation. But no other owner ever does in point of
fact present himself for my past; and the grounds which I
perceive for appropriating it—viz., continuity and resem-
blance with the present—outweigh those I perceive for dis-
owning it—viz., distance in time. My present Thought
stands thus in the plenitude of ownership of the train of
my past selves, is owner not only de facto, but de jure, the
most real owner there can be, and all without the supposi-
tion of any ‘inexplicable tie,’ but in a perfectly verifiable
and phenomenal way.
Turn we now to what we may call

THE TRANSCENDENTALIST THEORY.

which owes its origin to Kant. Kant’s own statements are >
too lengthy and obscure for verbatim quotation here, so I
must give their substance only. Kant starts, as I understand
him, from a view of the Object essentially like our own de-
scription of it on p. 275 ff., that is, it is a system of things,
qualities or facts in relation. “Object is that in the knowl-
edge (Begriff) of which the Manifold of a given Perception
is connected.” * But whereas we simply begged the vehi-
cle of this connected knowledge in the shape of what we
call the present Thought, or section of the Stream of Con-
sciousness (which we declared to be the ultimate fact
for psychology), Kant denies this to be an ultimate fact
and insists on analyzing it into a large number of distinct,

* Kritik d. reinen Vernunft, 2te Aufl. § 17.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 361

though equally essential, elements. The ‘ Manifoldness’ of
the Object is due to Sensibility, which per se is chaotic,
and the unity is due to the synthetic handling which this
Manifold receives from the higher faculties of Intuition,
Apprehension, Imagination, Understanding, and Appercep-
tion. It is the one essential spontaneity of the Under-
standing which, under these different names, brings unity
into the manifold of sense.

‘‘The Understanding és, in fact, nothing more than the faculty of
binding together a priori, and of bringing the Manifold of given ideas
under the unity of Apperception, which consequently is the supreme
principle in all human knowledge” (§ 16).

The material connected must be given by lower fac-
ulties to the Understanding, for the latter is not an intui-
tive faculty, but by nature ‘empty.’ And the bringing of
this material ‘under the unity of Apperception’ is ex-
plained by Kant to mean the thinking it always so that,
whatever its other determinations be, it may be known as
thought by me.* Though this consciousness, that I think
it, need not be at every moment explicitly realized, it is
always capable of being realized. For if an object incapable
of being combined with the idea of a thinker were there,
how could it be known, how related to other objects, how
form part of ‘experience’ at all ?

The awareness that J think is therefore implied in all ex-
perience. No connected consciousness of anything without
that of Self as its presupposition and ‘ transcendental’ condi-
tion! All things, then, so far as they are intelligible at all,
are so through combination with pure consciousness of Self,

*Tt must be noticed, in justice to what was said above on page 274 ff.,
that neither Kant nor his successors anywhere discriminate between the
presence of the apperceiving Ego to the combined object, and the aware-
ness by that Ego of its own presence and of its distinctness from what it
apperceives, That the Object must be known to something which thinks,
and that it must be known to something which thinks that it thinks, are
treated by them as identical necessities,—by what logic, does not appear.
Kant tries to soften the jump in the reasoning by saying the thought of 7t-
self on the part of the Ego need only be potential— the ‘I think’ must be
capable of accompanying all other knowledge ’’—but a thought which is
only potential is actually no thought at all, which practically gives up the
case.

362 PSYCHOLOGY.

and apart from this, at least potential, combination nothing
is knowable to us at all.

But this self, whose consciousness Kant thus established
deductively as a conditio sine qua non of experience, is in the
same breath denied by him to have any positive attributes.
Although Kant’s name for it—the ‘original transcendental
synthetic Unity of Apperception ’—is so long, our con-
sciousness about it is, according to him, shortenough. Self-
consciousness of this ‘transcendental’ sort tells us, ‘not
how we appear, not how we inwardly are, but only that we
are’ ($25), At the basis of our knowledge of our selves
there lies only “the simple and utterly empty idea: I; of
which we cannot even say we have a notion, but only a con-
sciousness which accompanies all notions. In this J, or he
or it (the thing) which thinks, nothing more is represented
than the bare transcendental Subject of the knowledge =a,
which is only recognized by the thoughts which are its pre-
dicates, and of which, taken by itself, we cannot form the
least conception” (ibid. ‘ Paralogisms’). The pure Ego of
all apperception is thus for Kant not the soul, but only ee:
‘Subject’ which is the necessary correlate of the Object in
all knowledge. There is a soul, Kant thinks, but this mere
ego-form of our consciousness tells us nothing about it,
neither whether it be substantial, nor whether it be imma-
terial, nor whether it be simple, nor whether it be per-
manent. These declarations on Kant’s part of the utter
barrenness of the consciousness of the pure Self, and of the
consequent impossibility of any deductive or ‘rational ’
psychology, are what, more than any thing else, earned for
him the title of the ‘all-destroyer.’ The Salk seli we know
anything positive about, he thinks, is the empirical me, not
the pure J; the self which is an object among other objects
and the ‘constituents’ of which we ourselves have seen, and
recognized to be phenomenal things appearing in the form
of 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 whether
anything in Kant’s conception ought to make us give up our
own, of a remembering and appropriating Thought inces-

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 363

santly renewed. In many respects Kant’s meaning is ob-
scure, but it will not be necessary for us to squeeze the
texts in order to make sure what it actually and historically
was. If we can define clearly two or three things which it
may possibly have been, that will hely us just as mnch to
clear our own ideas.

On the whole, a defensible interpretation of Kant’s
view would take somewhat the following shape. Like our-
selves he believes in a Reality outside the mind of which he
writes, but the critic who vouches for that reality does so
on grounds of faith, for it is not a verifiable phenomenal
thing. Neither is it manifold. The ‘Manifold’ which the
intellectual functions combine is a mental manifold alto-
gether, which thus stands between the Ego of Appercep-
tion and the outer Reality, but still stands inside the mind.
In the function of knowing there is a multiplicity to be con-
nected, and Kant brings this multiplicity inside the mind.
The Reality becomes a mere empty locus, or unknowable,
the so-called Noumenon; the manifold phenomenon is in
the mind. We, on the contrary, put the Multiplicity with
the Reality outside, and leave the mind simple. Both of us
deal with the same elements—thought and object—the only
question is in which of them the multiplicity shall be
lodged. Wherever it is lodged it must be ‘synthetized’
when it comes to be thought. And that particular way of
lodging it will be the better, which, in addition to describ-
ing the 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 elaborate
internal machine-shop stands condemned by all we said in
favor of its simplicity on pages 276 ff Our Thought is not
composed of parts, however so composed its objects may
be. There is no originally chaotic manifold in it to be re-
duced to order. There is something almost shocking in the
notion of so chaste a function carrying this Kantian hurly-
burly in her womb. If we are to have a dualism of Thought
and Reality at all, the multiplicity should be lodged in the
latter and not in the former member of the couple of related
terms. The parts and their relations surely belong less to
the knower than to what is known.

364 PSYCHOLOGY.

But even were all the mythology true, the process of
synthesis would in no whit be explained by calling the inside
of the mind its seat. No mystery would be made lighter by
such means. Itis just as much a puzzle how the ‘ Ego’ can
smploy the productive Imagination to make the Understand-
ing use the categories to combine the data which Recognition,
Association, and Apprehension receive from sensible Intui-
tion, as how the Thought can combine the objective facts,
Phrase it as one may, the difficulty is always the same: the
Many known by the One. Or does one seriously think he
understands better how the knower ‘connects’ its objects,
when one calls the former a transcendental Ego and the
latter a ‘Manifold of Intuition’ than when one calls them
Thought and Things respectively? Knowing must have a
vehicle. Call the vehicle Ego, or call it Thought, Psycho-
sis, Soul, Intelligence, Consciousness, Mind, Reason, Feel-
ing,—what you like—it must know. The best grammatical
subject for the verb know would, if possible, be one from
whose other properties the knowing could be deduced.
And if there be no such subject, the best one would be
that with the fewest ambiguities and the least pretentious
name. By Kant’s confession, the transcendental Ego has no
properties, and from it nothing can be deduced. Its name
is pretentious, and, as we shall presently see, has its mean-
ing ambiguously mixed up with that of the substantial
soul. So on every possible account we are excused from
using it instead of our own term of the present passing
‘Thought,’ as the principle by which the Many is simul-
taneously known.

The ambiguity referred to in the meaning of the tran-
scendental Ego is as to whether Kant signified by it an
Agent, and by the Experience it helps to constitute, an
operation ; or whether the experience is an event produced
in an unassigned way, and the Ego a mere indwelling ele-
ment therein contained. If an operation be meant, then
Ego and Manifold must both be existent prior to that col-
lision which results in the experience of one by the other.
If a mere analysis is meant, there is no such prior exist-
ence, and the elements only are in so far as they are in union.
Now Kant’s tone and language are everywhere the very

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 365

words of one who is talking of operations and the agents
by which they are performed.* And yet there is reason to
think that at bottom he may have had nothing of the sort
in mind.t In this uncertainty we need again do no more
than decide what to think of his transcendental Ego 7 it be
an agent.

Well, if it be so, Transcendentalism is only Substantial-
ism grown shame-faced, and the Ego only a ‘cheap and
nasty’ edition of the soul. All our reasons for preferring
the ‘Thought’ tothe ‘Soul’ apply with redoubled force
when the Soul is shrunk to this estate. The Soul truly ex-
plained nothing ; the ‘syntheses,’ which she performed,
were simply taken ready-made and clapped on to her as
expressions of her nature taken after the fact ; but at least
she had some semblance of nobility and outlook. She
was called active; might select; was responsible, and per-
manent in her way. The Ego is simply nothing: as in-
effectual and windy an abortion as Philosophy can show.
It would indeed be one of Reason’s tragedies if the good
Kant, with all his honesty and strenuous pains, should
have deemed this conception an important outbirth of his
thought.

But we have seen that Kant deemed it of next to no im-
portance at all. It was reserved for his Fichtean and He-
gelian successors to call it the first Principle of Philosophy,
to spell its name in capitals and pronounce it with adora-
tion, 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 know
that I may not read my authors aright. The whole lesson
of Kantian and post-Kantian speculation is, it seems to me,
the lesson of simplicity. With Kant, complication both of
thought and statement was an inborn infirmity, enhanced

* «As regards the soul, now, or the ‘I,’ the ‘ thinker,’ the whole drift of
Kant’s advance upon Hume and sensational psychology is towards the
demonstration that the subject of knowledge is an Agent.” (G. S. Morris,
Kant’s Critique, etc. (Chicago, 1882), p. 224.)

t ‘In Kant’s Prolegomena,” says II. Cohen,—I do not myself find the
passage, —‘‘it is expressly said that the problem is not to show how expe-
rience arises (ensteht), but of what it consists (besteht).” (Kant’s Theorie
d. Erfabrung (1871), p 138.)

366 PSYCHOLOGY.

by the musty academicism of his Konigsberg existence.
With Hegelit wasa raging fever. Terribly, therefore, do
the sour grapes which these fathers of philosophy have
eaten set our teeth on edge. We have in England and
America, however, a contemporary continuation of Hegel-
ism from which, fortunately, somewhat simpler deliverances
come ; and, unable to find any definite psychology in what
Hegel, Rosenkranz, or Erdmann tells us of the Ego, I turn
to Caird and Green.

The great difference, practically, between these authors
and Kant is their complete abstraction from the onlooking
Psychologist and from the Reality he thinks he knows; or
rather it is the absorption of both of these outlying terms
into the proper topic of Psychology, viz., the mental ex-
perience of the mind under observation. The Reality
coalesces with the connected Manifold, the Psy<hologist
with the Ego, knowing becomes ‘connecting,’ and there
results no longer a finite or criticisable, but an ‘ absolute’
Experience, of which the Object and the Subject are always
the same. Our finite ‘Thought’ is virtually and potentially
this eternal (or rather this ‘timeless’), absolute Ego, and
only provisionally and speciously the limited thing which
it seems primd 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 is
throughout all time the same.* This ‘solipsistic’ char-

* The contrast between the Monism thus reached and our own psycho-
logical point of view can be exhibited schematically thus, the terms in
squares standing for what, for us, are the ultimate irreducible data of
psychological science, and the vincula above it symbolizing the reductions
which post-Kantian idealism performs:

Absolute Self-consciousness

Reason or
Experience.
a SS = oars ‘\
Transcendental Ego World
tess CD — r+
| Psychologist Thought Thought’s Object Psy are |

— —E

= a
Psychologist’s Object.

These reductions account for the ubiquitousness of the ‘ psychologist’s
fallacy’ (bk. 11. ch. 1. p. 32) in the modern monistic writings. For us it is

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 367

acter of an Experience conceived as absolute really annihi-
lates psychology as a distinct body of science.

Psychology is a natural science, an account of particu-
lar finite streams of thought, coexisting and succeeding
in time. Itis of course conceivable (though far from clearly
so) that in the last metaphysical resort all these streams
of thought may be thought by one universal All-thinker.
But in this metaphysical notion there is no profit for psy-
chology ; for grant that one Thinker does think in all of us,
still what He thinks in me and what in you can never be de-
duced from the bare idea of Him. The idea of Him seems
even 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 last
but for a day. . . . No knowledge, nor any mental act involved in
knowledge, can properly be called a ‘phenomenon of consciousness.’
. . - For a phenomenon is a sensible event, related in the way of
antecedence or consequence to other sensible events, but the conscious-

ness which constitutes a knowledge... is not an event so related
nor made up of such events.”

Again, if

‘‘we examine the constituents of any perceived object, ... we
shall find alike that it is only for consciousness that they can exist, and
that the consciousness for which they thus exist cannot be merely a
series of phenomena or a succession of states. . . . It then becomes clear
that there is a function of consciousness, as exercised in the most rudi-
mentary experience [namely, the function of synthesis] which is incom-
patible with the definition of consciousness as any sort of succession of
any sort of phenomena.” *

Were we to follow these remarks, we should have to
abandon our notion of the ‘ Thought’ (perennially renewed in
time, but always cognitive thereof), and to espouse instead of

an unpardonable logical sin, when talking of a thought’s knowledge (eithei
of an object or of itself), to change the terms without warning, and, sub-
stituting the psychologist’s knowledge therefor, still make as if we were
continuing to talk of the same thing. For monistic idealism, this is the.
very enfranchisement of philosophy, and of course cannot be too much in-
dulged in.

* T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, $$ 57, 61, 64.

368 PSYCHOLOGY.

it an entity copied from thought in all essential respects, but
differing from it in being ‘out of time.’ What psychology
can gain by this barter would be hard to divine. More-
over this resemblance of the timeless Ego to the Soul is
completed by other resemblances still. The monism of
the post-Kantian idealists seems always lapsing into a
regular old-fashioned spiritualistic dualism. They inces-
santly talk as if, like the Soul, their All-thinker were an
Agent, operating on detached materials of sense. This may
come from the accidental fact that the English writings of
the school have been more polemic than constructive, and
that a reader may often take for a positive profession a
statement ad hominem meant as part of a reduction to the
absurd, or mistake the analysis of a bit of knowledge into
elements for a dramatic myth about its creation. But I
think the matter has profounder roots. Professor Green
constantly talks of the ‘activity’ of Self as a ‘condition’ of
knowledge taking place. Facts are said to become incor-

porated with other facts only through the ‘action of a com-
' pining self-consciousness upon data of sensation.’

‘‘Every object we perceive . . . requires, in order to its presen-
tation, the action of a principle of consciousness, not itself subject to
conditions of time, upon successive appearances, such action as may
hold the appearances together, without fusion, in an apprehended
fact.” =

It is needless to repeat that the connection of things in
our knowledge is in no whit explained by making it the
deed of an agent whose essence is self-identity and who is
out of time. The agency of phenomenal thought coming
and going in time is just as easy to understand. And when
it is furthermore said that the agent that combines is the
same ‘self-distinguishing subject’ which ‘in another mode
of its activity’ presents the manifold object to itself, the
unintelligibilities become quite paroxysmal, and we are
forced to confess that the entire school of thought in ques-
tion, in spite of occasional glimpses of something more re-~
fined, still dwells habitually in that mythological stage of
thought where phenomena are explained as results of

—

* Toc. cit. § 64.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 369

dramas enacted by entities which but reduplicate the char-
acters of the phenomena themselves. The self must not
only know its object,—that is too bald and dead a relation
to be written down and left in its static state. The know-
ing must be painted as a ‘famous victory’ in which the
object’s distinctness is in some way ‘ overcome.’

‘‘The self exists as one self only as it opposes itself, as object, to
itself as subject, and immediately denies and transcends that opposi-
tion. Only because it is such a concrete unity, which has in itself a
resolved contradiction, can the intelligence cope with all the manifold-
ness and division of the mighty universe, and hope to master its secrets.
As the lightning sleeps in the dew-drop, so in the simple and trans-
parent unity of self-consciousness there is held in equilibrium that vital
antagonism of opposites which . . . seems to rend the world asunder.
The intelligence is able to understand the world, or, in other words, to
break down the barrier between itself and things and find itself in them,
just because its own existence is implicitly the solution of all the division
and conflict of things.” *

This dynamic (I had almost written dynamitic) way of
representing knowledge has the merit of not being tame.
To turn from it to our own psychological formulation is like
turning from the fireworks, trap-doors, and transformations
of the pantomime into the insipidity of the midnight, where

‘* ghastly through the drizzling rain,
On the bald street breaks the blank day !”’+
And yet turn we must, with the confession that our
‘Thought’—a cognitive phenomenal event in time—is, if
it exist at all, itself the only Thinker which the facts require.
The only service that transcendental egoism has done to
psychology has been by its protests against Hume’s ‘ bundle ’-

* KE. Caird: Hegel (1883), p. 149.

+ One is almost tempted to believe that the pantomime-state of mind
and that of the Hegelian dialectics are, emotionally considered, one and the
same thing. In the pantomime all common things are represented to
happen in impossible ways, people jump down each other’s throats, houses
turn inside out, old women become young men, everything ‘passes into
its opposite’ with inconceivable celerity and skill; and this, so far from
producing perplexity, brings rapture to the beholder’s mind. And so in
the Hegelian logic, relations elsewhere recognized under the insipid name
of distinctions (such as that between knower and object, many and one)
must first be translated into impossibilities and contradictions, then ‘tran-
scended’ and identified by miracle, ere the proper temper is induced for
thoroughly enjoying the spectacle they show.

370 PSYCHOLOGY.

theory 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 merely tie it
up, with their special transcendental string, invented for
that use alone. Besides, they talk as if, with this miraculous
tying or ‘relating,’ the Ego’s duties were done. Of its far
more important duty of choosing some of the things it ties
and appropriating them, to the exclusion of the rest, they
tell us never a word. To sum up, then, my own opinion of
the transcendentalist school, it is (whatever ulterior meta-
physical truth it may divine) a school in which psychology
at least has naught to learn, and whose deliverances about
the Ego in particular in no wise oblige us to revise our own
formulaticn of the Stream of Thought.*

With this, all possible rival formulations have been dis-
cussed. The literature of the Self is large, but all its

* The reader will please understand that I am quite willing to leave the
hypothesis of the transcendental Ego as a substitute for the passing
Thought open to discussion on general speculative grounds. Only in this
book I prefer to stick by the common-sense assumption that we have suc-
cessive conscious states, because all psychologists make it, and because one
does not see how there can be a Psychology written which does not postulate
such thoughts as its ultimate data. The data of all natural sciences be-
come in turn subjects of a critical treatment more refined than that which
the sciences themselves accord; and so it may fare in the end with our
passing Thought. We have ourselves seen (pp. 299-805) that the sensible
certainty of its existence is less strong than is usually assumed. My
quarrel with the transcendental Egoists is mainly about their grownds for
their belief. Did they consistently propose it as a substitule for the passing
Thought, did they consistently deny the latter’s existence, I should respect
their position more. But so far as I can understand them, they habitually
believe in the passing Thought also. They seem even to believe in the
Lockian stream of separate ideas, for the chief glory of the Ego in their
pages is always its power to ‘overcome’ this separateness and unite the
naturally disunited, ‘ synthetizing,’ ‘connecting,’ or ‘relating’ the ideas
together being used as synonyms, by transcendentalist writers, for knowing
various objects at once. Not the being conscious at all, but the being con-
scious of many things together is held to be the difficult thing, in our psychic
life, which only the wonder-working Ego can perform. But on what
slippery ground does one get the moment one changes the definite notion
of knowing an object into the altogether vague one of uniting or synthetizing
the ideas of its various parts !—In the chapter on Sensation we shall come
upon all this again.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 371

authors may be classed as radical or mitigated representa-
tives of the three schools we have named, substantialism,
associationism, or transcendentalism. Our own opinion
must be classed apart, although it incorporates essential
elements from all three schools. There need never have
been a quarrel between associationism and its rivals if the former
had admitted the indecomposable unity of every pulse of thought,
and the latter been willing to allow that ‘perishing’ pulses of
thought might recollect and know.

We may sum up by saying that personality implies the
incessant presence of two elements, an objective person,
known by a passing subjective Thought and recognized as
continuing in time. Hereafter let us use the words ME and I
for the empirical person and the judging Thought.

Certain vicissitudes in the me demand our notice.

In the first place, although its changes are gradual,
they become in time great. The central part of the me is
the feeling of the body and of the adjustments in the head ;
and in the feeling of the body should be included that of
the general emotional tones and tendencies, for at bottom
these are but the habits in which organic activities and sen-
sibilities run. Well, from infancy to old age, this assem-
blage of feelings, most constant of all, is yet a prey to slow
mutation, Our powers, bodily and mental, change at least
as fast.* Our possessions notoriously are perishable facts.

* «When we compare the listless inactivity of theinfant, slumbering
from the moment at which he takes his milky food to the moment at which
he wakes to require it again, with the restless energies of that mighty being
which he is to become in his maturer years, pouring truth after truth, in
rapid and dazzling profusion, upon the world. or grasping in his single hand
the destiny of empires, how few are the circumstances of resemblance
which we can trace, of all that intelligence which is afterwards to be dis-
played; how little more is seen than what serves to give feeble motion to
the mere machinery of life! . . . Every age, if we may speak of many
ages in the few years of human life, seems to be marked with a distinct
character. Each has its peculiar objects which excite lively affections; and
in each, exertion is excited by affections, which in other periods terminate
without inducing active desire. The boy finds a world in less space than
that which bounds his visible horizon; he wanders over his range of field
and exhausts his strength in the pursuit of objects which, in the years that

372 PSYCHOLOGY.

The identity which the J discovers, as it surveys this long
procession, can only be a relative identity, that of a slow
shifting in which there is always some common ingredient
retained.* The commonest element of all, the most uni-
form, is the possession of the same memories. However
different the man may be from the youth, both look back
on the same childhood, and eall it their own.

Thus the identity found by the J in its me is only a
loosely construed thing, an identity ‘on the whole,’ just
like that which any outside observer might find in the same

follow, are seen only to be neglected; while to him the objects that are
afterwards to absorb his whole soul are as indifferent as the objects of his
present passions are destined then to appear. . . . How many opportuni-
ties must every one have had of witnessing the progress of intellectual
decay, and the coldness that steals upon the once benevolent heart! We
quit our country, perhaps at an early period of life, and after an absence of
many years we return with all the remembrances of past pleasure which
grow more tender as they approach their objects. We eagerly seek him to
whose paternal voice we have been accustomed to listen with the same rev-
erence as if its predictions had possessed oracular certainty,—who first led
us into knowledge, *nd whose image has been constantly joined in our
mind with all that veneration which does not forbid love. We find him
sunk, perhaps, in the imbecility of idiotism, unable to recognize us,—igno-
rant alike of the past and of the future, and living only in the sensibility of
animal gratification. We seek the favorite companion of our childhood,
whose tenderness of heart, ete. . . . We find him hardened into a man,
meeting us scarcely with the cold hypocrisy of dissembled friendship—in
his general relations to the world careless of the misery he is not to feel.
. . . When we observe all this, . . . do we use only a metaphor of little
meaning when we say of him that he is become a different person, and that
his mind and character are changed? In what does the identity consist?
. . . The supposed test of identity, when applied to the mind in these
cases, completely fails. It neither affects, nor is affected, in the same man-
ner in the same circumstances. It therefore, if the test be a just one, is
not the same identical mind.” (T. Brown: Lectures on the Philosophy of
the Human Mind, ‘on Mental Identity.’)

* «Sir John Cutler had a pair of black worsted stockings, which his
maid darned so often with silk that they became at last a pair of silk
stockings. Now, supposing these stockings of Sir John’s endued with
some degree of consciousness at every particular darning, they would have
been sensible that they were the same individual pair of stockings both be-
fore and after the darning; and this sensation would have continued in
them 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: but
they were grown to be silk stockings, as was said before.” (Pope’s Mar-
tinus Scriblerus, quoted by Brown, 7dzd.)

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 373

assemblage of facts. We often say of a man ‘he is so
changed one would not know him’; and so does a man,
less often, speak of himself. These changes in the me,
recognized by the I, or by outside observers, may be grave
or slight. They deserve some notice here.

THE MUTATIONS OF THE SELF
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 either losses or false recol-
lections. In either case the me is changed. Should a man
be punished for what he did in his childhood and no longer
remembers ? Should he be punished for crimes enacted
in post-epileptic unconsciousness, somnambulism, or in any
involuntarily induced state of which no recollection is re-
tained ? Law, in accord with common-sense, says: ‘‘ No;
he is not the same person forensically now which he was
then.” These losses of memory are a normal incident of
extreme old age, and the person’s me shrinks in the ratio
of the facts that have disappeared.

In dreams we forget our waking experiences; they are
as if they were not. And the converse is also true. Asa
rule, no memory is retained during the waking state of
what has happened during mesmeric trance, although when
again entranced the person may remember it distinctly, and
may then forget facts belonging to the waking state. We
thus have, within the bounds of healthy mental life, an
approach to an alternation of me’s.

False m-mories are by no means rare occurrences in
most of us, and, whenever they occur, they distort the con-
sciousness of the me. Most people, probably, are in doubt
about certain matters ascribed to their past. They may
have seen them, may have said them, done them, or they
may only have dreamed or imagined they did so. The
content of a dream will oftentimes insert itself into the
stream of real life in a most perplexing way. The mest
frequent source of false memory is the accounts we give to
others of our experiences. Such accounts we almost al-

374 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

ways make both more simple and more interesting than the
truth. We quote what we should have said or done,
rather than what we really said or did; and in the first
telling we may be fully aware of the distinction. But ere
long the fiction expels the reality from memory and reigns
in its stead alone. This is one great source of the fallibil-
ity of testimony meant to be quite honest. Especially
where the marvellous is concerned, the story takes a tilt
that way, and the memory follows the story. Dr. Carpen-
ter quotes from Miss Cobbe the following, as an instance
of a very common sort:

‘* Tt happened once to the Writer to hear a most scrupulously con-
scientious friend narrate an incident of table-turning, to which she
appended an assurance that the table rapped when nobody was within
a yard of it. The writer being confounded by this latter fact, the
lady, though fully satisfied of the accuracy of her statement, promised
to look at the note she had made ten years previously of the transac-
tion. The note was examined, and was found to contain the distinct
statement that the table rapped when the hands of six persons rested
on it! The lady’s memory as to all other points proved to be strictly
correct ; and in this point she had erred in entire good faith.” *

It is next to impossible to get a story of this sort accu-
rate in all its details, although it is the inessential details
that suffer most change.t Dickens and Balzac were said to
have constantly mingled their fictions with their real expe-
riences. Every one must have known some specimen of
our mortal dust so intoxicated with the thought of his own
person and the sound of his own voice as never to be able
even to think the truth when his autobiography was in
question. Amiable, harmless, radiant J. V.! mayst thou
ne’er wake to the difference between thy real and thy
fondly-imagined self ! {

* Hours of Work and Play, p. 100.

+For a careful study of the errors in narratives, see E. Gurney: Phan-
tasms of the Living, vol. 1. pp. 126-158. In the Proceedings of the
Society for Psychical Research for May 1887 Mr. Richard Hodgson shows
by an extraordinary array of instances how utterly inaccurate everyone's
description from memory of a rapid series of events is certain to be.

t See Josiah Royce (Mind, vol. 13, p. 244, and Proceedings of Am. Soc.
of Psych. Research, vol. 1. p. 366), for evidence that a certain sort of hal-
lucination of memory which he calls ‘ pseudo-presentiment’ is no uncom-
mon phenomenon.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 373

2. When we pass beyond alterations of memory to ab-
normal alterations in the present self we have still graver
disturbances. These alterations are of three main types,
from the descriptive point of view. But certain cases unite
features of two or more types; and our knowledge cf the
elements and causes of these changes of personality is so
slight that the division into types must not be regarded as
having any profound significance. The types are:

(1) Insane delusions ;

(2) Alternating selves;

(5) Mediumships or possessions.

1) In insanity we often have delusions projected into
the past, which are melancholic or sanguine according to
the character of the disease. But the worst alterations of
the self come from present perversions of sensibility and
impulse which leave the past undisturbed, but induce the
patient to think that the present me is an altogether new
personage. Something of this sort happens normally in
the rapid expansion of the whole character, intellectual as
well as volitional, which takes place after the time of
puberty. The pathological cases are curious enough to
merit longer notice.

The basis of our personality, as M. Ribot says, is that
feeling of our vitality which, because it is so perpetually
present, remains in the background of our consciousness.

‘‘Tt is the basis because, always present, always acting, without
peace or rest, it knows neither sleep nor fainting, and lasts as long as
life itself, of which it is one form. It serves as a support to that self-
conscious me which memory constitutes, it is the medium of association
among its other parts. . . . Suppose now that it were possible at once
to change our body and put another into its place: skeleton, vessels,
viscera, muscles, skin, everything made new, except the nervous sys-
tem with its stored-up memory of the past. There can be no doubt
that in such a case the afflux of unaccustomed vital sensations would
produce the gravest disorders. Between the old sense of existence en-
graved on the nervous system, and the new one acting with all the
intensity of its reality and novelty, there would be irreconcilable con-
tradiction.” *

* Maladies de la Mémoire, p. 85. The little that would be left of per-
sonal consciousness if a/Z our senses stopped their work is ingenuously
shown in the remark of the extraordinary anesthetic youth whose case

376 PSYCHOLOGY.

With the beginnings of cerebral disease there often
happens something quite comparable to this :

‘*Masses of new sensation, hitherto foreign to the individual, im-
pulses and ideas of the same inexperienced kind, for example terrors,
representations of enacted crime, of enemies pursuing one, ete. At the
outset, these stand in contrast with the old familiar me, as a strange,
often astonishing and abhorrent thou. * Often their invasion into the
former circle of feelings is felt as if the old self were being taken pos-
session of by a dark overpowering might, and the fact of such ‘ posses-
sion’ is described in fantastic images. Always this doubleness, this
struggle of the old self against the new discordant forms of experience,
is accompanied with painful mental conflict, with passion, with violent
emotional excitement. This is in great part the reason for the common
experience, that the first stage in the immense majority of cases of
mental disease is an emotional alteration particularly of a melancholic
sort. If now the brain-affection, which is the immediate cause of the
new abnormal train of ideas, be not relieved, the jiatter becomes con-
firmed. It may gradually contract associations with the trains ot 1deas
which characterized the old self, or portions of the latter may be ex-
tinguished and lost in the progress of the cerebral malady, so that little
by little the opposition of the two conscious me’s abates, and the emo-
tional storms are calmed. But by that time the old me itself has been
falsified and turned into another by those associations, by that recep-
tion into itself of the abnormal elements of feeling and of will. The
patient may again be quiet, and his thought sometimes logically correct,
but in it the morbid erroneous ideas are always present, with the adhe-
sions they have contracted, as uncontrollable premises, and the man is
no longer the same, but a really new person, his old self trans-
formed.” +

Professor Striimpell reports (in the Deutsches Archiv f. klin. Med., xxi.
847, 1878). This boy, whom we shall later find instructive in many con-
nections, was totally anesthetic without and (so far as could be tested)
within, save for the sight of one eye and the hearing of one ear. When
his eye was closed, he said: ‘‘ Wenn ich nicht sehen kann, da BIN ich gar
nicht—1 no longer am.”

* « One can compare the state of the patient to nothing so well as to
that of a-caterpillar, which, keeping all its caterpillar’s ideas and remem-
brances, should suddenly become a butterfly with a butterfly’s senses and
sensations. Between the old and the new state, between the first self, that
of the caterpillar, and the second self, that of the butterfly, there is a deep
scission, a complete rupture. The new feelings find no anterior series to
which they can knit themselves on ; the patient can neither interpret nor
use them; he does not recognize them; they are unknown. Hence two
conclusions, the first which consists in his saying, I no longer am; the
second. somewhat later, which consists in his saying, I am another person.”
(H. Taine: de ]’Intelligence, 3me édition (1878), p. 462.

+ W. Griesinger : Mental Diseases, § 29.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 377

But the patient himself rarely continues to describe the
change in just these terms unless new bodily sensations in
him 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 the
me.

What the particular perversions of the bodily sensibil-
ity may be, which give rise to these contradictions, is for the
most part impossible for a sound-minded person to con-
ceive. One patient has another self that repeats all his
thoughts for him. Others, among whom are some of the
first characters in history, have familiar demons who speak
with 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 had
lost parts of their bodies, teeth, brain, stomach, ete. In
some it is made of wood, glass, butter, etc. In some it
does not exist any longer, or is dead, or is a foreign object
quite separate from the speaker’s self. Occasionally, parts
of the body lose their connection for consciousness with
the rest, and are treated as belonging to another person
and moved by a hostile will. Thus the right hand may
fight with the left as with an enemy.* Or the cries of the
patient himself are assigned to another person with whom
the patient expresses sympathy. The literature of insan-
ity is filled with narratives of such illusions as these. M.
Taine quotes from a patient of Dr. Krishaber an account of
sufferings, from which it will be seen how completely aloof
from what is normal a man’s experience may suddenly be-
come:

“¢ After the first or second day it was for some weeks impossible to
observe or analyze myself. The suffering—angina pectoris—was too
overwhelming. It was not till the first days of January that I could
give an account to myself of what I experienced. . . . Here is the first
thing of which I retain a clearremembrance. I was alone, and already
a prey to permanent visual trouble, when I was suddenly seized with a
visual trouble infinitely more pronounced. Objects grew small and re-
ceded to infinite distances—men and things together. I was myself im-

* See the interesting case of ‘old Stump’ in the Proceedings of the Am.
Soc. for Psych. Research, p. 552.

378 PSYCHOLOGY.

measurably far away. I looked about me with terror and astonish-
ment ; the world was escaping from me. . . . I remarked at the same
time that my voice was extremely far away from me, that it sounded no
longer as if mine. I struck the ground with my foot, and perceived its
resistance ; but this resistance seemed illusory—not that the soil was
soft, but that the weight of my body was reduced to almost nothing.

.. . Thad the feeling of being without weight. . . .” In addition to
being so distant, ‘‘objects appeared to me flat. When I spoke with
anyone, I saw him like an image cut out of paper with no relief. . . . This

sensation lasted intermittently for two years. . .. Constantly it seemed
asif my legs did not belong tome. It was almost as bad with my arms.
As for my head, it seemed no longer to exist. . . . I appeared to my-
self to act automatically, by an impulsion foreign to myself. . . . There
was inside of me a new being, and another part of myself, the old be-
ing, which took no interest in the new-comer. I distinctly remember
saying to myself that the sufferings of this new being were to me
indifferent. I was never really dupe of these illusions, but my mind
grew often tired of incessantly correcting the new impressions, and I
let myself go and lived the unhappy life of this new entity. I had an
ardent 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 I
hated, I despised this other ; he was perfectly odious to me ; it was cer-
tainly another who had taken my form and assumed my functious.” *

In eases similar to this, it is as certain that the J is un-
altered as that the meis changed. That is to say, the pres-
ent Thought of the patient is cognitive of both the old me
and the new, so long as its memory holds good. Only,
within that objective sphere which formerly lent itself so
simply to the judgment of recognition and of egoistic appro-
priation, strange perplexities have arisen. The present and
the past both seen therein will not unite. Where is my old
me? Whatis this newone? Are theythe same? Or have
IT two? Such questions, answered by whatever theory the
patient is able to conjure up as plausible, form the begin-
ning of his insane life.t

* De l'Intelligence, 3me édition (1878), vol. m, note, p. 461. Kris-
haber’s book (La Névropathie Cérébro-cardiaque, 1873) is full of similar
observations.

+ Sudden alterations in outward fortune often produce such a change
in the empirical me as almost to amount to a pathological disturbance of
self-consciousness. When a poor man draws the big prize in a lottery, or
unexpectedly inherits an estate; when a man high in fame is publicly
disgraced, a millionaire hecomes a pauper, or a loving husband and father
sees his family perish at one fell swoop, there is temporarily such a rupture

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 379

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 self
as ‘the rat,’ asking me to ‘bury the little rat,’ etc. Her real self she
speaks of in the third person as ‘ the good woman,’ saying, ‘The good
woman knew Dr. F. and used to work for him,’ etc. Sometimes she
sadly asks: ‘Do you think the good woman will ever come back?’ She
works at needlework, knitting, laundry, ete., and shows her work, say-
ing, ‘Isn’t that good for only a rat?* She has, during periods of depres-
sion, hid herself under buildings, and crawled into holes and under
boxes. ‘She was only a rat, and wants to die,’ she would say when we
found her.”

2. The phenomenon of alternating personality in its sim-
plest phases seems based on lapses of memory. Any man
becomes, as we say, inconsistent with himself if he forgets his
engagements, pledges, knowledges, and habits; and it is
merely a question of degree at what point we shall say
that his personality is changed. In the pathological cases
known as those of double or alternate personality the lapse
of memory is abrupt, and is usually preceded by a period
of unconsciousness or syncope lasting a variable length of
time. In the hypnotic trance we can easily produce an
alteration of the personality, either by telling the subject to
forget all that has happened to him since such or such a date,
in which case he becomes (it may be) a child again, or by
telling him he is another altogether imaginary personage, in
which case all facts about himself seem for the time being
to lapse from out his mind, and he throws himself into the
new character with a vivacity proportionate to the amount
of histrionic imagination which he possesses.* But in the
pathological cases the transformation is spontaneous. The
most famous case, perhaps, on record is that of Félids X.,

between all past habits, whether of an active or a passive kind, anc the
exigencies and possibilities of the new situation, that the individual may
find no medium of continuity or association to carry him over from the one
phase to the other of his life. Under these conditions mental derangemert
is no unfrequent result.

* The number of subjects who can do this with any fertility and exu
berance is relatively quite small,

380 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

reported by Dr. Azam of Bordeaux.* At the age of four-
teen this woman began to pass into a ‘secondary’ state
characterized by a change in her general disposition and
character, as if certain ‘inhibitions,’ previously existing,
were suddenly removed. During the secondary state she
remembered the first state, but on emerging from it into
the first state she remembered nothing of the second. At
the age of forty-four the duration of the secondary state
(which was on the whole superior in quality to the original
state) had gained upon the latter so much as to occupy most
of her time. During it she remembers the events belonging
to the original state, but her complete oblivion of the sec-
ondary state when the original state recurs is often very
distressing to her, as, for example, when the transition
takes place in a carriage on her way to a funeral, and she
hasn’t the least idea which one of her friends may be dead.
She actually became pregnant during one of her early sec-
ondary states, and during her first state had no knowledge
of how it had come to pass. Her distress at these blanks
of memory is sometimes intense and once drove her to
attempt suicide.

To take another example, Dr. Rieger gives an account t
of an epileptic man who for seventeen years had passed his
life alternately free, in prisons, or in asylums, his character
being orderly enough in the normal state, but alternating
with periods, during which he would leave his home for
several weeks, leading the life of a thief and vagabond, be-
ing sent to jail, having epileptic fits and excitement, being
accused of malingering, etc., etc., and with never a memory
of the abnormal conditions which were to blame for all
his wretchedness.

‘‘T have never got from anyone,” says Dr. Rieger, ‘‘so singular an
impression as from this man, of whom it could not be said that he had
any properly conscious past at all. . . . It is really impossible to think
one’s self into such a state of mind. His last larceny had been per-
formed in Niirnberg, he knew nothing of it, and saw himself before the

* First in the Revue Scientifique for May 26, 1876, then in his book,
Hypnotisme, Double Conscience, et Altérations de la Personnalité (Paris,
1887).

+ Der Hypnotismus (1884), pp. 109-15.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 381

court and then in the hospital, but without in the least understand.
ing the reason why. That he had epileptic attacks, he knew. But it
was impossible to convince him that for hours together he raved and
acted in an abnormal way.”

Another remarkable case is that of Mary Reynolds,
lately republished again by Dr. Weir Mitchell.* This dull
and melancholy young woman, inhabiting the Pennsylvania
wilderness in 1811,

‘‘was found one morning, long after her habitual time for rising, in a
profound sleep from which it was impossible to arouse her. After
eighteen or twenty hours of sleeping she awakened, but in a state of
unnatural consciousness. Memory had fled. To all intents and pur-
poses she was as a being for the first time ushered intc the world. ‘AIl
of the past that remained to her was the faculty of pronouncing a few
words, and this seems te have been as purely instinctive as the wailings
of aninfant; for at first the words which she uttered were connected
with no ideas in her mind.’ Untilshe was taught their significance
they 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 such
by her. She had never seen them before,—never known them,—was
not aware that such persons had been. Now for the first time she
was introduced to their company and acquaintance. To the scenes by
which she was surrounded she was a perfect stranger. The house, the
fields, the forest, the hiils, the vales, the streams,—all were novelties.
The beauties of the landscape were all unexplored.

‘She had nos tke siightest consciousness that she had ever existed
previous to tue moment in which she awoke from that tiysterious
slumber. ‘.naword, she was an infant, just born, yet born in a state of
maturity, with a capacity for relishing the rich, sublime, luxuriant
wonders of created nature.’

‘*The first lesson in her education was to teach her by what ties she
was bound to those by whom she was surrounded, andthe duties de-
volving upon her accordingiy. This she was very slow to learn, and,
‘indeed, never did learn, or, at least, never would acknowledge the
ties of consanguinity, or scarcely those of friendship. She considered
those she had once known as for the most part strangers and enemies,
among whom she wa., by some remarkabie and unaccountable means,
transplanted, though from what region or state of existence was a prob-
lem unsolved.’

‘¢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 that in @

* Transactions of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, April 4,
1888. Also, less complete, in Harper’s Magazine, May 1860.

382 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

Jew weeks she had readily re-learned to read and write. In copying her
name which her brother had written for her as a first lesson, she took
her pen in a very awkward manner and began to copy from right to left
in the Hebrew mode, as though she had been transplanted from an
Eastern soil. . . .

‘‘ The next thing that is noteworthy is the change which took place
in her disposition. Instead of being melancholy she was now cheer-
ful to extremity. Instead of being reserved she was buoyant and social,
Formerly taciturn and retiring, she was now merry and jocose. Her
disposition was totally and absolutely changed. While she was, in this
second state, extravagantly fond of company, she was much more en-
amoured of nature’s works, as exhibited in the forests, hills, vales, and
water-courses. She used to start in the morning, either on foot or
horseback, and ramble until nightfall over the whole country ; nor was
she 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 the
restraint necessarily imposed upon her by her friends, which caused her
to consider them her enemies and not companions, and she was glad to
keep out of their way.

‘‘She knew no fear, and as bears and panthers were numerous in
the woods, and rattlesnakes and copperheads abounded everywhere,
her friends told her of the danger to which she exposed herself, but it
produced no other effect than to draw forth a contemptuous laugh, as
she 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 convinced
that they are nothing more than black hogs.’

‘‘One evening, after her return from her daily excursion, she told
the following incident: ‘ As I was riding to-day along a narrow path a
great black hog came out of the woods and stopped before me. I never
saw such an impudent black hog before. It stood up on its hind feet
and grinned and gnashed its teeth at me. Icould not make the horse
goon. I told him he was a fool to be frightened at a hog, and tried to
whip him past, but he would not go and wanted to turn back. I told
the hog to get out of the way, but he didnot mindme. ‘‘ 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 on
all fours and walked away slowly and sullenly stopping every few steps
and looking back and grinning and growling. Then I got on my horse
and rode on.’.. .

‘“Thus it continued for five weeks, when one morning, after a pro-
tracted sleep, she awoke and was herself again. She recognized the
parental, the brotherly, and sisterly ties as though nothing had hap-
pened, and immediately went about the performance of duties in-
cumbent upon 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 in
her mind of the giddy scenes through which she had passed. Her ram-

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 383

blings through the forest, her tricks and humor, all were faded from her
memory, and not a shadow left behind. Her parents saw their child;
her brothers and sisters saw their sister. She now had all the knowledge
that she had possessed in her first state previous to the change, still
fresh and in as vigorous exercise as though no change had been. But
any uew 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-keep-
ing for future use. Of course her natural disposition returned ; her
melancholy was deepened by the information of what had occurred. All
went on in the old-fashioned way, and it was fondly hoped that the
mysterious occurrences of those five weeks would never be repeated, but
these anticipations were not to be realized. After the lapseof a few
weeks 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 she
before passed from that state. She was not now a daughter or a sister.
All the knowledge she possessed was that acquired during the few weeks
of her former period of second consciousness. She knew nothing of
the intervening time. Two periods widely separated were brought into
contact. She thought it was but one night.

‘Tn this state she came to understand perfectly the facts of her case,
not from memory, but frominformation. Yet her buoyancy of spirits
was so great that no depression was produced. On the contrary, it
added to her cheerfulness, and was made the foundation, as was every-
thing else, of mirth.

‘‘These alternations from one state to another continued at intervals
of varying length for fifteen or sixteen years, but finally ceased when
she attained the age of thirty-five or thirty-six, leaving her permanently
in her second state. In this she remained without change for the last
quarter of a century of her life.”

The emotional opposition of the two states seems, how-
ever, to have become gradually effaced in Mary Reynolds :

‘‘The change from a gay, hysterical, mischievous woman, fond of
jests and subject to absurd beliefs or delusive convictions, to one retain-
ing the joyousness and love of society, but sobered down to levels of prac-
tical usefulness, was gradual. The most of the twenty-five years which
followed she was as different from her melancholy, morbid self as from
the hilarious condition of the early years of her second state. Some of
her family spoke of it as her third state. She is described as becoming
rational, industrious, and very cheerful, yet reasonably serious ; pos-
sessed of a well-balanced temperament, and not having the slightest
indication of an injured or disturbed mind. For some years she taught
school, and in that capacity was both useful and acceptable, being a
general favorite with old and young.

‘‘During these last twenty-five years she lived in the same
house with the Rev. Dr. John V. Reynolds, her nephew, part of that

384 PSYCHOLOG Y.

time keeping house for him, showing a sound judgment and a thorough
acquaintance with the duties of her position.

‘* Dr. Reynolds, who is still living in Meadville,” says br. Mitchell,
‘‘and who has most kindly placed the facts at my disposal, states in
his letter to me of January 4, 1888, that at a later period of her life she
said she did sometimes seem to have a dim, dreamy idea of a shadowy
past, which she could not fully grasp, and could not be certain whether
it originated in a partially restored memory or in the statements of the
events by others during her abnormal state.

‘* Miss Reynolds died in January, 1854, at the age of sixty-one. On
the morning of the day of her death she rose in her usual health, ate
her breakfast, and superintended household duties. While thus em-
ployed she suddenly raised her hands to her head and exclaimed :
‘Oh! I wonder what is the matter with my head!’ and immediately
fell to the floor. When carried to a sofa she gasped once or twice and
died.”

In such cases as the preceding, in which the secondary
character is superior to the first, there seems reason to
think that the first one is the morbid one. The word inhi-
bition describes its dulness and melancholy. Félida X.’s
original character was dull and melancholy in comparison
with that which she later acquired, and the change may be
regarded as the removal of inhibitions which had main-
tained themselves from earlier years. Such inhibitions we
all know temporarily, when we can not recollect or in some
other way command our mental resources. The systema-
tized amnesias (losses of memory) of hypnotic subjects or-
dered to forget all nouns, or all verbs, or a particular letter
of the alphabet, or all that is relative to a certain person,
are inhibitions of the sort on a more extensive scale. They
sometimes occur spontaneously as symptoms of disease.*
Now M. Pierre Janet has shown that such inhibitions when
they bear on a certain class of sensations (making the sub-
ject anesthetic thereto) and also on the memory of such
sensations, are the basis of changes of personality. The
anesthetic and ‘amnesic’ hysteric is one person ; but when
you restore her inhibited sensibilities and memories by
plunging her into the hypnotic trance—in other words, when

* Cf. Ribot’s Diseases of Memory for cases. See alsoa large number of
them in Forbes Winslow’s Obscure Diseases of the Brain and Mind.
chapters XIII-xVI.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 385

you rescue them from their ‘ dissociated ’ and split-off con-
dition, and make them rejoin the other sensibilities and
memories—she is a different person. As said above (p. 203),
the hypnotic trance is one method of restoring sensibility
in hysterics. But one day when the hysteric anzsthetic
named Lucie was already in the hypnotic trance, M. Janet
for a certain reason continued to make passes over her for
a full half-hour as if she were not already asleep, The re-
sult was to throw her into a sort of syncope from which,
after half an hour, she revived in a second somnambulic con-
dition entirely unlike that which had characterized her
thitherto—different sensibilities, a different memory, a dif-
ferent person,in short. In the waking state the poor young
woman was anesthetic all over, nearly deaf, and with a
badly contracted field of vision. Bad as it was, however,
sight was her best sense, and she used it as a guide in all
her movements. With her eyes bandaged she became en-
tirely helpless, and like other persons of a similar sort
whose cases have been recorded, she almost immediately
fell asleep in consequence of the withdrawal of her last
sensorial stimulus. M. Janet calls this waking or primary
(one can hardly in such a connection say ‘normal’) state by
the name of Lucie 1. In Lucie 2, her first sort of hypnotic
trance, the anesthesias were diminished but not removed.
In the deeper trance, ‘ Lucie 3,’ brought about as just de-
scribed, no trace of them remained. Her sensibility became
perfect, and instead of being an extreme example of the
‘visual’ type, she was transformed into what in Prof.
Chareot’s terminology is known as a motor. That is to
say, that whereas when awake she had thought in visual
terms exclusively, and could imagine things only by remem-
bering how they looked, now in this deeper trance her
thoughts and memories seemed to M. Janet to be largely
composed of images of movement and of touch.

Having discovered this deeper trance and change of
personality in Lucie, M. Janet naturally became eager to
find it in his other subjects. He found itin Rose, in Marie,
and in Léonie; and his brother, Dr. Jules Janet, who was
interne at the Salpétricre Hospital, found it in the celebrated
subject Wit... . whose trances had been studied for years

386 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

by the various doctors of that institution without any of
them having happened to awaken this very peculiar indi-
viduality.*

With the return of all the sensibilities in the deeper
trance, these subjects turned, as it were, into normal
persons. Their memories in particular grew more exten-
sive, and hereupon M. Janet spins a theoretic generaliza-
tion. When a certain kind of sensation, he says, is abol-
ished in an hysteric patient, there is also abolished along with
at all recollection of past sensations of that kind. If, for ex-
ample, hearing be the anesthetic sense, the patient becomes
unable even to imagine sounds and voices, and has to
speak (when speech is still possible) by means of motor or
articulatory cues. If the motor sense be abolished, the pa-
tient must will the movements of his limbs by first defining
them to his mind in visual terms, and must innervate his
voice by premonitory ideas of the way in which the words
are going to sound. The practical consequences of this
law would be great, for all experiences belonging to a
sphere of sensibility which afterwards became anesthetic,
as, for example, touch, would have been stored away and
remembered in tactile terms, and would be incontinently
forgotten as soon as the cutaneous and muscular sensibility
should come to be cut out in the course of disease.
Memory of them would be restored again, on the
other hand, so soon as the sense of touch came back.
Now, in the hysteric subjects on whom M. Janet experi-
mented, touch did come back in the state of trance. The
result was that all sorts of memories, absent in the ordinary
condition, came back too, and they could then go back and
explain the origin of many otherwise inexplicable things in
their life. One stage in the great convulsive crisis of hys-
tero-epilepsy, for example, is what French writers call the
phase des attitudes passionelles, in which the patient, without
speaking or giving any account of herself, will go through
the outward movements of fear, anger, or some other emo-
tional state of mind. Usually this phase is, with each

* See the interesting account by M. J. Janet in the Revue Scientifique,
May 19, 1888.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 387

patient, a thing so stereotyped as to seem automatic, and
doubts have even been expressed as to whether any con-
sciousness exists whilst it lasts. When, however, the
patient Lucie’s tactile sensibility came back in the deeper
trance, she explained the origin of her hysteriec crisis in a
great fright which she had had when a child, on a day
when certain men, hid behind the curtains, had jumped out
upon her; she told how she went through this scene again
in all her crises; she told of her sleep-walking fits through
the house when a child, and how for several months she
had been shut in a dark room because of a disorder of the
eyes. All these were things of which she recollected no-
thing when awake, because they were records of experiences
mainly of motion and of touch.

But M. Janet’s subject Léonie is interesting, and
shows best how with the sensibilities and motor impulses
the memories and character will change.

‘*This woman, whose life sounds more like an improbable romance
than a genuine history, has had attacks of natural somnambulism since
the age of three years. She has been hypnotized constantly by all sorts
of 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 poor
country surroundings, her second life was passed in drawing-rooms and
doctors’ offices, and naturally took an entirely different direction. To-
day, when in her normal state, this poor peasant woman is a serious
and rather sad person, calm and slow, very mild with every one, and
extremely timid: to look at her one would never suspect the personage
which she contains. But hardly is she put to sleep hypnotically when
a metamorphosis occurs. Her face is no longer the same. She keeps
her eyes closed, it is true, but the acuteness of her other senses supplies
their place. She is gay, noisy, restless, sometimes insupportably so.
She remains good-natured, but has acquired a singular tendency to irony
and sharp jesting. Nothing is more curious than to hear her after a
sitting when she has received a visit from strangers who wished to see
her asleep. She gives a word-portrait of them, apes their manners,
pretends to know their little ridiculous aspects and passions, and for
each invents a romance. To this character must be added the posses-
sion of an enormous number of recollections, whose existence she does
not 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 woman
is not myself,’ she says, ‘she is too stupid!’ To herself, Léontine or
Léonie 2, she attributes all the sensations and all the actions, in a word
all the conscious experiences which she has undergone in somnambulism,

888 PSYCHOLOGY.

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, she
exclusively ascribes the events lived through in waking hours. I was
at first struck by an important exception to the rule, and was disposed
to think that there might be something arbitrary in this partition of
her recollections. In the normal state Léonie has a husband and chil-
dren ; but Léonie 2, the somnambulist, whilst acknowledging the children
as her own, attributes the husband to ‘the other.’ This choice, was
perhaps explicable, but it followed no rule. It was not till later that I
learned that her magnetizers in early days, as audacious as certain hyp-
notizers of recent date, had somnambulized her for her first accouche-
ments, and that she had lapsed into that state spontaneously in the
later ones. Léonie 2 was thus quite right in ascribing to herself the
ehildren—it was she who had had them, and the rule that her first
trance-state forms a different personality was not broken. But it is
the same with her second or deepest state of trance. When after the
renewed passes, syncope, etc., she reaches the condition which I have
ealled Léonie 3, she is another person still. Serious and grave, instead
of being a restless child, she speaks slowly and moves but little. Again
she separates herself from the waking Léonie 1. ‘A good but rather
stupid woman,’ she says, ‘and not me.’ And she also separates herself
from Léonie 2: ‘ How can you see anything of me in that crazy crea-
ture?’ she says. ‘Fortunately I am nothing for her.’ ”

Léonie 1 knows only of herself; Léonie 2, of herself and
of Léonie 1; Léonie 3 knows of herself and of both the
others. Léonie 1 has a visual consciousness; Léonie 2 has
one both visual and auditory ; in Léonie 3 it is at once
visual, auditory, and tactile. Prof. Janet thought at first
that he was Léonie 3’s discoverer. But she told him
that she had been frequently in that condition before. A
former magnetizer had hit upon her just as M. Janet had,
in seeking by means of passes to deepen the sleep of
Léonie 2.

‘“This resurrection of a somnambulic personage who had been
extinct for twenty years is curious enough ; and in speaking to Léonie
3, Inaturally now adopt the name of Léonore which was given her by her
first master.”

The most carefully studied case of multiple personality
is that of the hysteric youth Louis Y. about whom MM.
Bourru and Burot have written a book.* The symptoms
are too intricate to be reproduced here with detail. Sufiice
it that Louis V. had led an irregular life, in the army, in

* Variations de la Personnalité (Paris, 1888).

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 389

hospitals, and in houses of correction, and had had numer-
ous hysteric anesthesias, paralyses, and contractures attack-
ing him differently at different times and when he lived at
different places. At eighteen, at an agricultural House of
Correction he was bitten by a viper, which brought on a
convulsive crisis and left both of his legs paralyzed for
three years. During this condition he was gentle, moral,
and industrious. But suddenly at last, after a long con-
vulsive seizure, his paralysis disappeared, and with it his
memory for all the time during which it had endured. His
character also changed: he became quarrelsome, glutton-
ous, impolite, stealing his comrades’ wine, and money from
an attendant, and finally escaped from the establishment
and fought furiously when he was overtaken and caught.
Later, when he first fell under the observation of the
authors, his right side was half paralyzed and insensible,
and his character intolerable; the application of metals
transferred the paralysis to the left side, abolished his
recollections of the other condition, and carried him psy-
chically back to the hospital of Bicétre where he had been
treated for a similar physical condition. His character,
opinions, education, all underwent a concomitant trans-
formation. He was no longer the personage of the moment
before. It appeared ere long that any present nervous dis-
order in him could be temporarily removed by metals,
magnets, electric or other baths, etc.; and that any past
disorder could be brought back by hypnotic suggestion.
He also went through a rapid spontaneous repetition of his
series of past disorders after each of the convulsive attacks
which occurred in him at intervals. It was observed that
each physical state in which he found himself, excluded
certain memories and brought with it a definite modifica-
tion of character.

‘‘The law of these changes,” say the authors, ‘‘is quite clear.
There exist precise, constant, and necessary relations between the
bodily and the mental state, such that it is impossible to modify the
one without modifying the other in a parallel fashion.” *

* Op. cit. p. 84. In this work and in Dr. Azam’s (cited on a previous
page), as well as in Prof. Th. Ribot’s Maladies de la Personnalité (1885), the

390 PSYCHOLOG Y.

The case of this proteiform individual would seem, then,
nicely to corroborate M. P. Janet’s law that anzesthesias and
gaps in memory go together. Coupling Janet’s law with
Locke’s that changes of memory bring changes of personal-
ity, we should have an apparent explanation of some cases at
least of alternate personality. But mere anesthesia does
not sufticiently explain the changes of disposition, which are
probably due to modifications in the perviousness of motor
and associative paths, co-ordinate with those of the senso-
rial paths rather than consecutive upon them. And indeed
a glance at other cases than M. Janet’s own, suffices to show
us that sensibility and memory are not coupled in any
invariable way.* 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 what
may be the cause of the amnesias which lie at the bottom
of changes in the Self. Changes of blood-supply have
naturally been invoked. Alternate action of the two hemi-
spheres was long ago proposed by Dr. Wigan in his book
on the Duality of the Mind. I shall revert to this expla-
nation after considering the third class of alterations of the
Self, those, namely, which I have called ‘ possessions.’

I have myself become quite recently acquainted with
the subject of a case of alternate personality of the ‘ ambu-

reader will find information and references relative to the other known
cases of the kind.

* His own brother’s subject Wit. .. . ,although in her anesthetic waking
state she recollected nothing of either of her trances, yet remembered her
deeper trance (in which her sensibilities became perfect—see above, p. 207)
when she was in her lighter trance. Nevertheless in the latter she was as
anesthetic as when awake. (Loc. cit. p. 619.)—It does not appear that
there was any important difference in the sensibility of Félida X. between
her two states—as far as one can judge from M. Azam’s account she was to
some degree anzesthetic in both (op. cit. pp. 71, 96).—In the case of double
personality reported by M. Dufay (Revue Scientifiaue, vol. xvi. p. 69),
the memory seems to have been best in the more anesthetic condition.—
Hypnotic subjects made blind do not necessarily lose their visual ideas. It
appears, then, both that amnesias may occur without anesthesias, and anss-
thesias without amnesias, though they may also occur in combination
Hypnotic subjects made blind by suggestion will tell you that they clearly
imagine the things which they can no longer see.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 391

fatory’’ sort, who has given me permission to name him in
these pages.*

The Rev. Ansel Bourne, of Greene, R. I., was brought up to the
trade of a carpenter; but, in consequence of a sudden temporary loss
of sight and hearing under very peculiar circumstances, he became con-
verted from Atheism to Christianity just before his thirtieth year, and
has since that time for the most part lived the life of an itinerant
preacher. He has been subject to headaches and temporary fits of de-
pression of spirits during most of his life, and has had a few fits of un-
consciousness lasting an hour or less. He also has a region of somewhat
diminished cutaneous sensibility on the left thigh. Otherwise his
health is good, and his muscular strength and endurance excellent.
He is of a firm and self-reliant disposition, a man whose yea is yea and
his nay, nay; and his character for uprightness is such in the com-
munity that no person who knows him will for a moment admit the
possibility of his case not being perfectly genuine.

On January 17, 1887, he drew 551 dollars from a bank in Provi-
dence with which to pay for a certain lot of land in Greene, paid
certain bills, and got into a Pawtucket horse-car. This is the last
incident which he remembers. He did not return home that day, and
nothing was heard of him for two months. He was published in the
papers as missing, and foul play being suspected, the police sought in
vain his whereabouts. On the morning of March 14th, however, at
Norristown, Pennsylvania, a man calling himself A. J. Brown, who
had rented a small shop six weeks previously, stocked it with station-
ery, confectionery, fruit and small articles, and carried on his quiet
trade without seeming to any one unnatural or eccentric, woke up in
a 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 igno-
rant of Norristown, that he knew nothing of shop-keeping, and that
the last thing he remembered—it seemed only yesterday—was draw-
ing the money from the bank, etc., in Providence. He would not be-
lieve that two months had elapsed. The people of the house thought
him insane ; and so, at first, did Dr. Louis H. Read, whom they called
in to see him. But on telegraphing to Providence, confirmatory mes-
sages came, and presently his nephew, Mr. Andrew Harris, arrived
npon the scene, made everything straight, and took him home. He was
very weak, having lost apparently over twenty pounds of flesh during
his escapade, and had such a horror of the idea of the candy-store that
he refused to set foot in it again.

The first two weeks of the period remained unaccounted for, as he
had no memory, after he had once resumed his normal personality, of
any part of the time, and no one who knew him seems to have seen him

* A full account of the case, by Mr. R. Hodgson, will be found in the
Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research for 1891.

392 PSYCHOLOGY.

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, orderiy in his
habits, and in no way queer. He went to Philadelphia several times;
replenished his stock ; cooked for himself in the back shop, where he
also slept; went regularly to church; and once at a prayer-meeting
made what was considered by the hearers a good address, in the course
of which he related an incident which he had witnessed in his natural
state of Bourne.

This was all that was known of the case up to June 1890, when I
induced Mr. Bourne to submit to hypnotism, so as to see whether, in the
hypnotic trance, his ‘ Brown’ memory would not come back. It did so
with surprising readiness; so much so indeed that it proved quite im-
possible to make him whilst in the hypnosis remember any of the facts
of his normal life. He had heard of Ansel Bourne, but ‘‘ didn’t know
as he had ever met the man.” When confronted with Mrs. Bourne he
said that he had ‘‘ never seen the woman before,” etc. On the other
hand, he told of his peregrinations during the lost fortnight, * and gave
all sorts of details about the Norristown episode. The whole thing was
prosaic enough ; and the Brown-personality seems to be nothing but a
rather shrunken, dejected, and amnesic extract of Mr. Bourne himself.
He gives no motive for the wandering except that there was ‘ trouble
back 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 lay
before and after the two months of the Brown experience. ‘I’m all
hedged in,” he says: ‘‘I can’t get out at either end. I don’t know
what set me down in that Pawtucket horse-car, and I don’t know how
T ever left that store, or what became of it.” His eyes are practically
normal, and all his sensibilities (save for tardier response) about the
same in hypnosis as in waking. I had hoped by suggestion, ete.,
to run the two personalities into one, and make the memories con-
tinuous, but no artifice would avail to accomplish this, and Mr. Bourne’s
skull to-day still covers two distinct personal selves.

The case (whether it contain an epileptic element or not) should
apparently be classed as one of spontaneous hypnotic trance, persisting
for two months. The peculiarity of it is that nothing else like it ever
occurred in the man’s life, and that no eccentricity of character came

* He had spent an afternoon in Boston, a night in New York, an after-
noon in Newark, and ten days or more in Philadelphia, first in a certain
hotel and next in a certain boarding-house, making no acquaintances, ‘rest-
ing,’ reading, and ‘looking round.’ I have unfortunately been unable to
get independent corroboration of these details, as the hotel registers are
destroyed, and the boarding-house named by him has been pulled down.
He forgets the name of the two ladies who kept it.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 393

out. In most similar cases, the attacks recur, and the sensibilities and
conduct markedly change. *

3. In ‘mediumships’ or ‘possessions’ the invasion and the
passing away of the secondary state are both relatively
abrupt, and the duration of the state is usually short—i.e.,
from a few minutes to a few hours. Whenever the second-
ary state is well developed no memory for aught that hap-
pened during it remains after the primary consciousness
comes back. The subject during the secondary conscious-
ness speaks, writes, or acts as if animated by a foreign per-
son, and often names this foreign person and gives his
history. In old times the foreign ‘control’ was usually a
demon, and 7: so now in communities which favor that be-
lief. With us he gives himself out at the worst for an
Indian or other grotesquely speaking but harmless person-
age. Usually ho purports to be the spirit of a dead per-
son known or unknown to tnose present, and the subject is
then what we call a ‘medium.’ Mediumistic possession in
all its grades seems to form a perfectly natural special type
of alternate personality, and the susceptibility to it in some
form is by no means an uncommon gift, in persons who have
no other obvious nervous anomaly. The phenomena are
very intricate, and are only jus* besinnine to be studied
in a proper scientific way. The lowest phase of medium-
ship is automatic writing, and the lowest grade of that is
where the Subject knows what words are coming, bui feeis
impelled to write them as if from without. Then comes
writing unconsciously, even whilst engaged i. reading or
talk. Inspirational speaking, playing on musical instru-
ments, etc., also belong to the relatively lower phases of
possession, in which the normal self is not excluded from
conscious participation in the performance, though their
initiative seems to come from elsewhere. In the highest
phase the trance is complete, the voice, language, and

* The details of the case, it will be seen, are all compatible with simula-
tion. 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 cau
discover, do any of his personal acquaintances indulge in a sceptical view:

394 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

everything are changed, and there is no after-memory
whatever until the next trance comes. One curious thing
about trance-utterances is their gencric similarity in differ-
ent individuals. The ‘control’ here in America is either a
grotesque, slangy, and flippant personage (‘ Indian’ con-
trols, calling the ladies ‘squaws,’ the men ‘braves,’ the
house a ‘wigwam,’ etc., etc., are excessively common); or,
if he ventures on higher intellectual flights, he aboundsina
curiously vague optimistic philosophy-and-water, in which
phrases about spirit, harmony, beauty, law, progression,
development, etc., keep recurring. It seems exactly as if
one author composed more than half of the trance-mes-
sages, no matter by whom they are uttered. Whether all
sub-conscious selves are peculiarly susceptible to a certain
stratum of the Zeitgeist, and get their inspiration from it, I
know not; but this is obviously the case with the second-
ary selves which become ‘developed’ in spiritualist circles.
There the beginnings of the medium trance are indistin-
suishable from effects of hypnotic suggestion. The sub-
ject assumes the role of a medium simply because opinion
expects it of him under the conditions which are present;
and carries it out with a feebleness or a vivacity propor-
tionate to his histrionic gifts. But the odd thing is that
persons unexposed to spiritualist traditions will so often act
in the same way when they become entranced, speak in the
name of the departed, go through the motions of their
several death-agonies, send messages about their happy
home in the summer-land, and describe the ailments of
those 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 I
will quote from an account of his own case kindly furnished
me by Mr. Sidney Dean of Warren, R. I, member of Con-
egress from Connecticut from 1855 to 1859, who has been all
his life a robust and active journalist, author, and man of
affairs. He has for many years been a writing subject, and
has a large collection of manuscript automatically pro-
duced.

‘* Some of it,” he writes us, ‘‘ is in hieroglyph, or strange compound-
ed arbitrary characters, each series possessing a seeming unity in general

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF: 395

design or enaracter, tollowed by what purports to be a translation or
rendering into mothe1 English. Inever attempted the seemingly impos-
sible feat of copying the characters. They were cut with the precision
of a graver’s ool, and generally with a single rapid stroke of the pen-
cil. Many languages, some obsolete and passed from history, are pro-
fessedly given. To see them would satisfy you that no one could copy
them except by tracing.

‘‘These, however, are but a small part of the phenomena. The
‘automatic’ has given place to the impresstonal, and when the work is
in progress I am in the normal condition, and seemingly two minds, in-
telligences, persons, are practically engaged. The writing is in my own
hand but the dictation not of my own mind and will, but that of an-
other, upon subjects of which I can have no knowledge and hardly a
theory ; and I, myself, consciously criticise the thought, fact, mode of
expressing it, etc., while the hand is recording the subject-matter and
even the words impressed to be written. If JZ refuse to write the sen-
tence, or even the word, the impression instantly ceases, and my wil-
lingness must be mentally expressed before the work is resumed, and it
is resumed at the point of cessation, even if it should be in the middle
of asentence. Sentences are commenced without knowledge of mineas
to their subject or ending. In fact, 1 have never known in advance the
subject of disquisition.

‘‘There is in progress now, at uncertain times, not subject to my
will, a series of twenty-four chapters upon the scientific features of life,
moral, spiritual, eternal. Seven have already been written in the man-
ner indicated. These were preceded by twenty-four chapters relating
generally to the life beyond material death, its characteristics, ete.
Each chapter is signed by the name of some person who has lived on
earth,—some with whom I have been personally acquainted, others
known in history... . I know nothing of the alleged authorship
of any chapter until it is completed and the name impressed and ap-
pended. . . . Iam interested not only in the reputed authorship,—
of which I have nothing corroborative,—but in the philosophy taught,
of which I was in ignorance until these chapters appeared. From my
standpoint of life—which has been that of biblical orthodoxy—the
philosophy is new, seems to be reasonable, and is logically put. I con-
fess to an inability to successfully controvert it to my own satisfaction.

‘‘Tt is an intelligent ego who writes, or else the influence assumes
individuality, which practically makes of the influence a personality. It
is not myself ; of that I am conscious at every step of the process. I
have also traversed the whole field of the claims of ‘ unconscious cere-
bration,’ so called, so faras I am competent to critically examine it, and
it fails, as a theory, in numberless points, when applied to this strange
work through me. It would be far more reasonable and satisfactory for
me to accept the silly hypothesis of re-incarnation,—the old doctrine of
metempsychosis,—as taught by some spiritualists to-day, and to believe
that I lived a former life here, and that once in a while it dominates my

396 PSYCHOLOGY.

intellectual powers, and writes chapters upon the philosophy of life, ot
opens a post-office for spirits to drop their effusions, and have them
put into English seript. No; the easiest and most natural solution to
me is to admit the claim made, i.e., that it is a decarnated intelligence
who writes. But who? that is the question. The names of scholars
and thinkers who once lived are affixed to the most ungrammatical and
weakest of bosh. . .

‘*Tt seems reasonable to me—upon the hypothesis that it is a per-
son using another’s mind or brain—that there must be more or less of
that other’s style or tone incorporated in the message, and that to the
unseen personality, i.e., the power which impresses, the thought, the
fact, or the philosophy, and not the style or tone, belongs. For in-
stance, while the influence is impressing my brain with the greatest
force and rapidity, so that my pencil fairly flies over the paper to record
the thoughts, I am conscious that, in many cases, the vehicle of the
thought, i.e., the language, is very natural and familiar to me, as if,
somehow, my personality as a writer was getting mixed up with the
message. And, again, the style, language, everything, is entirely
foreign to my cwn style.”

Iam myself persuaded by abundant acquaintance with
the trances of one medium that the ‘ control’ may be alto-
gether different from any possible waking self of the person.
In the case I have in mind, it professes to be a certain de-
parted French doctor; and is, I am convinced, acquainted
with facts about the circumstances, and the lying and dead
relatives and acquaintances, of numberless sitters whom the
medium never met before, and of whom she has never heard
the names. I record my bare opinion here unsupported by
the evidence, not, of course, in order to convert anyone to
my view, but because I am persuaded that a serious study
of these trance-phenomena is one of the greatest needs of
psychology, and think that my personal confession may
possibly draw a reader or two into a field which the soi-
disant ‘ scientist’ usually refuses to explore.

Many persons have found evidence conclusive to their
minds that in some cases the control is really the departed
spirit whom it pretends to be. The phenomena shade
off so gradually into cases where this is obviously ab-
surd, that the presumption (quite apart from a priori ‘ scien-
tific’ prejudice) is great against its being true. The case
of Lurancy Vennum is perhaps as extreme a case of ‘ pos-

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 397

session’ of the modern sort as one canfind.* Lurancy was
a young girl of fourteen, living with her parents at Watseka,
Tll., who (after various distressing hysterical disorders and
spontaneous trances, during which she was possessed by de-
parted spirits of a more or less grotesque sort) finally declared
herself to be animated by the spirit of Mary Roff (a
neighbor’s daughter, who had died in an insane asylum
twelve years before) and insisted on being sent ‘home’ to Mr,
Roff’s house. After a week of ‘homesickness’ and impor-
tunity on her part, her parents agreed, and the Roffs, who
pitied her, and who were spiritualists into the bargain, took
her in. Once there, she seems to have convinced the family
that their dead Mary had exchanged habitations with Lu-
rancy. Lurancy was said to be temporarily in heaven, and
Mary’s spirit now controlled her organism, and lived again
in her former earthly home.

‘‘The girl, now in ner new home, seemed perfectly happy and con-
tent, knowing every person and everything that Mary knew when in
her original body, twelve to twenty-five years ago, recognizing and call-
ing by name those who were friends and neighbors of the family from
1852 to 1865, when Mary died, calling attention to scores, yes, hundreds
of incidents that transpired during her natural life. During all the
period of her sojourn at Mr. Roff’s she had no knowledge of, and did
not recognize, any of Mr. Vennum’s family, their friends or neighbors,
yet Mr. and Mrs. Vennum and their children visited her and Mr. Roff’s
people, she being introduced to them as to any strangers. After fre-
quent visits, and hearing them often and favorably spoken of, she
learned to love them as acquaintances, and visited them with Mrs. Roff
three times. From day to day she appeared natural, easy, affable, and
industrious, attending diligently and faithfully to her household duties,
assisting in the general work of the family as a faithful, prudent daugh-

ter might be supposed to do, singing, reading, or conversing as oppor-

tunity offered, upon all matters of private or general interest to the
family.

The so-called Mary whilst at the Roffs’ would sometimes
‘co back to heaven,’ and leave the body in a ‘ quiet trance,’
ie., without the original personality of Lurancy returning.
After eight or nine weeks, however, the memory and
manner of Lurancy would sometimes partially, but not en-
tirely, return for a few minutes. Once Lurancy seems to

* The Watseka Wonder, by E. W. Stevens. Chicago, Religio-Philo-
sophical Publishizg House, 1887.

398 PSYCHOLOGY.

have taken full possession for a short time. At last, after
some fourteen weeks, conformably to the prophecy which
‘Mary’ had made when she first assumed ‘control,’ she
departed definitively and the Lurancy-consciousness came

back 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. She
said it seemed like a dream to her. She met her parents and brothers
in a very affectionate manner, hugging and kissing each one in tears of
gladness. She clasped her arms around her father’s neck a long time,
fairly smothering him with kisses. Isaw her father just now (eleven
o’clock). He says she has been perfectly natural, and seems entirely
well.”

Lurancy’s mother writes, a couple of months later, that
she was

‘perfectly and entirely well and natural. For two or three weeks after
her return home, she seemed a little strange to what she had been before
she was taken sick last summer, but only, perhaps, the natural change
that had taken place with the girl, and except it seemed to her as
though she had been dreaming or sleeping, etc. Lurancy has been
smarter, more intelligent, more industrious, more womanly, and more
polite than before. We give the credit of her complete cure and restora-
tion to her family, to Dr. E. W. Stevens, and Mr. and Mrs. Roff, by
their 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 ; and
if so, that she would have died there ; and further, that I could not have
lived but a short time with the care and trouble devolving on me.
Several of the relatives of Lurancy, including ourselves, now believe
she was cured by spirit power, and that Mary Roff controlled the girl.”

Eight years later, Lurancy was reported to be married
and a mother, and in good health. She had apparently out-
grown the mediumistic phase of her existence.*

On the condition of the sensibility during these inva-
sions, few observations have been made. I have found the
hands of two automatic writers anesthetic during the act.

* My friend Mr. R. Hodgson informs me that he visited Watseka in
April 1890, and cross-examined the principal witnesses of this case. His
confidence in the original narrative was strengthened by what he learned ;
and various unpubtished facts were ascertained, which increased the plau
sibility of the spiritualistic interpretation of the phenomenon.

THH CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 399

In two others I have found this not to be the case. Auto.
matic writing is usually preceded by shooting pains along
the arm-nerves and irregular contractions of the arm-
muscles. I have found one medium’s tongue and lips
apparently insensible to pin-pricks during her (speaking)
trance.

If we speculate on the brain-condition during all these
different perversions of personality, we see that it must be
supposed capable of successively changing all its modes of
action, and abandoning the use for the time being of whole
sets of well-organized association-paths. In no other way
can we explain the loss of memory in passing from one
alternating condition to another. And not only this, but
we must admit that organized systems of paths can be
thrown out of gear with others, so that the processes in one
system give rise to one consciousness, and those of another
system to another simultaneously existing consciousness.
Thus only can we understand the facts of automatic writing,
etc., whilst the patient is out of trance, and the false anes-
thesias and amnesias of the hysteric type. But just what
sort of dissociation the phrase ‘thrown out of gear’ may
stand for, we cannot even conjecture ; only I think we ought
not to talk of the doubling of the self as if it consisted in
the failure to combine on the part of certain systems of
adeas which usually do so. It is better to talk of objects
usually combined, and which are now divided between the
two ‘selves,’ in the hysteric and automatic cases in ques-
tion. Each of the selves is due to a system of cerebral
paths acting by itself. If the brain acted normally, and
the dissociated systems came together again, we should get
a new affection of consciousness in the form of a third ‘ Self’
different from the other two, but knowing their objects
together, as the result.—After all I have said in the last
chapter, this hardly needs further remark.

Some peculiarities in the lower automatic performances
suggest that the systems thrown out of gear with each other
are contained one in the right and the other in the left
hemisphere. The subjects, e.g., often write backwards, or
they transpose letters, or they write mirror-script. All these

400 PSYCHOLOGY.

are symptoms of agraphic disease. The left hand, if left
to its natural impulse, will in most people write mirror-
script more easily than natural script. Mr. F. W. H. Myers
has laid stress on these analogies.* He has also called
attention to the usual inferior moral tone of ordinary plan-
chette writing. On Hughlings Jackson’s principles, the
left hemisphere, being the more evolved organ, at ordinary
times inhibits the activity of the right one; but Mr. Myers
suggests that during the automatic performances the usual
inhibition may be removed and the right hemisphere set
free to act all by itself. This is very likely to some extent
to be the case. But the crude explanation of ‘two’ selves
by ‘two’ hemispheres is of course far from Mr. Myers’s
thought. The selves may be more than two, and the brain-
systems severally used for each must be conceived as inter-
penetrating each other in very minute ways.

SUMMARY.

To sum up now this long chapter. The consciousness of
Self involves a stream of thought, each part of whichas ‘I’
can 1) remember those which went before, and know the
things they knew ; and 2) emphasize and care paramountly
for certain ones among them as ‘me, and appropriate to
these the rest. The nucleus of the ‘me’ is always the bodily
existence felt to be present at the time. Whatever remem-
bered-past-feelings resemble this present feeling are deemed
to belong to the same me with it. Whatever other things
are perceived to be associated with this feeling are deemed
to form part of that me’s experience; and of them certain
ones (which fluctuate more or less) are reckoned to be
themselves constituents of the me in a larger sense,—such
are the clothes, the material possessions, the friends, the
honors and esteem which tho person receives or may re-
ceive. ‘This me is an empirical aggregate of things object-
ively known. The J which knows them cannot itself be an

* 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. xtv. p. 161, and Luys’s essay, ‘Sur le Dédoublement,’ etc., w
VEncéphale for 1889.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 401

aggregate, neither for psychological purposes need it be
considered to be an unchanging metaphysical entity like
the Soul, or a principle like the pure Ego, viewed as ‘out
of time.’ It is a Thought, at each moment different from
that of the last moment, but appropriative of the latter,
together with all that the latter called its own. All the
experiential facts find their place in this description, unen-
cumbered with any hypothesis save that of the existence of
passing thoughts or states of mind. The same brain may
subserve many conscious selves, either alternate or coexist-
ing; but by what modifications in its action, or whether
ultra-cerebral conditions may intervene, are questions which
cannot now be answered.

If anyone urge that I assign no reason why the succes-
sive passing thoughts should inherit each other’s posses-
sions, or why they and the brain-states should be functions
(in the mathematical sense) of each other, I reply that the
reason, if there be any, must lie where all real reasons lie,
in the total sense or meaning of the world. If there be such
a meaning, or any approach to it (as we are bound to trust
there is), it alone can make clear to us why such finite
human streams of thought are called into existence in
such functional dependence upon brains. This is as much
as to say that the special natural science of psychology must
stop with the mere functional formula. J/ the passing thought
be the directly verifiable existent which no school has hitherto
doubted it to be, then that thought is itself the thinker, and
psychology need not look beyond. The only pathway that
I can discover for bringing in a more transcendental thinker
would be to deny that we have any direct knowledge of the
thought as such. The latter’s existence would then be
reduced to a postulate, an assertion that there must be a
knower correlative to all this known ; and the problem who
that knower is would have become a metaphysical problem.
With the question once stated in these terms, the spirit-
ualist and transcendentalist solutions must be considered
as prima facie on a par with our own psychological one,
and discussed impartially. But that carries us beyond the
psvchological or naturalistic point of view.

CHAPTER XI.
ATTENTION.

STRANGE to say, so patent a fact as the perpetual pres-
ence of selective attention has received hardly any notice
from psychologists of the English empiricist school. The
Germans have explicitly treated of it, either as a faculty or
as a resultant, but in the pages of such writers as Locke,
Hume, Hartley, the Mills, and Spencer the word hardly
occurs, or if it does so, it is parenthetically and as if by inad-
vertence.* The motive of this ignoring of the phenomenon
of attention is obvious enough. These writers are bent on
showing how the higher faculties of the mind are pure
products of ‘experience ;’ and experience is supposed to be
of something simply given. Attention,implying a degree
of reactive spontaneity, would seem to break through the
circle of pure receptivity which constitutes ‘experience,’
and hence must not be spoken of under penalty of inter-
fering with the smoothness of the tale.

But the moment one thinks of the matter, one sees how
false a notion of experience that is which would make it
tantamount to the mere presence to the senses of an out-
ward order. Millions of items of the outward order are
present to my senses which never properly enter into my
experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me.
My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items
which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest,
experience is an utter chaos. Interest alone gives accent
and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground
—intelligible perspective, in a word. It varies in every

* Bain mentions attention in the Senses and the Intellect, p. 558, and
even gives a theory of it on pp. 370-874 of the Emotions of the Will. I
shall recur to this theory later on.

402

ATTENTION. 403

creature, but without it the consciousness of every creature
would be a gray chaotic indiscriminateness, impossible for
us even to conceive. Such an empiricist writer as Mr.
Spencer, for example, regards the creature as absolutely
passive clay, upon which ‘experience’ rains down. The
clay will be impressed most deeply where the drops fall
thickest, and so the final shape of the mind is moulded.
Give time enough, and all sentient things ought, at this
rate, to end by assuming an identical mental constitution—
for ‘experience,’ the sole shaper, is a constant fact, and the
order of its items must end by being exactly reflected by
the passive mirror which we call the sentient organism.
If such an account were true, a race of dogs bred for gen-
erations, say in the Vatican, with characters of visual shape,
sculptured in marble, presented to their eyes, in every va-
riety of form and combination, ought to discriminate be-
fore long the finest shades of these peculiar characters.
In a word, they ought to become, if time were given, ac-
complished connoisseurs of sculpture. Anyone may judge
of the probability of this consummation. Surely an eternity
of experience of the statues would leave the dog as inartistic
as he was at first, for the lack of an original interest to knit
his discriminations on to. Meanwhile the odors at the bases
of the pedestals would have organized themselves in the
consciousness of this breed of dogs into a system of ‘ cor-
respondences’ to which the most hereditary caste of cus-
todi would never approximate, merely because to them, as
human beings, the dog’s interest in those smells would
for ever be an inscrutable mystery. These writers have,
then, utterly ignored the glaring fact that subjective inter-
est may, by laying its weighty index-finger on particular
items of experience, so accent them as to give to the least
frequent associations far more power to shape our thought
than the most frequent ones possess. The interest itself,
though its genesis is doubtless perfectly natural, makes ex-
perience more than it is made by it.

Every one knows whatattentionis. Itis the taking pos-
session by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of
what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains

404 PSYCHOLOGY.

of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness
are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things
in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition
which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatter-
brained state which in French is called distraction, and Zer-
streutheit in German.

We all know this latter state, even in its extreme degree.
Most people probably fall several times a day into a fit
of something like this: The eyes are fixed on vacancy, the
sounds of the world melt into confused unity, the attention
is dispersed so that the whole body is felt, as it were, at
once, and the foreground of consciousness is filled, if by
anything, by a sort of solemn sense of surrender to the
empty passing of time. In the dim background of our
mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: get-
ting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who has
spoken to us, trying to make the next step in our reason-
ing. But somehow we cannot start ; the pensée de derriere la
téte fails to pierce the shell of lethargy that wraps our state
about. Every moment we expect the spell to break, for we
know no reason why it should continue. But it does con-
tinue, pulse after pulse, and we float with it, until—also
without reason that we can discover—an energy is given,
something—we know not what—enables us to gather our-
selves together, we wink our eyes, we shake our heads, the
background-ideas become effective, and the wheels of life
go round again.

This curious state of inhibition can for a few moments be
produced at will by fixing the eyes on vacancy. Some per-
sons can voluntarily empty their minds and ‘think of noth-
ing.’ With many, as Professor Exner remarks of himself,
this is the most efficacious means of falling asleep. It is
difficult not to suppose something like this scattered con-
dition of mind to be the usual state of brutes when not
actively engaged in some pursuit. Fatigue, monotonous
mechanical occupations that end by being automatically
carried on, tend to produce it in men. It is not sleep; and
yet when aroused from such a state, a person will often
hardly be able to say what he has been thinking about.
Subjects of the hypnotic trance seem to lapse into it whe»

ATTENTION. 405

left to themselves ; asked what they are thinking of, they
reply, ‘of nothing particular’! *

The abolition of this condition is what we call the awak-
ening of the attention. One principal object comes then
into the focus of consciousness, others are temporarily sup-
pressed. The awakening may come about either by reason
of a stimulus from without, or in consequence of some
unknown inner alteration ; and the change it brings with it
amounts to a concentration upon one single object with
exclusion of aught besides, or to a condition anywhere be-
tween this and the completely dispersed state.

TO HOW MANY THINGS CAN WE ATTEND AT ONCE?

The question of the ‘ span’ of consciousness has often been
asked and answered—sometimes @ priori, sometimes by ex-
periment. This seems the proper place for us to touch
upon it ; and our answer, according to the principles laid
down in Chapter IX, will not be difficult. The number of
things we may attend to is altogether indefinite, depending
on the power of the individual intellect, on the form of the
apprehension, and on what the things are. When appre-
hended conceptually as a connected system, their number
may be very large. But however numerous the things, they
can only be known in a single pulse of consciousness for
which they form one complex ‘object’ (p. 276 ff.), so that
properly speaking there is before the mind at no time a
plurality of ideas, properly so called.

The ‘unity of the soul’ has been supposed by many

* «The first and most important, but also the most difficult, task at the
outset of an education is to overcome gradually the inattentive dispersion
of mind which shows itself wherever the organic life preponderates over
the intellectual. The training of animals . . . must be in the first in-
stance based on the awakening of attention (cf. Adrian Leonard, Essai sur
Uv’ Hducation des Animaua, Lille, 1842); that is to say, we must seek to make
them gradually perceive separately things which, if left to themselves,
would not be attended to, because they would fuse with a great sum of
other sensorial stimuli toa confused total impression of which each separate
item only darkens and interferes with the rest. Similarly at first with the
human child. The enormous difficulties of deaf-mute- and especially of
idiot-instruction is principally due to the slow and painful manner in
which we succeed in bringing out from the general confusion of perception
single items with sufficient sharpness.”” (Waitz, Lehrb. d. Psychol., p. 632.)

406 PSYCHOLOG ¥Y.

philosophers, who also believed in the distinct atomic na<
ture of ‘ideas,’ to preclude the presence to it of more than
one objective fact, manifested in one idea, at a time. Even
Dugald Stuart opines that every minimum visibile of a pic-
tured figure

‘* constitutes just as distinct an object of attention to the mind as if it
were separated by an interval of empty space from the rest... . It
is impossible for the mind to attend to more than one of these points at
once ; and as the perception of the figure implies a knowledge of tne
relative situation of the different points with respect to each other, we
must conclude that the perception of figure by the eye is the result of
a number of different acts of attention. These acts of attention, how-
ever, are performed with such rapidity, that the effect, with respect to
us, is the same as if the perception were instantaneous.” *

Such glaringly artificial views can only come from fan-
tastic metaphysics or from the ambiguity of the word ‘idea,’
which, standing sometimes for mental state and sometimes
for thing known, leads men to ascribe to the thing, not
only the unity which belongs to the mental state, but even
the simplicity which is thought to reside in the Soul.

When the things are apprehended by the senses, the
number 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 of
six objects at once ; by Abraham Tucker the number is limited to four ;
while Destutt Tracy again amplifies it to six. The opinion of the first
and last of these philosophers” [continues Sir Wm. Hamilton] ‘‘seems
to me correct. You can easily make the experiments for yourselves,
but you must beware of grouping the objects into classes. If you
throw a handful of marbles on the floor, you will find it difficult to
view at once more than six, or seven at most, without confusion ; but
if you group them into twos, or threes, or fives, you can comprehend as
many groups as you can units; because the mind considers these
groups only as units—it views them as wholes, and throws their parts
out of consideration.” +

Professor Jevons, repeating this observation, by count-
ing instantaneously beans thrown into a box, found that
the number 6 was guessed correctly 120 times out of 147, 5
correctly 102 times out of 107, and 4 and 3 always right. t

* Elements, part 1. chap. 0, fin.
+ Lectures on Metaphysics, lecture xiv.
t Nature, vol. m1. p. 281 (1871).

ATTENTION. 407

It is obvious that such observations decide nothing at all
about our attention, properly so called. They rather meas-
ure in part the distinctness of our vision—especially of the
primary-memory-image*—in part the amount of association
in the individual between seen arrangements and the names
of numbers.t

Each number-name is a way of grasping the beans as
one total object. In such a total object, all the parts con-
verge harmoniously to the one resultant concept; no sin-
gle bean has special discrepant associations of its own;
and so, with practice, they may grow quite numerous ere
we fail to estimate them aright. But where the ‘object’ be-

* Tf a lot of dots or strokes on a piece of paper be exhibited for a mo-
ment to a person in normal condition, with the request that he say how
many 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 the
others dissolve. In short, the impression made by the dots changes rapidly
into something else. In the trance-subject, on the contrary, it seems to
stick ; I find that persons in the hypnotic state easily count the dots in
the mind’s eye so long as they do not much exceed twenty in number.

+ Mr. Cattell made Jevons’s experiment in a much more precise way
(Philosophische Studien, mr. 121 ff.). Cards were ruled with short lines,
varying in number from four to fifteen, and exposed to the eye for a hun-
dredth of asecond. When the number was but four or five, no mistakes
as arule were made. For higher numbers the tendency was to under-
rather than to over-estimate. Similar experiments were tried with letters
and figures, and gave the same result. When the letters formed familiar
words, three times as many of them could be named as when their com-
bination was meaningless. If the words formed a sentence, twice as many
of them could be caught as when they had no connection. ‘The sentence
was then apprehended as a whole. If not apprehended thus, almost noth-
ing is apprehended of the several words; but if the sentence as a whole is
apprehended, then the words appear very distinct.”—Wundt and his pupil
Dietze had tried similar experiments on rapidly repeated strokes of sound.
Wundt made them follow each other in groups, and found that groups of
twelve strokes at most could be recognized and identified when they suc-
ceeded each other at the most favorable rate, namely, from three to five
tenths of a second (Phys. Psych., 1. 215). Dietze found that by mentally
subdividing the groups into sub-groups as one listened, as many as forty
strokes could be identified asa whole. They were then grasped as eight
sub-groups of five, or as five of eight strokes each. (Philosophische Studien,

11. 362.)—Later in Wundt’s Laboratory. Bechterew made observations on
two simultaneously elapsing series of metronome strokes, of which one con-
tained one stroke more than the other. The most favorable rate of succes-
sion was 0.3 sec., and he then discriminated a group of 18 from one of
18+ 1, apparently. (Neurologisches Centralblatt, 1889, 272.)

408 PSYCHOLOG Y.

fore us breaks into parts disconnected with each other, and
forming each as it were a separate object or system, not
eonceivable in union with the rest, it becomes harder to
apprehend all these parts at once, and the mind tends to
let go of one whilst it attends to another. Still, within
limits this can be done. M. Paulhan has experimented
carefully on the matter by declaiming one poem aloud
whilst he repeated a different one mentally, or by writing
one sentence whilst speaking another, or by performing
‘calculations on paper whilst reciting poetry.* He found
that

“*the most favorable condition for the doubling of the mind was its
sinultaneous application to two easy and heterogeneous operations.
Two operations of the same sort, two multiplications, two recitations, or
the reciting one poem and writing another, render the process more
uncertain and difficult.”

The attention often, but not always, oscillates during
these performances ; and sometimes a word from one part
of the task slips into another. I myself find when I try to
simultaneously recite one thing and write another that the
beginning of each word or segment of a phrase is what re-
quires the attention. Once started, my pen runs on for a
word or two as if by its own momentum. M. Paulhan
compared the time occupied by the same two operations
done simultaneously or in succession, and found that there
was often a considerable gain of time from doing them
simultaneously. For instance :

‘‘T write the first four verses of Athalie, whilst reciting eleven of
Musset. The whole performance occupies 40 seconds. But reciting
alone takes 22 and writing alone 31, or 53 altogether, so that there is a
difference in favor of the simultaneous operations.”

Or again:

‘‘T multiply 421 312 212 by 2; the operation takes 6 seconds; the
recitation of 4 verses also takes 6 seconds. But the two operations
done at once only take 6 seconds, so that there is no loss of time from
combining them.”

Of course these time-measurements lack precision.
With three systems of object (writing with each hand whilst
reciting) the operation became much more difficult.

* Revue Scientifique, vol. 39, p. 684 (May 28, 1887).

ATTENTION. 409

If, then, by the original question, how many ideas or
things can we attend to at once, be meant how many entirely
disconnected systems or processes of conception can go on
simultaneously, the answer is, not easily more than one,
unless the processes are very habitual ; but then two, or
even three, without very much oscillation of the attention.
Where, however, the processes are less automatic, as in the
story of Julius Cesar dictating four letters whilst he writes’
a fifth,* there must be a rapid oscillation of the mind from
one to the next, and no consequent gain of time. Within
any one of the systems the parts may be numberless, but
we attend to them collectively when we conceive the whole
which they form.

When the things to be attended to are small sensations,
and when the effort is to be exact in noting them, it is
found that attention to one interferes a good deal with the
perception of the other. A good deal of fine work has been
done in this field, of which I must give some account.

It has long been noticed, when expectant attention is
concentrated upon one of two sensations, that the other
one is apt to be displaced from consciousness for a moment
and to appear subsequent ; although in reality the two may
have been contemporaneous events. ‘Thus, to use the stock
example of the books, the surgeon would sometimes see
the blood flow from the arm of the patient whom he was
bleeding, before he saw the instrument penetrate the skin.
Similarly the smith may see the sparks fly before he sees
the hammer smite the iron, etc. There is thus a certain
difficulty in perceiving the exact date of two impressions
when they do not interest our attention equally, and when
they are of a disparate sort.

Professor Exner, whose experiments on the minimal per-
ceptible succession in time of two sensations we shall have to
quote in another chapter, makes some noteworthy remarks
about the way in which the attention must be set to catch
the interval and the right order of the sensations, when the
time is exceeding small. The point was to tell whether

* Cf. Chr. Wolff: Psychologia Empirica, § 245. Wolff’s account of the
phenomena of attention is in general excellent.

410 PS YCHOLOG Y.

two signals were simultaneous or successive ; and, if succes-
sive, which one of them came first.

The first way of attending which he found himself to
fall into, was when the signals did not differ greatly—when,
e.g., they were similar sounds heard each by a different
ear. Here he lay in wait for the first signal, whichever
it 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 the
time was too short, the first could not be isolated from the
second at all.

The second way was to accommodate the attention for a
certain sort of signal, and the next moment to become aware
in memory of whether it came before or after its mate.

‘‘This way brings great uncertainty with it. The impression not
prepared 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 subjec-
tively stronger stimulus, that which we were intent upon, for the first,
just as we are apt to take an objectively stronger stimulus to be the
first. Still, it may happen otherwise. In the experiments from touch

to sight it often seemed to me as if the impression for which the atten-
tion was not prepared were there already when the other came.”

Exner found himself employing this method oftenest
when the impressions differed strongly.*

In such observations (which must not be confounded
with those where the two signals were identical and their
successiveness known as mere doubleness, without distine-
tion of which came first), it is obvious that each signal must
combine stably in our perception with a different instant of
time. Itis the simplest possible case of two discrepant
concepts simultaneously occupying the mind. Now the case
of the signals being simultaneous seems of a different sort.
We must turn to Wundt for observations fit to cast a nearer
light thereon.

The reader will remember the reaction-time experiments
of which we treated in Chapter III. It happened occasion-
ally in Wundt’s experiments that the reaction-time was
reduced to zero or even assumed a negative value, which,
being translated into common speech, means that the ob-

* Pfliiger’s Archiv, x1. 429-31.

ATTENTION. 411

server was sometimes so intent upon the signal that his
reaction actually coincided in time with it, or even preceded it,
instead of coming a fraction of a second after it, as in the
nature of things it should. More will be said of these re-
sults anon. Meanwhile Wundt, in explaining them, says
this :

“In general we have a very exact feeling of the simultaneity of two
stimuli, if they do not differ much in strength. And in a series of ex-
periments in which a warning precedes, at a fixed interval, the stimu-
lus, we involuntarily try to react, not only as promptly as possible,
but also in such wise that our movement may coincide with the stimu-
lus itself. We seek to make our own feelings of touch and innervation
[muscular contraction] objectively contemporaneous with the signal
which we hear; and experience shows that in many cases we approxi-
mately succeed. In these cases we have a distinct consciousness of
hearing the signal, reacting upon it, and feeling our reaction take
place,—all at one and the same moment.” *

In another place, Wundt adds:

‘The difficulty of these observations and the comparative infrequency
with which the reaction-time can be made thus to disappear shows how
hard it is, when our attention is intense, to keep it fixed even on two
different ideas at once. Note besides that when this happens, one
always tries to bring the ideas into a certain connection, to grasp them
as components of a certain complex representation. Thus in the ex-
periments in question, it has often seemed to me that I produced by
my own recording movement the sound which the ball made in drops
ping on the board.” +

The ‘ difficulty,’ in the cases of which Wundt speaks, is
that of forcing two non-simultaneous events into apparent
combination with the same instant of time. There is no
difficulty, as he admits, in so dividing our attention be-
tween two really simultaneous impressions as to feel them
to be such. The cases he describes are really cases of
anachronistic perception, of subjective time-displacement,
to use his own term. Still more curious cases of it have
been most carefully studied by him. They carry us a step
farther in our research, so I will quote them, using as far
as possible his exact words :

‘‘The conditions become more complicated when we receive a series
of impressions separated by distinct intervals, into the midst of which

* Physiol. Psych., 2d ed. 11. pp. 2388-40.
+ Ib. p. 262.

412 PSYCHOLOGY.

a heterogeneous impression is suddenly brought. Then comes the
question, with which member of the series do we perceive the additional
impression to coincide? with that member with whose presence it
really coexists, or is there some aberration? ... If the additional
stimulus belongs to a different sense very considerable aberrations may |
occur,

‘* The best way to experiment is with a number of visual impressions
(which one can easily get from a moving object) for the series, and
with a sound as the disparate impression. Let, e.g., an index-hand
move over a circular scale with uniform and sufficiently slow velocity,
so that the impressions it gives will not fuse, but permit its position at
any instant to be distinctly seen. Let the clockwork which turns it
have an arrangement which rings a bell once in every revolution, but
at a point which can be varied, so that the observer need never know
in advance just when the bell-stroke takes place. In such observations
three cases are possible. The beil-stroke can be perceived either ex-
actly at the moment to which the index points when it sounds—in this
case there will be no time-displacement ; or we can combine it with a
later position of the index— . . . positive time-displacement, as we
shall eall it; or finally we can combine it with a position of the index
earlier than that at which the sound occurred—and this we will call a
negative displacement. The most natural displacement would appa-
rently be the positive, since for apperception a certain time is always re-
quired. . . . But experience shows that the opposite is the case: it
happens most frequently that the sound appears earlier than its real
date—far less often coincident with it, or later. It should be observed
that in all these experiments it takes some time to get a distinctly per-
ceived combination of the sound with a particular position of the in-
dex, and that a single revolution of the latter is never enough for the
purpose. The motion must go on long enough for the sounds them-
selves to form a regular series—the outcome being a simultapeous per-
ception of two distinct series of events, of which either may by changes
in its rapidity modify the result. The first thing one remarks is that
the sound belongs in a certain region of the scale; only gradually is it
perceived to combine with a particular position of the index. But even
a result gained by observation of many revolutions may be deficient in
certainty, for accidental combinations of attention have a great influ-
ence upon it. If we deliberately try to combine the bell-stroke with
an arbitrarily chosen position of the index, we succeed without diffi-
culty, provided this position be not too remote from the true one. If,
again, we cover the whole scale, except a single division over which we
may see the index pass, we have a strong tendency to combine the
bell-stroke with this actually seen position ; and in so doing may easily
overlook more than } of a second of time. Results, therefore, to be of
any value, must be drawn from long-continued and very numerous ob-
servations, in which such irregular oscillations of the attention neutral-
ize each other according to the law of great numbers, and allow the

ATTENTION. 413

true laws to appear. Although my own experiments extend over many
years (with interruptions), they are not even yet numerous enough to ex-.
haust the subject—still, they bring out the principal laws which the
attention follows under such conditions.” *

Wundt accordingly distinguishes the direction from the
amount of the apparent displacement in time of the bell.
stroke. The direction depends on the rapidity of the
movement of the index and (consequently) on that of the
succession of the bell-strokes. The moment at which the
bell struck was estimated by him with the least tendency
to 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 other
hand, if the rapidity went quickening, errors became nega-
tive ; if slowing, positive. ‘The amount of error is, in gen-
eral, the greater the slower the speed and its alterations.
Finally, individual differences prevail, as well as differences
in the same individual at different times.+

* Physiol. Psych., 2d ed. 11. 264-6.

+ This was the original ‘ personal equation’ observation of Bessel. An
observer looked through his equatorial telescope to note the moment at
which a star crossed the meridian, the latter being marked in the telescopic
field of view by a visible thread, beside which other equidistant threads
appear. ‘‘ Before the star reached the thread he looked at the clock, and
then, with eye at telescope, counted the seconds by the beat of the pendu-

b c a

Fig. 35.

lum. Since the star seldom passed the meridian at the exact moment of a
beat, the observer, in order to estimate fractions, had to note its position
at the stroke before and at the stroke after the passage, and to divide the
time as the meridian-line seemed to divide the space. If, e.g., one had

414 PSYCHOLOG Y.

Wundt’s pupil von Tschisch has carried out these ex-
periments on a still more elaborate scale,* using, not only
the single bell-stroke, but 2, 3, 4, or 5 simultaneous impres-
sions, so that the attention had to note the place of the
index at the moment when a whole group of things was
happening. The single bell-stroke was always heard too
early by von Tschisch—the displacement was invariably
‘negative.’ As the other simultaneous impressions were
added, the displacement first became zero and finally posi-
tive, 1.e. the impressions were connected with a position of
the index that was too late. This retardation was greater
when the simultaneous impressions were disparate (electric
tactile 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 with
each additional impression, so that it is probable that six
impressions would have given almost the same result as
five, which was the maximum number used by Herr von T.

Wundt explains all these results by his previous obser-
vation that a reaction sometimes antedates the signal (see
above, p. 411). The mind, he supposes, is so intent upon
the bell-strokes that its ‘apperception’ keeps ripening
periodically after each stroke in anticipation of the next.
Its most natural rate of ripening may be faster or slower
than the rate at which the strokes come. If faster, then it
hears the stroke too early; if slower, it hears it too late.
The position of the index on the scale, meanwhile, is noted
at the moment, early or late, at which the bell-stroke is
subjectively heard. Substituting several impressions for

counted 20 seconds, and at the 2ist the star seemed removed by ac from
the meridian-thread c, whilst at the 22d it was at the distance dc; then, if
ac: be :: 1: 2, the star would have passed at 214 seconds. The conditions
resemble those in our experiment: the star is the index-hand, the threads
are the scale ; and a time-displacement is to be expected, which with high
rapidities may be positive, and negative with low. The astronomic ob-
servations do not permit us to measure its absolute amount ; but that it ex-
ists is nade certain by the fact than after all other possible errors are elimi-
nated, there still remains between different observers a personal difference
which is often much larger than that between mere reaction-times, amount-
ing . .. sometimes to more than a second.” (Op. cit. p. 270.)
* Philosophische Studien, 1. 601.

ATTENTION. 415

the single bell-stroke makes the ripening of the perception
slower, and the index is seen too late. So, at least, do I
understand the explanations which Herren Wundt and y.
Tschisch give.*

* Physiol. Psych., 2d ed. 1m. 2738-4; 3d ed. mu. 389; Philosophische
Studien, 1. 621 ff.—I know that I am stupid, but I confess I find these
theoretical statements, especially Wundt’s, a little hazy. Herr v. Tschisch
considers it impossible that the perception of the index’s position should
come in too late, and says it demands no particular attention (p. 622). It
seems, however, that this can hardly be the case. Both observers speak of
the difficulty of seeing the index at the right moment. The case is quite
different from that of distributing the attention impartially over simuita-
neous momentary sensations. The bell or other signal gives a momentary
sensation, the index a continuous one, of motion. To note any one position
of the latter is to interrupt this sensation of motion and to substitute an
entirely different percept—one, namely, of position—for it, during a time
however brief. This involves a sudden change in the manner of attending
to the revolutions of the index; which change ought to take place neither
“ooner nor later than the momentary impression, and fiz the index as it is
then and there visible. Now this is not a case of simply getting two sen-
sations at once and so feeling them—which would be an harmonious act;
but of stopping one and changing it into another, whilst we simultaneously
getathird. Two of these acts are discrepant, and the whole three rather
interfere with each other. It becomes hard to ‘ fix’ the index at the very
instant that we catch the momentary impression; so we fall into a way of
fixing it either at the last possible moment before, or at the first possible
moment after, the impression comes.

This at least seems to me the more probable state of affairs. If we fix
the index before the impression really comes, that means that we perceive
it too late But why do we fix it before when the impressions come slow
and simple, aad after when they come rapid and complex? And why
under certain conditions is there no displacement at all? The answer
which suggests itself is that when there is just enough leisure between the
impressions for the attention to adapt itself comfortably both to them and
to the index (one second in W.’s experiments), it carries on the two pro-
cesses at once; when the leisure is excessive, the attention, following its
own laws of ripening, and being ready to note the index before the other
impression comes, notes it then, since that is the moment of easiest action,
whilst the impression, which comes a moment later, interferes with noting
it again ; and finally, that when the leisure is insufficient, the momentary
impressions, being the more fixed data, are attended to first, and the index
is fixed a little lateron. The noting of the index at too early a moment
would be the noting of a real fact, with its analogue in many other rhyth-
mical experiences. In reaction-time experiments, for example, when, in &
regularly recurring series, the stimulus is once in a while omitted, the ob-
server sometimes reacts asif it came. Here, as Wundt somewhere observes,
we catch ourselves acting merely because our inward preparation is com-
plete. The ‘fixing’ of the index is a sort of action; so that my interpre-

416 PSYCHOLOG Y.

This is all I have to say about the difficulty of having
two discrepant concepts together, and about the number of
things to which we can simultaneously attend.

THE VARIETIES OF ATTENTION.

The things to which we attend are said to interest us.
Our interest in them is supposed to be the cause of our at-
tending. What makes an object interesting we shall see
presently ; and later inquire in what sense interest may
cause 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 is
interesting in itself, without relation to anything else; de-
rived, when it owes its interest to association with some
other immediately interesting thing. What I call derived
attention has been named ‘apperceptive’ attention. Fur-
thermore, Attention may be either

e) Passive, reflex, non-voluntary, effortless; or

j) Active and voluntary.

Voluntary attention is always derived ; we never make an
effort to attend to an object except for the sake of some remote
interest which the effort will serve. But both sensorial and
intellectual attention may be either passive or voluntary.

In passive immediate sensorial attention the stimulus is a
sense-impression, either very intense, voluminous, or sud-
den,—in which case it makes no difference what its nature

tation tallies with facts recognized elsewhere ; but Wundt’s explanation (if
I understand it) of the experiments requires us to believe that an observer
like v. Tschisch shall steadily and without exception get an hallucination
of a bell-stroke before the latter occurs, and not hear the real bell-stroke after-
wards. I doubt whether this is possible, and I can think of no analogue
to it in the rest of our experience. The whole subject deserves to be gone
over again. To Wundt is due the highest credit for his patience in work-
ing out the facts. His explanation of them in his earlier work (Vorlesungen
ib. Menschen und Thierseele, 1. 87-42, 365-871) consisted merely in the
appeal to the unity of consciousness, and may be considered quite crude.

ATTENTION. 417

may be, whether sight, sound, smell, blow, or inner pain,—
or else it is an instinctive stimulus, a perception which, by
reason of its nature rather than its mere force, appeals to
some one of our normal congenital impulses and has a
directly exciting quality. In the chapter on Instinct we
shall see how these stimuli differ from one animal to another,
and what most of them are in man: strange things, moving
things, wild animals, bright things, pretty things, metallic
things, words, blows, blood, ete., etc., ete.

Sensitiveness to immediately exciting sensorial stimuli
characterizes the attention of childhood and youth. In
mature age we have generally selected those stimuli which
are connected with one or more so-called permanent inter-
ests, and our attention has grown irresponsive to the rest.*
But childhood is characterized by great active energy, and
has few organized interests by which to meet new impres-
sions and decide whether they are worthy of notice or not,
and the consequence is that extreme mobility of the atten-
tion with which we are all familiar in children, and which
makes their first lessons such rough affairs. Any strong
sensation whatever produces accommodation of the organs
which perceive it, and absolute oblivion, for the time being,
of the task in hand. This reflex and passive character of
the attention which, as a French writer says, makes the
child seem to belong less to himself than to every object
which happens to catch his notice, is the first thing which
the teacher must overcome. It never is overcome in some
people, whose work, to the end of life, gets done in the
interstices of their mind-wandering.

The passive sensorial attention is derived when the
impression, without being either strong or of an instinctively
exciting nature, is connected by previous experience and
education with things that are so. These things may be
called the motives of the attention. The impression draws
an interest from them, or perhaps it even fuses into a single
complex object with them; the result is that it is brought
into the focus of the mind. A faint tap per se is not an
interesting sound; it may well escape being discriminated

* Note that the permanent interests are themselves grounded in certain
objects and relations in which our interest is immediate and instinctive.

418 PSYCHOLOGY.

from the general rumor of the world. But when it isa
signal, as that of a lover on the window-pane, it will hardly
go unperceived. Herbart writes:

‘* How a bit of bad grammar wounds the ear of the purist! How a
false note hurts the musician! or an offence against good manners the
man of the world! How rapid is progress in a science when its first
principles have been so well impressed upon us that we reproduce them
mentally with perfect distinctness and ease! How slow and uncertain, on
the other hand, is our learning of the principles themselves, when
familiarity with the still more elementary percepts connected with the
subject has not given us an adequate predisposition!—Apperceptive
attention may be plainly observed in very small children when, hearing
the speech of their elders, as yet unintelligible to them, they suddenly
catch 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 and
pronounce his name. Not far removed is the talent which mind-
wandering school-boys display during the hours of instruction, of notic-
ing every moment in which the teacher tells a story. I remember classes
in which, instruction being uninteresting, and discipline relaxed, a buz-
zing murmur was always to be heard, which invariably stopped for as
Jong a time as an anecdote lasted. How could the boys, since they
seemed to hear nothing, notice when the anecdote began? Doubtless
most of them always heard something of the teacher’s talk; but most of
it had no connection with their previous knowledge and occupations,
and therefore the separate words no sooner entered their consciousness
than they fell out of it again; but, on the other hand, no sooner did the
words awaken old thoughts, forming strongly-connected series with
which the new impression easily combined, than out of new and old
together a total interest resulted which drove the vagrant ideas below
the threshold of consciousness, and brought for a while settled atten-
tion into their place.” *

Passive intellectual attention is immediate when we follow
in thought a train of images exciting or interesting per se;
derived, when the images are interesting only as means toa
remote end, or merely because they are associated with
something which makes them dear. Owing to the way in
which immense numbers of real things become integrated
into single objects of thought for us, there is no clear line
to be drawn between immediate and derived attention of
an intellectual sort. When absorbed in intellectual atten-
tion we may become so inattentive to outer things as to be

* Herbart: Psychologie als Wissenschaft, § 128.

ATTENTION. 419

‘absent-minded,’ ‘abstracted,’ or ‘distraits.’ All revery or
concentrated meditation is apt to throw us into this state.

‘¢ Archimedes, it is well known, was so absorbed in geometrical medi-
tation that he was first aware of the storming of Syracuse by his own
death-wound, and his exclamation on the entrance of the Roman sol-
diers was: Noli turbare circulos meos! In like manner Joseph Scaliger,
the most learned of men, when a Protestant student in Paris, was so
engrossed in the study of Homer that he became aware of the massacre
of St. Bartholomew, and of his own escape, only on the day subsequent
to the catastrophe. The philosopher Carneades was habitually liable to
fits of meditation so profound that, to prevent him sinking from
inanition, his maid found it necessary to feed him like a child. And
it is reported of Newton that, while engaged in his mathematical re-
searches, he sometimes forgot to dine. Cardan, one of the most illus-
trious of philosophers and mathematicians, was once, upon a journey,
so lost in thought that he forgot both his way and the object of his
jeurney. To the questions of his driver whether he should proceed, he
made no answer; and when he came to himself at nightfall, he was sur-
prised to find the carriage at a standstill, and directly under a gallows,
The mathematician Vieta was sometimes so buried in meditation that
for 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 Budzeus forgot everything in his
philological speculations, and he was only awakened to the affairs of the
external world by a tardy embassy from the marriage-party, who found
him absorbed in the composition of his Commentarii.” *

The absorption may be so deep as not only to banish
ordinary 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 so
severe as to make him apprehend that he would find it impossible to
proceed ; yet no sooner has he by a determined effort fairly launched
himself into the stream of thought, than he has found himself con-
tinuously borne along without the least distraction, until the end has
come, and the attention has been released; when the pain has re-

curred with a force that has overmastered all resistance, making him
wonder how he could have ever ceased to feel it.” +

Dr. Carpenter speaks of launching himself by a deter-
mined effort. ‘This effort characterizes what we called ac-

* Sir W. Hamilton: Metaphysics, lecture xrv.
+ Mental Physiol., § 124. The oft-cited case of soldiers not perceiving
that they are wounded is of an analogous sort.

420 PSYCHOLOG Y.

tive or voluntary attention. It is a feeling which every one
knows, but which most people would call quite indesecrib-
able. We get it in the sensorial sphere whenever we seek
to catch an impression of extreme faintness, be it of sight,
hearing, taste, smell, or touch ; we get it whenever we seek
to discriminate a sensation merged in a mass of others that
are similar; we get it whenever we resist the attractions of
more potent stimuli and keep our mind occupied with
some object that is naturally unimpressive. We get it in
the intellectual sphere under exactly similar conditions :
as when we strive to sharpen and make distinct an idea
which we but vaguely seem to have; or painfully diserimi-
nate a shade of meaning from its similars; or resolutely
hold fast to a thought so discordant with our impulses
that, if left unaided, it would quickly yield place to images
of an exciting and impassioned kind. All forms of atten-
tive effort would be exercised at once by one whom we
might suppose at a dinner-party resolutely to listen to a
neighbor giving him insipid and unwelcome advice in a
low voice, whilst all around the guests were loudly laugh-
ing and talking about exciting and interesting things.

There is no such thing as voluntary attention sustained for
more than a few seconds at a time. What is called sustained
voluntary attention is a repetition of successive efforts
which bring back the topic to the mind.* The topic once
brought back, if a congenial one, develops ; and if its de-
velopment is interesting it engages the attention passively
for atime. Dr. Carpenter, a moment back, described the
stream of thought, once entered, as ‘bearing him along.’
This passive interest may be short or long. As soon as it
flags, the attention is diverted by some irrelevant thing, and
then a voluntary effort may bring it back to the topic
again; and so on, under favorable conditions, for hours to-
gether. During all this time, however, note that it is not

* Prof. J. M. Cattell made experiments to which we shall refer further
on, on the degree to which reaction-times might be shortened by distract-
ing or voluntarily concentrating the attention. He says of the latter series
that ‘‘the averages show that the attention can be kept strained, thatis, the
centres kept in a state of unstable equilibrium, for one second” (Mind, xt.
240).

ATTENTION. 421

an identical object in the psychological sense (p. 275), but a
succession of mutually related objects forming an identical
topic only, upon which the attention is fixed. No one can
possibly attend continuously to an object that does not change.

Now there are always some objects that for the time
being will not develop. They simply go out; and to keep
the mind upon anything related to them requires such in-
cessantly renewed effort that the most resolute Will ere long
gives out and letsits thoughts follow the more stimulating
solicitations after it has withstood them for what length of
time it can. There are topics known to every man from
which he shies like a frightened horse, and which to get a
glimpse of is to shun. Such are his ebbing assets to the
spendthrift in full career. But why single out the spend-
thrift when to every man actuated by passion the thought
of interests which negate the passion can hardly for more
than a fleeting instant stay before the mind? It is like
‘memento mori’ in the heyday of the pride of life. Nature
rises at such suggestions, and excludes them from the
view :—How long, O healthy reader, can you now continue
thinking of your tomb ?—In milder instances the difficulty
is as great, especially when the brain is fagged. One
snatches at any and every passing pretext, no matter how
trivial or external, to escape from the odiousness of the
matter in hand. I know a person, for example, who will
poke the fire, set chairs straight, pick dust-specks from
the floor, arrange his table, snatch up the newspaper, take
down any book which catches his eye, trim his nails, waste
the morning anyhow, in short, and all without premedita-
tion,—simply because the only thing he ought to attend to
is the preparation of a noouday lesson in formal logic
which he detests. Anything but that !

Once more, the object must change. When itis one of
sight, 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 ex-
pressly overlooked, makes some interesting remarks on
this point in his chapter on retinal rivalry.* The phe-

* Physiologische Optik, § 382.

422 PSYCHOLOGY.

nomenon called by that name is this, that if we look with
each eye upon a different picture (as in the annexed stereo-
scopic slide),-sometimes one picture, sometimes the other,

Fic. 36.

or parts of both, will come to consciousness, but hardly
ever both combined. Helmholtz now says:

*¢T find that Iam able to attend voluntarily, now to one and now
to the other system of lines; and that then this system remains visi-
ble alone for a certain time, whilst the other completely vanishes.
This happens, for example, whenever I try to count the lines first of
one and then of the other system. . . . But it is extremely hard to
chain the attention down to one of the systems for long, unless we
associate with our looking some distinct purpose which keeps the ac-
tivity of the attention perpetually renewed. Such a one is counting the
lines, comparing their intervals, or the like. An equilibrium of the
attention, persistent for any length of time, is under no circumstances
attainable. The natural tendency of attention when left to itself is to
wander to ever new things ; and so soon as the interest of its object is
over, so soon as nothing new is to be noticed there, it passes, in spite of
our will, tosomething else. If we wish to keep it upon one and the same
object, we must seek constantly to find out something new about the
jatter, especially if other powerful impressions are attracting us away.”

And again criticising an author who had treated of at-
tention as an activity absolutely subject to the conscious
will, Helmholtz writes:

‘‘This is only restrictedly true. We move our eyes by our will; but
one without training cannot so easily execute the intention of making

them converge. At any moment, however, he can execute that of
looking at a near object, in which act convergence is involved. Now

ATTENTION. 423

just as little can we carry out our purpose to keep our attention steadily
fixed upon a certain object, when our interest in the object is exhausted,
and the purpose is inwardly formulated in this abstract way. But we
can set ourselves new questions about the object, so that a new interest
in it arises, and then the attention will remain riveted. The relation
of attention to will is, then, less one of immediate than of mediate
control.”

These words of Helmholtz are of fundamental impor-
tance. And if true of sensorial attention, how much more
true are they of the intellectual variety! The conditio sine
qua non of sustained attention to a given topic of thought
is that we should roll it over and over incessantly and con-
sider different aspects and relations of itin turn. Only in
pathological states will a fixed and ever monotonously re-
curring idea possess the mind.

And now we can see why it is that what is called sus-
tained attention is the easier, the richer in acquisitions and
the fresher and more original the mind. In such minds,
subjects bud and sprout and grow. At every moment, they
please by anew consequence and rivet the attention afresh.
But an intellect unfurnished with materials, stagnant, un-
original, will hardly be likely to consider any subject long.
A glance exhausts its possibilities of interest. Geniuses
are commonly believed to excel other men in their power
of sustained attention.* In most of them, it is to be feared,
the so-called ‘power’ is of the passive sort. Their ideas
coruscate, every subject branches infinitely before their
fertile minds, and so for hours they may be rapt. But it
is their genius making them attentive, not their attention
making geniuses of them. And, when we come down to
the root of the matter, we see that they differ from ordinary
men less in the character of their attention than in the
nature of the objects upon which it is successively bestowed.
In the genius, these form a concatenated series, suggesting

* ««« Genius,’ says Helvetius, ‘is nothing but a continued attention (une
attention suivie).’ ‘Genius,’ says Buffon, ‘is only-a protracted patience
(une longue patience).’ ‘In the exact sciences, at least,’ says Cuvier, ‘it
is the patience of a sound intellect, when invincible, which truly consti-
tutes genius.’ And Chesterfield has also observed that ‘ the power of ap-
plying an attention, steady and undissipated, to a single object, is the sure
mark of a superior genius.” (Hamilton: Lect. on Metaph., lecture x1v.)

424 PSYCHOLOG Y¥.

each other mutually by some rational law. Therefore we
call the attention ‘sustained’ and the topic of meditation
for hours ‘the same.’ Jn the common man the series is
for the most part incoherent, the objects have no rational
bond, and we call the attention wandering and unfixed.

It is probable that genius tends actually to prevent a
man from acquiring habits cf voluntary attention, and that
moderate intellectual endowments are the soil in which we
may best expect, here as elsewhere, the virtues of the will,
strictly so called, to thrive. But, whether the attention
come by grace of genius or by dint of will, the longer one
does attend to a topic the more mastery of it one has. And
the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering at-
tention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment,
character, and will. No one is compos sui if he have it not.
An education which should improve this faculty would be
the education par excellence. But itis easier to define this
ideal than to give practical directions for bringing it about.
The only general pedagogic maxim bearing on attention is
that the more interest the child has in advance in the sub-
ject, the better he will attend. Induct him therefore in
such a way as to knit each new thing on to some acquisi-
tion already there; and if possible awaken curiosity, so
that the new thing shall seem to come as an answer, or
part of an answer, to a question pre-existing in his mind.

At present having described the varieties, let us turn to

THE EFFECTS OF ATTENTION.

Its remote effects are too incalculable to be recorded.
The practical and theoretical life of whole species, as well
as of individual beings, results from the selection which the
habitual direction of their attention involves. In Chapters
XIV and XV some of these consequences will come to light.
Suftice it meanwhile that each of us literally chooses, by his
ways of attending to things, what sort of a universe he
shall appear to himself to inhabit.

The immediate effects of attention are to make us:

a) perceive—

b) conceive
c) distinguish —
d) remember—

ATTENTION. 425

better than otherwise we could—both more successive
things and each thing more clearly. It also
(é) shortens ‘reaction-time.’

aand b. Most people would say that a sensation at-
tended to becomes stronger than it otherwise would be.
This point is, however, not quite plain, and has occasioned
some discussion. * From the strength or intensity of a
sensation must be distinguished its clearness; and to in-
crease this is, for some psychologists, the utmost that
attention can do. When the facts are surveyed, however,
it must be admitted that to some extent the relative inten-
sity of two sensations may be changed when one of them is
attended to and the other not. Every artist knows how he
can make a scene before his eyes appear warmer or colder
in color, according to the way he sets his attention. If
for warm, he soon begins to see the red color start out of
everything; if for cold, the blue. Similarly in listening for
certain notes in a chord, or overtones in a musical sound,
the one we attend to sounds probably a little more loud as
well as more emphatic than it did before. When we men-
tally break a series of monotonous strokes into a rhythm,
by accentuating every second or third one, ete., the stroke
on which the stress of attention is laid seems to become
stronger as well as more emphatic. The increased visi-
bility of optical after-images and of double images, which
close attention brings about, can hardly be interpreted
otherwise than as a real strengthening of the retinal
sensations themselves. And this view is rendered par-
ticularly probable by the fact that an imagined visual
object may, if attention be concentrated upon it long
enough, acquire before the mind’s eye almost the brill-
lancy of reality, and (in the case of certain exceptionally
gifted observers) leave a negative after-image of itself when
it passes away (see Chapter XVIII). Confident expectation
of a certain intensity or quality of impression will often
make us sensibly see or hear it in an object which really

* See, e.g., Ulrici: Leib u. Seele, 11. 28; Lotze: Metaphysik, § 273;
Fechner: Revision d. Psychophysik, ee G. E. Miller: Zur Theorie d.
sinnl. Aufmerksamkeit, § 1; Stumpf: Tonpsychologie, r. 71.

426 PS YCHOLOG Y.

falls far short of it. In face of such facts it is rash to say
that attention cannot make a sense-impression more intense.

But, on the other hand, the intensification which may be
brought about seems never to lead the judgment astray.
As we rightly perceive and name the same color under
various lights, the same sound at various distances; so we
seem to make an analogous sort of allowance for the vary-
ing amounts of attention with which objects are viewed ;
and whatever changes of feeling the attention may bring
we charge, as it were, to the attention’s account, and still
perceive and conceive the object as the same.

‘‘ A gray paper appears to us no lighter, the pendulum-beat of a
clock no louder, no matter how much we increase the strain of our at-
tention upon them. No one, by doing this, can make the gray paper
look white, or the stroke of the pendulum sound like the blow of a
strong hammer,—everyone, on the contrary, feels the increase as that
of his own conscious activity turned upon the thing.” *

Were it otherwise, we should not be able to note inten-
sities by attending to them. Weak impressions would, as
Stumpf says,t become stronger by the very fact of being
observed.

‘‘T should not be able to observe faint sounds at all, but only such
as appeared to me of maximal strength, or at least of a strength that
increased with the amount of my observation. In reality, however, I
can, with steadily increasing attention, follow a diminuendo perfectly
well.”

The subject is one which would well repay exact experi-
ment, if methods could be devised. Meanwhile there is no
question whatever that attention augments the clearness of
all that we perceive or conceive by its aid. But what is
meant by clearness here?

c. Clearness, so far as attention produces it, means dis-
tinction from other things and internal analysis or subdivision.
These are essentially products of intellectual discrimination,
involying comparison, memory, and perception of various
relations. The attention per se does not distinguish and
analyze and relate. The most we can say is that it is a

* Fechner, op. cit. p. 271.
¢ Tonpsychologie, 1. p. 71.

ATTENTION. 427

condition of our doing so. And as these processes are to
be described later, the clearness they produce had better
not be farther discussed here. The important point to no-
tice here is that it is not attention’s immediate fruit.*

d. Whatever future conclusion we may reach as to
this, we cannot deny that an object once attended to will re-
main in the memory, whilst one inattentively allowed to pass
will leave no traces behind. Already in Chapter VI (see
pp. 163 ff.) we discussed whether certain states of mind
were ‘unconscious, or whether they were not rather states
to which no attention had been paid, and of whose passage
recollection could afterwards find no vestiges. Dugald
Stewart says:+ ‘The connection between attention and
memory has been remarked by many authors.” He quotes
Quintilian, Locke, and Helvetius; and goes on at great
length to explain the phenomena of ‘secondary automa-
tism’ (see above, p. 114 ff.) by the presence of a mental action
grown so inattentive as to preserve no memory of itself.
In our chapter on Memory, later on, the point will come
up again.

e) Under this head, the shortening of reaction-time, there
is a good deal to be said of Attention’s effects. Since
Wundt has probably worked over the subject more thor-
oughly than any other investigator and made it peculiarly
his own, what follows had better, as far as possible, be in
his words. ‘The reader will remember the method and re-
sults of experimentation on ‘reaction-time, as given in
Chapter III.

The facts I proceed to quote may also be taken as a
supplement to that chapter. Wundt writes:

‘* When we wait with strained attention for a stimulus, it will often
happen that instead of registering the stimulus, we react upon some
entirely different impression,—and this not through confounding the
one with the other. On the contrary, we are perfectly well aware at
the moment of making the movement that we respond to the wrong
stimulus. Sometimes even, though not so often, the latter may be an-

&

* Compare, on clearness as the essential fruit of attention, Lotze’s Meta.
physic, § 273.
' + Elements, part 1. chap. 11.

428 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

other kind of sensation altogether,—one may, for example, in experi:
menting with sound, register a flash of light, produced either by
accident or design. We cannot well explain these results otherwise
than by assuming that the strain of the attention towards the impres-
sion we expect coexists with a preparatory innervation of the motor
centre for the reaction, which innervation the slightest shock then
suffices to turn into an actual discharge. This shock may be given by
any chance impression, even by one to which we never intended to re-
spond. When the preparatory innervation has once reached this pitch
of intensity, the time that intervenes between the stimulus and the
contraction of the muscles which react, may become vanishingly
small.” *

‘*The perception of an impression is facilitated when the impres-
sion is preceded by a warning which announces beforehand that it is
about to occur: This case is realized whenever several stimuli follow
each other at equal intervals,—when, e.g. we note pendulum movements
by the eye, or pendulum-strokes by the ear. Each single stroke forms
here the signal for the next, which is thus met by a fully prepared at-
tention. The same thing happens when the stimulus to be perceived is
preceded, at a certain interval, by a single warning: the time is
always notably shortened. ... I have made comparative observa-
tions on reaction-time with and without a warning signal. The im-
pression to be reacted on was the sound made by the dropping of a
ball on the board of the ‘drop apparatus.’.... In a first series no
warning preceded the stroke of the ball; in the second, the noise made
by the apparatus in liberating the ball served as a signal. ... Here
are the averages of two series of such experiments :

Height of Fall. Average. Mean Error. No. of Expts.
ae ein 1 No warning..... 0.253 0.051 13
: Warming. .<=... 0.076 0.060 17
oe | No warning..... 0.266 0.036 14
; WEEMS 5 ee hea -1- 0.175 0.0385 17

“| . In a long series of experiments, (the interval between warn-
ing and stimulus remaining the same) the reaction-time grows less and
Jess, 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.+

. . The only ground that we can assign for this phenomenon is the
preparation (vorbereitende Spannung) of the attention. It is easy to
understand that the reaction-time should be shortened by this means;
but that it should sometimes sink to zero and even assume negative
values, may appear surprising. Nevertheless this latter case is also
explained by what happens in the simple reaction-time experiments”
just referred to, in which, ‘‘ when the strain of the attention has reached

* Physiol. Psych., 2d ed. 11. 226.
+ By a negative value of the reaction-time Wundt means the case of the
reactive movement occurring before the stimulus.

ATTENTION. 429

its climax, the movement we stand ready to execute escapes from the
control of our will, aud we register a wrong signal. In these other ex-
periments, in wnicn a warning foretells the moment of the stimulus, it
is also plain that attention accommodates itself so exactly to the lat-
ter’s reception that no sooner is it objectively given than it is fully
appercetved, and with the apperception the motor discharge coin-
cides.” *

Usually, when the imrression is fully anticipated, atten-
tion prepares the motor centres so completely for both
stimulus and reaction that the only time lost is that of the
physiological conduction downwards. But even this inter-
val may disappear, i.e. the stimulus and reaction may be-
come objectively contemporaneous ; or more remarkable
still, the reaction may be discharged before the stimulus has
actually occurred.t Wundt, as we saw.some pages back
(p. 411), explains this by the effort of the mind so to react
that we may feel our own movement and the signal which
prompts it, both at the same instant. As the execution of
the movement must precede our feeling of it, so it must
also precede the stimulus, if that and our movement are to
be felt at once.

The peculiar theoretic interest of these experiments
lies in their showing expectant attention and sensation to be
continuous or identical processes, since they may have identical
motor effects. Although other exceptional observations
show them likewise to be continuous subjectively, Wundt’s
experiments do not: he seems never, at the moment of
reacting prematurely, to have been misled into the belief
that the real stimulus was there.

As concentrated attention accelerates perception, so,
conversely, perception of a stimulus is retarded by anything
which either baffles or distracts the attention with which we
await it.

“Tf, e.g., we make reactions on a sound in such a way that weak
and strong stimuli irregularly alternate so that the observer can never

expect a determinate strength with any certainty, the reaction-time for
all the various signals is increased,—and so is the average error. I

- —

* Op. cit. 11. 239.

+The reader must not suppose this phenomenon to be of frequent
eccurrence. Experienced observers, like Exner and Cattell, deny having
met with it in their personal experience.

430 PSYCHOLOGY.

append two examples. . .. In Series I a strong and a weak sound
alternated regularly, so that the intensity was each time known in ad-
vanee. In II they came irregularly.

I. Regular Alternation.
Average Time, Average Error. No. of Expts.

tron PISOUNG, 2. < Sock sectecsce ee ns > 0.116" 0.010" 18

WY Go: SOULE Sos tase w pares rae em nian caer 0.127” 0.012” 9
Il. Irregular Alternation,

Strong sound...... wisGava ewes werew se (UDkees 0.038" 9

Weak SOU joni cienatebtont os sp sine 0.298" 0.076" 15

‘Still greater is the increase of the time when, unexpectedly into a
series of strong impressions, a weak one is interpolated, or vice versd.
In this way I have seen the time of reaction upon a sound so weak as
to be barely perceived rise to 0.4” or 0.5”, and for a strong sound to
025". It isalso matter of general experience that a stimulus expected in
a general way, but for whose intensity attention cannot be adapted in
advance, demands a longer reaction-time. In such cases... the
reason for the difference can only lie in the fact that wherever a prepa-
ration of the attention is impossible, the time of both perception and
volition is prolonged. Perhaps also the conspicuously large reaction-
times which are got with stimuli so faint as to be just perceptible may
be explained by the attention tending always to adapt itself for some-
thing more than this minimal amount of stimulus, so that a state ensues
similar to that in the case of unexpected stimuli. . . . Still
more than by previously unknown stimuli is the reaction-time
prolonged by wholly wnexpected impressions. This is sometimes acci-
dentally brought about, when the observer’s attention, instead of being
concentrated on the coming signal, is dispersed. It can be realized
purposely by suddenly thrusting into a long series of equidistant
stimuli a much shorter interval which the observer does not expect.
The mental effect here is like that of being startled ;—often the startling
is outwardly visible. The time of reaction may then easily be length-
ened to one quarter of a second with strong signals, or with weak ones
to a half-second. Slighter, but still very noticeable, is the retardation
when the experiment is so arranged that the observer, ignorant whether
the stimulus is to be an impression of light, sound, or touch, cannot
keep his attention turned to any particular sense-organ in advance.
One notices then at the same time a peculiar unrest, as the feeling of
strain which accompanies the attention keeps vacillating between the
several senses.

‘‘Complications of another sort arise when what is registered is an
impression anticipated both in point of quality and strength, but ac-
companied by other stimuli which make the concentration of the atten-
tion difficuit. The reaction-time is here always more or less prolonged.
The simplest case of the sort is where a momentary impression is regis-
tered in the midst of another, and continuous, sensorial-stimulation of
considerable strength. The continuous stimulus may belong to the

ATTENTION. 431

same sense as the stimulus to be reacted on, or to another. When it is
of the same sense, the retardation it causes may be partly due to the
distraction of the attention by it, but partly also to the fact that the
stimulus to be reacted on stands out less strongly than if alone, and
practically becomes a less intense sensation. But other factors in reality
are present ; for we find the reaction-time more prolonged by the con-
comitant stimulation when the stimulus is weak than when it is strong.
I made experiments in which the principal impression, or signal for re-
action, was a bell-stroke whose strength could be graduated by a spring
against the hammer with a movable counterpoise. Each set of obser-
vations comprised two series ; in one of which the bell-stroke was regis-
tered in the ordinary way, whilst in the other a toothed wheel belong-
ing to the chronometric apparatus made during the entire experiment a
steady noise against a metal spring. In one half of the latter series (A)
the bell-stroke was only moderately strong, so that the accompanying
noise diminished it considerably, without, however, making it indistin-
guishable. In the other half (B) the bell-sound was so loud as to be
heard with perfect distinctness above the noise.

No. of
Mean. Maximum. Mininum. Miecrnn antes

A Without noise....... 0.189 0.244 0.156 21
ee With noise.......... 0.313 0.499 0.183 16
moderate)

B Without noise....... 0.158 0.206 0.1383 20
CBettstroke| With noise........... 0.208 0.295 0.140 19

loud)

‘* Since, in these experiments, the sound B even with noise made a
considerably stronger impression than the sound A without, we must
see in the figures a direct influence of the disturbing noise on the pro-
cess of reaction. This influence is freed from mixture with other factors
when the momentary stimulus and the concomitant disturbance appeal
to different senses. I chose, to test this, sight and hearing. The mo-
mentary signal was an induction-spark leaping from one platinum point
to another against a dark background. The steady stimulation was the
noise above described.

Spark. Mean. Maximum. Minimum. No. of Expts.
WAEHOULMOISEs 0c... ence ese 0.222 0.284 0.158 20
WVAILINIOISEs 1. V5.2 2's isle ea 0;800 0.390 0.250 18

‘* When one reflects that in the experiments with one and the same
sense the relative intensity of the signal is always depressed [which by
itself is a retarding condition] the amount of retardation in these last
observations makes it probable that the disturbing influence upon atten-
tion is greater when the stimuli are disparate than when they belong
to the same sense. One does not, in fact, find it particularly hard’to
register immediately, when the bell rings in the midst of the noise ; but
when the spark is the signal one hasa feeling of being coerced, as one
turns away from the noise towards it. This fact is immediately con-

432 PSYCHOLOGY.

nected with other properties of our attention. The effort of the latter
is accompanied by various corporeal sensations, according to the sense
which is engaged. The innervation which exists during the effort of
attention is therefore probably a different one for each sense-organ.” *

Wundt then, after some theoretical remarks which we
need not quote now, gives a table of retardations, as fol-
lows:

‘ Retardation.
1. Unexpected strength of impression :
a) Unexpectedly strong sound......... , 0.078
b) Unexpectedly weak sound............ 0.171

2. Interference by like stimulus (sound by sound) 0.045 +
3. Interference by unlike stimulus (light by sound) 0.078

It seems probable, from these results obtained with ele.
mentary processes of mind, that all processes, even the
higher ones of reminiscence, reasoning, etc., whenever at-
tention is concentrated upon them instead of being diffused
and languid, are thereby more rapidly performed.t

Still more interesting reaction-time observations have
been made by Miinsterberg. The reader will recollect the
fact noted in Chapter III (p. 93) that reaction-time is
shorter when one concentrates his attention on the expected
movement than when one concentrates it on the expected
signal. Herr Miinsterberg found that this is equally the
case when the reaction is no simple reflex, but can take
place only after an intellectual operation. In a series of
experiments the five fingers were used to react with, and

* Op. cit. pp. 241-5.

+It should be added that Mr. J. M. Cattell (Mind, x1. 33) found, on
repeating Wundt’s experiments with a disturbing noise upon two practised
observers, that the simple reaction-time either for light or sound was
hardly perceptibly increased. Making strong voluntary concentration of
attention shortened it by about 0.013 seconds on an average (p. 240).
Performing mental additions whilst waiting for the stimulus lengthened it
more than anything, apparently. For other, less careful, observations,
compare Obersteiner, in Brain, 1.489. Cattell’s negative results show how
far some persons can abstract their attention from stimuli by which oth-
ers would be disturbed.—A Bartels (Versuche iiber die Ablenkung d. Auf-
merksamkeit, Dorpat, 1889) found that a stimulus to one eye sometimes
prevented, sometimes improved, the perception of a quickly ensvipg very
faint stimulus to the other.

t Cf. Wundt, Physiol. Psych., 1st ed. p. 794.

ATTENTION. 433

the reacter had to use a different finger according as the
signal was of one sort or another. Thus when a word in
the nominative case was called out he used the thumb, for
the dative he used another finger; similarly adjectives,
substantives, pronouns, numerals, etc., or, again, towns,
rivers, beasts, plants, elements; or poets, musicians, phi-
losophers, etc., were co-ordinated each with its finger, so
that when a word belonging to either of these classes was
mentioned, a particular finger and no other had to perform
the reaction. Ina second series of experiments the reac-
tion consisted in the utterance of a word in answer to a
question, such as ‘name an edible fish,” etc.; or “name
the 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 or
cherries ?”’ ete. ; or “ which is Goethe’s finest drama ?”’ ete. ;
or “ which letter comes the later in the alphabet, the letter
L or the first letter of the most beautiful tree?” ete.; or
“which is less, 15 or 20 minus 8?” * ete. ete. ete. Even in
this series of reactions the time was much quicker when the
reacter turned lis attention in advance towards the answer than
when he turned it towards the question. The shorter reaction-
time was seldom more than one fifth of a second; the
longer, from four to eight times as long.

To understand such results, one must bear in mind that
in these experiments the reacter always knew in advance
in a general way the kind of question which he was to re-
ceive, and consequently the sphere within which his possible
answer lay.t In turning his attention, therefore, from the
outset towards the answer, those brain-processes in him
which were connected with this entire ‘sphere’ were kept
sub-excited, and the question could then discharge with a
minimum amount of lost time that particular answer out of
the ‘sphere’ which belonged especially to it. When, on the
contrary, the attention was kept looking towards the ques-
tion exclusively and averted from the possible reply, all

*Beitriige zur Experimentellen Psychologie, Heft 1. pp. 73-106 (1889).

+ To say the very least, he always brought his articulatory innervation
close to the discharging point. Herr M. describesa tightening of the head-
muscles as characteristic of the attitude of attention to the reply.

434 PSYCHOLOGY.

this preliminary sub-excitement of motor tracts failed to
occur, and the entire process of answering had to be gone
through with after the question was heard. No wonder
that the time was prolonged. It is a beautiful example of
the summation of stimulations, and of the way in which
expectant attention, even when not very strongly focalized,
will prepare the motor centres, and shorten the work which
a stimulus has to perform on them, in order to produce a
given effect when it comes.

THE INTIMATE NATURE OF THE ATTENTIVE PROCESS.

We have now a sufficient number of facts to warrant our
considering this more recondite question. And two physi-
ological processes, of which we have got a glimpse, imme-
diately suggest themselves as possibly forming in combina-
tion a complete reply. I mean

1. The accommodation or adjustment of the sensory or-
gans ; and

2. The anticipatory preparation from within of the idea-
tional centres concerned with the object to which the attention is
paid.

1. The sense-organs and the bodily muscles which favor
their exercise are adjusted most energetically in sensorial
attention, whether immediate and reflex, or derived. But
there are good grounds for believing that even intellectual
attention, attention to the idea of a sensible object, is also
accompanied with some degree of excitement of the sense-
organs to which the object appeals. The preparation of
the ideational centres exists, on the other hand, wherever
our interest in the object—be it sensible or ideal—is de-
rived from, or in any way connected with, other interests,
or the presence of other objects, in the mind. It exists as
well when the attention thus derived is classed as passive
as when it is classed as voluntary. So that on the whole
we may confidently conclude—since in mature life we never
attend to anything without our interest in it being in some
degree derived from its connection with other objects—that
the two processes of sensorial adjustment and ideational prep-
aration probably coexist in all our concrete attentive acts.

ATTENTION. 435

The two points must now be proved in more detail.
First, as respects the sensorial adjustment.

That it is present when we attend to sensible things is
obvious. When we look or listen we accommodate our
eyes and ears involuntarily, and we turn our head and body
as well; when we taste or smell we adjust the tongue, lips,
and respiration to the object; in feeling a surface we move
the palpatory organ in a suitable way ; in all these acts, be-
sides making involuntary muscular contractions of a pos-
itive sort, we inhibit others which might interfere with the
result—we close the eyes in tasting, suspend the respiration
in listening, etc. The result is a more or less massive or-
ganic feeling that attention is going on. This organic feel-
ing comes, in the way described on page 302, to be con-
trasted with that of the objects which it accompanies, and
regarded as peculiarly ours, whilst the objects form the not-
me. We treat it as asense of our own activity, although
it comes in to us from our organs after they are accommo-
dated, just as the feeling of any object does. Any object,
if immediately exciting, causes a reflex accommodation of
the sense-organ, and this has two results—first, the object’s
increase in clearness ; and second, the feeling of activity in
question. Both are sensations of an ‘ afferent’ sort.

But in intellectual attention, as we have aiready seen,
(p. 800), similar feelings of activity occur. Fechner was the
first, I believe, to analyze these feelings, and discriminate
them from the stronger ones just named. He writes:

‘When we transfer the attention from objects of one sense to those
of another, we have an indescribable feeling (though at the same time
one perfectly determinate, and reproducible at pleasure), of altered
direction or differently localized tension (Spannung). We feela strain
forward in the eyes, one directed sidewise in the ears, increasing with
the degree of our attention, and changing according as we look at an
object carefully, or listen to something attentively ; and we speak ac-
cordingly of straining the attention. The difference 1s most plainly
felt when the attention oscillates rapidly between eye and ear; and the
feeling localizes itself with most decided difference in regard to the
various sense-organs, according as we wish to discriminate a thing deli-
eately by touch, taste, or smell.

‘* But now I have, when I try to vividly recall a picture of memory
or fancy, a feeling perfectly analogous to that which I experience when [
seek to apprehend a thing keenly by eye or ear; and this analogous feel-

436 PSYCHOLOGY.

ing is very differently localized. While in sharpest possible attention te
real objects (as well as to after-images) the strain is plainly forwards,,
and when the attention changes from one sense to another only alters its
direction between the several external sense-organs, leaving the rest of
the head free from strain, the case is different in memory or fancy, for
here the feeling withdraws entirely from the external sense-organs, and
seems rather to take refuge in that part of the head which the brain
fills ; if I wish, for example, to recall a place or person it will arise be-
fore me with vividness, not according as I strain my attention forwards,
but rather in proportion as I, so to speak, retract it backwards.” *

In myself the ‘ backward retraction’ which is felt during
attention to ideas of memory, etc., seems to be principally
constituted by the feeling of an actual rolling outwards and
upwards of the eyeballs, such as occurs in sleep, and is the
exact opposite of their behavior when we look at a physical
thing. I have already spoken of this feeling on page 300.+

* Psychophysik, Bd. um. pp. 475-6.

+I must say that I am wholly unconscious of the peculiar feelings in
the scalp which Fechner goes on to describe. ‘‘ The feeling of strained
attention in the ditferent sense-organs seems to be only a muscular one prc-
duced in using these various organs by setting in motion, by asort of reflex
action, the muscles which belong to them. One can ask, then, with what.
particular muscular contraction the sense of strained attention in the effort
to recall something is associated? On this question my own feeling gives
me a decided answer; it comes to me distinctly, not as a sensation of ten-
sion in the inside of the head, but as a feeling of strain and contraction in
the scalp with a pressure from without inwards over the whole cranium,
undoubtedly caused by a contraction of the muscles of the scalp. This
harmonizes very well with the German popular expression den Kopf zu-
sammennehmen, ete., etc. Ina former illness, in which I could not endure
the slightest effort of continuous thought, and had no theoretical bias on
this question, the muscles of the scalp, especially those of the occiput,
assumed a fairly morbid degree of sensibility whenever I tried to think.”
(1bid. pp. 490-491.) In an early writing by Professor Mach, after speak-
ing of the way in which by attention we decompose complex musical
sounds into their elements, this investigator continues: ‘‘It is more than a
figure of speech when one says that we ‘search’ among the sounds. ‘This
hearkening search is very observably a bodily activity, just like attentive
looking in the case of the eye. If, obeying tbe drift of physiology, we
understand by attention nothing mystical, but a bodily disposition, it is
most 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 to
accommodating and setting of the optic axes. . . . According to this, it
seems to me a very plausible view that quite generally Attention has its seat
in the mechanism of the body. If nervous work is being done through
certain channels, that by itself is a mechanical ground for other channels
being closed.” (Wien. Sitzungsberichte, Math. Naturw., xLvit. 2. 297,
1863.)

ATTENTION. 437

The reader who doubts the presence of these organic feel-
ings is requested to read the whole of that passage again.

It has been said, however, that we may attend to an
object on the periphery of the visual field and yet aot
accommodate the eye for it. Teachers thus notice the acts
of children in the school-room at whom they appear not to
be looking. Women in general train their peripheral visual
attention more than men. This would be an objection to
the invariable and universal presence of movements of ad-
justment as ingredients of the attentive process. Usually,
as is well known, no object lying in the marginal portions
of the field of vision can catch our attention without at the
same time ‘catching our eye’—that is, fatally provoking
such movements of rotation and accommodation as will
focus its image on the fovea, or point of greatest sensibility.
Practice, however, enables us, with effort, to attend to a
marginal object whilst keeping the eyes immovable. The
object under these circumstances never becomes perfectly
distinct—the place of its image on the retina makes dis-
tinctness impossible—but (as anyone can satisfy himself by
trying) we become more vividly conscious of it than we were
before the effort was made. Helmholtz states the fact so
strikingly that I will quote his observation in fnll. He was
trying to combine in a single solid percept pairs of stereo-
scopic pictures illuminated instantaneously by the electric
spark. The pictures were in a dark box which the spark
from time to time lighted up; and, to keep the eyes frem
wandering betweenwhiles, a pin-hole was pricked through
the middle of each picture, through which the light of the
room came, so that each eye had presented to it during the
dark intervals a single bright point. With parallel optical
axes the points combined into a single image; and the
slightest movement of the eyeballs was betrayed by this
image at once becoming double. Helmholtz now found
that simple linear figures could, when the eyes were thus
kept immovable, be perceived as solids at a single flash of
the spark. But when the figures were complicated photo-
graphs, many successive flashes were required to grasp
their totality.

438 PSYCHOLOG ¥Y.

‘¢ Now it is interesting,” he says, ‘‘to find that, although we keep
steadily fixating the pin-holes and never allow their combined image to
break into two, we can, nevertheless, before the spark comes, keep our
attention voluntarily turned to any particular portion we please of the
dark field, so as then, when the spark comes, to receive an impression
only from such parts of the picture aslie inthis region. In this respect,
then, our attention is quite independent of the position and accommo-
dation of the eyes, and of any known alteration in these organs; and
free to direct itself by a conscious and voluntary effort upon any selected
portion of a dark and undifferenced field of view. This is one of the
most important observations for a future theory of attention.” *

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 fora
single instant we let the latter slip out of our mind, our eye moves
towards the former, as may be easily recognized by the after-images
produced, or by the muscular sounds heard. The case is then less
properly to be called one of translocation, than one of unusually wide
dispersion, of the attention, in which dispersion the largest share still
falls upon the thing directly looked at,” t
and consequently directly accommodated for. Accommoda-
tion exists here, then, as it does elsewhere, and without it
we should lose a part of our sense of attentive activity. In
fact, the strain of that activity (which is remarkably great in
the experiment) is due in part to unusually strong contrac-
tions of the muscles needed to keep the eyeballs still, which
produce unwonted feelings of pressure in those organs.

2. Butif the peripheral part of the picture in this ex-
periment be not physically accommodated for, what is meant
by its sharing our attention? What happens when we
‘distribute’ or ‘disperse ’ the latter upon a thing for which
we remain unwilling to ‘adjust’? This leads us to that
second feature in the process, the ‘ ideational preparation’
of which we spoke. The effort to attend to the marginal
region of the picture consists in nothing more nor less than the
effort to form as clear an idea as is possible of what is there
portrayed. The idea is to come to the help of the sensation
and make it more distinct. It comes with effort, and such
a mode of coming is the remaining part of what we know as

* Physiol. Optik, p. 741.
+ Hermann’s Handbuch, mr. 1. 648.

ATTENTION. 439

our attention’s ‘strain’ under the circumstances. Let us
show how universally present in our acts of attention this
reinforcing imagination, this inward reproduction, this an-
ticipatory thinking of the thing we attend to, is.

It must as a matter of course be present when the atten-
tion is of the intellectual variety, for the thing attended to
then 7s nothing but an idea, an inward reproduction or con-
ception. If then we prove ideal construction of the object
to be present in sensorial attention, it will be present every-
where. When, however, sensorial attention is at its height,
it is impossible to tell how much of the percept comes from
without and how much from within; but if we find that the
preparation we make for it always partly consists of the
creation of an imaginary duplicate of the object in the mind,
which shall stand ready to receive the outward impression
as if in a matrix, that will be quite enough to establish the
point in dispute.

In Wundt’s and Exner’s experiments quoted above, the
lying in wait for the impressions, and the preparation to
react, consist of nothing but the anticipatory imagination
of what the impressions or the reactions are to be. Where
the stimulus is unknown and the reaction undetermined,
time is lost, because no stable image can under such cir-
cumstances be formed in advance. But where both nature
and time of signal and reaction are foretold, so completely
does the expectant attention consist in premonitory imagina-
tion that, as we have seen (pp. 341, note, 373, 377), it may
mimic the intensity of reality, or at any rate produce
reality’s motor effects. It is impossible to read Wundt’s
and Exner’s pages of description and not to interpret the
‘Apperception’ and ‘Spannung’ and other terms as equiva-
lents of «¢magination. With Wundt, in particular, the word
Apperception (which he sets great store by) is quite inter-
changeable with both imagination and attention. All three
are names for the excitement from within of ideational
brain-ceutres, for which Mr. Lewes’s name of preperception
seems the best possible designation.

Where the impression to be caught is very weak, the
way not to miss it is to sharpen our attention for it by pre-
liminary contact with it in a stronger form.

440 PSYCHOLOG Y.

‘‘If we wish to begin to observe overtones, it is advisable, just
before the sound which is to be analyzed, to sound very softly the note
of which we are in search. . .. The piano and harmonium are well
fitted for this use, as both give overtones that are strong. Strike upon
the piano first the g’ [of a certain musical example previously given in
the text]; then, when its vibrations have objectively ceased, strike
powerfully the note ¢, in whose sound g’ is the third overtone, and keep
your attention steadily bent upon the pitch of the just heard g’; you
will now hear this tone sounding in the midst of thee. ... If you
place the resonator which corresponds to a certain overtone, for ex-
ample g’ of the sound ¢, against your ear, and then make the note ¢
sound, you will hear g’ much strengthened by the resonator. . . . This
strengthening by the resonator can be used to make the naked ear
attentive to the sound which it is to catch. For when the resonator
is gradually removed, the g’ grows weaker; but the attention, once
directed to it, holds it now more easily fast, and the observer hears the
tone g’ now in the natural unaltered sound of the note with his unaided
ear.” +

Wundt, commenting on experiences of this sort, says
that

‘©on carefully observing, one will always find that one tries first to
recall the image in memory of the tone to be heard, and that then one
hears it in the total sound. The same thing is to be noticed in weak or
fugitive visual impressions. Illuminate a drawing by electric sparks
separated by considerable intervals, and after the first, and often after
the second and third spark, hardly anything will be recognized. But
the confused image is held fast in memory ; each successive illumination
completes it; and so at last we attain to a clearer perception. The
primary motive to this inward activity proceeds usually from the outer
impression itself. We hear a sound in which, from certain associations,
we suspect a certain overtone ; the next thing is to recall the overtone
in memory ; and finally we catch it in the sound we hear. Or perhaps
we see some mineral substance we have met: before ; the impression
awakens the memory-image, which again more or less completely melts
with the impression itself. In this way every idea takes a certain time
to penetrate to the focus of consciousness. And during this time we
always find in ourselves the peculiar feeling of attention. . . . The
phenomena show that an adaptation of attention to the impression takes
place. The surprise which unexpected impressious give us is due essen-
tially to the fact that our attention, at the moment when the impression
occurs, is not accommodated for it. The accommodation itself is of the
double sort, relating as it does to the intensity as well as to the quality
of the stimulus. Different qualities of impression require disparate

* Helmholtz: Tonempfindungen, 3d ed. 85-9 (Engl. tr., 2d ed. 50, 51;
see also pp. 60-1).

ATTENTION. 441

adaptations. And we remark that our feeling of the strain of our
inward attentiveness increases with every increase in the strength of
the impressions on whose perception we are intent.” *

The natural way of conceiving all this is under the sym-
bolic form 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 latter
influence is the ‘adaptation of the attention.’ The plenary
energy of the brain-cell demands the co-operation of both fac-
tors: not when merely present, but when both present and
attended to, is the object fully perceived.

A few additional experiences will now be perfectly clear.
Helmholtz, for instance, adds this observation to the pas-
sage we quoted a while ago concerning the stereoscopic
pictures lit by the electric spark.

‘* These experiments,” he says, ‘‘ are interesting as regards the part
which attention plays in the matter of double images. . . . For in
pictures 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 only
instantaneous, the moment I strive to imagine in a lively way how
they ought then to look. The influence of attention is here pure; for
all eye movements are shut out.” +

In another place { the same writer says:

‘* When I have before my eyes a pair of stereoscopic drawings which
are hard to combine, it is difficult to bring the lines and points that
correspond, to cover each other, and with every little motion of the eyes
they glide apart. But if I chance to gain a lively mental image (An-
schawuungsbild) of the represented solid form (a thing that often occurs
by lucky chance), I then move my two eyes with perfect certainty over
the figure without the picture separating again.”

Again, writing of retinal rivalry, Helmholtz says:

‘“‘It is not a trial of strength between two sensations, but depends
on our fixing or failing to fix the attention. Indeed, there is scarcely
any phenomenon so well fitted for the study of the causes which are
capable of determining the attention. It is not enough to form the
conscious 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.” §

* Physiol. Psych., 11. 209.
+ Physiol. Optik, 741. t P. 728.
§ Popular Scientific Lectures, Eng. Trans., p. 295.

442 PSYCHOLOGY.

In figures 37 and 38, where the result is ambiguous,
we can make the change from one apparent form to
the other by imagining strongly in advance the form we
wish to see. Similarly in those puzzles where certain lines
in a picture form by their combination an object that has
no connection with what the picture ostensibly represents ;
or indeed in every case where an object is inconspicuous
and hard to discern from the background; we may not be

Fie. 37. Fic. 38.

able to see it for a long time; but, having once seen it, we
can attend to it again whenever we like, on account of the
mental duplicate of it which our imagination now bears. In
the meaningless French words ‘pas de liew Rhone que nous,’
who can recognize immediately the English ‘paddle your
own canoe’?* But who that has once noticed the identity
can fail to have it arrest his attention again? When watch-
ing for the distant clock to strike, our mind is so filled with
its image that at every moment we think we hear the longed-
for or dreaded sound. So of an awaited footstep. Every
stir in the wood is for the hunter his game; for the fugi-
tive his pursuers. Every bonnet in the street is moment-
arily taken by the lover to enshroud the head of his idol.
The image in the mind is the attention; the preperception,
as Mr. Lewes calls it, is half of the perception of the looked-
for thing.t

* Similarly in the verses which some one tried to puzzle me with the
other day: ‘‘ Gui n’a beau dit, qui sabot dit, nid a beau dit elle ?”’

+ I cannot refrain from referring ina note to an additional set of facts
instanced by Lotze in his Medizinische Psychologie, § 431, although I am

ATTENTION. 443

It is for this reason that men have no eyes but for those
aspects of things which they have already been taught to
discern. Any one of us can notice a phenomenon after it
has once been pointed out, which not one in ten thousand
could ever have discovered for himself. Even in poetry
and the arts, some one has to come and tell us what aspects
we may single out, and what effects we may admire, before
our esthetic nature can ‘dilate’ to its full extent and never
‘with the wrong emotion.’ In kindergarten instruction one
of the exercises is to make the children see how many
features they can point out in such an object as a flower or

not satisfied with the explanation, fatigue of the sense-organ, which he
gives. ‘‘In quietly lying and contemplating a wall-paper pattern, some-
times it is the ground, sometimes the design, which is clearer and conse-
quently comes nearer. . . . Arabesques of monochromic many-convoluted
lines now strike us as composed of one, now of another connected linear
system, and all without any intention on our part. [This is beautifully
seen in Moorish patterns ; but a simple diagram like Fig. 39 also shows it
well. We see it sometimes as two
large triangles superposed, some-
times as a hexagon with angles
spanning its sides, sometimes as six
small triangles stuck together at
their corners.]. . . Often it hap-
pens in revery that when we stare
at a picture, suddenly some one of
its features will be lit up with es-
pecial clearness, although neither
its optical character nor its mean-
ing discloses any motive for such
an arousal of the attention. ...
To one in process of becoming
drowsy the surroundings alter-
nately fade into darkness and
abruptly brighten up. The talk of
the bystanders seems now to come
from indefinite distances; but at the next moment {it startles us by
its threatening loudness at our very ear,” etc. These variations, which
everyone will have noticed, are, it seems to me, easily explicable by the
very unstable equilibrium of our ideational centres, of which constant
change is the law. We conceive one set of lines as object, the other as
background, and forthwith the first set becomes the set we see. There
need be no logical motive for the conceptual change, the irradiations of
brain-tracts by each other, according to accidents of nutrition, ‘like sparks
in burnt-up paper,’ suffice. The changes during drowsiness are still more
obviously due to this cause.

Fig. 39,

444 PS YCHOLOG Y.

a stuffed bird. They readily name the features they know
already, such as leaves, tail, bill, feet. But they may look
for 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 only
things which we commonly see are those which we preperceive.
and the only things which we preperceive are those which
have been labelled for us, and the labels stamped into our
mind. If we lost our stock of labels we should be intellect-
ually lost in the midst of the world.

Organic adjustment, then, and ideational preparation or
preperception are concerned in all attentive acts. An interest-
ing theory is defended by no less authorities than Professors
Bain * and Ribot,t and still more ably advocated by Mr. N.
Lange,t who will have it that the ideational preparation
itself is a consequence of muscular adjustment, so that the
latter may be called the essence of the attentive process
throughout. This at least is what the theory of these
authors practically amounts to, though the former two do
not state it in just these terms. The proof consists in the
exhibition of cases of intellectual attention which organic
adjustment accompanies, or of objects in thinking which we
have to execute a movement. Thus Lange says that when
he tries to imagine a certain colored circle, he finds himself
first making with his eyes the movement to which the circle
corresponds, and then imagining the color, etc., as a conse-
quence of the movement.

‘Let my reader,” he adds, ‘‘ close his eyes and think of an extended
object, for instance a pencil. He will easily notice that he first makes
a slight movement fof the eyes] corresponding to the straight line, and
that he often gets a weak feeling of innervation of the hand as if touch-
ing the pencil’s surface. So, in thinking of a certain sound, we turn
towards its direction or repeat muscularly its rhythm, or articulate an
imitation of it.” §

* The Emotions and the Will, 3d ed. p. 370.

+ Psychologie de l’Attention (1889), p. 82 ff.

¢t Philosophische Studien, rv. 413 ff.

§ See Lange, loc. cit. p. 417, for another proof of his view, drawn from
the phenomenon of retinal rivalry.

ATTENTION. 445

But it is one thing to point out the presence of muscu-
lar contractions as constant concomitants of our thoughts,
and another thing to say, with Herr Lange, that thought is
made possible by muscular contraction alone. It may well
be that where the object of thought consists of two parts,
one perceived by movement and another not, the part per-
ceived by movement is habitually called up first and fixed
in the mind by the movement’s execution, whilst the other
part comes secondarily as the movement’s mere associate.
But even were this the rule with all men (which I doubt*),
it would only be a practical habit, not an ultimate necessity.
In the chapter on the Will we shall learn that movements
themselves are results of images coming before the mind,
images sometimes of feelings in the moving part, some-
times of the movement’s effects on eye and ear, and some-
times (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 any
quality of feeling whatever can directly rise up in the form
of an idea, and to assert that only ideas of movement can
call other ideas to the mind.

So much for adjustment and preperception. The only
third process I can think of as always presentis the inhibi-
tion of irrelevant movements and ideas. This seems, how-
ever, to be a feature incidental to voluntary attention rather
than the essential feature of attention at large,t and need

* Many of my students have at my request experimented with imagined
letters of the alphabet and syllables, and they tell me that they can see
them inwardly as total colored pictures without following their outlines
with the eye. I am myself a bad visualizer, and make movements all the
while.—M. L. Marillier, in an article of eminent introspective power which
appeared after my text was written (Remarques sur le Mécanisme de ]’At-
tention, in Revue Philosophique, vol. xxvu. p. 566), has contended against
Ribot and others for the non-dependence of sensory upon motor images in
their relations to attention. I am glad to cite him as an ally.

+ Drs. Ferrier (Functions of the Brain, §§ 102-8) and Obersteiner (Brain,
1, 439 ff.) treat it as the essential feature. The author whose treatment
of the subject is by far the most thorough and satisfactory is Prof. G. E.
Miiller, whose little work Zur Theorie der sinnlichen Aufmerksamkeit,
Inauguraldissertation, Leipzig, Edelmann (1874?), is for learning and
acuteness a model of what a monograph should be. I should like to have
quoted from it, but the Germanism of its composition makes quotation quite

446 PSYCHOLOGY.

not concern us particularly now. Noting merely the inti-
mate connection which our account so far establishes be-
tween attention, on the one hand, and imagination, discrim-
ination, and memory, on the other, let us draw a couple of
practical inferences, and then pass to the more speculative
problem that remains.

The practical inferences are pedagogic. First, to
strengthen attention in children who care nothing for the sub-
ject they are studying and let their wits go wool-gathering.
The interest here must be ‘derived’ from something that
the teacher associates with the task, a reward or a punish-
ment if nothing less external comes to mind. Prof. Ribot
says:

‘A child refuses to read; he is incapable of keeping his mind fixed
on the letters, which have no attraction for him; but he looks with avid-
ity upon the pictures contained in a book. ‘What do they mean?’ he
asks. The father replies: ‘When you can read, the book will tell you.’
After several colloquies like this, the child resigns himself and falls to
work, first slackly, then the habit grows, and finally he shows an ardor
which has to be restrained. This is a case of the genesis of voluntary
attention. An artificial and indirect desire has to be grafted on a natu-
ral and direct one. Reading has no immediate attractiveness, but it
has a borrowed one, and that is enough. The child is caught in the
wheelwork, the first step 1s made.”

I take another example, from M. B. Perez: *

‘“A child of six years, habitually prone to miud-wandering, sat
down one day to the piano of his own accord to repeat an air by which
his mother had been charmed. His exercises lasted an hour. The
same child at the age of seven, seeing his brother busy with tasks in
vacation, 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 an
agreeable surprise to mamma.’ ”

Here, again, a birth of voluntary attention, grafted this
time on a sympathetic instead of ‘a selfish sentiment like
that of the first example. The piano, the German, awaken

impossible. See also G. H. Lewes: Problems of Life and Mind, 3d Series,
Prob. 2, chap. 10, G@ H. Schneider. Der menschliche Wille, 294 ff., 209
ft.: C Stumpf: Tonpsychologie. 1. 67-75, W. B Carpenter: Mental Physi-
ology. chap. 3; Cappie in ‘ Brain,’ July 1886 (hypersemia-theory) , J. Sully
in ~ Brain,’ Oct. 1890.

* L’Enfant de trois 4 sept Ans, p. 108.

ATTENTION. 447

no spontaneous attention; but they arouse and maintain it
by borrowing a force from elsewhere.*

Second, take that mind-wandering which at a later age
may trouble us whilst reading or listening to a discourse. If
attention be the reproduction of the sensation from within,
the habit of reading not merely with the eye, and of listen-
ing not merely with the ear, but of articulating to one’s self
the words seen or heard, ought to deepen one’s attention to
the latter. Experience shows that this is the case. I can
keep my wandering mind a great deal more closely upon a
conversation or a lecture if I actively re-echo to myself the
words than if I simply hear them; and I find a number of
my students who report benefit from voluntarily adopting
a similar course.t

Second, a teacher who wishes to engage the attention of his
class must knit his novelties on to things of which they already
have preperceptions. The old and familiar is readily at-
tended to by the mind and helps to hold in turn the new,
forming, in Herbartian phraseology, an ‘ Apperceptions-
masse’ for it. Of course it is in every case a very delicate
problem to know what ‘Apperceptionsmasse’ to use.
Psychology can only lay down the general rule.

IS VOLUNTARY ATTENTION A RESULTANT OR A FORCE?

When, a few pages back, I symbolized the ‘ideational
preparation’ element in attention by a brain-cell played
upon from within, I added ‘by other brain-cells, or by
some spiritual force,’ without deciding which. The ques-
tion ‘which? is one of those central psychologic wys-
teries which part the schools. When we reflect that the
turnings of our attention form the nucleus of our inner
self; when we see (as in the chapter on the Will we
shall see) that volition is nothing but attention; when we
believe that our autonomy in the midst of nature depends
on our not being pure effect, but a cause,—

Principium quoddam quod fati fadera rumpat,
Ex infinito ne causam causa sequatur—

* Psychologie de l’Attention, p. 53.

+ Repetition of this sort does not confer intelligence of what is said, it only
keeps the mind from wandering into other channels. The intelligence
sometimes comes in beats, as it were, at the end of sentences, or in the
midst of words which were mere words until then. See above, p 281.

448 PSYCHOLOGY.

we must admit that the question whether attention involve
such a principle of spiritual activity or not is metaphysical
as well as psychological, and is well worthy of all the pains
we can bestow on its solution. It is in fact the pivotal
question of metaphysics, the very hinge on which our
picture of the world shall swing from materialism, fatalism,
monism, towards spiritualism, freedom, pluralism,—or else
the other way.

It goes back to the automaton-theory. If feeling is an
inert accompaniment, then of course the brain-cell can be
played upon only by other brain-cells, and the attention
which we give at any time to any subject, whether in the
form of sensory adaptation or of ‘preperception,’ is the
fatally predetermined effect of exclusively material laws.
If, on the other hand, the feeling which coexists with the
brain-cells’ activity reacts dynamically upon that activity,
furthering or checking it, then the attention is in part, at
least, a cause. It does not necessarily follow, of course,
that this reactive feeling should be ‘free’ in the sense of
having its amount and direction undetermined in advance,
for it might very well be predetermined in all these par-
ticulars. If it were so, our attention would not be ma-
terially determined, nor yet would it be ‘free’ in the
sense of being spontaneous or unpredictable in advance.
The question is of course a purely speculative one, for we
have no means of objectively ascertaining whether our feel-
ings react on our nerve-processes or not; and those who
answer the question in either way do so in consequence
of general analogies and presumptions drawn from other
fields. As mere conceptions, the effect-theory and the cause-
theory of attention are equally clear; and whoever affirms
either conception to be true must do so on metaphysical or
universal rather than on scientific or particular grounds.

As regards immediate sensorial attention hardly any one
is tempted to regard it as anything but an effect.* We

* The reader will please observe that I am saying all that can possibly
be said in favor of the effect-theory, since, inclining as 1 do myself to the
cause-theory, 1 do not want to undervalue the enemy. As a matter of
fact, one might begin to take one’s stand against the effect theory at
the outset, with the phenomenon of immediate sensorial attention. One

ATTENTION. 449

are ‘evolved’so as to respond to special stimuli by special
accommodative acts which produce clear perceptions on
the one hand in us, and on the other hand such feelings of
inner activity as were above described. The accommoda-
tion and the resultant feeling ave the attention. We don’t
bestow it, the object draws it from us. The object has the
initiative, not the mind.

Derived attention, where there is no voluntary effort, seems
also most plausibly to be a mere effect. The object again
takes the initiative and draws our attention to itself, not
by reason of its own intrinsic interest, but because it is
connected with some other interesting thing. Its brain-
process is connected with another that is either excited, or
tending to be excited, and the liability to share the excite-
ment and become aroused is the liability to ‘preperception’
in which the attention consists: If I have received an
insult, I may not be actively thinking of it all the time, yet
the thought of it is in sucha state of heightened irrita-
bility, that the place where I received it or the man who
inflicted it cannot be mentioned in my hearing without my
attention bounding, as it were, in that direction, as the im-
agination of the whole transaction revives. Where such a
stirring-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

might say that attention causes the movements of adjustment of the eyes,
for example, and is not merely their effect. Hering writes most emphati-
cally to this effect : ‘“ The movements from one point of fixation to another
are occasioned and regulated by the changes of place of the attention.
When an object, seen at first indirectly, draws our attention to itself, the
corresponding movement of the eye follows without further ado. as a con-
sequence of the attention’s migration and of our effort to make the object
distinct. The wandering of the attention entails that of the fixation point.
Before its movement begins, its goal is already in consciousness and
grasped by the attention. and the location of this spot in the total space
seen is what determines the direction and amount of the movement of the
eye.’ (Hermann’s Handbuch, p. 534.) I do not here insist on this, because
it is hard to tell whether the attention or the movement comes lirst (Her-
ing’s reasons, 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 of
stimulus and association. Mach’s theory that the z7t/ to look is the space-
feeling itself may be compared with Hering’s in this place. See Mach’s
Beitrage zur Analyse der Empfindungen (1886), pp. 55 ff.

450 PSYCHOLOGY.

accounted for if we grant that there is something interest-
ing enough to arouse and fix the thought of whatever may
be connected with it. This fixing is the attention; and it
carries with it a vague sense of activity going on, and of
acquiescence, furtherance, and adoption, which makes us
feel the activity to be our own,

This reinforcement of ideas and impressions by the pre-
existing contents of the mind was what Herbart had in
mind when he gave the name of apperceptive attention to the
variety we describe. We easily see now why the lover's tap
should be heard—it finds a nerve-centre half ready in ad-
vance to explode. We see how we can attend toa com-
panion’s voice in the midst of noises which pass unnoticed
though objectively much louder than the words we hear.
Each word is doubly awakened ; once from without by the
lips of the talker, but already before that from within by
the premonitory processes irradiating from the previous
words, and by the dim arousal of all processes that are
connected with the ‘topic’ of the talk. The irrelevant
noises, on the other hand, are awakened only once. They
form an unconnected train. The boys at school, inatten-
tive to the teacher except when he begins an anecdote, and
then all pricking up their ears, are as easily explained.
The words of the anecdote shoot into association with ex-
citing objects which react and fix them; the other words do
not. Similarly with the grammar heard by the purist and
Herbart’s other examples quoted on page 418.

Even where the attention is voluntary, it is possible to
conceive of it as an effect, and not a cause, a product and
not an agent, The things we attend to come to us by their
own laws. Attention creates no idea ; an idea must already
be there before we can attend to it. Attention only fixes
and retains what the ordinary laws of association bring ‘ be-
fore the footlights’ of consciousness. But the moment we
admit this we see that the attention per se, the feeling of at-
tending need no more fix and retain the ideas than it need
bring them. The associates which bring them also fix them
by the interest which they lend. In short, voluntary and
involuntary attention may be essentially the same. It is
true that where the ideas are intrinsically very unwelcome

ATTENTION. 45)

and the effort to attend to them is great, it seems to us as
if the frequent renewal of the effort were the very cause by
which they are held fast, and we naturally think of the ef-
fort as an original force. In fact it is only to the effort to
attend, not to the mere attending, that we are seriously
tempted to ascribe spontaneous power. We think we can
make more of it ¢f we will ; and the amount which we make
does not seem a fixed function of the ideas themselves, as
it would necessarily have to be if our effort were an eftect
and not a spiritual force. But even here it is possible to
conceive the facts mechanically and to regard the effort as
a mere effect.

Effort is felt only where there is a conflict of interests
in the mind. The idea A may be intrinsically exciting to
us. The idea Z may derive its interest from association
with some remoter good. A may be our sweetheart, Z
may be some condition of our soul’s salvation. Under
these circumstances, if we succeed in attending to Z at all it
is always with expenditure of effort. The ‘ideational prepar-
aration,’ the ‘preperception’ of A keeps going on of its own
accord, whilst that of Z needs incessant pulses of voluntary
reinforcement—that is, we have the feeling of voluntary re-
inforcement (or effort) at each successive moment in which
the thought of Z flares brightly up in our mind. Dynami-
cally, however, that may mean only this: that the associa-
tive processes which make Z triumph are really the
stronger, 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 con-
cerned with A. Such inhibition is a partial neutralization
of the brain-energy which would otherwise be available
for fluent thought. But what is lost for thought is con-
verted into feeling, in this case into the peculiar feeling of
effort, difficulty, or strain.

The stream of our thought is like a river. On the
whole easy simple flowing predominates in it, the drift of
things is with the pull of gravity, and effortless attention
is the rule. But at intervals an obstruction, a set-back, a
log-jam occurs, stops the current, creates an eddy, and
makes things temporarily move the other way. If a real

452 PSYCHOLOGY.

river could feel, it would feel these eddies and set-backs as
places of effort. “I am here flowing,” it would say, “in the
direction of greatest resistance, instead of flowing, as usual,
in the direction of least. My effort is what enables me to per-
form this feat.” Really, the effort would only be a passive in-
dex that the feat was being performed. The agent would all
the while be the total downward drift of the rest of the water,
forcing some of it upwards in this spot; and although, on
the average, the direction of least resistance is downwards,
that would be no reason for its not being upwards now
and then. Just so with our voluntary acts of attention.
They are momentary arrests, coupled with a peculiar feel-
ing, of portions of the stream. But the arresting force,
instead of being this peculiar feeling itself, may be nothing
but the processes by which the collision is produced. The
feeling of effort may be ‘an accompaniment,’ as Mr. Brad-
ley says, ‘more or less superfluous,’ and no more contribute
to the result than the pain in a man’s finger, when a ham-
mer falls on it, contributes to the hammer’s weight. Thus
the notion that our effort in attending is an original faculty,
a force additional to the others of which brain and mind
are the seat, may be an abject superstition. Attention may
have to go, like many a faculty once deemed essential, like
many a yerbal phantom, like many an idol of the tribe. It
may be an excrescence on Psychology. No need of it to
drag ideas before consciousness or fix them, when we see
how perfectly they drag and fix each other there.

T have stated the effect-theory as persuasively as I can.*
It is a clear, strong, well-equipped conception, and like all
such, is fitted to carry conviction, where there is no con-
trary proof. The feeling of effort certainly may be an inert
accompaniment and not the active element which it seems,
No measurements are as yet performed (it is safe to say
none ever will be performed) which can show that it con-
tributes energy to the result. We may then regard atten-
tion as a superfluity, or a ‘Luxus,’ and dogmatize against

* F. H. Bradley, ‘‘Isthere a Special Activity of Attention ?” in ‘ Mind,’
x1. 305, and Lipps, Grundtatsachen, chaps. rv and xxx, have stated it
similarly.

ATTENTION. 453

its causal function with no feeling in our hearts but one of
pride that we are applying Occam’s razor to an entity that
has 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 and
of association may well be indispensable actors in all at-
tention’s performances, and may even be a good enough
‘stock-company’ to carry on many performances without
aid ; and yet they may at times simply form the background
for a ‘ star-performer,’ who is no more their ‘inert accompa-
niment’ or their ‘incidental product’ than Hamlet is
Horatio’s and Ophelia’s. Such a star-performer would be
the voluntary effort to attend, if it were an original psychic
force. Nature may, I say, indulge in these complications ;
and the conception that she has done so in this case is, I
think, just as clear (if not as ‘ parsimonious’ logically) as the
conception that she has not. ‘To justify this assertion, let
us ask just what the effort to attend would effect if it were an
original force.

It would deepen and prolong the stay in consciousness
of innumerable ideas which else would fade more quickly
away. The delay thus gained might not be more than a
second in duration—but that second might be critical ; for
in the constant rising and falling of considerations in the
mind, where two associated systems of them are nearly in
equilibrium it is often a matter of but a second more or less
of attention at the outset, whether one system shall gain
force to occupy the field and develop itself, and exclude
the other, or be excluded itself by the other. When devel-
oped, itmay make us act; and that act may seal our doom.
When we come to the chapter on the Will, we shall see that
the whole drama of the voluntary life hinges on the amount
of attention, slightly more or slightly less, which rival
motor ideas may receive. But the whole feeling of reality,
the whole sting and excitement of our voluntary life, depends
on our sense that in it things are really being decided from
one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling
off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago. This
appearance, which makes life and history tingle with such
a tragic zest, may not be an illusion. As we grant to

454 PSYCHOLOGY.

the advocate of the mechanical theory that it may be one,
so he must grant to us that it may not. And the result is
two conceptions of possibility face to face with no facts
definitely enough known to stand as arbiter between them.

Under these circumstances, one can leave the question
open whilst waiting for light, or one can do what most spec-
ulative minds do, that is, look to one’s general philosophy
to incline the beam. The believers in mechanism do so
without hesitation, and they ought not to refuse a similar
privilege to the believers in a spiritual force. I count my-
self among the latter, but as my reasons are ethical they
are hardly suited for introduction into a psychological
work.* The last word of psychology here is ignorance, for
the ‘forces’ engaged are certainly too delicate and numerous
to be followed in detail. Meanwhile, in view of the strange
arrogance with which the wildest materialistic speculations
persist in calling themselves ‘science,’ it is well to recall
just what the reasoning is, by which the effect-theory of
attention is confirmed. It is an argument from analogy,
drawn from rivers, reflex actions and other material phe-
nomena where no consciousness appears to exist at all, and
extended to cases where consciousness seems the phenom-
enon’s essential feature. Zhe consciousness doesn’t count,
these reasoners say; it doesn’t exist for science, it is ni ;
you mustn’t think about it at all. The intensely reckless
character of all this needs no comment. It is making the me-
chanical theory true per fas aut nefas. For the sake of that
theory we make inductions from phenomena to others that
are startlingly wnlike them; and we assume that a compli-
eation which Nature has introduced (the presence of feeling
and of effort, namely) is not worthy of scientific recognition
at all. Such conduct may conceivably be wise, though I
doubt it; but scientific, as contrasted with metaphysical,
it cannot seriously be called. t

ee

* More will be said of the matter when we come to the chapter on the
Will.

+ See. for a defence of the notion of inward activity, Mr. James Ward’s
searching articles in ‘ Mind,’ xu. 45 and 564.

ATTENTION. 455

INATTENTION.

Having spoken fully of attention, let me add a word
about inattention.

We do not notice the ticking of the clock, the noise of
the city streets, or the roaring of the brook near the
house; and even the din of a foundry or factory will
not mingle with the thoughts of its workers, if they have
been there long enough. When we first put on spectacles,
especially if they be of certain curvatures, the bright reflec-
tions they give of the windows, etc., mixing with the field
of view, are very disturbing. In a fewdays we ignore them
altogether. Various entoptic images, musce volitantes, etc.,
although constantly present, are hardly ever known. The
pressure of our clothes and shoes, the beating of our hearts
and arteries, our breathing, certain steadfast bodily pains,
habitual odors, tastes in the mouth, etc., are examples from
other senses, of the same lapse into unconsciousness of any
too unchanging content—a lapse which Hobbes has ex-
pressed in the well-known phrase, ‘“ Semper idem sentire
ac non sentire ad idem revertunt.”

The cause of the unconsciousness is certainly not the
mere blunting of the sense-organs. Were the sensation
important, we should notice it well enough ; and we can at
any moment notice it by expressly throwing our attention
upon it,* provided it have not become so inveterate that in-
attention to it is ingrained in our very constitution, as in the
case of the musce volitantes the double retinal images, ete.
But even in these cases artificial conditions of observation
and patience soon give us command of the impression
which we seek. The inattentiveness must then be a habit
grounded on higher conditions than mere sensorial fatigue.

* It must be admitted that some little time will often elapse before this
effort succeeds, Asa child, I slept in a nursery with a very loud-ticking
clock, and remember my astonishment more than once, on listening for its
tick, to find myself unable to catch it for what seemed a long space of
time ; then suddenly it would break into my consciousness with an almost
startling loudness.—M. Delbceuf somewhere narrates how, sleeping in the
country near a mill-dam, he woke in the night and thought the water had
ceased to flow, but on looking out of the open window saw it flowing in the
moonlight, and then heard it too.

456 PSYCHOLOGY.

Helmholtz has formulated a general law of inattention
which we shall have to study in the next chapter but
one. Helmholtz’s law is that we leave all impressions un-
noticed which are valueless to us as signs by which to dis-
eriminate things. At most such impressions fuse with their
consorts into an aggregate effect. The upper partial tones
which make human voices differ make them differ as wholes
only—we cannot dissociate the tones themselves. The
odors which form integral parts of the characteristic taste
of certain substances, meat, fish, cheese, butter, wine, do
not come as odors to our attention. The various muscular
and tactile feelings that make up the perception of the
attributes ‘ wet,’ ‘elastic,’ ‘doughy,’ etc., are not singled out
separately for what they are. And all this is due to an in-
veterate habit we have contracted, of passing from them
immediately to their import and letting their substantive
nature alone. They have formed connections in the mind
which it is now difficult to break ; they are constituents of
processes which it is hard to arrest, and which differ alto-
gether from what the processes of catching the attention
would be. In the cases Helmholtz has in mind, not only
we but our ancestors have formed these habits. In the
cases we started from, however, of the mill-wheel, the
spectacles, the factory, din, the tight shoes, etc., the habits
of inattention are mare recent, and the manner of their
genesis seems susceptible, hypothetically at least, of being
traced.

How can impressions that are not needed by the intel-
lect be thus shunted off from all relation to the rest of
consciousness? Professor G. E. Miller has made a plausi-
ble reply to this question, and most of what follows is
borrowed from him.* He begins with the fact that

‘¢ When we first come out of a mill or factory, in which we have re-
mained long enough to get wonted to the noise, we feel as if something
were lacking. Our total feeling of existence is different from what it
was when we were in the mill. . . . A friend writes to me: ‘I have in
my room a little clock which does not run quite twenty-four hours with
out winding. In consequence of this, it often stops. So soon as this
happens, I notice it, whereas I naturally fail to notice it when going.

_———— , OrrvwnwWO ROO

* Zur Theorie d. sinnl. Aufmerksamkeit, p. 128 foll.

ATTENTION. 457

When this first began to happen, there was this modification : I sud-
denly felt an undefined uneasiness or sort of void, without being abie to
say what was the matter; and only after some consideration did I find
the cause in the stopping of the clock.’ ”’

That the stopping of an unfelt stimulus may itself be
felt is a well-known fact: the sleeper in church who wakes
when the sermon ends; the milier who does the same when
his wheel stands still, are stock examples. Now (since
every impression falling on the nervous system must propa-
gate itself somewhither), Miller suggests that impressions
which come to us when the thought-centres are preoccupied
with other matters may thereby be blocked or inhibited
from invading these centres, and may then overflow into
lower paths of discharge. And he farther suggests that if
this process recur often enough, the side-track thus-created
will grow so permeable as to be used, no matter what may
be going on in the centres above. In the acquired inat-
tention mentioned, the constant stimulus always caused
disturbance at first ; and consciousness of it was extruded
successfully only when the brain was strongly excited about
other things. Gradually the extrusion became easier, and
at last automatic.

The side-tracks which thus learn to draft off the stimu-
lations that interfere with thought cannot be assigned with
any precision. They probably terminate in organic pro-
cesses, or insignificant muscular contractions which, when
stopped by the cessation of their instigating cause, immedi-
ately give us the feeling that something is gone from our
existence (as Miiller says), or (as his friend puts it) the feel-
ing of a void.*

Miiller’s suggestion awakens another. It is a well-
known fact that persons striving to keep their attention on
a difficult subject will resort to movements of various un-
meaning kinds, such as pacing the room, drumming with
the fingers, playing with keys or watch-chain, scratching

* T have begun to inquire experimentally whether any of the measurabie
functions of the workmen change after the din of machinery stops at a
workshop. 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 in-
quiry farther (May, 1890).

458 PSYCHOLOG Y.

head, pulling mustache, vibrating foot, or what not, accord-
ing to the individual. There is an anecdote of Sir W. Scott,
when a boy, rising to the head of his class by cutting off
from the jacket of the usual head-boy a button which the
latter was in the habit of twirling in his fingers during the
lesson. The button gone, its owner’s power of reciting
also departed.—Now much of this activity is unquestionably
due to the overflow of emotional excitement during anxious
and concentrated thought. It drains away nerve-currents
which if pent up within the thought-centres would very
likely make the confusion there worse confounded. But
may it not also be a means of drafting off all the irrelevant
sensations of the moment, and so keeping the attention
more exclusively concentrated upon its inner task? Each
individual usually has his own peculiar habitual movement
of this sort. A downward nerve-path is thus kept con-
stantly open during concentrated thought ; and as it seems
to be a law of frequent (if not of universal) application, that
incidental stimuli tend to discharge through paths that are
already discharging rather than through others, the whole
arrangement might protect the thought-centres from inter-
ference from without. Were this the true rationale of these
peculiar movements, we should have to suppose that the
sensations produced by each phase of the movement itself
are also drafted off immediately by the next phase and help
to keep the circular process agoing. I offer the suggestion
for what itis worth; the connection of the movements them-
selves with the continued effort of attention is certainly a
genuine and curious fact.

CHAPTER XII.

CONCEPTION.

THE SENSE OF SAMENESS.

In Chapter VIII, p. 221, the distinction was drawn be<
tween two kinds of knowledge of things, bare acquaintance
with them and knowledge about them. The possibility of
two such knowledges depends on a fundamental psychical
peculiarity which may be entitled “the principle of constancy
in the mind’s meanings,” and which may be thus expressed:
“ The same matters can be thought of in successive portions of
the mental stream, and some of these portions can know that
they mean the same matters which the other portions meant.”
One might put it otherwise by saying that “the mind can
always intend, and know when it intends, to think of the Same.”

This sense of sameness is the very keel and backbone of
our thinking. We saw in Chapter X how the conscious-
ness of personal identity reposed on it, the present thought
finding in its memories a warmth and intimacy which it
recognizes as the same warmth and intimacy it now feels.
This sense of identity of the knowing subject is held by
some philosophers to be the only vehicle by which the
world hangs together. It seems hardly necessary to say
that a sense of identity of the known object would perform
exactly the same unifying function, even if the sense of
subjective identity were lost. And without the intention to
think of the same outer things over and over again, and the
sense that we were doing so, our sense of our own personal
sameness would carry us but a little way towards making
a universe of our experience.

Note, however, that we are in the first instance speak-
ing of the sense of sameness from the point of view of the
mind’s structure alone, and not from the point of view of
the universe. We are psychologizing, not philosophizing,

459

460 PSYCHOLOGY.

That is, we do not care whether there be any real sameness
in things or not, or whether the mind be true or false in its
assumptions of it. Our principle only lays it down that
the mind makes continual use of the notion of sameness,
and if deprived of it, would have a different structure from
what it has. In a word, the principle that the mind can
mean the Same is true of its meanings, but not necessarily
of aught besides.* The mind must conceive as possible
that the Same should be before it, for our experience to be
the sort of thing itis. Without the psychological sense of
identity, sameness might rain down upon us from the outer
world for ever and we be none the wiser. With the psy-
chological sense, on the other hand, the outer world might
be an unbroken flux, and yet we should perceive a repeated
experience. Even now, the world may be a place in which
the same thing never did and never will come twice. The
thing we mean to point at may change from top to bottom
and we be ignorant of the fact. But in our meaning itself
we are not deceived ; our intention is to think of the same.
The name which I have given to the principle, in calling it
the law of constancy in our meanings, accentuates its sub-
jective character, and justifies us in laying it down as the
most important of all the features of our mental structure.

Not all psychic life need be assumed to have the sense
of sameness developed in this way. In the consciousness
of worms and polyps, though the same realities may fre-
quently impress it, the feeling of sameness may seldom
emerge. We, however, running back and forth, like spiders
on the web they weave, feel ourselves to be working over
identical materials and thinking them in different ways.
And the man who identifies the materials most is held to
have the most philosophic human mind.

* There are two other ‘principles of identity’ in philosophy. The
ontological one asserts that every real thing is what it is, that @ is a, and 5,
b. The logical one says that what is once true of the subject of a judgment
is always true of that subject. The ontological law is a tautological
truism; the logical principle is already more, for it implies subjects unal-
terable by time. The psychological law also implies facts which might not
be realized : there might be no succession of thoughts; or if there were, the
later ones might not think of the earlier; or if they did, they might not
recall the content thereof; or, recalling the content, they might not take it
as ‘ the same’ with anything else.

CONCEPTION. 461

CONCEPTION DEFINED.

The function by which we thus identify a numerically dis-
tinct and permanent subject of discourse is called CONCEPTION ;
and the thoughts which are its vehicles are called concepts.
But the word ‘concept’ is often used as if it stood for the
object of discourse itself; and this looseness feeds such
evasiveness in discussion that I shall avoid the use of the
expression concept altogether, and speak of ‘conceiving
state of mind,’ or something similar, instead. The word
‘conception’ is unambiguous. It properly denotes neither
the mental state nor what the mental state signifies, but
the relation between the two, namely, the function of the
mental state in signifying just that particular thing. It is
plain that one and the same mental state can be the ve-
hicle of many conceptions, can mean a particular thing,
and a great deal more besides. If it has such a multiple
conceptual function, it may be called an act of compound
conception.

We may conceive realities supposed to be extra-mental,
as steam-engine ; fictions, as mermaid; or mere entia rati-
onis, like difference or nonentity. But whatever we do
conceive, our conception is of that and nothing else—noth-
ing else, that is, instead of that, though it may be of much
else in addition to that. Each act of conception results
from our attention singling out some one part of the mass
of matter for thought which the world presents, and hold-
ing fast to it, without confusion.* Confusion occurs when

* In later chapters we shall see that determinate relations exist between
the various data thus fixed upon by the mind. These are called a priorz
or axiomatic relations. Simple inspection of the data enables us to per-
ceive them; and one inspection is as effective as a million for engendering
in us the conviction that between those data that relation must always hold.
To change the relation we should have to make the data different. ‘Tie
guarantee for the uniformity and adequacy’ of the data can only be the
mind’s own power to fix upon any objective content, and to mean that
content as often as it likes. This right of the mind to ‘construct ’ perma-
nent ideal objects for itself out of the data of experience seems, singularly
enough, to be a stumbling-block to many. Professor Robertson in his
clear and instructive article ‘Axioms’ in the Encyclopedia Britannica (9th
edition) suggests that it may only be where movements enter into the con-
stitution of the ideal object (as they do in geometrical figures) that we can

462 PSYCHOLOGY.

we do not know whether a certain object proposed to us
is the same with one of our meanings or not; so that the
conceptual function requires, to be complete, that the
thought should not only say ‘I mean this,’ but also say ‘I
don’t mean that.’ *

Each conception thus eternally remains what it is, and
never can become another. The mind may change its.
states, and its meanings, at different times; may drop one
conception and take up another, but the dropped concep-
tion can in no intelligible sense be said to change into its
successor. The paper, a moment ago white, I may now see
to have been scorched black. But my conception ‘ white ’
does not change into my conception ‘black.’ On the con-
trary, it stays alongside of the objective blackness, as a
different meaning in my mind, and by so doing lets me
judge the blackness as the paper’s change. Unless it
stayed, I should simply say ‘ blackness’ and know no more-
Thus, amid the flux of opinions and of physical things, the
world of conceptions, or things intended to be thought
about, stands stiff and immutable, like Plato’s Realm of
Ideas. t

Some conceptions are of things, some of events, some of
qualities. Any fact, be it thing, event, or quality, may be
conceived sufficiently for purposes of identification, if only
it be singled out and marked so as to separate it from
other things. Simply calling it ‘this’ or ‘that’ will suffice.

“‘make the ultimate relations to be what for us they must be in ali circum-
stances.” He makes, it is true, a concession in favor of conceptions of
number abstracted from ‘‘ subjective occurrences succeeding each other in
time” because these also are acts ‘‘of construction, dependent on the
power we have of voluntarily determining the flow of subjective con-
sciousness.”’ ‘‘ The content of passive sensation,” on the other hand, ‘‘ may
indefinitely vary beyond any control of ours.”” What if it do vary, so long
as we can continue to think of and mean the qualities it varied from? We
can ‘make’ ideal objects for ourselves out of irrecoverable bits of passive
experience quite as perfectly as out of easily repeatable active experiences.
And when we have got our objects together and compared them, we da
not make. but find, their relations.

* Cf. Hodgson, Time and Space, § 46. Lotze, Logic, § 11.

+ ‘For though a man in a fever should from sugar have a bitter taste,
which at another time would produce a sweet one, yet the idea of bitter in
that man’s mind would be as distinct as if he had tasted only gall.” (Locke’s
Essay, bk. 11. chap. xt. § 3. Read the whole section !)

CONCEPTION. 463

To speak in technical language, a subject may be conceived
by its denotation, with no connotation, or a very minimum of
connotation, attached. The essential point is that it should
be re-identified by us as that which the talk is about; and
no full representation of it is necessary for this, even when
it is a fully representable thing.

In this sense, creatures extremely low in the intellectual
scale may have conception. All that is required is that
they should recognize the same experience again. A polyp
would be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of ‘ Hollo! thing-
umbob again!’ ever flitted through its mind.

Most of the objects of our thought, however, are to
some degree represented as well as merely pointed out.
Either they are things and events perceived or imagined,
or they are qualities apprehended ina positive way. Even
where we have no intuitive acquaintance with the nature of
a thing, if we know any of the relations of it at all, anything
about it, that is enough to individualize and distinguish it
from all the other things which we might mean. Many of
our topics of discourse are thus problematical, or defined by
their relations only. We think of a thing about which cer-
tain facts must obtain, but we do not yet know how the
thing will look when it is realized. Thus we conceive of a
perpetual-motion machine. Itis a quesitum of a pertectly
definite kind,—we can always tell whether the actual
machines offered us do or do not agree with what we mean
by it. The natural possibility or impossibility of the thing
does not touch the question of its conceivability in this
problematic way. ‘Round square,’ ‘ black-white-thing,’ are
absolutely definite conceptions ; it is a mere accident, as far
as conception goes, that they happen to stand for things
which nature never lets us sensibly perceive.*

* Black round things, square white things. per contra, Nature gives us
freely enough. But the combinations which she refuses to realize may exist
as distinctly, in the shape of postulates, as those which she gives may exist
in the shape of positive images, inour mind. As a matter of fact, she may
realize a warm cold thing whenever two pointsof the skin, so near together
as not to be locally distinguished, are touched, the one with a warm, the
Other with a cold, piece of metal. The warmth and the cold are then often
felt 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. The

464 PSYCHOLOGY.

CONCEPTIONS ARE UNCHANGEABLE.

The fact that the same real topic of discourse is at one
time conceived as a mere ‘that’ or ‘that which, etc.,’ and
is at another time conceived with additional specifications,
has been treated by many authors as a proof that concep-
tions themselves are fertile and self-developing. A concep-
tion, according to the Hegelizers in philosophy, ‘develops
its own significance,’ ‘makes explicit what it implicitly con-
tained,’ passes, on occasion, ‘ over into its opposite,’ and in
short loses altogether the blankly self-identical character
we supposed it to maintain. The figure we viewed as a
polygon appears to us now as a sum of juxtaposed triangles ;
the number hitherto conceived as thirteen is at last noticed
to be six plus seven, or prime; the man thought honest is
believed a rogue. Such changes of our opinion are viewed
by these thinkers as evolutions of our conception, from
within.

The facts are unquestionable ; our knowledge does
grow and change by rational and inward processes, as well
as by empirical discoveries. Where the discoveries are
empirical, no one pretends that the propulsive agency, the
force that makes the knowledge develop, is mere con-
ception. All admit it to be our continued exposure to the
thing, with its power to impress our senses. Thus strychnin,
which tastes bitter, we find will also kill, ete. Now I say
that where the new knowledge merely comes from thinking,
the facts are essentially the same, and that to talk of self-
development on the part of our conceptions is a very bad
way of stating the case. Not new sensations, as in theem-

same space may appear of two colors if, by optical artifice, one of the
colors is made to appear as if seen through the other.—Whether any two
attributes whatever shall be compatible or not, in the sense of appearing
or not to occupy the same place and moment, depends simply on de facto
peculiarities of natural bodies and of our sense-organs. Logically, any one
combination of qualities is to the full as conceivable as any other, and has
as distinct a meaning for thought. What necessitates this remark is the
confusion deliberately kept up by certain authors (e.g. Spencer, Psychol-
ogy, §§ 426-7) between the inconceivable and the not-distinctly-imagin-
able. How do we know which things we cannot imagine unless by first con
ceiving them, meaning them and not other things?

CONCEPTION. 465

pirical instance, but new conceptions, are the indispensable
conditions of advance.

For if the alleged cases of self-development be examined
it will be found, I believe, that the new truth affirms in
every case a relation between the original subject of con-
ception and some new subject conceived later on. These
new subjects of conception arise in various ways. Every
one of our conceptions is of something which our attention
originally tore out of the continuum ef felt experience, and
provisionally isolated so as to make of it an individual
topic of discourse. Every one of them has a way, if the
mind is left alone with it, of suggesting other parts of the
continuum from which it was torn, for conception to work
upon in a similar way. This ‘suggestion’ is often no more
than 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 itis, it brings
new conceptions into cousciousness, which latter thereupon
may or may not expressly attend to the relation in which
the new stands to the old. Thus I have a conception of
equidistant lines. Suddenly, I know not whence, there
pops into my head the conception of their meeting. Sud-
denly again I think of the meeting and the equidistance both
together, and perceive them incompatible. ‘ Those lines
will never meet,” I say. Suddenly again the word ‘ paral-
lel’ pops into my head. ‘They are parallels,’ I continue ;
and soon. Original conceptions to start with ; adventitious
conceptions pushed forward by multifarious psychologic
causes ; comparisons and combinations of the two; result-
ant conceptions to end with; which latter may be of either
rational or empirical relations.

As regards these relations, they are conceptions of the
second degree, as one might say, and their birthplace is
the mind itself. In Chapter XXVIII I shall at considerable
length defend the mind’s claim to originality and fertility
in bringing them forth. But no single one of the mind’s
conceptions is fertile of itself, as the opinion which I criti-
cise pretends. When the several notes of a chord are
sounded together, we get a new feeling from their combi-
nation. This feeling is due to the mind reacting upon that

466 PSYCHOLOGY.

group of sounds in that determinate way, and no one would
think of saying of any single note of the chord that it ‘de-
veloped’ of itself into the other notes or into the feeling of
harmony. So of Conceptions. No one of them develops
into any other. Butif two of them are thought at once,
their relation may come to consciousness, and form matter
for a third conception.

Take ‘thirteen’ for example, which is said to develop
into ‘prime.’ What really happens is that we compare the
utterly changeless conception of thirteen with various other
conceptions, those of the different multiples of two, three,
four, five, and six, and ascertain that it differs from them
all. Such difference is a freshly ascertained relation. It is
only for mere brevity’s sake that we call it a property of the
original thirteen, the property of being prime. We shall see
in the next chapter that (if we count out wsthetic and moral
relations between things) the only important relations of
which the mere inspection of conceptions makes us aware are
relations of comparison, that is, of difference and no-differ-
ence, between them. The judgment 6 + 7 = 18 expresses
the relation of equality between two ideal objects, 13 on the
one hand and 6+-7 on the other, sucessively conceived
and compared. The judgments 6+ 7 > 12, or 6+ 7 < 14,
express in like manner relations of inequality between
ideal objects. But if it be unfair to say that the conception
of 6+7 generates that of 12 or of 14, surely it is as un-
fair to say that it generates that of 13.

The conceptions of 12, 13, and 14 are each and all gen-
erated by individual acts of the mind, playing with its ma-
terials. When, comparing two ideal objects, we find them
equal, the conception of one of them may be that of a whole
and of the other that of all its parts. This particular case
is, it seems to me, the only case which makes the notion of
one conception evolving into another sound plausible. But
even in this case the conception, as such, of the whole does
not evolve into the conception, as such, of the parts. Let
the conception of some object as a whole be given first.
To begin with, it points to and identifies for future thought
a certain that. The ‘whole’ in question might be one of
those mechanical puzzles of which the difficulty is to un-

CONCEPTION. 467

lock the parts. In this case, nobody would pretend that
the richer and more elaborate conception which we gain
of the puzzle after solving it came directly out of our first
crude conception of it, for it is notoriously the outcome of

xperimenting with our hands. It is true that, as they
both mean that same puzzle, our earlier thought and our later
thought have one conceptual function, are vehicles of one
conception. But in addition to being the vehicle of this
bald unchanging conception, ‘that same puzzle, the later
thought is the vehicle of all those other conceptions which
it took the manual experimentation to acquire. Now, it is
just the same where the whole is mathematical instead of
being mechanical. Let it be a polygonal space, which we
cut into triangles, and of which we then affirm that it zs
those triangles. Here the experimentation (although usu-
ally done by a pencil in the hands) may be done by the
unaided imagination. We hold the space, first conceived
as polygonal simply, in our mind’s eye until our atten-
tion wandering to and fro within it has carved it into the
triangles. The triangles are a new conception, the result of
this new operation. Having once conceived them, however,
and compared them with the old polygon which we origi-
nally conceived and which we have never ceased conceiving,
we judge them to fit exactly into its area. The earlier and
later conceptions, we say, are of one and the same space.
But this relation between triangles and potygon which the
mind cannot help finding if it compares them at all, is very
badly expressed by saying that the old conception has de-
veloped into the new. New conceptions come from new
sensations, new movements, new emotions, new associations,
new acts of attention, and new comparisons of old concep-
tions, and not in other ways, Endogenous prolification
is not a mode of growth to which conceptions can lay
claim.

I hope, therefore, that I shall not be accused of hud-
dling mysteries out of sight, when I insist that the psycho!-
ogy of conception is not the place in which to treat of those
of continuity and change. Conceptions form the one class
of entities that cannot under any circumstances change.
They can cease to be, altogether ; or they can stay, as what

468 PSYCHOLOGY.

they severally are; but there is for them no middle way.
They form an essentially discontinuous system, and trans-
fate the process of our perceptual experience, which is nat-
urally a flux, into a set of stagnant and petrified terms. The
very conception of flux itself is an absolutely changeless
meaning in the mind: it signifies just that one thing, flux,
immovably.—And, with this, the doctrine of the flux of the
concept may be dismissed, and need not occupy our atten-
tion again.*
‘ABSTRACT’ IDEAS.

We have now to pass to a less excusable mistake.
There are philosophers who deny that associated things
can be broken asunder at all, even provisionally, by the
conceiving mind. The opinion known as Nominalism says
that we really never frame any conception of the partial
elements of an experience, but are compelled, whenever we
think it, to think it in its totality, just as it came.

I will be silent of medizval Nominalism, and begin with
Berkeley, who is supposed to have rediscovered the doc-

* Arguments seldom make converts in matters philosophical; and some
readers, I know, who find that they conceive a certain matter differently
from what they did, will still prefer saying they have two different editions
of the same conception, one evolved from the other, to saying they have
two different conceptions of the same thing. It depends, after all, on how
we define conception. We ourselves defined it as the function by which
a state of mind means to think the same whereof it thought on a former
occasion. Two states of mind will accordingly be two editions of the same
conception 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, it
is a different conception from the other. And if either mean to think all
that the other thought, and more, it is a different conception, so far as the
more goes. In this last case one state of mind has two conceptual func-
tions. Each thought decides, by its own authority, which, out of all the con-
ceptive functions open to it, it shall now renew; with which other thought
it shall identify itself asa conceiver, and just how far. ‘The same
A which I once meant,” it says, ‘‘I shall now mean again, and mean it
with 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 re-
coupling of conceptions, Compound conceptions come, as functions of
new states of mind. Some of these functions are the same with previous
ones, some not. Any changed opinion, then, partly contains new editions
(absolutely identical with the old, however) of former conceptions, partly
absolutely new conceptions. The division is a perfectly easy one to make
in each particular case.

CONCEPTION. 469

trine for himself. His asseverations against ‘abstract
ideas’ are among the oftenest quoted passages:in philo-
sophic literature.

‘Tt is agreed,” he says, ‘‘on all hands that the qualities or modes
of things do never really exist each of them apart by itself, and sepa-
rated from all others, but are mixed, as it were, and blended together,
several in the same object. But, we are told, the mind being able to
consider each quality singly, or abstracted from those other qualities
with which it is united, does by that means frame to itself abstract
ideas. . . . After this manner, it is said, we come by the abstract idea
of man, or, if you please, humanity, or human nature; wherein it is
true there is included color, because there is no man but has some
color, but then it can be neither white, nor black, nor any particular
color, because there is no one particular color wherein all men partake.
So likewise there is included stature, but then it is neither tall stature
nor low stature, nor yet middle stature, but something abstracted from
all these. And so of the rest. . . . Whether others have this wonder-
ful faculty of abstracting their ideas, they best can tell: for myself, I
find indeed I have a faculty of imagining or representing to myself the
ideas of those particular things I have perceived and of variously com-
pounding and dividing them. . . . I can consider the hand, the eye,
the nose, each by itself abstracted or separated from the rest of the
body. But then, whatever hand or eye I imagine, it must have some
particular shape and color. Likewise the idea of man that I frame to
myself must be either of a white, or a black, or a tawny, a straight, or
a crooked, a tall, or a low, or a middle-sized man. I cannot by any
effort of thought conceive the abstract idea above described. And it
is equally impossible for me to form the abstract idea of motion distinct
from the body moving, and which is neither swift nor slow, curvilinear
nor rectilinear; and the like may be said of all other abstract general
ideas whatsoever. . . . And there is ground to think most men will
acknowledge themselves to be in my case. The generality of men
which are simple and illiterate never pretend to abstract notions. It is
said they are difficult, and not to be attained without pains and study.
. . » Now I would fain know at what time it is men are empioyed in
surmounting that difficulty, and furnishing themselves with those nec-
essary helps for discourse. It cannot be when they are grown up, for
then it seems they are not conscious of any such painstaking; it re-
mains therefore to be the business of their childhood. And surely the
great and multiplied labor of framing abstract notions will be found a
hard task for that tender age. Is it not a hard thing to imagine that a
couple of children cannot prate together of their sugar-plums and rat-
tles and the rest of their little trinkets, till they have first tacked to-
gether numberless inconsistencies, and so framed in their minds ab-
stract general ideas, and annexed them to every common name they
make use of ?” *

* Principles of Human Knowledge, Introduction, §§ 10, 14.

470 PSYCHOLOGY.

The note, so bravely struck by Berkeley, could not,
however, be well sustained in face of the fact patent to
every human being that we can mean color without mean-
ing any particular color, and stature without meaning any
particular height. James Mill, to be sure, chimes in heroi-
cally in the chapter on Classification of his ‘Analysis’; but
in his son John the nominalistic voice has grown so weak
that, although ‘abstract ideas’ are repudiated as a matter
of traditional form, the opinions uttered are really nothing
but a conceptualism ashamed to call itself by its own legit-
imate name.* Conceptualism says the mind can conceive
any quality or relation it pleases, and mean nothing but it,
in isolation from everything else in the world. This is, of
course, the doctrine which we have professed. John Mill
says:

‘* The formation of a Concept does not consist in separating the at-
tributes which are said to compose it from all other attributes of the
same object, and enabling us to conceive those attributes, disjoined
from any others. We neither conceive them, nor think them, nor cog-
nize them in any way, as a thing apart, but solely as forming, in com-
bination with numerous other attributes, the idea of an individual ob-
ject. But, though meaning them only as part of a larger agglomera-
tion, we have the power of fixing our attention on them, to the neglect
of the other attributes with which we think them combined. While
the concentration of attention lasts, if itis sufficiently intense, we may
be temporarily unconscious of any of the other attributes, and may
really, for a brief interval, have nothing present to owr mind but the
attributes constituent of the concept. . . . General concepts, therefore,
we have, properly speaking, none ; we have only complex ideas of ob-
jects in the concrete : but we are able to attend exclusively to certain
parts of the conerete idea: and by that ewclusive attention we enable
those parts to determine exclusively the course of our thoughts as
subsequently called up by association ; and are in a condition to carry
on a traiu of meditation or reasoning relating to those parts only, ea-
actly as if we were able to conceive them separately from the rest.” +

This is a lovely example of Mill’s way of holding piously
to his general statements, but conceding in detail all that
their adversaries ask. If there be a better description ex-
tant, of a mind in possession of an ‘ abstract idea,’ than is

* *Conceptualisme honteux,’ Rabier, Psychologie, 310.
+ Exam. of Hamilton, p. 398. Cf. also Logic, bk. 1. chap. v. § 1, and
bk. rv. chap. 11. § 1.

CONCEPTION. 471

contained in the words I have italicized, I am unacquainted
with it. The Berkeleyan nominalism thus breaks down.

It is easy to lay bare the false assumption which under-
lies the whole discussion of the question as hitherto carried
on. That assumption is that ideas, in order to know, must
be cast in the exact likeness of whatever things they know,
and that the only things that can be known are those which
ideas can resemble. The error has not been confined to
nominalists. Omnis cognitio fit per assimilationem cognoscen-
tis et cogniti has been the maxim, more or less explicitly
assumed, of writers of every school. Practically it amounts
to saying that an idea must be a duplicate edition of what
it knows *—in other words, that it can only know itself—or,
more shortly still, that knowledge in any strict sense of the
word, as a self-transcendent function, is impossible.

Now our own blunt statements about the ultimateness:
of the cognitive relation, and the difference between the
‘object’ of the thought and its mere ‘ topic’ or ‘ subject of
discourse’ (cf. pp. 275 ff.), are all at variance with any such
theory ; and we shall find more and more occasion, as we
advance in this book, to deny its general truth. All that a
state of mind need do, in order to take cognizance of a real-
ity, intend it, or be ‘ about’ it, is to lead to a remoter state
of mind which either acts upon the reality or resembles it.
The only class of thoughts which can with any show of
plausibility be said to resemble their objects are sensations.
The stuff of which all our other thoughts are composed is
symbolic, and a thought attests its pertinency to a topic by
simply terminating, sconer or later, in a sensation which re-
sembles the latter.

But Mill and the vest believe that a thought must be
what it means, and mean what it is, and that if it be a pic-
ture of an entire individual, it cannot mean any part of him
to the exclusion of the rest. I say nothing here of the pre-
posterously false descriptive psychology involved in the
statement that the only things we can mentally picture are

* E.g.: ‘‘ The knowledge of things must mean that the mind finds
itself in them, or that, in some way, the difference between them and the
mind is dissolved.” (E. Caird, Philosophy of Kant, first edition, p. 553.)

472 PSYCHOLOGY.

individuals completely determinate in all regards. Chap-
ter XVIII will have something to say on that point, and we
can ignore it here. For evenif it were true that our images
were always of concrete individuals, it would not in the
least follow that our meanings were of the same.

The sense of our meaning is an entirely peculiar ele-
ment of the thought. It is one of those evanescent and
‘transitive ’ facts of mind which introspection cannot turn
round upon, and isolate and hold up for examination, as an
entomologist passes round an insect on a pin. In the
(somewhat clumsy) terminology I have used, it pertains to
the ‘fringe’ of the subjective state, and is a ‘ feeling of ten-
dency, whose neural counterpart is undoubtedly a lot of
dawning and dying processes too faint and complex to be
traced. The geometer, with his one definite figure before
him, knows perfectly that his thoughts apply to countless
other figures as well, and that although he sees lines of a
certain special bigness, direction, color, etc., he means not
one of these details.. When I use the word man in two dif-
ferent sentences, I may have both times exactly the same
sound upon my lips and the same picture in my mental
eye, but I may mean, and at the very moment of utter-
ing the word and imagining the picture, know that I mean,
two entirely different things. Thus when I say: “ What a
wonderful man Jones is!” Tam perfectly aware that I mean
by man to exclude Napoleon Bonaparte or Smith. But
when I say: “ What a wonderful thing Man is!” I am
equally well aware that I mean to include not only Jones,
but Napoleon and Smith as well. This added conscious-
ness is an absolutely positive sort of feeling, transforming
what would otherwise be mere noise or vision into some-
thing understood; and determining the sequel of my think-
ing, the later words and images, in a perfectly definite way.
We saw in Chapter IX that the image per se, the nucleus,
is functionally the least important part of the thought. Our
doctrine, therefore, of the ‘fringe’ leads to a perfectly satisfac-
tory decision of the nominalistic and conceptualistic controversy,
so far as it touches psychology. We must decide in favor of
the conceptualists, and affirm that the power to think things,
qualities, relations, or whatever other elements there may

CONCEPTION. 473

be, isolated and abstracted from the total experience in
which they appear, is the most indisputable function of our
thought.

UNIVERSALS.

After abstractions, universals! The ‘fringe,’ which
lets us believe in the one, lets us believe in the other too.
An individual conception is of something restricted, in its
application, to a single case. A universal or general con-
ception is of an entire class, or of something belonging to
an entire class, of things. The conception of an abstract
quality is, taken by itself, neither universal nor particular.*
If I abstract white from the rest of the wintry landscape
this morning, it is a perfectly definite conception, a self-
identical quality which I may mean again; but, as I have
not yet individualized it by expressly meaning to restrict it
to this particular snow, nor thought at all of the possibility
of other things to which it may be applicable, it is so far
nothing but a ‘that,’ a ‘floating adjective, as Mr. Brad-
ley calls it, or a topic broken out from the rest of the
world. Properly it is, in this state, a singular—I have
‘singled it out; and when, later, I universalize or indi-
vidualize its application, and my thought turns to mean
either this white or all possible whites, I am in reality mean-
ing two new things and forming two new conceptions.t
Such an alteration of my meaning has nothing to do with
any change in the image I may have in my mental eye, but
solely with the vague consciousness that surrounds the
image, of the sphere to which it is intended to apply. We
can give no more definite account of this vague conscious-

* The traditional conceptualist doctrine is that an abstract must eo ipso
be a universal. Even modern and independent authors like Prof. Dewey

(Psychology, 207) obey the tradition: ‘‘The mind seizes upon some one
aspect, . . . abstracts or prescinds it. This very seizure of some one
element generalizes the one abstracted. ... Attention, in drawing it

forth, makes it a distinct content of consciousness, and thus universalizes
it; 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 the
mind; and significance is always universal.”

tC. F. Reid’s Intellectual Powers, Essay v. chap. 111.— Whiteness is
one thing, the whiteness of this sheet of paper another thing.

474 PSYCHOLOG Y.

ness than has been given on pp. 249-266. But that is no
reason for denying its presence.*

But the nominalists and traditional conceptualists find
matter for an inveterate quarrel in these simple facts. Full
of their notion that an idea, feeling, or state of conscious-
ness can at bottom only be aware of its own quality; and
agreeing, as they both do, that such an idea or state of con-
sciousness is a perfectly determinate, singular, and tran-
sitory thing; they find it impossible to conceive how it
should become the vehicle of a knowledge of anything
permanent or universal. “To know a universal, it must
be universal; for like can only be known by lke,” ete.
Unable to reconcile these incompatibles, the knower and
the known, each side immolates one of them to save the
other. The nominalists ‘settle the hash’ of the thing known
by denying it to be ever a genuine universal ; the conceptual-
ists despatch the knower by denying it to be a state of
mind, in the sense of being a perishing segment of thoughts’
stream, consubstantial with other facts of sensibility. They
invent, instead of it, as the vehicle of the knowledge of
universals, an actus purus intellectiis, or an Ego, whose fune-
tion is treated as quasi-miraculous and nothing if not awe-
inspiring, and which it is a sort of blasphemy to approach
with the intent to explain and make common, or reduce to
lower terms. Invoked in the first instance as a vehicle for
the knowledge of universals, the higher principle presently
is made the indispensable vehicle of all thinking whatever,
for, it is contended, “a universal element is present in
every thought.” The nominalists meanwhile, who dislike

* Mr. F. H. Bradiey says the conception or the ‘meaning’ ‘‘ consists
of a part of the content, cut off, fixed by the mind, and considered apart
from the existence of the sign. It would not be correct to add, and re-
ferred away to another real subject ; for where we think without judging,
and where we deny, that description would not be applicable.” Tkis
seems to be the same doctrine as ours; the application to one or to all sub-
jects of 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 his
Principles of Logic. The doctrine I defend is stoutly upheld in Rosmini’s
Philosophical System, Introduction by Thomas Davidson, p. 48 (London,
1882).

CONCEPTION. 475

actus puros and awe-inspiring principles and despise the
reverential mood, content themselves with saying that we
are mistaken in supposing we ever get sight of the face of
an universal ; and that what deludes us is nothing but the
swarm of ‘individual ideas° which may at any time ve
awakend by the hearing of a name.

If we open the pages of either school, we find it impos-
sible to tell, in all the whirl about universal and particular,
when the author is talking about universals in the mind,
and when about objective universals, so strangely are the two
mixed together. James Ferrier, for example, is the most
brilliant of anti-nominalist writers. But who is nimble-
witted enough to count, in the following sentences from
him, the number of times he steps from the known to the
knower, and attributes to 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 thinking
can take place without them. They are universal, inasmuch as they
are completely divested of the particularity which characterizes all the
phenomena of mere sensation. To grasp the nature of this univer-
sality is not easy. Perhaps the best means by which this end may be
compassed is by contrasting it with the particular. It is not difficult
to understand that a sensation, a phenomenon of sense, is never more
than the particular which it is. As such, that is, in its strict particu-
larity, it is absolutely unthinkable. In the very act of being thought,
something more than it emerges, and this something more cannot be
again the particular. . . . Ten particulars per se cannot be thought
of any more than one particular can be thought of; . . . there always
emerges in thought an additional something, which is the possibility of
other particulars to an indefinite extent. . . . The indefinite additional
something which they are instances of is a universal. ... The idea
or universal cannot possibly be pictured in the imagination, for this
would at once reduce it to the particular. . . . This inability to form
any sort of picture or representation of an idea does not proceed
from any imperfection or limitation of our faculties, but is a quality
inherent in the very nature of intelligence. A contradiction is in-
volved in the supposition that an idea or a universal can become the
object either of sense or of the imagination. An idea is thus diamet-
rically opposed to an image.” *

The nominalists, on their side, admit a qguasi-universal,
something which we think as if it were universal, though it

=-

* Lectures on Greek Philosophy, pp. 33-39.

476 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

isnot; andin all that they say about this something, which
they explain to be ‘an indefinite number of particular
ideas,’ the same vacillation between the subjective and the
objective points of view appears. The reader never can
tell whether an ‘idea’ spoken of is supposed to be a knower
ora known. The authors themselves do not distinguish.
They want to get something in the mind which shall resem-
ble what is out of the mind, however vaguely, and they think
that when that fact is accomplished, no farther questions
will be asked. James Mill writes : *

‘*The word, man, we shall say, is first applied to an individual ; it
is first associated with the idea of that individual, and acquires the
power of calling up the idea of him ; it is next applied to another indi-
vidual and acquires the power of calling up the idea of him ; so of an-
other and another, till it has become associated with an indefinite num-
ber, and has acquired the power of calling up an indefinite number of
those ideas indifferently. What happens? It does call up an indefinite
number of the ideas of individuals as often as it occurs ; and calling
them 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 extent
complex, from the multiplicity of the ideas it comprehends, it is of ne-
cessity indistinct; . . . and this indistinctness has, doubtless, been a
main cause of the mystery which has appeared to belong to it... . It
thus appears that the word man is not a word having a very simple
idea, as was the opinion of the realists ; nor a word having no idea at
all, as was that of the [earlier] nominalists ; but a word calling up an
indefinite number of ideas, by the irresistible laws of association, and
forming them into one very complex and indistinct, but not therefore
unintelligible, idea.”

Berkeley had already said : +

‘* A word becomes general by being made the sign, not of an ab-
stract general idea, but of many several particular ideas, any one of
which it indifferently suggests to the mind. An idea which, consid-
ered in itself, is particular, becomes general by being made to represent
or stand for all other particular ideas of the same sort.” ‘

‘Stand for,’ not know ; ‘becomes general,’ not becomes
aware of something general; ‘particular ideas,’ not par-
ticular things—everywhere the same timidity about beg-
sing the fact of knowing, and the pitifully impotent attempt
to foist it in the shape of a mode of being of ‘ideas.’ If

* Analysis, chap. VIII.
t+ Principles of Human Knowledge, Introduction, §§ 11, 12.

CONCEPTION. 477

the fact to be conceived be the indefinitely numerous ac-
tual and possible members of a class, then it is assumed
that if we can only get enough ideas to huddle together for
a moment in the mind, the being of each several one of
them there will be an equivalent for the knowing, or mean-
ing, of one member of the class in question ; and their num-
ber will be so large as to confuse our tally and leave it
doubtful whether all the possible members of the class
have thus been satisfactorily told off or not.

Of course this is nonsense. An idea neither is what it
knows, nor knows what it is; nor will swarms of copies of
the same ‘ idea,’ recurring in stereotyped form, or ‘ by the
irresistible laws of association formed into one idea,’ ever
be the same thing as a thought of ‘all the possible members’
of aclass. We must mean that by an altogether special
bit of consciousness ad hoc. But it is easy to translate
Berkeley’s, Hume’s, and Mill’s notion of a swarm of ideas
into cerebral terms, and so to make them stand for some-
thing real ; and, in this sense, I think the doctrine of these
authors less hollow than the opposite one which makes
the vehicle of universal conceptions to be an actus purus of
the soul. Ifeach ‘idea’ stand for some special nascent
nerve-process, then the aggregate of these nascent processes
might have for its conscious correlate a psychic ‘ fringe,’
which should be just that universal meaning, or intention
that the name or mental picture employed should mean all
the possible individuals of the class. Every peculiar compli-
cation of brain-processes must have some peculiar correlate
in the soul. To one set of processes will correspond the
thought of an indefinite taking of the extent of a word like
man ; to another set that of a particular taking; and to a
third set that of a universal taking, of the extent of the
same word. The thought corresponding to either set of
processes, is always itself a unique and singular event,
whose dependence on its peculiar nerve-process I of course
am far from professing to explain.*

*It may add to the effect of the. text to quote a passage from the essay
in ‘Mind,’ referred to ow p. 224.

“Why may we not side with the conceptualists in saying that the un1-
versal sense of a word does correspond toa mental fact of some kind, but

478 PSYCHOLOG Y.

Truly in comparison with the fact that every conception,
whatever it be of, is one of the mind’s immutable posses-

at the same time, agreeing with the nominalists that all mental facts are
modifications of subjective sensibility, why may we not call that fact a
‘feeling’? Man meant for mankind is in short a different feeling from
man as a mere noise, or from man meant for that man, to wit, John Smith
alone. Not that the difference consists simply in the fact that, when
taken universally, the word has one of Mr. Galton’s ‘ blended’ images of
man associated with it. Many persons have seemed to think that these
blended or, as Prof. Huxley calls them, ‘generic’ images are equivalent
to concepts. But, in itself, a blurred thing is just as particular as
a sharp thng ; and the generic character of either sharp image or
blurred image depends on its being felt with its representative function.
This function is the mysterious plus, the understood meaning. But it is
nothing applied to the image from above, no pure act of reason inhabiting
a supersensible and semi-supernatural plane. It can be diagrammatized as
continuous with all the other segments of the subjective stream. It is
just that staining, fringe, or halo of obscurely felt relation to masses of
other imagery about to come, but not yet distinctly in focus, which we
have so abundantly set forth [in Chapter LX].

“Tf the image come unfringed, it reveals but a simple quality, thing,
or event ; if it come fringed, it may reveal something expressly taken uni-
versally or in a scheme of relations. The difference between thought and
feeling thus reduces itself, in the last subjective analysis, to the presence
or absence of ‘fringe.’ And this in turn reduces itself, with much proba-
bility, in the last physiological analysis, to the absence or presence of sub-
excitements in other convolutions of the brain than those whose discharges
underlie the more definite nucleus, the substantive ingredient, of the
thought,—in this instance, the word or image it may happen to arouse,

‘«The contrast is not, then, as the Platonists would have it, between
cerlain subjective facts called images and sensations, and others called
acts of relating intelligence; the former being blind perishing things,
knowing not even their own existence as such, whilst the latter combine
the poles in the mysterious synthesis of their cognitive sweep. The con-
trast is really between two «aspects, in which all mental facts without excep-
tion may be taken ; their structural aspect, as being subjective, and their
functional aspect, as being cognitions. In the former aspect, the highest
as well as the lowest is a feeling, a peculiarly tinged segment of the stream.
This tingeing is its sensitive body, the wie thm zu Muthe ist, the way it feels
whilst passing. In the latter aspect, the lowest mental fact as well as the
highest may grasp some bit of truth as its content, even though that truth
were as relationless a matter as a bare unlocalized and undated quality of
pain. From the cognitive point of view, all mental facts are intellections.
From the subjective point of view all are feelings. Once admit that the
passing and evanescent are as real parts of the stream as the distinct
and comparatively abiding; once allow that fringes and halos, inarticulate
perceptions, whereof the objects are as yet unnamed, mere nascencies of
cognition, premonitions, awarenesses of direction, are thoughts sue generis,

CONCEPTION. 479

sions, the question whether a single thing, or a whole class
of things, or only an unassigned quality, be meant by it, is
an insignificant matter of detail. Our meanings are of
singulars, particulars, indefinites, and universals, mixed
together in every way. A singular individual is as much
conceived when he is isolated and identified away from the
rest of the world in my mind, as is the most rarefied and
universally applicable quality he may possess—being, for
example, when treated in the same way.* From every
point of view, the overwhelming and portentous character
ascribed to universal conceptions is surprising. Why, from
Plato and Aristotle downwards, philosophers should have
vied with each other in scorn of the knowledge of the par-
ticular, and in adoration of that of the general, is hard to
understand, seeing that the more adorable knowledge ought
to be that of the more adorable things, and that the tings
of worth are all concretes and singulars. The only value
of universal characters is that they help us, by reasoning,

as much as articulate imaginings and propositions are; once restore, I say,
the vague to its psychological rights, and the matter presents no further
difficulty.

«« And then we see that the current opposition of Feeling to Knowledge
is quite a false issue. If every feeling is at the same time a bit of knowl-
edge, we ought no longer to talk of mental states differing by having more
or 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 broad
scheme of relations is a feeling that knows much ; the feeling of a simple
quality is a feeling that knows little. But the knowing itself, whether of
much or of little, has the same essence, and is as good knowing in the one
case as in the other. Concept and image, thus discriminated through
their 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 of
entity, 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, gud subjective, are singularand particular. Both
are 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 or
structure, which is always finite. It only has a meaning when applied to
their use, import, or reference to the kind of object they may reveal. The
representation, as such, of the universal object is as particular as that of
an object about which we know so little that the interjection ‘ Ha!’ is all
it can evoke from us in the way of speech. Both should be weighed in the
same scales, and have the same measure meted out to them, whether of
worship or of contempt.” (Mind, 1x. pp. 18-19.)

* Hodgson, Time and Space, p. 404.

480 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

to know new truths about individual things. The restric-
tion of one’s meaning, moreover, to an individual thing,
probably requires even more complicated brain-processes
than its extension to all the instances of a kind; and the
mere 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 be
called a bit of perverse sentimentalism, a philosophic ‘idol
of the cave.’

It may-seem hardly necessary to add (what follows
as a matter of course from pp. 229-237, and what has
been implied in our assertions all along) that nothing can
be conceived twice over without being conceived in entirely
different states of mind. Thus, my arm-chair is one of the
things of which I have a conception; I knew it yesterday
and recognized it when I looked at it. But if I think of it
to-day as the same arm-chair which I looked at yesterday,
it is obvious that the very conception of it as the same is an
additional complication to the thought, whose inward con-
stitution must alter in consequence. In short, it is logically
impossible that the same thing should be known as the same
by two successive copies of ne same thought. As a matter of
fact, the thoughts by which we know that we mean the same
thing 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 our
sense of its identity pertains to the mere fringe, sometimes
it involves the nucleus, of our thought. We never can
break the thought asunder and tell just which one of its bits
is the part that lets us know which subject is referred to ;
but nevertheless we always do know which of all possible
subjects we have in mind. Introspective psychology must
here throw up the sponge; the fluctuations of subjective life
are too exquisite to be arrested by its coarse means. It
must confine itself to bearing witness to the fact that all sorts
of different subjective states do form the vehicle by which
the same is known; and it must contradict the opposite
view.

The ordinary Psychology of ‘ideas’ constantly talks as

CONCEPTION. 481

if the vehicle of the same thing-known must be the same re-
current state of mind, and as if the having over again of the
same ‘idea’ were not only a necessary but a sufficient con-
dition for meaning the same thing twice. But this recur-
rence of the same idea would utterly defeat the existence of
a repeated knowledge of anything. It would be a simple re-
version into a pre-existent state, with nothing gained in the
interval, and with complete unconsciousness of the state
having existed before. Such is not the way in which we
think. As a rule we are fully aware that we have thought
before of the thing we think of now. The continuity and
permanency of the topic is of the essence of our intellection.
We recognize the old problem, and the old solutions ; and
we go on to alter and improve and substitute one predicate
for another without ever letting the subject change.

This is what is meant when it is said that thinking con-
sists in making judgments. A succession of judgments may
all be about the same thing. The general practical postulate
which encourages us to keep thinking at all is that by going
on to do so we shall judge better of the same things than if
we do not.* In the successive judgments, all sorts of new
operations are performed on the things, and all sorts of
new results brought out, without the sense of the main
topic ever getting lost. At the outset, we merely have the
topic ; then we operate on it; and finally we have it again
in a richer and truer way. A compound conception has
been substituted for the simple one, but with full conscious-
ness that both are of the Same.

The distinction between having and operating is as
natural in the mental as in the material world. As our
hands may hold a bit of wood and a knife, and yet do
naught with either; so our mind may simply be aware of a
thing’s existence, and yet neither attend to it nor discrimi-
nate it, neither locate nor count nor compare nor like nor
dislike nor deduce it, nor recognize it articulately as having
been 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,

* Compare the admirable passage in Hodgson’s Time and Space, p. 210.

482 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

compare, count, and judge it. There is nothing involved in
all this which we did not postulate at the very outset of our
introspective work : realities, namely, extra mentem, thoughts,
and possible relations of cognition between the two. The
result of the thoughts’ operating on the data given to
sense is to transform the order in which experience comes
into an entirely different order, that of the conceived world.
There is no spot of light, for example, which I pick out and
proceed to define as a pebble, which is not thereby torn
from its mere time- and space-neighbors, and thought in
conjunction with things physically parted from it by the
width of nature. Compare the form in which facts appear
in 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 to
gather up the world’s contents. Most facts and relations
fall through its meshes, being either too subtle or insig-
nificant to be fixed in any conception. But whenever a
physical reality is caught and identified as the same with
something already conceived, it remains on the sieve, and
all the predicates and relations of the conception with
which it is identified become its predicates and relations
too ; 1t is subjected to the sieve’s network, in other words.
Thus comes to pass what Mr. Hodgson calls the translation
of the perceptual into the conceptual order of the world.*
In Chapter XXII we shall see how this translation
always takes place for the sake of some subjective interest,
and how the conception with which we handle a bit of sen-
sible experience is really nothing but a teleological instru-
ment. This whole function of conceiving, of fixing, and hold-
ing fast to meanings, has no significance apart from the fact
that the conceiver is a creature with partial purposes and pri-
vate ends. There remains, therefore, much more to be said
about conception, but for the present this will suffice.

* Philosophy of Reflection, 1. 273-808.

oO
LIBRARY) =o]

CHAPTER XIII. ~
DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON.

Ir is matter of popular observation that some men have
sharper senses than others, and that some have acutecr
minds and are able to ‘split hairs’ and see two shades of
meaning where the majority see but one. Locke long ago
set apart the faculty of discrimination as one in which men
differ individually. What he wrote is good enough to quote
as an introduction to this chapter:

‘* Another faculty we may take notice of in our minds is that of
discerning and distinguishing between the several ideas it has. It is
not enough to have a confused perception of something in general : un-
less the mind had a distinct perception of different objects and their
qualities, it would be capable of very little knowledge; though the
bodies that affect us were as busy about us as they are now, and the
mind were continually employed in thinking. On this faculty of dis-
tinguishing one thing from another depends the evidence and certainty
of several even very general propositions, which have passed for innate
truths ; because men, overlooking the true cause why those propositions
find universal assent, impute it wholly to native uniform impressions +
whereas it in truth depends upon this clear discerning faculty of the
mind, whereoy it perceives two ideas to be the same or different. But
of this more hereafter ?

‘¢How much the imperfection of accurately discriminating ideas one
from another lies either in the dulness or faults of the organs of sense,
or want of acuteness, exercise, or attention in the understanding, or
hastiness and precipitancy natural to some tempers, I will not here ex-
amine : it suffices to take notice that this is one of the operations that
the mind may reflect on and observe in itself. It is of that conse-
quence to its other knowledge, that so far as this faculty is in itself
dull, or not rightly made use of for the distinguishing one thing
from another, so far our notions are confused, and our reason and
judgment disturbed or misled. If in having our ideas in the memory
ready at hand consists quickness of parts ; in this of having them un-
confused, and being able nicely to distinguish one thing from another
where there is but the least difference, consists in a great measure the
exactness of judgment and clearness of reason which is to be observed
in one man above another. And hence, perhaps, may be given some

483

484 PSYCHOLOGY.

reason of that common observation,—that men who have a great
deal of wit and prompt memories have not always the clearest judg:
ment or deepest reason. For, wit lying most in the assemblage
of ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety
wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, thereby to
make up pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the fancy;
judgment, on the contrary, lies quite on the other side, in separating
earefully one from another ideas wherein can be found the least
difference, thereby to avoid being misled by similitude and by
affinity to take one thing for another. This is a way of proceeding
quite contrary to metaphor and allusion, wherein for the most part
lies that entertainment and pleasantry of wit which strikes so lively on
the fancy, and therefore, so acceptable to all people because its beauty
appears at first sight, and there is required no labor of thought to ex-
amine what truth or reason there is in it.” *

But Locke’s descendants have been slow to enter into the
path whose fruitfulness was thus pointed out by their mas-
ter, and have so neglected the study of discrimination that
one might almost say that the classic English psychologists
have, as a school, hardly recognized it to exist. ‘Associa-
tion’ has proved itself in their hands the one all-absorbing
power of the mind. Dr. Martineau, in his review of Bain,
makes some very weighty remarks on this onesidedness of
the Lockian school. Our mental history, says he, is, in
its view,

‘‘a perpetual formation of new compounds: and the words ‘ associ-
ation,’ ‘cohesion,’ ‘fusion,’ ‘indissoluble connection,’ all express the
change from plurality of data to some unity of result. An explanation
of the process therefore requires two things: a true enumeration of
the primary constituents, and a correct statement of their laws of com-
bination ; just as, in chemistry, we are furnished with a list of the
simple elements, and the with then principles of their synthesis. Now
the latter of these two conditions we find satisfied by the association-
psychologists : but not the former. They are not agreed upon their
catalogue of elements, or the marks by which they may know the simple
from the compound. The psychologic unit is not fixed ; that which is
called one impression by Hartley is treated as half-a-dozen or more by
Mill: and the tendency of the modern teachers on this point is to recede
more and more from the better-chosen track of their master. Hartley,
for example, regarded the whole present effect upon us of any single
object—say, an orange—as a single sensation ; and the whole vestige
it left behind, asa single ‘idea of sensation.’ His modern disciples,

* Human Understanding, 11. xi. 1, 2.

DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON. 485

on the other hand, consider this same effect as an aggregate from a
plurality of sensations, and the ideal trace it leaves as highly compound.
‘The idea of an object,’ instead of being an elementary starting-point
with them, is one of the elaborate results of repetition and experience ;
and is continually adduced as remarkably illustrating the fusing power
of habitual association. Thus James Mill observes :

‘**Tt is to this great law of association that we trace the formation of
our ideas of what we call external objects ; that is, the ideas of a cer-
tain number of sensations, received together so frequently that they
coalesce 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 aman. In using the names, tree, horse, man, the names
of what I call objects, I am referring, and can be referring, only to my
own sensations; in fact, therefore, only naming a certain number of
sensations 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.’ *

‘*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 the
additional feeling of touch. Knock two together, and there is a charac-
teristic sound. To preserve the impression of an object of this kind,
there must be an association of all these different effects. Such associa-
tion, when matured and firm, is our idea, our intellectual grasp of the
pebble. Passing to the organic world, and plucking a rose, we have
the same effects of form to the eye and hand, color and touch, with
new effects of odor and taste. <A certain time is requisite for the co-
herence of all these qualities in one aggregate, so as to give us for all
purposes the enduring image of the rose. When fully acquired, any
one of the characteristic impressions will revive the others ; the odor,
the sight, the feeling of the thorny stalk—each of these by itself will
hoist the entire impression into the view.’ ¢

‘*Now, this order of derivation, making our objective knowledge be-
gin with plurality of impression and arrive at unity, we take to bea
complete inversion of our psychological history. Hartley, we think,
was perfectly right in taking no notice of the number of inlets through
which an object delivers its effect upon us, and, in spite of this circum-
stance, treating the effect as one. . . . Even now, after life has read
us so many analytic lessons, in proportion as we can fix the attitude of
our scene and ourselves, the sense of plurality in our impressions re-
treats, and we lapse into an undivided consciousness ; losing, for in-

* Analysis, vol. 1. p. 71.
+ The Senses and the Intellect, page 411.

486 PSYCHOLOGY.

stance, the separate notice of any uniform hum in the ear, or light in
the eye, or weight of clothes on the body, though not one of them is in-
operative on the complexion of our feeling. This law, once granted,
must be carried far beyond Hartley’s point. Not only must each ob-
ject present itself to us integrally before it shells off into its qualities,
but-the whole scene around us must disengage for us object after object
from its still background by emergence and change; and even our
self-detachment from the world over against us must wait for the
start of collision between the force we issue and that which we receive.
To confine ourselves to the simplest case: when a red ivory ball, seen
for the first time, has been withdrawn, it will leave a mental represen-
tation of itself, in which all that it simultaneously gave us will indis-
tinguishably coexist. Let a white ball succeed to it; now, and not
before, will an attribute detach itself, and the color, by force of con-
trast, be shaken out into the foregronnd. Let the white ball be re-
placed by an egg: and this new difference will bring the form into
notice from its previous slumber. And thus, that which began by
being simply an object, cut out from the surrounding scene, becomes
for us first a ved object, and then a ved rownd object ; and so on. In-
stead, therefore, of the qualities, as separately given, subscribing to-
gether and adding themselves up to present us with the object as their
aggregate, the object is beforehand with them, and from its integrity
delivers 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, ex-
pressed by an adjective. Hence it is that we are compelled to think of
the object as having, not as being, its qualities ; and can never heartily
admit the belief of any loose lot of attributes really fusing themselves
into a thing.. The unity of the original whole is not felt to go to pieces
and be resolved into the properties which it successively gives off ; it
retains a residuary existence, which constitutes it a substance, as against
the emerging quality, which is only its phenomenal predicate. Were
it not for this perpetual process of differentiation of self from the
world, of object from its scene, of attribute from object, no step of
Abstraction could be taken ; no qualities could fall under our notice ;
and had we ten thousand senses, they would all converge and meet in
but one consciousness. But if this be so, it is an utter falsification of
the order of nature to speak of sensations grouping themselves into
aggregates, and so composing for us the objects of which we think ;
and the whole language of the theory, in regard to the field of
synchronous existences, is a direct inversion of the truth. Experience
proceeds and intellect is trained, not by Association, but by Dissoct-
ation, not by reduction of pluralities of impression to one, but by the
opening out of one into many ; and a true psychological history must
expound itself in analytic rather than synthetic terms. Precisely those
ideas—of Substance, of Mind, of Cause, of Space—which this system
treats as infinitely complex, the last result of myriads of confluent ele-

DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON. 487

ments, are in truth the residuary simplicities of consciousness, whose
stability the eddies and currents of phenomenal experience have left
undisturbed.” *

The truth is that Experience is trained by both associa-
tion and dissociation, and that psychology must be writ
both in synthetic and in analytic terms. Our original sen-
sible totals are, on the one hand, subdivided by discrimi-
native attention, and, on the other, united with other totals,
—either through the agency of our own movements, carrying
our senses from one part of space to another, or because
new objects come successively and replace those by which
we were at first impressed. The ‘simple impression’ of
Hume, the ‘simple idea’ of Locke are both abstractions,
never realized in experience. Experience, from the very
first, presents us with concreted objects, vaguely continuous
with the rest of the world which envelops them in space
and time, and potentially divisible into inward elements
and parts. These objects we break asunder and reunite.
We must treat them in both ways for our knowledge of
them to grow; and it is hard to say, on the whole, which
way preponderates. But since the elements with which
the traditional associationism performs its constructions—
‘simple sensations,’ namely—are all products of discrimi-
nation carried to a high pitch, it seems as if we ought to
discuss the subject of analytic attention and discrimination
first.

The noticing of any part whatever of our object is an
act of discrimination. Already on p. 404 I have described
the manner in which we often spontaneously lapse into the
undiscriminating state, even with regard to objects which
we have already learned to distinguish. Such anesthetics
as chloroform, nitrous oxide, etc., sometimes bring about
transient lapses even more total, in which numerical dis-
crimination especially seems gone; for one sees light and
hears sound, but whether one or many lights and sounds
is quite impossible to tell. Where the parts of an object
have already been discerned, and each made the object of
a special discriminative act, we can with difficulty feel the

* Essays Philosophical and Theological : First Series, pp. 268-273.

488 PSYCHOLOG Y.

object again in its pristine unity ; and so prominent may
our consciousness of its composition be, that we may hardly
believe that it ever could have appeared undivided. But
this is an erroneous view, the undeniable fact being that
any number of impressions, from any number of sensory sources,
falling simultaneously on a mind WHICH HAS NOT YET EXPERI-
ENCED THEM SEPARATELY, will fuse into a single undivided ob-
ject for that mind. 'The law is that all things fuse that can
fuse, and nothing separates except what must. What makes
impressions separate we have to study in this chapter.
Although they separate easier if they come in through dis-
tinct nerves, yet distinct nerves are not an unconditional
ground of their discrimination, as we shall presently see.
The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails
at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confu-
sion ; and to the very end of life, our location of all things
in one space is due to the fact that the original extents or
bignesses of all the sensations which came to our notice at
once, coalesced together into one and the same space.
There is no other reason than this why “the hand I touch
and see coincides spatially with the hand I immediately
feel.” *

It is true that we may sometimes be tempted to exclaim,
whenonce a lot of hitherto unnoticed details of the object lie
before us, “ How could we ever have been ignorant of these
things and yet have felt the object, or drawn the conclusion,
as if it were a continuum, a plenum? There would have
been gaps—but we felt no gaps ; wherefore we must have seen
and heard these details, leaned upon these steps; they must
have beenoperative upon our minds, just as they are now, only
unconsciously, or at least inattentively. Our first unanalyzed
sensation was really composed of these elementary sensa-
tions, our first rapid conclusion was really based on these
intermediate inferences, all the while, only we failed to note
the fact.”” But thisis nothing but the fatal ‘ psychologists fal-
lacy’ (p. 196) of treating an inferior state of mind as if it
must somehow know implicitly all that is explicitly known

* Montgomery in ‘ Mind,’ x. 527. Cf. also Lipps: Grundtatsachen des
Seelenlebens, p. 579 ff.; and see below, Chapter XIX.

DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON. 489

about the same topic by superior states of mind. The thing
thought of is unquestionably the same, but it is thought
twice over in two absolutely different psychoses,—once as an
unbroken unit, and again as asum of discriminated parts. It
is not one thought in two editions, but two entirely distinct
thoughts of one thing. And each thought is within itself a
continuum, a plenum, needing no contributions from the other
to fill up its gaps. As I sit here, I think objects, and I
make inferences, which the future is sure to analyze and
articulate and riddle with discriminations, showing me many
things wherever I now notice one. Nevertheless, my
thought feels quite sufficient unto itself for the time being;
and ranges from pole to pole, as free, and as unconscious
of having overlooked anything, as if it possessed the great-
est discriminative enlightenment. We all cease analyzing
the world at some point, and notice no more differences.
The last units with which we stop are our objective elements
of being. Those of a dog are different from those of a
Humboldt; those of a practical man from those of a meta-
physician. But the dog’s and the practical man’s thoughts
feel continuous, though to the Humboldt or the metaphy-
sician they would appear full of gaps and defects. And
they are continuous, as thoughts. It is only as mirrors of
things that the superior minds find them full of omissions.
And when the omitted things are discovered and the un-
noticed differences laid bare, it is not that the old thoughts
split up, but that new thoughts supersede them, which make
new judgments about the same objective world.

THE PRINCIPLE OF MEDIATE COMPARISON.

When we discriminate an element, we may contrast it
with the case of its own absence, of its simply not being
there, without reference to what 2s there; or we may also
cake the latter into account. Let the first sort of discrim-
ination be called existential, the latter differential discrimina-
tion. A peculiarity of differential discriminations is that
they result in a perception of differences which are felt as
greater or less one than the other. Entire groups of differ-
ences may be ranged in series: the musical scale, the color
‘scale, are examples. Every department of our experience

490 PSYCHOLOG Y.

may have its data written down in an evenly gradated order,
from a lowest to a highest member. And any one datum
may be aterm in several such orders. A given note may
have a high place in the pitch-series, a low place in the
loudness-series, and a medium place in the series of agree-
ablenesses. A given tint must, in order to be fully deter-
mined, have its place assigned in the series of qualities, in
the series of purities (freedom from white), and in the series
of intensities or brightnesses. It may be low in one of
these respects, but high in another. In passing from term
to term in any such series we are conscious not only of each
step of difference being equal to (or greater or less than)
the last, but we are conscious of proceeding in a uniform
direction, different from other possible directions. This
consciousness of serial increase of differences is one of the
fundamental facts of our intellectual life. More, more,
MORE, of the same kind of difference, we say, as we advance
from term to term, and realize that the farther on we get
the larger grows the breach between the term we are at
and the one from which we started Between any two
terms of such a series the difference is greater than that be-
tween any intermediate terms, or than that between an inter-
mediate term and either of the extremes. The louder than
the loud is louder than the less loud ; the farther than the
far is farther than the less far; the earlier than the early is
earlier than the late ; the higher than the high is higher
than the low; the bigger than the big is bigger than the
small; or, to put it briefly and universally, the more than the
more is more than the less ; such is the great synthetic prin-
ciple of mediate comparison which is involved in the posses-
sion by the human mind of the sense of serial increase. In
Chapter XXVIII we shall see the altogether overwhelming
importance of this principle in the conduct of all our higher
rational operations.

ARE ALL DIFFERENCES DIFFERENCES OF COMPOSITION ?

Each of the differences in one of these uniform series
feels like a definite sensible quantity, and each term seems
like the last term with this quantity added. In many con-
crete objects which differ from one another we can plainly

DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON. 491

see that the difference does consist simply in the fact that
one object is the same as the other plus something else, or
that they both have an identical part, to which each adds
a distinct remainder. Thus two pictures may be struck
from the same block, but one of them may differ in having
color added; or two carpets may show an identical pattern
which in each is woven in distinct hues. Similarly, two
classes of sensation may have the same emotional tone but
negate each other in remaining respects—a dark color and
a deep sound, for example; or two faces may have the same
shape of nose but everything else unlike. The similarity
of the same note sounded by instruments of different tim-
bre is explained by the coexistence of a fundamental tone
common to both, with over-tones in one which the other
lacks. Dipping my hand into water and anon into a colder
water, I may then observe certain additional feelings, broader
and deeper irradiations of the cold, so to speak, which were
not in the earlier experience, though for aught I can tell,
the feelings may be otherwise the same. ‘ Hefting’ first
one weight, and then another, new feelings may start out
in my elbow-joint, wrist, and elsewhere, and make me call
the second weight the heavier of the twain. In all these
eases each of the differing things may be represented by
two parts, one that is common to it and the others, and an-
other that is peculiar to itself. If they form a series,
A, B, C, D, ete., and the common part be called X, whilst
the lowest difference be called d, then the composition
of the series would be as follows:

B=(X+ d)+d, orX + 2d;

D= X-+ 4d;

If X itself were ultimately composed of d’s we should
have the entire series explained as due to the varying com-
bination and re-combination with itself of an unvarying ele-
ment; and all the apparent differences of quality would be
translated into differences of quantity alone. This is the
sort of reduction which the atomic theory in physics and

492 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

the mind-stuff theory in psychology regard as their ideal.
So that, following the analogy of our instances, one might
easily be tempted to generalize and to say that all difference
is but addition and subtraction, and that what we called
‘ differential ’ discrimination is only ‘existential’ discrimina-
tion in disguise; that is to say, that where A and B differ,
we merely discern something in the one which the other is
without. Absolute identity in things up to a certain point,
then absolute non-identity, would on this theory take the
place of those ultimate qualitative unlikenesses between
them, in which we naturally believe ; and the mental func-
tion of discrimination, ceasing to be regarded as an ultimate
one, would resolve itself into mere logical affirmation and
negation, or perception that a feature found in one thing,
in another does not exist.

Theoretically, however, this theory is full of difficulty.
Tf all the differences which we feel were in one direction,
so that all objects could be arranged in one series (how-
ever long), it might still work. But when we consider the
notorious fact that objects differ from each other in divergent
directions, it grows well nigh impossible to make it do so.
For then, supposing that an object differed from things in
one direction by the increment d, it would have to differ
from things in another direction by a different sort of incre-
ment, call it d’; so that, after getting rid of qualitative un-
likeness between objects, we should have it back on our
hands again between their increments. We may of course
re-apply our method, and say that the difference between
d and d’ is not a qualitative unlikeness, but a fact of com-
position, one of them being the same as the other plus an
increment of still higher order, 6 for example, added. But
when we recollect that everything in the world can be com-
pared with everything else, and that the number of direc-
tions of difference is indefinitely great, then we see that the
complication of self-compoundings of the ultimate differen-
tial increment by which, on this theory, all the innumerable
unlikenesses of the world are explained, in order to avoid
writing any of them down as ultimate differences of kind,
would beggar all conception. It is the mind-dust theory,

—

DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON. 493

with all its difficulties in a particularly uncompromising
form ; and all for the sake of the fantastic pleasure of being
able arbitrarily to say that there is between the things in
the world and between the ‘ideas’ in the mind nothing but
absolute sameness and absolute not-sameness of elements,
the not-sameness admitting no degrees.

To me it seems much wiser to turn away from such
transcendental extravagances of speculation, and to abide
by the natural appearances. These would leave unlikeness
as an indecomposable relation amongst things, and a rela-
tion moreover of which there were all degrees. Absolute
not-sameness would be the maximal degree, absolute same-
ness the minimal degree of this unlikeness, the discernment
of which would be one of our ultimate cognitive powers.*
Certainly the natural appearances are dead against the notion
that no qualitative differences exist. With the same clear-
ness with which, in certain objects, we do feel a difference to
be a mere matter of plus and minus, in other objects we feel
that this is not the case. Contrast our feeling of the differ-
ence between the length of two lines with our feeling of the
difference between blue and yellow, or with that between
right and left. Is right equal to left with something added ?
Is blue yellow plus something? If so, plus what?t So
long as we stick to verifiable psychology, we are forced to
admit that differences of simple KIND form an irreducible sort
of relation between some of the elements of our experi-
ence, and forced to deny that differential discrimination

* Stumpf (Tonpsychologie, 1. 116 ff.) tries to prove that the theory that
all differences are differences of composition leads necessarily to an infinite
regression when we try to determine the unit. It seems to me that in his
particular reasoning he forgets the ultimate units of the mind-stuff
theory. I cannot find the completed infinite to be one of the obstacles to
belief 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 ex-
ceptionally clear thinker. The strictures by Wable in the Vierteljsch. f.
wiss. Phil. seem to me to have no force, since the writer does not dis-
criminate between resemblance of things obviously compound and that of
things sensibly simple.

+ The beltef that the causes of effects felt by us to differ qualitatively are
facts which differ only in quantity (e.g. that blue is caused by so many
ether- waves, and yellow by a smaller number) must not be confounded
with the feeling that the effects differ quantitatively themselves.

494 PSYCHOLOGY.

can everywhere be reduced to the mere ascertainment
that elements present in one fact, in another fail to exist.
The perception that an element exists in one thing and does
not exist in another and the perception of qualitative differ-
ence are, in short, entirely disconnected mental functions,*

But at the same time that we insist on this, we must
also admit that differences of quality, however abundant,
are not the only distinctions with which our mind has to
deal. Differences which seem of mere composition, of
number, of plus and minus, also abound.t But it will be
best for the present to disregard all these quantitative
cases and, taking the others (which, by the least favorable
calculation, will still be numerous enough), to consider
next the manner in which we come to cognize simple differences
of kind. We cannot explain the cognition; we can only as-
certain the conditions by virtue of which it occurs.

THE CONDITIONS OF DISCRIMINATION.

What, then, are the conditions under which we discriminate
things differing in a simple way ?

First, the things must BE different, either in time, or
place, or quality. If the difference in any of these regards
is sufliciently great, then we cannot overlook it, except by
not noticing the things at all. No one can help singling
out a black stripe on a white ground, or feeling the contrast
between a bass note and a high one sounded immediately
after it. Discrimination is here involuntary. But where
the objective difference is less, discrimination need not so
inevitably occur, and may even require considerable effort
of attention to be performed at all.

* Herr G. H. Schneider, in his youthful pamphlet (Die Unterscheidung,
1877) has tried to show that there are no positively existent elements of
sensibility, no substantive qualities between which differences obtain, but
that the terms wecal! such, the sensations, are but sums of differences,
loci or starting points whence many directions of difference proceed.
‘ Unterschiedsempfindungs- Complexe’ are what he callsthem. This absurd
carrying out of that ‘principle of relativity’ which we shall have to men-
tion in Chapter XVII may serve as a counterpoise to the mind-stuff
theory, which says that there are nothing but substantive sensations, and
denies the existence of relations of difference between them at all.

+ Cf. Stumpf, Tonpsychologie, 1. 121, and James Ward, Mind, 1. 464,

DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON. 495

Another condition which then favors it is that the sen-
sations excited by the differing objects should not come to
us simultaneously but fall in immediate SUCCESSION upon the
same organ. It is easier to compare successive than simul-
taneous sounds, easier to compare two weights or two tem-
peratures by 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 color
by moving the eye from one to the other, so that they suc-
cessively stimulate the same retinal tract. In testing the
local discrimination of the skin, by applying compass-
points, it is found that they are felt to touch different spots
much more readily when set down one after the other than
when both are appled at once. In the latter case they
may be two or three inches apart on the back, thighs, etce.,
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 to
compare simultaneous impressions at all. The reason why
successive impression so much favors the result seems to
be that there is a real sensation of difference, aroused by the
shock of transition from one perception to another which
is unlike the first. This sensation of difference has its own
peculiar quality, as difference, which remains sensible, no
matter of what sort the terms may be, between which it
obtains. It is, in short, one of those transitive feelings,
or feelings of relation, of which I treated in a former
place (pp- 245 ff.); and, when once aroused, its object
lingers in the memory ale with the substantive terms
which precede and follow, and enables our judgments of
comparison to be made. We shall soon see reason to believe
that no two terms can possibly be simultaneously perceived
to differ, unless, in a preliminary operation, we have suc-
cessively attended to each, and, in so doing, had the transi-
tional sensation of difference between ee aroused, A
field of consciousness, however complex, is never analyzed
unless some of its ingredients have changed. We now
discern, ’tis true, a multitude of coexisting things about
us at every moment: but this is because we have had a
long education, and each thing we now see distinct has
been already differentiated from its neighbors by repeated

496 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

appearances in successive order. To the infant, sounds,
sights, touches, and pains, form probably one unanalyzed
bloom of confusion.*

Where the difference between the successive sensations
is but slight, the transition between them must be made as
immediate as possible, and both must be compared in mem-
ory, in order to get the best results. One cannot judge
accurately of the difference between two similar wines,
whilst the second is still in one’s mouth. So of sounds,
warmths, ete.—we must get the dying phases of both sen-
sations of the pair we are comparing. Where, however,
the difference is strong, this condition is immaterial, and
we can then compare a sensation actually felt with another
carried in memory only. The longer the interval of time
between the sensations, the more uncertain is their discrim-
ination.

The difference, thus immediately felt between two terms,
is independent of our ability to identify either of the terms
by itself. I can feel two distinct spots to be touched on
my skin, yet not know which is above and which below. IL
can observe two neighboring musical tones to differ, and
still not know which of the two is the higher in pitch.
Similarly I may discriminate two neighboring tints, whilst
remaining uncertain which is the bluer or the yellower,
or how either differs from its mate.t

With such direct perceptions of difference as this, we
must not confound those entirely unlike cases in which we
infer that two things must differ because we know enough
about each of them taken by itself to warrant our classing

* The ordinary treatment of this is to call it the result of the fusion of
a lot of sensations, in themselves separate. This is pure mythology, as the
sequel will abundantly show.

+ ‘‘ We often begin to be dimly aware of a difference in a sensation or
group of sensations, before we can assign any definite character to that
which differs. Thus we detect a strange or foreign ingredient or flavor in
a familiar dish, or of tone in a familiar tune, and yet are wholly unable for
a while to say what the intruder is like. Hence perhaps discrimination
may be regarded as the earliest and most primordial mode of intellectual
activity.” (Sully: Outlines of Psychology, p. 142. (Cf. also G. H.
Schneider: Die Unterscheidung, pp. 9-10.)

:
.
;

DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON. 407

them under distinct heads. It often happens, when the
interval is long between two experiences, that our judg-
ments are guided, not so much by a positive image or copy
of the earlier one, as by our recollection of certain facts
about it. Thus I know that the sunshine to-day is less
bright than on a certain day last week, because I then said
it was quite dazzling, a remark I should not now care to
make. Or I know myself to feel better now than I was last
summer, because I can now psychologize, and then I could
not. We are constantly busy comparing feelings with
whose quality our imagination has no sort of acquaintance
at the time—pleasures, or pains, for example. It is notori-
ously hard to conjure up in imagination a lively image of
either of these classes of feeling. The associationists may
prate of an idea of pleasure being a pleasant idea, of an
idea of pain being a painful one, but the unsophisticated
sense of mankind is against them, agreeing with Homer
that the memory of griefs when past may be a joy, and with
Dante that there is no greater sorrow than, in misery, to
recollect one’s happier time.

Feelings remembered in this iniperfect way must be
compared with present or recent feelings by the aid of what
we know about them. We identify the remote experience
in such a case by conceiving it. The most perfect way of
conceiving it is by defining it in terms of some standard
scale. If I know the thermometer to stand at zero to-day
and to have stood at 32° last Sunday, I know to-day to be
colder, and I know just how much colder, than it was last
Sunday. IH I know that a certain note was c, and that this
note is d, I know that this note must be the higher of the
two.

The inference that two things differ because their con-
comitants, effects, names, kinds, or—to put it generally—
their signs, differ, is of course susceptible of unlimited
complication. The sciences furnish examples, in the way
in which men are led, by noticing differences in effects, to
assume new hypothetical causes, differing from any known
heretofore. But no matter how many may be the steps by
which such inferential discriminations are made, they all
end in a direct intuition of difference somewhere. The last

498 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

ground for inferring that A and B differ must be that,
whilst Ais an m, B is an n, and that m and nare seen to
differ. Let us then neglect the complex cases, the A’s and
the B’s, and go back to the study of the unanalyzable per-
ception of difference between their signs, the m’s and the
ns, when these are seemingly simple terms.

I said that in their immediate succession the shock of
their difference was felt. Itis felt repeatedly when we go
back and forth from m to n; and we make a point of get-
ting it thus repeatedly (by alternating our attention at least)
whenever the shock is so slight as to be with difficulty per-
ceived. But in ad@tion to being felt at the brief instant
of transition, the difference also feels as if incorporated
and taken up into the second term, which feels ‘ different-
from-the-first’’ even while it lasts. Itis obvious that the
‘second term’ of the mind in this case is not bald n, but
a very complex object; and that the sequence is not sim-
ply first ‘m,’ then ‘difference, then ‘n’; but first ‘m,’
then ‘difference, then ‘n-different-from-m.’ The several
thoughts, however, to which these three several objects are
revealed, are three ordinary ‘segments’ of the mental
‘stream.’

As our brains and minds are actually made, it is impos-
sible to get certain m’s and n’s in immediate sequence and
to keep them pure. If kept pure, it would mean that they
remained uncompared. With us, inevitably, by a mechan-
ism which we as yet fail to understand, the shock of differ-
ence is felt between them, and the second object is not n
pure, but n-as-different-from-m.* It is no more a paradox
that under these conditions this cognition of m and n in
mutual relation should occur, than that under other condi-
tions the cognition of m’s or n’s simple quality should
occur. Butasit has been treated as a paradox, and asa
spiritual agent, not itself a portion of the stream, has been

* Tn cases where the difference is slight, we may need, as previously
remarked, to get the dying phase of 7 as well as of m before n-different-
from-m is 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 whit
the essential features of the case.

DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON. 499

invoked to account for it, a word of further remark seems
desirable.

My account, it will be noted, is merely a description of
the facts as they occur: feelings (or thoughts) each know-
ing something, but the later one knowing, if preceded by
a certain earlier one, a more complicated object than it
would have known had the earlier one not been there. I
offer no explanation of such a sequence of cognitions. The
explanation (I devoutly expect) will be found some day to
depend on cerebral conditions. Until it is forthcoming, we
can only treat the sequence as a special case of the general
law that every experience undergone by the brain leaves in
it a modification which is one fact#in determining what
manner of experiences the following ones shall be (cf.
pp. 252-236). To anyone who denies the possibility of such
a 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 must
in some fashion contain what it knows) begin by giving a
crooked account of the facts. Both admit that for m and —
n to be known in any way whatever, little rounded and fin-
ished off duplicates of each must be contained in the mind
as separate entities. These pure ideas, so called, of m and
n respectively, succeed each other there. And since they
are distinct, say the sensationalists, they are eo ipso distin-
guished. “'To have ideas different and ideas distinguished,
are synonymous expressions; different and distinguished
meaning exactly the same thing,” says James Mill.* “Dis,
tinguished!” say the spiritualists, “distinguished by what,
forsooth? Truly the respective ideas of m and of n in the
mind are distinct. But for that very reason neither can
distinguish itself from the other, for to do that it would
have to be aware of the other, and thus for the time being
become the other, and that would be to get mixed up with
the other and to lose its own distinctness. Distinctness
of ideas and idea of distinctness, are not one thing, but
two. This last is a relation. Only a relating principle, op-
posed in nature to all facts of feeling, an Ego, Soul, or

* Analysis, J. S. Mill’s ed., 1.17. Cf. also pp. 12, 14.

500 PSYCHOLOG Y.

Subject, is competent, by being present to both of the
ideas alike, to hold them together and at the same time to
keep them distinct.”

But if the plain facts be admitted that the pure idea of
‘n’ is never in the mind at all, when ‘m’ has once gone be-
fore; and that the feeling ‘n-different-from-m’ is itself an
absolutely unique pulse of thought, the bottom of this
precious quarrel drops out and neither party is left with
anything to fight about. Surely such a consummation
ought to be welcomed, especially when brought about, as
here, by a formulation of the facts which offers itself so
naturally and unsophistically.*

* There is only one obstacle, and that is our inveterate tendency to be-
lieve that where two things or qualities are compared, it must be that
exact duplicates of both have got into the mind and have matched them-
selves against each other there. To which the first reply is the empirical
one of ‘‘ Look into the mind and see.” When I recognize a weight which
I now lift as inferior to the one I just lifted; when, with my tooth now
aching, I perceive the pain to be ess intense than it was a minute ago; the
two things in the mind which are compared would, by the authors I criti-
cise, 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 ad-
mitted to be a weaker thing than a sensation. Nevertheless it is in these
instances judged stronger; that is, an object supposed to be known only in
so far forth as this image represents it, is judged stronger. Ought not this
to shake one’s belief in the notion of separate representative ‘ideas’ weigb-
ing themselves, or being weighed by the Ego, against each other in the
mind? And let it not be said that what makes us judge the felt pain to be
weaker than the imagined one of a moment since is our recollection of
the downward nature of the shock of difference which we felt as we passed to
the present moment from the one before it. That shock does undoubtedly
have a different character according as 1t comes between terms of which
the second diminishes or increases; and it may be admitted that in cases
where the past term is doubtfully remembered, the memory of the shock,
as plus or minus, might sometimes enable us to establish a relation which
otherwise we should not perceive. But one could hardly expect the mem-
ory of this shock to overpower our actual comparison of terms, both of
which are present (as are the image and the sensation in the case supposed),
and make us judge the weaker one to be the stronger.—And hereupon
comes the second reply: Suppose the mind does compare two realities by
comparing two ideas of its own which represent them—what is gained?
The same mystery is still there. The ideas must still be known; and, as
the attention in comparing oscillates from one to the other, past must be
known with present just as before. If you must end by simply saying
that your ‘ Ego,’ whilst being neither the idea of m nor the idea of n, yet
knows and compares both, why not allow your pulse of thought, which 2s

DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON. 501

We may, then, conclude our examination of the manner
in which simple involuntary discrimination comes about, by
saying, 1) that its vehicle is a thought possessed of a knowl-
edge of both terms compared and of their difference ; 2)
that the necessary and sufficient condition (as the human
mind goes) for arousing this thoughe is that a thought or
feeling of one of the terms discriminated should, as imme-
diately as possible, precede that in which the other term is
known ; and 3) and that the thought which knows the second
term will then also know the difference (or in more difficult
cases will be continuously succeeded by one which does
know the difference) and both of the terms between which
it holds.

This last thought need, however, not be these terms with
their difference, nor contain them. A man’s thought can
know and mean all sorts of things without those things get-
ting bodily into it—the distant, for example, the future, and
the past.* The vanishing term in the case which occupies
us vanishes; but because it is the specific term it is and
nothing else, it leaves a specific influence behind it when it
vanishes, the effect of which is to determine the succeeding
pulse of thought in a perfectly characteristic way. What-
ever consciousness comes next must know the vanished
term and call it different from the one now there.

Here we are at the end of our tether about involuntary
discrimination of successively felt simple things ; and must
drop the subject, hopeless of seeing any deeper into it for

neither the thing m nor the thing 7, to know and compare both directly?
"Tis but a question of how to name the facts least artificially. The egoist
explains them, by naming them as an Ego ‘combining’ or *synthetizing’
two ideas, no more than we do by naming them a pulse of thought know-
ing two facts.

*1 fear that few will be converted by my words, so obstinately do
thinkers of all schools refuse to admit the unmediated function of knowing
a thing, and so incorrigibly do they substitute being the thing for it. E.g., in
the latest utterance of the spiritualistic philosophy (Bowne’s Introduction to
Psychological 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 ang
the flow of the body, and gathering up its past, carries it with it” (p. 28).
Why, for heaven’s sake, O Bowne, cannot you say ‘knows it’? If there is
anything our soul does not do to its past, it is to carry it with it.

502 PSYCHOLOGY.

the present, and turn to discriminations of a less simple
sort.

THE ‘PROCESS OF ANALYSIS.

And first, of the discrimination of simultaneously felt
impressions! Our first way of looking at a reality is often
to suppose it simple, but later we may learn to perceive it
as compound. This new way of knowing the same reality
may conveniently be called by the name of Analysis. It is
manifestly one of the most incessantly performed of all our
mental processes, so let us examine the conditions under
which it occurs.

I think we may safely lay down at the outset this fun-
damental principle, that any total impression made on the
mind must be unanalyzable, whose elements are never experi-
enced apart. The components of an absolutely changeless
group of not-elsewhere-occurring attributes could never
be discriminated. If all cold things were wet and all wet
things cold, if all hard things pricked our skin, and no
other things did so; is it likely that we should discrimi-
nate between coldness and wetness, and hardness and
pungency respectively ? If all liquids were transparent
and no non-liquid were transparent, it would be long before
we had separate names for liquidity and transparency. If
heat were a function of position above the earth’s surface,
so that the higher a thing was the hotter it became, one
word would serve for hot and high. We have, in fact, a
number of sensations whose concomitants are almost in-
variably the same, and we find it, accordingly, almost im-
possible to analyze them out from the totals in which they
are found. The contraction of the diaphragm and the ex-
pansion of the lungs, the shortening of certain muscles and
the rotation of certain joints, are examples. The converg-
ing of the eyeballs and the accommodation for near objects
are, for each distance of the object (in the common use
of the eyes) inseparably linked, and neither can (without a
sort of artificial training which shall presently be mentioned)
be felt by itself. We learn that the causes of such groups
of feelings are multiple, and therefore we frame theories
about the composition of the feelings themselves, by ‘fusion,’

DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON. 503

‘integration,’ ‘synthesis, or what not. But by direct intro-
spection no analysis of them is ever made. A conspicuous
case 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 expression
gives rise to bodily feelings; and the emotion is thus neces-
sarily and invariably accompanied by these bodily feelings.
The consequence is that it is impossible to apprehend it as
a spiritual state by itself, or to analyze it away from the
lower feelings in question. It isin fact impossible to prove
that it exists as a distinct psychic fact. The present writer
strongly doubts that it does so exist. But those who are
most firmly persuaded of its existence must wait, to prove
their point, until they can quote some as yet unfound patho-
logical case of an individual who shall have emotions in a
body in which either complete paralysis will have prevented
their expression, or complete anzsthesia will have made
the latter unfelt.

In general, then, if an object affects us simultaneously
in a number of ways, abcd, we get a peculiar integral impres-
sion, which thereafter characterizes to our mind the individ-
uality of that object, and becomes the sign of its presence ;
and which is only resolved into a, b, c, d, respectively by
the aid of farther experiences. These we now may turn to
consider.

Tf any single quality or constituent, a, of such an object, have
previously been known by us isolatedly, or have in any other
manner already become an object of separate acquaintance
on our part, so that we have an image of it, distinct or vague,
in our mind, disconnected with bed, then that constituent a
may be analyzed out from the total impression. Analysis of
a thing means separate attention to each of its parts. In
Chapter XI we saw that one condition of attending to a thing
was the formation from within of a separate image of that
thing, which should, as it were, go out to meet the impres-
sion received. Attention being the condition of analysis,
and separate imagination being the condition of attention,
it follows also that separate imagination is the condition of
analysis. Only such elements as we are acquainted with, and
can imagine, separately, can be discriminated within a total

504 PSYCHOLOGY.

sense-impression. The image seems to welcome its own
mate from out of the compound, and to heighten the feel-
ing thereof; whereas it dampens and opposes the feeling of
the other constituents ; and thus the compound becomes
broken for our consciousness into parts.

All the facts cited in Chapter XI, to prove that attention
involves inward reproduction, go to prove this point as
well. In looking for any object in a room, for a book in a
library, for example, we detect it the more readily if, in
addition to merely knowing its name, etc., we carry in our
mind a distinct image of its appearance. The assafoetida
in ‘Worcestershire sauce’ is not obvious to anyone who
has not tasted assafcetida per se. In a ‘cold’ color an
artist would never be able to analyze out the pervasive
presence of blue, unless he had previously made acquaint-
ance with the color blue by itself. All the colors we ac-
tually experience are mixtures. Kven the purest primaries
always come to us with some white. Absolutely pure red
or green or violet is never experienced, and so can never
be discerned in the so-called primaries with which we have
to deal: the latter consequently pass for pure.—The reader
will remember how an overtone can only be attended to in
the midst of its consorts in the voice of a musical instru-
ment, by sounding it previously alone. The imagination,
being then full of it, hears the like of it in the compound
tone. Helmholtz, whose account of this observation we
formerly quoted, goes on to explain the difficulty of the
case in a way which beautifully corroborates the point I
now seek to prove. He says:

‘‘The ultimate simple elements of the sensation of tone, simple tones
themselves, are rarely heard alone. Even those instruments by which
they can be produced (as tuning-forks before resonance-chambers),
when strongly excited, give rise to weak harmonic upper partials, partly
within and partly without the ear. . . . Hence the opportunities are
very scanty for impressing on our memory an exact and sure image of
these simple elementary tones. But if the constituents are only indefi-
nitely and vaguely known, the analysis of their sum into them must
be correspondingly uncertain. If we do not know with certainty how
much of the musical tone under consideration is to be attributed to its
prime, we cannot but be uncertain as to what belongs to the partials.
Consequently we must begin by making the individual elements which

DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON. 505

have to be distinguished individually audible, so as to obtain an en-
tirely fresh recollection of the corresponding sensation, and the whole
business requires undisturbed and concentrated attention. Weare even
without the ease that can be obtained by frequent repetitions of the
experiment, such as we possess in the analysis of musical chords into
their individual notes. In that case we hear the individual notes suffi-
ciently often by themselves, whereas we rarely hear simple tones, and
may almost be said never to hear the building up of a eempound from
its simple tones.” *

THE PROCESS OF ABSTRACTION.

Very few elements of reality are experienced by us in
absolute isolation. The most that usually happens to a
constituent a, of a compound phenomenon abcd, is that
its strength relatively to bcd varies from a maximum to a
minimum ; or that it appears linked with other qualities,
in other compounds, as aefg, or ahik. Either of these
vicissitudes in the mode of our experiencing a may, under
favorable circumstances, lead us to feel the difference be-
tween it and its concomitants, and to single it out—not
absolutely, it is true, but approximately—and so to analyze
the compound of which it is a part. The act of singling
out is then called abstraction, and the element disengaged
is an abstract.

Consider the case of fluctuations of relative strength
or intensity first. Let there be three grades of the com-
pound, as Abed, abcd, and abeD. In passing between these
compounds, the mind will feel shocks of difference. The
differences, moreover, will serially increase, and their direc-
tion will be felt as of a distinct sort. The increase from
abed to Abcd is on the a side ; that to abcD is on the d side.
And these two differences of direction are differently
felt. Ido not say that this discernment of the a-direction
from the d-direction will give us an actual intuition
either of a or of d in the abstract. But it leads us to
conceive or postulate each of these qualities, and to define
it as the extreme of a certain direction. ‘Dry’ wines
and ‘sweet’ wines, for example, differ, and form a series.
It happens that we have an experience of sweetness
pure and simple in the taste of sugar, and this we can

-———

* Sensations of Tone, 2d English Ed., p. 65.

506 PSYCHOLOGY.

analyze out of the wine-taste. But no one knows what
‘dryness’ tastes like, all by itself. It must, however, be
something extreme in the dry direction; and we should
probably not fail to recognize it as the original of our ab-
stract conception, in case we ever did come across it. In
some such way we get to form notions of the flavor ot meats,
apart from their feeling to the tongue, or of that of fruits
apart from their acidity, etc., and we abstract the touch of
bodies as distinct from their temperature. We may even
apprehend the quality of a muscle’s contraction as distin-
guished from its extent, or one muscle’s contraction from
another’s, as when, by practising with prismatic glasses,
and varying our eyes’ convergence whilst our accommoda-
tion remains the same, we learn the direction in which our
feeling of the convergence differs from that of the accom-
modation.

But the fluctuation in a quality’s intensity is a less effi-
cient aid to our abstracting of it than the diversity of the
other qualities in whose company it may appear. What is
associated now with one thing and now with another tends to
become dissociated from either, and to grow into an object of ab-
stract contemplation by the mind. One might call this the
law of dissociation by varying concomitants. The practical
result of it will be to allow the mind which has thus disso-
ciated and abstracted a character to analyze it out of a
total, whenever it meets with it again. The law has been
frequently recognized by psychologists, though I know of
none who has given it the emphatic prominence in our men-
tal history which it deserves. Mr. Spencer says:

‘Tf 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 must
happen that by multiplication of experiences the impressions produced
by these properties on the organism will be disconnected and rendered
so far independent in the organism as the properties are in the environ-
ment, whence must eventually result a power to recognize attributes in
themselves, apart from particular bodies.” *

And stili more to the point Dr. Martineau, in the passage
I have already quoted, writes :

‘‘When a red ivory ball, seen for the first time, has been with-
drawn, it will leave a mental representation of itself, in which all that

= Psychology, I. 340.

DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON. 507

it simultaneously gave us will indistinguishably coexist. Let a white
ball succeed to it ; now, and not before, will an attribute detach itself,
and the color, by force of contrast, be shaken out into the foreground.
Let the white ball be replaced by an egg, and this new difference will
bring the form into notice from its previous slumber, and thus that
which began by being simply an object cut out from the surrounding
scene becomes for us first a red object, then a ved round object, and
so on.”

Why the repetition of the character in combination with
different wholes will cause it thus to break up its adhesion
with any one of them, and roll out, as it were, alone upon
the table of consciousness, is a little of a mystery. One
might suppose the nerve-processes of the various concom-
itants to neutralize or inhibit each other more or less and
to leave the process of the common term alone distinctly
active. Mr. Spencer appears to think that the mere fact
that the common term is repeated more often than any one
of its associates will, of itself, give it such a degree of in-
tensity that its abstraction must needs ensue.

This has a plausible sound, but breaks down when ex-
amined closely. For it is not always the often-repeated
character which is first noticed when its concomitants have
varied a certain number of times; it is even more likely to
be the most novel of all the concomitants, which will arrest
the attention. If a boy has seen nothing all his life but
sloops and schooners, he will probably never distinctly
have singled out in his notion of ‘ sail’ the character of be-
ing hung lengthwise. When for the first time he sees a
square-rigged ship, the opportunity of extracting the length-
wise mode of hanging as a special accident, and of disso-
ciating it from the general notion of sail, is offered. But
there are twenty chances to one that that will not be the
form of the boy’s consciousness. What he notices will be
the new and exceptional character of being hung crosswise.
He will go home and speak of that, and perhaps never con-
sciously formulate what the more familiar peculiarity con-
sists in.

This mode of abstraction is realized on a very wide
scale, because the elements of the world in which we find
ourselves appear, as a matter of fact, here, there, and every-
where, and are changing their concomitants all the while.

508 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

But on the other hand the abstraction is, so to speak, never
complete, the analysis of a compound never perfect, be-
cause no element is ever given to us absolutely alone, and
we can never therefore approach a compound with the
image in our mind of any one of its components in a perfectly
pure form. Colors, sounds, smells, are just as much en-
tangled with other matter as are more formal elements of
experience, such as extension, intensity, effort, pleasure,
difference, likeness, harmony, badness, strength, and even
consciousness itself. All are embedded in one world. But
by the fluctuations and permutations of which we have
spoken, we come to form a pretty good notion of the direc-
tion in which each element differs from the rest, and so we
frame the notion of it as a terminus, and continue to mean
it 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 in
these instances we have a comparatively exact perception of
what it is we mean to abstract. But even this is only an
approximation ; and in literal mathematical strictness all
our abstracts must be confessed to be but imperfectly im-
aginable things. At bottom the process is one of concep-
tion, and is everywhere, even in the sphere of simple sensi-
ble qualities, the same as that by which we are usually
understood to attain to the notions of abstract goodness,
perfect felicity, absolute power, and the like: the direct
perception of a difference between compounds, and the
imaginary prolongation of the direction of the difference to
an ideal terminus, the notion of which we fix and keep as
one of our permanent subjects of discourse.

This is all that I can say usefully about abstraction, ox
about analysis, to which it leads.

THE IMPROVEMENT OF DISCRIMINATION BY PRACTICE.

In all the cases considered hitherto I have supposed
the differences involved to be so large as to be flagrant, and
the discrimination, where successive, was treated as invol-
untary. But, so far from being always involuntary, dis-
criminations are often difficult in the extreme, and by most
men neyer performed. Professor de Morgan, thinking, it

.

DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON. 509

is true, rather of conceptual than of perceptive discrimi-
nation, wrote, wittily enough:

‘The great bulk of the illogical part of the educated community —
whether majority or minority I know not; perhaps six of one and half
a dozen of the other—have not power to make a distinction, and of
course cannot be made to take a distinction, and of course never at-
tempt to shake a distinction. With them all such things are evasions,
subterfuges, come-offs, loop-holes, ete. They would hang a man for
horse-stealing under a statute against sheep-stealing ; and would laugh
at you if you quibbled about the distinction between a horse anda
sheep.” * 3

Any personal or practical interest, however, in the re-
sults to be obtained by distinguishing, makes one’s wits
amazingly sharp to detect differences. The culprit himself
is not likely to overlook the difference between a horse and
a sheep. And long training and practice in distinguishing
has the same effect as personal interest. Both of these
agencies give to small amounts of objective difference the
same effectiveness upon the mind that, under other circum-
stances, only large ones would have. Let us seek to pene-
trate the modus operandi of their influence—beginning with
that of practice and habit.

That ‘practice makes perfect’ is notorious in the field
of motor accomplishments. But motor accomplishments
depend in part on sensory discrimination. Billiard-play-
ing, rifle-shooting, tight-rope-dancing, demand the most
delicate appreciation of minute disparities of sensation, as
well as the power to make accurately graduated muscular
response thereto. In the purely sensorial field we have
the well-known virtuosity displayed by the professional
buyers and testers of various kinds of goods. One man
will distinguish by taste between the upper and the lower
half of a bottle of old Madeira. Another will recognize,
by feeling the flour in a barrel, whether the wheat was
grown in Iowa or Tennessee. The blind deaf-mute, Laura
Bridgman, had so improved her touch as to recognize,
after a year’s interval, the hand of a person who once had
shaken hers; and her sister in misfortune, Julia Brace, is
said to have been employed in the Hartford Asylum to sort

* A Budget of Paradoxes, p. 380.

510 PSYCHOLOGY.

the linen of its multitudinous inmates, after it came from
the wash, by her wonderfully educated sense of smell.

The fact is so familiar that few, if any, psychologists have
even recognized it as needing explanation. They have
seemed to think that practice must, in the nature of things,
improve the delicacy of discernment, and have let the
matter rest. At most they have said: “ Attention accounts
for it; we attend more to habitual things, and what we at-
tend to we perceive more minutely.” This answer is true,
but too general ; it seems to me that we can be a little more
precise.

There are at least two distinct causes which we can see at
work whenever experience improves discrimination :

First, the terms whose difference comes to be felt con-
tract disparate associates and these help to drag them
apart.

Second, the difference reminds us of larger differences
of the same sort, and these help us to notice it.

Let us study the first cause first, and begin by suppos-
ing two compounds, of ten elements apiece. Suppose no one
element of either compound to differ from the correspond-
ing element of the other compound enough to be distin-
guished from it if the two are compared alone, and let the
amount of this imperceptible difference be called equal to
1. The compounds will differ from each other, however,
in ten different ways; and, although each difference by it-
self might pass unperceived, the total difference, equal to
10, may very well be sufficient to strike the sense. In a
word, increasing the number of ‘points’ involved ina difference
may excite our discrimination as effectually as increasing the
amount of difference at any one point. Two men whose mouth,
nose, eyes, cheeks, chin, and hair, all differ slightly, will be
as little confounded by us, as two appearances of the same
man one with, and the other without, a false nose. The
only contrast in the cases is that we can easily name the
point of difference in the one, whilst in the other we cannot.

Two things, then, B and C, indistinguishable when
compared together alone, may each contract adhesions
with different associates, and the compounds thus formed

DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON. oid

may, as wholes, be judged very distinct. The effect of
practice in increasing discrimination must then, in part, be due
to the reinforcing effect, upon an original slight difference between
the terms, of additional differences between the diverse associates
which they severally affect. Let Band C be the terms: If
A contract adhesions with B, and C with D, AB may ap-
pear very distinct from CD, though B and C per se might
have been almost identical.

To illustrate, how does one learn to distinguish claret
from burgundy? Probably they have been drunk on
different occasions. When we first drank claret we heard
it called by that name, we were eating such and such a
dinner, etc. Next time we drink it, a dim reminder of all
those things chimes through us as we get the taste of the
wine. When we try burgundy our first impression is that
it is a kind of claret; but something falls short of full iden-
tification, and presently we hear it called burgundy. Dur-
ing the next few experiences, the discrimination may still
be uncertain—* which,” weask ourselves, “ of the two wines
is this present specimen ?” But at last the claret-flavor re-
calls pretty distinctly its own name, ‘claret,’ “that wine I
drank at So-and-so’s table,” etc.; and the burgundy-flavor
recalls the name burgundy and some one else’s table. And
only when this different SETTING has come to each is our dis-
crimination between the two flavors solid and stable. After a
while the tables and other parts of the setting, besides the
name, grow so multifarious as not to come up distinetly into
consciousness ; but part passu with this, the adhesion of
each wine with its own name becomes more and more in-
veterate, and at last each flavor suggests instantly and cer-
tainly its own name and nothing else. The names differ far
more than the flavors, and help to stretch these latter farther
apart. Some such process as this must go on in all our
experience. Beef and mutton, strawberries and rasp-
berries, odor of rose and odor of violet, contract different
adhesions which reinforce the differences already felt in
the terms.

The reader may say that this has nothing to do with
making us feel the difference between the two terms. It is
merely fixing, identifying, and so to speak substantializing,

512 PSYCHOLOGY.

the ferms. But what we feel as their difference, we should
feel, even though we were unable to name or otherwise
identify the terms.

To which I reply that I believe that the difference is
always concreted and made to seem more substantial by rec-
ognizing the terms. I went out for instance the other day
and found that the snow just fallen had a very odd look,
different from the common appearance of snow. I presently
called it a ‘micaceous’ look ; and it seemed to me as if, the
moment I did so, the difference grew more distinct and
fixed than it was before. The other connotations of the
word ‘micaceous’ dragged the snow farther away from
ordinary snow and seemed even to aggravate the peculiar
look in question. I think some such effect as this on our
way of feeling a difference will be very generally admitted
to follow from naming the terms between which it obtains ;
although I admit myself that it is difficult to show coercively
that naming or otherwise identifying any given pair of
hardly distinguishable terms is essential to their being felt
as different at jfirst.*

* The explanation I offer presupposes that a difference too faint to have
any direct effect in the way of making the mind notice it per se will never-
theless be strong enough to keep its ‘terms’ from calling up identical
associates. It seems probable from many observations that this is the case.
All the facts of ‘unconscious’ inference are proofs of it. We say a
painting ‘ looks’ like the work of a certain artist, though we cannot name
the characteristic differentia. 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-
perception quoted from Helmholtz a few pages below will be additional
examples. Here is another good one, though it will perhaps be easier
understood after reading the chapter on Space-perception than now.
Take two stereoscopic slides and represent on each half-slide a pair of
spots, a and }, but make their distances such that the a’s are equidistant
on both slides, whilst the ’s are nearer together on slide 1 than on slide 2.
Make moreover the distance ad = ab'" and the distance ab’= ab" Then

a b a 6
Slide 1. e@ co e °®

a 2bt a be
Slide 2. ee € €

look successively at the two slides stereoscopically, so that the a’s in both
are directly fixated (that is, fallon the two fovex, or centres of distinct

SS fa

DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON. 513

I offer the explanation only as a partial one: it certainly
is not complete. Take the way in which practice refines
our local discrimination on the skin, for example. Two
compass-points touching the palm of the hand must be
kept, say, half an inch asunder in order not to be mistaken
for one point. But at the end of an hour or so of practice
with them we can distinguish them as two, even when less
than a quarter of an inch apart. If the same two regions
of the skin were constantly touched, in this experience,
the explanation we have been considering would perfectly
apply. Suppose a line abede/ of points upon the skin.
Suppose the local difference of feeling between a and f to
be so strong as to be instantly recognized when the points
are simultaneously touched, but suppose that between c and
d to be at first too small for this purpose. If we began by
putting the compasses on a and f and gradually contracted
their opening, the strong doubleness recognized at first
would still be suggested, as the compass-points approached
the positions ¢ and d; for the point e would be so near /, and
so like it, as not to be aroused without falso coming to mind.
Similarly d would recall e and, more remotely, f. In such
wise c—d would no longer be bare ce—d, but something more
like abe—def,—palpably differing impressions. But in ac-
tual experience the education can take place in a much less
methodical way, and we learn at last to discriminate c and d
without any constant adhesion being contracted between

est vision). The a’s will then appear single, and so probably will the 3’s.
But the now single-seeming 0} on slide 1 will look nearer, whilst that on
slide 2 will look farther than the a. But, if the diagrams are rightly drawn,
band b'” must affect ‘identical’ spots, spots equally far to the right of
the fovea, bin the left eye and 6’ inthe right eye. The same is true
of b' and 6". Identical spots are spots whose sensations cannot possibly be
discriminated as such. Since in these two observations, however, they
give rise to such opposite perceptions of distance, and prompt such op-
posite tendencies to movement (since in slide 1 we converge in looking from
ato 6, whilst in slide 2 we diverge), it follows that two processes which
occasion feelings quite indistinguishable to direct consciousness may never-
theless be each allied with disparate associates both of a sensorial and of a
motor kind. Cf. Donders, Archiv f. Ophthalmologie, Bd. 13 (1867). The
basis of his essay is that we cannot feel on which eye any particular ele.
ment of a compound picture falls, but its effects on our total perception
differ in the two eyes.

514 PSYCHOLOGY.

one of these spots and ab, and the other and ef, Volkmann's
experiments show this. He and Fechner, prompted by
Czermak’s observation that the skin of the blind was twice
as discriminative as that of seeing folks, sought by experi-
ment to show the effects of practice upon themselves. They
discovered that even within the limits of a single sitting
the distances at which points were felt double might fall
at the end to considerably less than half of their magnitude
at the beginning; and that some, though not all, of this
improved sensibility was retained next day. But they
also found that exercising one part of the skin in this way
improved the discrimination not only of the corresponding
part of the opposite side of the body, but of the neighbor-
ing parts as well. Thus, at the beginning of an experimen-
tal sitting, the compass-points had to be a Paris line asun-
der, in order to be distinguished by the little-finger-tip.
But after exercising the other fingers, it was ‘found that the
little-finger-tip could discriminate points only half a line
apart.* The same relation existed betwixt divers points of
the arm and hand.t

Here it is clear that the cause which I first suggested
fails to apply, and that we must invoke another.

What are the exact experimental phenomena? ‘The
spots, as such, are not distinctly located, and the difference,
as such, between their feelings, is not distinctly felt, until
the interval is greater than the minimum required for the
mere perception of their doubleness. What we first feel is a
bluntness, then a suspicion of doubleness, which presently
becomes a distinct doubleness, and at last two different-
feeling and differently placed spots with a definite tract of
space between them. Some of the places we try give us
this latest stage of the perception immediately ; some only
give us the earliest; and between them are intermediary
places. But as soon as the image of the doubleness as it is
felt in the more discriminative places gets lodged in our
memory, it helps us to find its like in places where other-
wise we might have missed it, much as the recent hearing of

* A. W. Volkmann: Ueber den Einfluss der Uebung, etc., Leipzig Be-

richte, Math.-phys. Classe, x, 1858, p. 67.
+ Ibid., Tabelle I, p. 43.

oF

DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON. 515

an ‘overtone’ helps us to detect the latter in a compound
sound (supra, pp. 489-40). A dim doubleness grows clearer
by being assimilated to the image of a distincter doubleness
felt a moment before. It is interpreted by means of the
latter. And so is any difference, like any other sort of im-
pression, more easily perceived when we carry in our mind
to meet it a distinct image of what sort of a thing we are to
look for, of what its nature is likely to be.*

These two processes, the reinforcement of the terms by
disparate associates, and the filling of the memory with
past differences, of similar direction with the present one,
but of more conspicuous amount, are the only explanations
I can offer of the effects of education in this line. What is
accomplished by both processes is essentially the same
thing: they make small differences affect us as if they were
large ones—that large differences should affect us as they do
remains an inexplicable fact. In principle these two pro-
cesses ought to be sufficient to account for all possible
cases. Whether in fact they are sufficient, whether there
be no residual factor which we have failed to detect and
analyze out, I will not presume to decide.

PRACTICAL INTERESTS LIMIT DISCRIMINATION.

It will be remembered that on page 509 personal inter-
est was named as a sharpener of discrimination alongside
of practice. But personal interest probably acts through
attention and not in any immediate or specific way. A
distinction in which we have a practical stake is one which
we concentrate our minds upon and which we are on the
look-out for. We draw it frequently, and we get all the
benefits of so doing, benefits which have just been ex-
plained. Where, on the other hand, a distinction has no
practical interest, where we gain nothing by analyzing a
feature from out of the compound total of which it forms a

* Professor Lipps accounts for the tactile discrimination of the blind
in a way which (divested of its ‘mythological’ assumptions) seems to me
essentially to agree with this. Stronger ideas are supposed to raise weaker
ones over the threshold of consciousness by fusing with them, the tenden-
cy to fuse being proportional to the similarity of the ideas. Cf. Grundtat-
sachen, etc., pp. 2382-8; also pp. 118, 492, 526-7.

516 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

part, we contract a habit of leaving it unnoticed, and at last
grow callous to its presence. Helmholtz was the first psy-
chologist who dwelt on these facts as emphatically as they
deserve, and I can do no better than quote his very words.

‘« We are accustomed,” he says, ‘‘in a large number of cases where
sensations of different kinds, or in different parts of the body, exist
simultaneously, to recognize that they are distinct as soon as they are
perceived, and to direct our attention at will to any one of them sepa-
rately. Thus at any moment we can be separately conscious of what
we see, of what we hear, of what we feel ; and distinguish what we feel
in a finger or in the great toe, whether pressure, gentle touch, or
warmth. So also in the field of vision. Indeed, as I shall endeavor to
show in what follows, we readily distinguish our sensations from one
another when we have a precise knowledge that they are composite, as,
for example, when we have become certain, by frequently repeated and
invariable experience, that our present sensation arises from the simul-
taneous action of many independent stimuli, each of which usually ex-
cites an equally well-known individual sensation.”

This, it will be observed, is only another statement of our
law, that the only individual components which we can
pick out of compounds are those of which we have inde-
pendent knowledge in a separate form.

‘‘This induces us to think that nothing can be easier, when a num-
ber of different sensations are simultaneously excited, than to distin-
guish them individually from each other, and that this is an innate
faculty of our minds.

‘‘Thus we find, among other things, that it is quite a matter of
course to hear separately the different musical tones which come to our
senses collectively; and we expect that in every case when two of them
occur together, we shall be able to do the like.

‘‘The matter becomes very different when we set to workto inyesti-
gate the more unusual cases of perception, and seek more completely to
understand the conditions under which the above-mentioned distinction
can or cannot be made, as is the case in the physiology of the senses.
We then become aware that tevo different kinds or grades must be dis-
tinguished in our becoming conscious of a sensation. The lower grade
of this consciousness is that in which the influence of the sensation in
question makes itself felt only in the conceptions we form of external
things and processes, and assists in determining them. This can take
place without our needing, or indeed being able, to ascertain to what
particular part of our sensations we owe this or that circumstance ip
our perceptions. In this case we will say that the impression of the
sensation in question is perceived synthetically. The second higher
grade is when we immediately distinguish the sensation in question ag

DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON. 517

an existing part of the sum of the sensations excited in us. We will
say, then, that the sensation is perceived analytically. The two cases
must be carefully distinguished from each other.” *

By the sensation being perceived synthetically, Helm-
holtz means that it is not discriminated at all, but only felt
in a mass with other simultaneous sensations. That it is
felt there he thinks is proved by the fact that our judg-
ment of the total will change if anything occurs to alter
the outer cause of the sensation.t The following pages
from an earlier edition show what the concrete cases of
synthetic perception and what those of analytic perception
are wont to be:

‘* In the use of our senses, practice and experience play a much larger
part than we ordinarily suppose. Our sensations are in the first in-
stance important only in so far as they enable us to judge rightly of
the world about us; and our practice in discriminating between them
usually goes only just far enough to meet this end. We are, however,
too much disposed to think that we must be immediately conscious of
every ingredient of our sensations. This natural prejudice is due to
the fact that we are indeed conscious, immediately and without effort,
of everything in our sensations which has a bearing upon those practi-
cal purposes, for the sake of which we wish to know the outer world.
Daily and hourly, during our whole life, we keep our senses in training
for this end exclusively, and for its sake our experiences are accumu-
lated. But even within the sphere of these sensations, which do corre-
spond to outer things, training and practice make themselves felt. It is
well known how much finer and quicker the painter is in discriminating
colors and illuminations than one whose eye is not trained in these
matters ; how the musician and the musical-instrument maker perceive
with ease and certainty differences of pitch and tone which for the ear
of the layman do not exist; and how even in the inferior realms of
cookery and wine-judging it takes a long habit of comparing to make a
master. But more strikingly still is seen the effect of practice when
we pass to sensations which depend only on inner conditions of our
organs, and which, not corresponding at all to outer things or to their
effects upon us, are therefore of no value in giving us information about
the outer world. The physiology of she sense-organs has, in recent
times, made us acquainted with a number of such phenomena, discov-
ered partly in consequence of theoretic speculations and questionings,
partly by individuals, like Goethe and Purkinje, specially endowed by
nature with talent for this sort of observation. These so-called subjec-

* Sensations of Tone, 2d English Edition, p. 62.
+ Compare as to this, however, what I said above, Chapter V, pp
172-176.

518 PSYCHOLOG Y.

tive phenomena are extraordinarily hard to find; and when they are
once found, special aids for the attention are almost always required to
observe them. It is usually hard to notice the phenomenon again even
when one knows already the description of the first observer. The
reason is that we are not only unpractised in singling out these subjec-
tive sensations, but that we are, on the contrary, most thoroughly
trained in abstracting our attention from them, because they would
only hinder us in observing the outer world. Only when their inten-
sity is so strong as actually to hinder us in observing the outer world
do we begin to notice them; or they may sometimes, in dreaming and
delirium, form the starting point of hallucinations.

‘* Let me give a few well-known cases, taken from physiological optics,
as examples. Every eye probably contains musce volitantes, so called ;
these are fibres, granules, etc., floating in the vitreous humor, throwing
their shadows on the retina, and appearing in the field of vision as
little dark moving spots. They are most easily detected by looking at-
tentively at a broad, bright, blank surface like the sky. Most persons
who have not had their attention expressly called to the existence of
these figures are apt to notice them for the first time when some ail-
ment befalls their eyes and attracts their attention to the subjective
state of these organs. The usual complaint then is that the musce
volitantes came in with the malady ; and this often makes the patients
very anxious about these harmless things, and attentive to all their
peculiarities. It is then hard work to make them believe that these
figures have existed throughout all their previous life, and that all
healthy eyes contain them. I knew an old gentleman who once had
occasion to cover one of his eyes which had accidentally become dis-
eased, and who was then in no small degree shocked at finding that his
other eye was totally blind; with a sort of blindness, moreover, which
must have lasted years, and yet he never was aware of it.

‘* Who, besides, would believe without performing the appropriate ex-
periments, 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, in
which he sees nothing at all, but which he fills out with his imagination ?
Mariotte, who was led by theoretic speculations to discover this
phenomenon, awakened no small surprise when he showed it at the
court of Charles II. of England. The experiment was at that time
repeated with many variations, and became a fashionable amusement.
The gap is, in fact, so large that seven full moons alongside of each
other would not cover its diameter, and that a man’s face 6 or 7 feet
off disappears within it. In our ordinary use of vision this great hole
in the field fails utterly to be noticed ; because our eyes are constantly
wandering, and the moment an object interests us we turn them full
upon it. So it follows that the object which at any actual moment
excites our attention never happens to fall upon this gap, and thus it
1s that we never grow conscious of the blind spot in the field. In order
to notice it, we must first purposely rivet our gaze upon one object and

DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON. 519

then move about a second object in the neighborhood of the blind spot,
striving meanwhile to attend to this latter without moving the direction
of our gaze from the first object. This runs counter to all our habits, and
is therefore a difficult thing to accomplish. With some people it is even
an impossibility. But only when it is accomplished do we see the
second object vanish and convince ourselves of the existence of this
gap.

‘¢ Finally, let me refer to the double images of ordinary binocular
vision. Whenever we look at a point with both eyes, all objects on this
side of it or beyond it appear double. It takes but a moderate effort of
observation to ascertain this fact; and from this we may conclude that
we have been seeing the far greater part of the external world double
all our lives, although numbers of persons are unaware of it, and are
in the highest degree astonished when it is brought to their attention.
As a matter of fact, we never Have seen in this double fashion any
particular object upon which our attention was directed at the time ;
for upon such objects we always converge both eyes. In the habitual
use of our eyes, our attention is always withdrawn from such objects
as give us double images at the time; this is the reason why we so
seldom learn that these images exist. In order to find them we must
set our attention a new and unusual task; we must make it explore
the lateral parts of the field of vision, not, as usual, to find what objects
are there, but to analyze our sensations. Then only do we notice this
phenomenon.*

‘¢The same difficulty which is found in the observation of subjective
sensations to which no external object corresponds is found also in the
analysis of compound sensations which correspond to a single object.
Of this sort are many of our sensations of sound. When the sound of
a violin, no matter how often we hear it, excites over and over again
in our ear the same sum of partial tones, the result is that our feeling
of this sum of tones ends by becoming for our mind a mere sign for the
voice of the violin. Another combination of partial tones becomes the
sensible sign of the voice of a clarionet, etc. And the oftener any such
combination is heard, the more accustomed we grow to perceiving it as
an integral total, and the harder it becomes to analyze it by immediate
observation. I believe that this is one of the principal reasons why
the analysis of the notes of the human voice in singing is relatively so

* When a person squints, double images are formed in the centre of the
field. Asa matter of fact, most squinters are found blind of one eye, or
almost so; and it has long been supposed amongst ophthalmologists that
the blindness is a secondary affection superinduced by the voluntary sup-
pression of one of the sets of double images, in other words by the positive
and persistent refusal to use one of the eyes. This explanation of the
blindness has, however, been called in question of late years. See, fora
brief account of the matter, O. F. Wadsworth in Boston Med. and Surg.
Journ., cxvr. 49 (Jan. 20, ’87), and the replies by Derby and others a little
later.—W. J.

520 PSYCHOLOGY.

difficult. Such fusions of many sensations into what, to conscious
perception, seems a simple whole, abound in all our senses.

‘* Physiological optics affords other interesting examples. The per-
ception of the bodily form of a near object comes about through the
combination of two diverse pictures which the eyes severally receive
from it, and whose diversity is due to the different position of each eye,
altering the perspective view of what is before it. Before the invention
of 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 two
perspective views of the two eyes, in such a manner that each eye sees
its own view in the proper place ; and we obtain, in consequence, the
perception of a single extended solid, as complete and vivid as if we
had the real object before us.

‘* Now we can, it is true, by shutting one eye after the other and at-
tending to the point, recognize the difference in the pictures—at least
when it is not too small. But, for the stereoscopic perception of solidity,
pictures suffice whose difference is so extraordinarily slight as hardly
to be recognized by the most careful comparison ; and it is certain that,
in our ordinary careless observing of bodily objects, we never dream
that the perception is due to two perspective views fused into one, be-
cause it is an entirely different kind of perception from that of either
flat perspective view by itself. It is certain, therefore, that two different
sensations of our two eyes fuse into a third perception entirely different
from either. Just as partial tones fuse into the perception of a certain
instrument’s voice ; and just as we learn to separate the partial tones
of a vibrating string by pinching a nodal point and letting them sound
in isolation ; so we learn to separate the images on the two eyes by
opening and closing them alternately.

‘¢ There are other much more complex instances of the way in which
many sensations may combine to serve as the basis of a quite simple
perception. When, for example we perceive an object in a certain
direction, we must somehow be impressed by the fact that certain of
our optic nerve-fibres, and no others, are impressed by its light. Fur-
thermore, 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-muscles
and our neck-muscles respectively. If any of these processes is dis-
turbed we get a false perception of the object’s position. The nerve-
fibres can be changed by a prism before the eye; or the eyeball’s position
changed by pressing the organ towards one side; and such experiments
show that, for the simple seeing of the position of an object, sensations
of these two sorts must concur. But it would be quite impossible to
gather this directly from the sensible impression which the object
makes. Even when we have made experiments and convinced ourselves
in every possible manner that such must be the fact, it still remains
hidden from our immediate introspective observation.

‘‘These examples” [of ‘synthetic perception,’ perception in which

DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON. 521

each contributory sensation is felt in the whole, and is a co-determinant
of what the whole shall be, but does not attract the attention to its
separate self] ‘‘ may suffice to show the vital part which the direction
of attention and practice in observing play in sense-perception. To
apply this now to the ear. The ordinary task which our ear has to
solve when many sounds assail it at once is to discern the voices of the
several sounding bodies or instruments engaged ; beyond this it has no
objective interest in analyzing. We wish to know, when many men are
speaking together, what each one says, when many instruments and
voices combine, which melody is executed by each. Any deeper
analysis, such as that of each separate note into its partial tones
(although it might be performed by the same means and faculty of
hearing as the first analysis) would tell us nothing new about the
sources of sound actually present, but might lead us astray as to their
number. For this reason we confine our attention in analyzing a mass
of sound to the several instruments’ voices, and expressly abstain, as it
were, from discriminating the elementary components of the latter. In
this last sort of discrimination we are as unpractised as we are, on the
contrary, well trained in the former kind.” *

* Tonempfindungen, Dritte Auflage, pp. 102-107.—The reader who
has assimilated the contents of our Chapter V, above, will doubtless
have remarked that the illustrious physiologist has fallen, in these para-
graphs, into that sort of interpretation of the facts which we there
tried to prove erroneous. Helmholtz, however, is no more careless than
most psychologists in confounding together the object perceived. the
organic conditions of the perception, and the sensations which would
be excited by the several parts of the object, or by the several organic
conditions, provided they came into action separately or were separately
attended to, and in assuming that what is true of any one of these sorts of
fact must be true of the other sorts also If each organic condition or part
of the object is there, its sensation, he thinks, must be there also, only in
a ‘synthetic ’—which isindistinguishable from what the authors whom we
formerly reviewed called an ‘unconscious "— state. I will not repeat argu-
ments sufficiently detailed in the earlier chapter (see especially pp. 170-176),
but simply say that what he calls the ‘fusion of many sensations into one’
is really the production of one sensation by the co-operation of many organic
conditions ; and that what perception fails to discriminate (when it is
“ synthetic’) is not sensations already existent but not singled out, but new
objective facts, judged truer than the facts already synthetically perceived—
two views of the solid body, many harmonic tones, instead of one view and
one tone, states of the eyeball-muscles thitherto unknown, and the like.
These new facts, when first discovered, are known in states of conscious-
ness never till that moment exactly realized before, states of consciousness
which at the same time judge them to be determinations of the same
matter of fact which was previously realized. All that Helmholtz says of
the conditions which hinder and further analysis applies just as naturally
to the analysis, through the advent of new feelings, of objects into their ele

522 PSYCHOL OGY.

After all we have said, no comment seems called for
upon these interesting and important facts and reflections
of Helmholtz.

ments, as to the analysis of aggregate feelings into elementary feelings sup-
posed to have been hidden in them all the while.

The reader can himself apply this criticism to the following passages from
Lotze and Stumpf respectively, which 1 quote because they are the ablest
expressions of the view opposed to my own. Both authors, itseems to me,
commit the psychologist’s fallacy, and allow their later knowledge of the
things felt to be foisted into their account of the primitive way of feeling
them.

Lotze says: ‘‘It is indubitable that the simultaneous assault of a
variety 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 certainly
not conscious of clearly distinguishing the different impressions. Still it
does not follow that in such a case we have a positive perception of an
actual unity of the contents of our ideas, arising from their mixture ; our
state of mind seems rather to consist in (1) the consciousness of our inabil-
ity to separate what really has remained diverse, and (2) in the general
feeling of the disturbance produced in the economy of our body by the
simultaneous assault of the stimuli. . . . Not that the sensations melt into
one another, but simply that the act of distinguishing them is absent; and
this again certainly not so far that the fact of the difference remains
entirely unperceived, but only so far as to prevent us from determining the
amount of the difference, and from apprehending other relations between
the different impressions. Anyone who is annoyed at one and the same
time by glowing heat, dazzling light, deafening noise, and an offensive
smell, will certainly not fuse these disparate sensations into a single one
with a single content which could be sensuously perceived ; they remain
for him in separation, and he merely finds it impossible to be conscious of
one of them apart from the others. But, further, he will have a feeling of
discomfort—what I mentioned above as the second constituent of his whole
state. For every stimulus which produces in consciousness a definite con-
tent of sensation is also a definite degree of disturbance, and therefore
makes a call upon the forces of the nerves; and the sum of these little
changes, which in their character as disturbances are not so diverse as the
contents of consciousness they give rise to, produce the general feeling
which, added to the inability to distinguish. deludes us into the belief in
an actual absence of diversity in our sensations. It is only in some such
way as this, again that I can imagine that state which is sometimes de-
scribed as the beginning of our whole education, a state which in itself is
supposed to be simple, and to be afterwards divided into different sensa-
tions by an activity of separation. No activity of separation in the world
could establish differences where no real diversity existed ; for it would
have nothing to guide it to the places where it was to establish them, or to
indicate the width it was to give them.” (Metaphysic, § 260, English trans-
lation.)

Stumpf writes as follows: ‘‘ Of coexistent sensations there are al

DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON. 523

REACTION-TIME AFTER DISCRIMINATION.

The time required for discrimination has been made a
subject of experimental measurement. Wundt calls it Un-
terscheidungszeit. His subjects (whose simple reaction-time
—see p. 85 ffi—had previously been determined) were re-
quired to make a movement, always the same, the instant
they discerned which of two or more signals they received.
The exact time of the signal and that of the movement
were automatically registered by a galvanic chronoscope.
The particular signal to be received was unknown in ad-
vance, and the excess of time occupied by those reactions
in which its character had first to be discerned, over the
simple reaction-time, measured, according to Wundt, the
time required for the act of discrimination. It was found
longer when four different signals were irregularly used
than when only two were used. In the former case it
averaged, for three observers respectively (the signals be-
ing the sudden appearance of a black or of a white object),

0.050 see.;
0.047 “
O09 =

——— EE - - — —

ways a large number undiscriminated in consciousness, or (if one prefer
to call what is undiscriminated unconscious) in the soul. They are, how-
ever, not fused into a simple quality. When, on entering a room, we
receive sensations of odor and warmth together, without expressly attend-
ing to either, the two qualities of sensation are not, as it were, an entirely
new simple quality, which first at the moment in which attention analyti-
cally steps in changes into smell and warmth. . . . In such cases we find
ourselves in presence of an indefinable, unnamable total of feeling. And
when, after successfully analyzing this total, we call it back to memory, as
it was in its unanalyzed state, and compare it with the elements we have
found, the latter (as it seems to me) may be recognized as real parts con-
tained in the former, and the former seen to betheirsum. So, for example,
when we clearly perceive that the content of our sensation of oil of pepper-
ment is partly a sensation of taste and partly one of temperature.” (Ton-
psychologie, 1. 107.)

I should prefer to say that we perceive that objective fact, known to us
as the peppermint taste, to contain those other objective facts known as
aromatic or sapid quality, and coldness, respectively. No ground to sup-
pose that the vehicle of this last very complex perception has any identity

with the earlier psychosis—least of all is contained in it.

§24 PSYCHOLOGY.

In the latter case, a red and a green signal being added to
the former ones, it became, for the same observers,

0.157:

0.073 ;

0.132.*

Later, in Wundt’s Laboratory, Herr Tischer made many
careful experiments after the same method, where the facts
to be discriminated were the different degrees of loudness
in the sound which served as a signal. I subjoin Herr
Tischer’s table of results, explaining that each vertical col-
umn after the first gives the average results obtained from
a distinct individual, and that the figure in the first column
stands for the number of possible loudnesses that might be
expected in the particular series of reactions made. The
times are expressed in thousandths of a second.

7 6 8.5 10.75 10.7 30 53
B Sn ae 14.4 19.9 22.7 58.5 57.8
pe 16 si 20.8 29 29.1 75 84
5 | 20.6 31 40.1 95.5 138 +

The interesting points here are the. great individual varia-
tions, and the rapid way in which the time for discrimina-
tion increases with the number of possible terms to dis-
criminate. The individual variations are largely due to
want of practice in the particular task set, but partly also
to discrepancies in the psychic process. One gentleman
said, for example, that in the experiments with three
sounds, he kept the image of the middle one ready in his
mind, and compared what he heard as either louder, lower,
or the same. His discrimination among three possibilities
became thus very similar to a discrimination between two.t

Mr. J. M. Cattell found he could get no results by this
method,§ and reverted to one used by observers previous

* Physioi. Psych., 11. 248.

+ Wundt’s Philos. Studien, 1. 527.

t Jbvd. p. 530.

§ Mind, x1. 377 ff. He says: ‘I apparently either distinguished the
impression and made the motion simultaneously, or if I tried to avoid this
by waiting until I had formed a distinct impression before I began to
make the motion, I added to the simple reaction, not only a perception,
but a volition.”—Which remark may well confirm our doubts as to the
strict psychologic worth of any of these measurements.

DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON. 525

to Wundt and which Wundt had rejected. This is the
einfache Wahlmethode, as Wundt calls it. The reacter
awaits the signal and reacts if it is of one sort, but omits to
act if it is of another sort. The reaction thus occurs after
discrimination ; the motor impulse cannot be sent to the
hand until the subject knows what the signal is. The
nervous impulse, as Mr. Cattell says, must probably travel
to the cortex and excite changes there, causing in conscious-
ness the perception of the signal. These changes occupy
the time of discrimination (or perception-time, as it is called
by Mr. C.) But then a nervous impulse must descend from
the cortex to the lower motor centre which stands primed
and ready to discharge ; and this, as Mr. C. says, gives a
will-time as well. The total reaction-time thus includes
both ‘will-time’ and ‘discrimination-time.’ But as the
centrifugal and centripetal processes occupying these two
times respectively are probably about the same, and the
time used in the cortex is about equally divided between
the perception of the signal and the preparation of the
motor discharge, if we divide it equally between percep-
tion (discrimination) and volition, the error cannot be
great.* We can moreover change the nature of the per-
ception without altering the will-time, and thus investigate
with considerable thoroughness the length of the percep-
tion-time.

Guided by these principles, Prof. Cattell found the time
required for distinguishing a white signal from no signal
to be, in two observers :

0.030 see. and 0.050 sece.;
that for distinguishing one color from another was simi-
larly :

0.100 and 0.110;
that for distinguishing a certain color from ten other col-
ors:

0.105 and OnLT;
that for distinguishing the letter A in ordinary print from
the letter Z:

0.142 and OS

* Mind, x1. 379.

526 PSYCHOLOGY.

that for distinguishing a given letter from all the rest of
the alphabet (not reacting until that letter appeared)
0.119 and 0.116 ;
that for distinguishing a word from any of twenty-five other
words, from
0.118 see. to 0.158 see.
The difference depending on the length of the words and
the familiarity of the language to which they belonged.
Prof. Cattell calls attention to the fact that the time for
distinguishing a word is often but little more than that for
distinguishing a letter :
‘‘We do not, therefore, distinguish separately the letters of which

a word is composed, but the word as a whole. The application of this in
teaching children to read is evident.”

He also finds a great difference in the time with which
various letters are distinguished, E being particularly
bad.*

I have, in describing these experiments, followed the ex-
ample of previous writers and spoken as if the process by
which the nature of the signal determines the reaction were
identical with the ordinary conscious process of discrimina-
tive perception and volition. I am convinced, however,
that this is not the case ; and that although the results are the
same, the form of consciousness is quite different. The reader
will remember my contention (supra, p. 90 ff.) that the simple
reaction-time (usually supposed to include a conscious pro-
cess of perceiving) really measures nothing but a reflex
act. Anyone who will perform reactions with discrimina-
tion will easily convince himself that the process here also
is far more like a reflex, than like a deliberate, operation. I
have made, with myself and students, a large number of
measurements where the signal expected was in one series
a touch somewhere on the skin of the back and head, and
in another series a spark somewhere in the field of view.
The hand had to move as quickly as possible towards the

* For other determinations of discrimination-time by this method cf.
v. Kries and Auerbach, Archiv f. Physiologie, Bd. 1. p. 297 ff. (these au-
thors get much smaller figures); Friedrich, Psychologische Studien, 1. 39.
Chapter 1x of Buccola’s book, Le Legge del tempo, etc., gives a full ac«
count of the subject.

DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON. DT

place of the touch or the spark. It did so infallibly, and
sensibly instantly ; whilst both place and movement seemed
to be perceived only a moment later, in memory. These ex-
periments were undertaken for the express purpose of ascer-
taining whether the movement at the sight of the spark was
discharged immediately by the visual perception, or whether
a ‘motor-idea’ had to intervene between the perception of
the spark and the reaction.* ‘The first thing that was mani-
fest to introspection was that no perception or idea of any
sort preceded the reaction. It jumped of itself, whenever
the signal came; and perception was retrospective. We

must suppose, then, that the state of eager expectancy of a
certain definite range of possible discharges, innervates a
whole set of paths in advance, so that when a particular
sensation comes it is drafted into its appropriate motor
outlet too quickly for the perceptive process to be aroused.
In the experiments I describe, the conditions were most
favorable for rapidity, for the connection between the
signals and their movements might almost be called in-
nate. It is instinctive to move the hand towards a thing
seen or a skin-spot touched. But where the movement is
conventionally attached to the signal, there would be more
chance for delay, and the amount of practice would then
determine the speed. This is well shown in Tischer’s re-
sults, quoted on p. 524, where the most practised observer,
Tischer himself, reacted in one eighth of the time needed
by one of the others.t But what all investigators have
aimed to determine in these experiments is the minimum
time. JI trust I have said enough to convince the student
that this minimum time by no means measures what we
consciously know as discrimination. It only measures
something which, under the experimental conditions, leads

* If so, the reactions upon the spark would have to be slower than
those upon the touch. The investigation was abandoned because it was
found impossible to narrow down the difference between the conditions of
the sight-series and those of the touch-series, to nothing more than the
possible presence in the latter of the intervening motor-idea. Other dis-
parities could not be excluded.

+ Tischer gives figures from quite unpractised individuals, which i have
not quoted. The discrimination-time of one of them is 22 times longer than
Tischer’s own! (Psychol. Studien, 1 527.)

§28 PSYCHOLOG Y.

to a similar result. But it is the bane of psychology to
suppose that where results are similar, processes must be
the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers
would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle
is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, for-
sooth, they terminate in the same two points.*

THE PERCEPTION OF LIKENESS.

The perception of likeness is practically very much bound
up with that of difference. That is to say, the only differ-
ences we note as differences, and estimate quantitatively, and
arrange along a scale, are those comparatively limited dif-
ferences which we find between members of a common
genus. The force of gravity and the color of this ink are
things it never occurred to me to compare until now that L
am casting about for examples of the incomparable.
Similarly the elastic quality of this india-rubber band, the
comfort of last night’s sleep, the good that can be done with
a legacy, these are things too discrepant to have ever been
compared ere now. Their relation to each other is less
that of difference than of mere logical negativity. To be found
different, things must as arule have some commensurability,
some aspect in common, which suggests the possibility of
their being treated in the same way. This is of course not
a theoretic necessity—for any distinction may be called a
‘ difference, if one hkes—but a practical and linguistic re-
mark.

The same things, then,which arouse the perception of difference
usually arouse that of resemblance also. And the analysis of
them, so as to define wherein the difference and wherein the
resemblance respectively consists, is called comparison. If
we 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

* Compare Lipps’s excellent passage to the same critical effect in his
Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens, pp. 390-393.—I leave my text just as it
was written before the publication of Lange’s and Miinsterberg’s results
cited on pp. 92 and 432. Their shortened’ or ‘muscular’ times, got
when the expectant attention was addressed to the possible reactions rather
than to the stimulus, constitute the minimal reaction-time of which I speak,
and ail that I say in the text falls beautifully into line with their results.

DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON. 529

treat them as merely different, we are apt to discover how
much they are alike. Difference, commonly so called, is
thus between species of a genus. And the faculty by which
we perceive the resemblance upon which the genus is based,
is just as ultimate and inexplicable a mental endowment as
that by which we perceive the differences upon which the
species depend. Thereisa shock of likeness when we pass
from one thing to another which in the first instance we
merely discriminate numerically, but, at the moment of
bringing our attention to bear, perceive to be similar to the
first ; Just as there is a shock of difference when we pass be-
tween two dissimilars.* The objective extent of the like-
ness, just like that of the difference, determines the magni-
tude of the shock. The likeness may be so evanescent, or
the basis of it so habitual and little liable to be attended
to, that it will escape observation altogether. Where, how-
ever, we find it, there we make a genus of the things com-
pared ; and their discrepancies and incommensurabilities in
other respects can then figure as the differentie of so many
species. As ‘ thinkables’ or ‘existents’’ even the smoke of
a cigarette and the worth of a dollar-bill are comparable—
still more so as ‘ perishables,’ or as ‘ enjoyables.’

Much, then, of what I have said of difference in the
course of this chapter will apply, with a simple change of
language, to resemblance as well. We go through the
world, carrying on the two functions abreast, discovering
differences in the like, and likenesses in the different. To
abstract the ground of either difference or likeness (where
it is not ultimate) demands an analysis of the given objects
into their parts. So that all that was said of the depend-
ence of analysis upon a preliminary separate acquaintance
with the character to be abstracted, and upon its having
varied concomitants, finds a place in the psychology of re-
semblance as well as in that of difference.

But when all is said and done about the conditions
which favor our perception of resemblance and our ab-
straction of its ground, the crude fact remains, that some

* Cf. Sully: Mind, x. 494-5; Bradley: cb¢d. x1. 83 ; Bosanquet : zbid. xt.
405-

530 PSYCHOLOGY.

people are far more sensitive to resemblances, and far more
ready to point out wherein they consist, than others are.
They are the wits, the poets, the inventors, the scientfic
men, the practical geniuses. A native talent for perceiving
analogies is reckoned by Prof. Bain, and by others before
and after him, as the leading fuct in genius of every order.
But as this chapter is already long, and as the question of
genius had better wait till Chapter XXII, where its practical
consequences can be discussed at the same time, I will
say nothing more at present either about it or about the
faculty of noting resemblances. If the reader feels that
this faculty is having small justice done it at my hands,
and that it ought to be wondered at and made much more of
than has been done in these last few pages, he will per-
haps find some compensation when that later chapter is
reached. JI think I emphasize it enough when I call it one
of the ultimate foundation-pillars of the intellectual life,
the others being Discrimination, Retentiveness, and Asso-
ciation.

THE MAGNITUDE OF DIFFERENCES.

On page 489 I spoke of differences being greater or less,
and of certain groups of them being susceptible of a linear
arrangement exhibiting serial increase. A series whose
terms grow more and more different from the starting point
is one whose terms grow less and less like it. They grow
more and more like it if you read them the other way.
So that likeness and unlikeness to the starting point are
functions inverse to each other, of the position of any term
in such a series.

Professor Stumpf introduces the word distance to de-
note the position of a term in any such series. The less
like is the term, the more distant it is from the start-
ing point. The ideally regular series of this sort would
be one in which the distances—the steps of resemblance
or difference—between all pairs of adjacent terms were
equal. This would be an evenly gradated series. And
it is an interesting fact in psychology that we are able,
in many departments of our sensibility, to arrange the
terms without difficulty in this evenly gradated way. Dif:

DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON. §31

ferences, in other words, between diverse pairs of terms,
a and b, for example, on the one hand, and ¢ and d on the
other,* can be judged equal or diverse in amount. The dis-
tances from one term to another in the series are equal.
Linear magnitudes and musical notes are perhaps the im-
pressions which we easiest arrange in this way. Next come
shades of ight or color, which we have little difficulty in
arranging by steps of difference of sensibly equal value.
Messrs. Plateau and Delbcoeuf have found it fairly easy to
determine what shade of gray will be judged by every one
to hit the exact middle between a darker and a lighter
shade.t

How now do we so readily recognize the equality of two
differences between different pairs of terms? or, more
briefly, how do we recognize the magnitude of a difference
at all? Prof. Stumpf discusses this question in an inter-
esting way ;{ and comes to the conclusion that our feeling
for the size of a difference, and our perception that the
terms of two diverse pairs are equally or unequally distant
from each other, can be explained by no simpler mental
process, but, like the shock of difference itself, must be
regarded as for the present an unanalyzable endowment

* The judgment becomes easier if the two couples of terms have one
member in common, if a—b and b—c, for example, are compared. This, as
Stumpf says (Tonpsychologie, 1. 131), is probably because the introduction
of the fourth term brings involuntary cross-comparisons with it, a and }
with d, } with c, etc., which confuses us by withdrawing our attention
from the relations we ought alone to be estimating.

+ J. Delbeuf: Eléments de Psychophysique (Paris, 1883), p. 64. Pla-
teau in Stumpf, Tonpsych., 1.125. I have noticed a curious enlargement
of certain ‘distances’ of difference under the influence of chloroform.
The jingling of the bells on the horses of a horse-car passing the door, for
example, and the rumbling of the vehicle itself, which to our ordinary
hearing merge together very readily into a quasi-continuous body of
sound, have seemed so far apart as to require a sort of mental facing in
opposite directions to get from one to the other, as if they belonged in dif-
ferent worlds. Iam inclined to suspect, from certain data, that the ulti-
mate philosophy of difference and likeness will have to be built upcen
experiences of intoxication, especially by nitrous oxide gas, which lets 71s
into intuitions the subtlety whereof is denied to the waking state. Cf. B.
P. Blood: The Anesthetic Revelation, and the Gist of Philosophy (Am-
sterdam, N. Y., 1874). Cf. also Mind, vir. 206.

t Op. cit. p. 126 ff.

532 PSYCHOLOGY.

of the mind. This acute author rejects in particular the
notion which would make our judgment of the distance
between two sensations depend upon our mentally travers-
ing the intermediary steps. We may of course do so, and
may often find it useful to do so, as in musical intervals, or
figured lines. But we need not do so; and nothing more
is really required for a comparative judgment of the amount
of a ‘distance’ than three or four impressions belonging to
a common kind.

The vanishing of all perceptible difference between two
numerically distinct things makes them qualitatively the
same or equal. Equality, or qualitative (as distinguished
from numerical) identity, is thus nothing but the extreme
degree of likeness.*

We saw above (p. 492) that some persons consider that
the ditference between two objects is constituted of two
things, viz., their absolute identity in certain respects, plus
their absolute non-identity in others. We saw that this theory
would not apply to all cases (p. 495). So here any theory
which would base likeness on identity, and not rather iden-
tity on likeness, must fail. It is supposed perhaps, by most
people, that two resembling things owe their resemblance
to their absolute identity in respect of some attribute or
attributes, combined with the absolute non-identity of the
rest of their being. This, which may be true of compound
things, breaks down when we come to simple impressions.

‘‘ When we compare a deep, a middle, and ahigh note, e.g. C, fsharp,
a’, we remark immediately that the first is less like the third than the
second is. The same would be true of ¢d e in the same region of the
scale. Our very calling one of the notes a ‘ middle’ note is the expres-
sion of a judgment of this sort. But where here is the identical and
where the non-identical part? We cannot think of the overtones ; for
the first-named three notes have none in common, at least not on musi-
cal instruments. Moreover, we might take simple tones, and still our
judgment would be unhesitatingly the same, provided the tones were
not chosen too close together. . . . Neither can it be said that the
identity consists in their all being sounds, and not a sound, a smell, and
a color, respectively. For this identical attribute comes to each of them
in equal measure, whereas the first, being less like the third than the
second is, ought, on the terms of the theory we are criticising, to have

* Stumpf, pp. 111-121.

DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON. 533

less of the identical quality. . . . It thus appears impracticable to define
all possible cases of likeness as partial identity plws partial disparity ;
and it is vain to seek in all cases for identical elements.” * ;

And as all compound resemblances are based on simple
ones like these, it follows that likeness iiberhaupt must not
be conceived as a special complication of identity, but
rather that identity must be conceived as a special degree
of likeness, according to the proposition expressed at the
outset of the paragraph that precedes. Likeness and dif-
ference are ultimate relations perceived. As a matter of
fact, no two sensations, no two objects of all those we know,
are in scientific rigor identical. We call those of them
identical whose difference is unperceived. Over and above
this we have a conception of absolute sameness, it is true,
but this, like so many of our conceptions (cf. p. 508), is an
ideal construction got by following a certain direction of
serial increase to its maximum supposable extreme. It
plays an important part, among other permanent meanings
possessed by us, in our ideal intellectual constructions.
But it plays no part whatever in explaining psychologically
how we perceive likenesses between simple things.

THE MEASURE OF DISCRIMINATIVE SENSIBILITY.

In 1860, Professor G. T. Fechner of Leipzig, a man of
ereat learning and subtlety of mind, published two volumes
entitled ‘ Psychophysik,’ devoted to establishing and ex-
plaining a law called by him the psychophysic law, which

* Stumpf, pp. 116-7. I have omitted, so as not to make my text too intri-
cate, an extremely acute and conclusive paragraph, which I reproduce here :
““We may generalize: Wherever a number of sensible impressions are
apprehended as a series, there in the last instance must perceptions of sim-
ple likeness be found. Proof: Assume that all the terms of a series, e.g.
the qualities of tone, ede fg, have something in common,—no matter what
it is, call it X; then I say that the differing parts of each of these terms
must not only be differently constituted in each, but must themselves form
@ series, whose existence is the ground for our apprehending the original
terms in serial form. We thus get instead of the original series abedef

. . the equivalent series Xa, Xf, Xy, ... etc. What is gained ? The
question immediately arises: How is a 6 y known asa series? According
to the theory, these elements must themselves be made up of a part common
to all, and of parts differing in each, which latter parts form a new series,
and so on ad infinitum, which is absurd.”

534. PSYCHOLOGY.

he considered to express the deepest and most elementary
relation between the mental and the physical worlds. It is
a formula for the connection between the amount of our
sensations and the amount of their outward causes. Its
simplest expression is, that when we pass from one sensa-
tion to a stronger one of the same kind, the sensations in-
crease proportionally to the logarithms of their exciting
causes. Fechner’s book was the starting point of a new
department of literature, which it would be perhaps impos-
sible to match for the qualities of thoroughness and sub-
tlety, but of which, in the humble opinion of the present
writer, the proper psychological outcome is just nothing.
The psychophysic law controversy has prompted a good
many series of observations on sense-discrimination, and
has made discussion of them very rigorous. It has also
cleared up our ideas about the best methods for getting
average results, when particular observations vary; and
beyond this it has done nothing; but as it is a chapter in
the history of our science, some account of it is here due to
the reader.

Fechner’s train of thought has been popularly expounded
a great many times. As I have nothing new to add, it is
but just that I should quote an existing account. I choose
the one given by Wundt in his Vorlesungen itber Menschen
und Thierseele, 1863, omitting a good deal :

‘* How much stronger or weaker one sensation is than another, we
are never able to say. Whether the sun be a hundred or a thousand
times brighter than the moon, a cannon a hundred or a thousand times
louder than a pistol, is beyond our power to estimate. The natural
measure of sensation which we possess enables us to judge of the equal-
ity, of the ‘ more’ and of the ‘less,’ but not of ‘ how many times more
or less.” This natural measure is, therefore, as good as no measure at
all, whenever it becomes a question of accurately ascertaining intensi-
ties in the sensational sphere. Even though it may teach us in a genera]
way that with the strength of the outward physical stimulus the strength
of the concomitant sensation waxes or wanes, still it leaves us without
the slightest knowledge of whether the sensation varies in exactly the
same proportion as the stimulus itself, or at a slower or a more rapid
rate. In a word, we know by our natural sensibility nothing of the law
that connects the sensation and its outward cause together. To find
this law we must first find an exact measure for the sensation itself;
we must be able to say: A stimulus of strength one begets a sensation

DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON. 535

of strength one, a stimulus of strength two begets a sensation of
strength fwo, or three, or fowr, etc. But to do this we must first know
what a sensation two, three, or four times greater than another,
signifies. . .

‘* Space magnitudes we soon learn to determine exactly, because we
only measure one space against another. The measure of mental mag-
nitudes is far more difficult. . . . But the problem of measuring the
magnitude of sensations is the first step in the bold enterprise of mak-
ing mental magnitudes altogether subject to exact measurement. .
Were our whole knowledge limited to the fact that the sensation rises
when the stimulus rises, and falls when the latter falls, much would not
be gained. But even immediate unaided observation teaches us certain
facts which, at least in a general way, suggest the law according to
which the sensations vary with their outward cause.

‘* Every one knows that in the stilly night we hear things unnoticed
in the noise of day. The gentle ticking of the clock, the air circulating
through the chimney, the cracking of the chairs in the room, anda
thousand other slight noises, impress themselves upon our ear. It is
equally well known that in the confused hubbub of the streets, or the
clamor 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 are
brightest at night are invisible by day; and although we see the moon
then, she is far paler than at night. Everyone who has had to deal
with weights knows that if to a pound in the hand a second pound be
added, the difference is immediately felt; whilst if it be added to a
hundredweight, we are not aware of the difference at all... .

‘¢ The sound of the clock, the light of the stars, the pressure of the
pound, these are all stimuii to our senses, and stimuli whose outward
amount remains the same. What then do these experiences teach ?
Evidently nothing but this, that one and the same stimulus, according
to the circumstances under which it operates, will be felt either more or
less intensely, or not felt at all. Of what sort now is the alteration in
the circumstances, upon which this alteration in the feeling may depend ?
On considering the matter closely we see that it is everywhere of one
and the same kind. The tick of the clock is a feeble stimulus for our
auditory nerve, which we hear plainly when it is alone, but not when it
is added to the strong stimulus of the carriage-wheels and other noises
of the day. The light of the stars is a stimulus to the eye. But if the
stimulation which this light exerts be added to the strong stimulus of
daylight, we feel nothing of it, although we feel it distinctly when it
unites itself with the feebler stimulation of the twilight. The pound-
weight is a stimulus to our skin, which we feel when it joins itself to a
preceding stimulus of equal strength, but which vanishes when it is
combined 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-exist-
ing stimulation of the organ is small, hut must be so much the larger,

536 PSYCHOLOGY.

the greater the pre-existing stimulation is. From this in a general way
we can perceive the connection between the stimulus and the feeling it
excites. At least thus much appears, that the law of dependence is
not as simple a one as might have been expected beforehand. The
simplest relation would obviously be that the sensation should increase
in identically the same ratio as the stimulus, thus that if a stimulus of
strength one occasioned a sensation one, a stimulus of two should occa-
sion sensation fwo, stimulus three, sensation three, etc. But if this
simplest of all relations prevailed, a stimulus added to a pre-existing
strong stimulus ought to provoke as great an increase of feeling as if
it were added to a pre-existing weak stimulus; the light of the stars
e.g., ought to make as great an addition to the daylight as it does to
the 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 sensation
then is unnoticable, whereas the same addition to our feeling of the twi-
light is very considerable indeed. So it is clear that the strength of the
sensations does not increase in proportion to the amount of the stimuli,
but more slowly. And now comes the question, in what proportion
does the increase of the sensation grow less as the increase of the
stimulus grows greater. To answer this question, every-day experiences
do not suffice. We need exact measurements both of the amounts of
the various stimuli, and of the intensity of the sensations themselves.

‘* How to execute these measurements, however, is something which
daily experience suggests. To measure the strength of sensations is, as
we saw, impossible ; we can only measure the difference of sensations.
Experience showed us what very unequal differences of sensation might
come from equal differences of outward stimulus. But all these ex-
periences expressed themselves in one kind of fact, that the same differ-
ence of stimulus could in one case be felt, and in another case not felt
at all—a pound felt if added to another pound, but not if added toa
hundred-weight. . . . Wecan quickest reach a result with our observa-
tions if we start with an arbitrary strength of stimulus, notice what
sensation it gives us, and then sve how much we can increase the stim-
ulus without making the sensation seem to change. If we earry out
such observations with stimuli of varying absolute amounts, we shall be
forced to choose in an equally varying way the amounts of addition to
the stimulus which are capable of giving us a just barely perceptible
feeling of more. A light, to be just perceptible in the twilight need not
be near as bright as the starlight ; it must be far brighter to be just per-
ceived during the day. If now we institute such observations for all
possible strengths of the various stimuli, and note for each strength
the amount of addition of the latter required to produce a barely per-
ceptible alteration of sensation, we shall have a series of figures in
which is immediately expressed the law according to which the sensa-
tion alters when the stimulation is increased. ie

Observations according to this method are particularly

DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON. 037

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 ad-
dition to the original weight must stand exactly in the same proportion
to it, be the same fraction of it, no matter what the absolute value
may be of the weights on which the experiment is made. ... As the
average of a number of experiments, this fraction is found to be about
4; that is, no matter what pressure there may already be made upon
the skin, an increase or a diminution of the pressure will be felt, as
soon as the added or subtracted weight amounts to one third of the
weight originally there.”

Wundt then describes how differences may be observed
in the muscular feelings, in the feelings of heat, in those of
light, and in those of sound; and he concludes his seventh
lecture (from which our extracts have been made) thus :

‘*So we have found that all the senses whose stimuli we are enabled
to measure accurately, obey a uniform law. However various may be
their several delicacies of discrimination, this holds true of all, that
the increase of the stimulus necessary to produce an increase of the sen-
sation bears a constant ratio to the total stimulus. The figures which
express this ratio in the several senses may be shown thus in tabular
form : .

Sensation of light, - th
Muscular sensation; 6 «is < = s = «ay
Feeling of pressure,

oe ‘¢ warmth,

“i ** sound,

‘These figures are far from giving as accurate a measure as might
be desired. But at least they are fit to convey a general notion of the
relative discriminative susceptibility of the different senses... . The
important law which gives in so simple a form the relation of the sen-
sation to the stimulus that calls it forth was first discovered by the
physiologist Ernst Heinrich Weber to obtain in special cases. Gustav
Theodor Fechner first proved it to be a law for all departments of sen-
sation. Psychology owes to him the first comprehensive investigation
of sensations from a physical point of view, the first basis of an exact
Theory of Sensibility.”

So much for a general account of what Fechner calls
Weber’s law. The ‘exactness’ of the theory of sensibility to
which it leads consists in the supposed fact that it gives
the means of representing sensations by numbers. The
wnt of any kind of sensation will be that increment which,

538 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

when the stimulus is increased, we can just barely perceive
to be added. The total number of units which any given
sensation contains will consist of the total number of such
increments which may be perceived in passing from no
sensation of the kind to a sensation of the present amount.
We cannot get at this number directly, but we can, now
that we know Weber’s law, get at it by means of the physi-
eal stimulus of which it is a function. For if we know how
much of the stimulus it will take to give a barely percep-
tible sensation, and then what percentage of addition to
the stimulus will constantly give a barely perceptible incre-
ment to the sensation, it is at bottom only a question of
compound interest to compute, out of the total amount of
stimulus which we may be employing at any moment, the
number of such increments, or, in other words, of sensa-
tional units to which it may give rise. This number bears
the same relation to the total stimulus which the time
elapsed bears to the capital plus the compound interest
accrued.

To take an example: If stimulus A just falls short of
producing a sensation, and if r be the percentage of itself
which must be added to it to get a sensation which is
barely perceptible—call this sensation 1—then we should
have the series of sensation-numbers corresponding to
their several stimuli as follows:

Sensation 0 = stimulus A ;

os = a A(1+7);
66 = 73 A i+ry;
“ce 3 — 6“ A (1 —- Bier

as (ate “ A (1+ 1r)".

The sensations here form an arithmetical series, and
the stimuli a geometrical series, and the two series corre-
spond term for term. Now, of two series corresponding in
this way, the terms of the arithmetical one are called the
logarithms of the terms corresponding in rank to them in
the geometrical series. A conventional arithmetical series
beginning with zero has been formed in the ordinary log-
arithmic tables, so that we may truly say (assuming our

DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON. 539

facts to be correct so far) that the sensations vary in the
same proportion as the logarithms of their respective stimuli.
And we can thereupon proceed to compute the number of
units In any given sensation (considering the unit of sen-
sation to be equal to the just perceptible increment above
zero, and the unit of stimulus to be equal to the increment
of stimulus r, which brings this about) by multiplying the
logarithm of the stimulus by a constant factor which must
vary with the particular kind of sensation in question. If
we call the stimulus R, and the constant factor C, we get
the formula

S = C log R,

which is what Fechner calls the psychophysischer Maas-
formel. This, in brief, is Fechner’s reasoning, as I under-
stand it.

The Maasformel admits of mathematical development
in various directions, and has given rise to arduous discus-
sions into which I am glad to be exempted from entering
here, since their interest is mathematical and metaphysical
and not primarily psychological at all.* I must say a word
about them metaphysically a few pages later on. Mean-
while it should be understood that no human being, in any
investigation into which sensations entered, has ever used
the numbers computed in this or any other way in order to
test a theory or to reach a new result. The whole notion
of measuring sensations numerically, remains in short a
mere mathematical speculation about possibilities, which
has never been applied to practice. Incidentally to the
discussion of it, however, a great many particular facts
have been discovered about discrimination which merit a
place in this chapter.

In the first place it is found, when the difference of two
sensations approaches the limit of discernibility, that at
one moment we discern it and at the next we do not. There
are accidental fluctuations in our inner sensibility which
make it impossible to tell just what the least discernible

* The most important ameliorations of Fechner’s formula are Delbeeuf’s
in his Recherches sur la Mesure des Sensations (18738), p. 35, and Elsas’s in
his pamphlet Uber die Psychophysik (1886), p. 16.

540 PSYCHOLOGY.

increment of the sensation is without taking the average ol
a large number of appreciations. These accidental errors
are as likely to increase as to diminish our sensibility,
and are eliminated in such an average, for those above
and those below the line then neutralize each other in the
sum, and the normal sensibility, if there be one (that is, the
sensibility due to constant causes as distinguished from
these accidental ones), stands revealed. The best way of
getting at the average sensibility has been very minutely
worked over. Fechner discussed three methods, as follows:
(1) The Method of just-discermble Differences. Take a
standard sensation S, and add to it until you distinctly feel the
addition d; then subtract from S-+d until you distinctly
feel the effect of the subtraction ;* call the difference here
d +d’
2

d’. The least discernible difference sought is ; and

the ratio of this quantity to the original S (or rather to
S +d — d’) is what Fechner calls the difference-threshold.
This difference-threshold should be a constant fraction (no
matter what is the size of S) if Weber’s law holds universally
true. The difficulty in applying this method is that we are
so often in doubt whether anything has been added to S or
not. Furthermore, if we simply take the smallest d about
which we are never in doubt or in error, we certainly get
our least discernible difference larger than it ought theo-
retically to be.t

Of course the sensibility is small when the least dis-
cernible difference is large, and vice versa ; in other words,
it and the difference-threshold are inversely related to each
other.

(2) The Method of True and False Cases. A sensation
which is barely greater than another will, on account of
azcidental errors in a long series of experiments, sometimes
be judged equal, and sometimes smaller; ie., we shall
make a certain number of false and a certain number of

* Reversing the order is for the sake of letting the opposite accidental
errors due to ‘ contrast’ neutralize each other.

+ Theoretically it would seem that it ought to be equal to the sum of
all the additions which we judge to be increases divided by the total num-
ber of judgments made.

DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON. 541

true judgments about the difference between the two sen-
sations which we are comparing.

‘‘ But the larger this difference is, the more the number of the true
judgments will increase at the expense of the false ones ; or, otherwise
expressed, the nearer to unity will be the fraction whose denominator
represents the whole number of judgments, and whose numerator rep-
resents those which are true. If m isa ratio of this nature, obtained
by comparison of two stimuli, A and B, we may seek another couple
of stimuli, a and 6, which when compared will give the same ratio of
true to false cases.” *

If this were done, and the ratio of a to b then proved
to be equal to that of A to B, that would prove that pairs
of small stimuli and pairs of large stimuli may affect our
discriminative sensibility similarly so long as the ratio of
the components to each other within each pair is the same.
In other words, it would in so far forth prove the Weberian
law. Fechner made use of this method to ascertain his
own power of discriminating differences of weight, record-
ing no less than 24,576 separate judgments, and computing
as a result that his discrimination for the same relative
increase of weight was less good in the neighborhood of
500 than of 300 grams, but that after 500 grams it improved
up to 3000, which was the highest weight he experimented
with.

(3) The Method of Average Errors consists in taking a
standard stimulus and then trying to make another one of
the same sort exactly equal to it. There will in general be
an error whose amount is large when the discriminative
sensibility called in play is small, and vice versa. The
sum of the errors, no matter whether they be positive or
negative, divided by their number, gives the average error.
This, when certain corrections are made, is assumed by
Fechner to be the ‘reciprocal’ of the discriminative sensi-
bility in question. It should bear a constant proportion
to the stimulus, no matter what the absolute size of the
latter may be, if Weber’s law hold true.

These methods deal with just perceptible differences.
Delbceuf and Wundt have experimented with larger differ-

* J. Delbceuf, Eléments de Psychophysique (1888), p. 9.

542 PSYCHOLOGY.

ences oy means of what Wundt calls the Methode der mitt
leren Abstufungen, and what we may call

(4) The Method of Equal-appearing Intervals. This con-
sists in so arranging three stimuli in a series that the inter-
vals between the first and the second shall appear equal to
that between the second and the third. At first sight there
seems to be no direct logical connection between this method
and the preceding ones. By them we compare equally per,
ceptible increments of stimulus in different regions of the
latter’s scale ; but by the fourth method we compare incre-
ments which strike us as equally biy. But what we can but
just notice as an increment need not appear always of the
same bigness after itis noticed. On the contrary, it will
appear much bigger when we are dealing with stimuli that
are already large.

(5) The method of doubling the stimulus has been
employed by Wundt’s collaborator, Merkel, who tried to
make one stimulus seem just double the other, and then
measured the objective relation of the two. The remarks
just made apply also to this case.

So much for the methods. The results differ in the
hands of different observers. I will add a few of them,
and will take first the discriminative sensibility to light.

By the first method, Volkmann, Aubert, Masson, Helm-
holtz, and Kriipelin find figures varying from 4 or } to z+,
of the original stimulus. The smaller fractional increments
are discriminated when the light is already fairly strong, the
larger ones when it is weak or intense. That is, the dis-
criminative sensibility is low when weak or overstrong
lights are compared, and at its best with a certain medium
illumination. It is thus a function of the light’s intensity ;
but throughout a certain range of the latter it keeps con-
stant, and in 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 by
his arbitrary unit) between 96 and 4096, beyond which in-
tensity no experiments were made.* Konig and Brodhun

* Philos. Studien, ry. 588.

DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON. 543

have given measurements by method 1 which cover the
most extensive series, and moreover apply to six different
colors of light. These experiments (performed in Helm-
holtz’s laboratory, apparently,) ran from an intensity called
1 to one which was 100,000 times as great. From intensity
2000 to 20,000 Weber’s law held good; below and above
this range discriminative sensibility declined. The incre-
ment discriminated here was the same for all colors of
light, and lay (according to the tables) between 1 and 2 per
cent of the stimulus.* Delbceuf had verified Weber’s law
for a certain range of luminous intensities by method 4;
that is, he had found that the objective intensity of a light
which appeared midway between two others was really the
geometrical mean of the latter's intensities. But A. Lehmann
and afterwards Neiglick, in Wundt’s laboratory, found that
effects of contrast played so large a part in experiments
performed in this way that Delbceut’s results could not be
held conclusive. Merkel, repeating the experiments still
later, found that the objective intensity of the light which
we judge to stand midway between two others neither
stands midway nor is a geometric mean. The discrepancy
from both figures is enormous, but is least large from the
midway figure or arithmetical mean of the two extreme in-
tensities.t Finally, the stars have from time immemorial
been arranged in ‘magnitudes’ supposed to differ by equal-
seeming intervals. Lately their intensities have been
gauged photometrically, and the comparison of the subjec-
tive with the objective series has been made. Prof. J. Jas-
trow is the latest worker in this field. He finds, taking
Pickering’s Harvard photometric tables as a basis, that the
ratio of the average intensity of each ‘magnitude’ to that
below it decreases as we pass from lower to higher magni-
tudes, showing a uniform departure from Weber’s law, if
the method of equal-appearing intervals be held to have
any direct relevance to the latter.

* Berlin Acad. Sitzungsberichte, 1888, p. 917. Other observers (Dobro.
wolsky, Lamansky) found great differences in different colors.

+ See Merkel’s tables, doc. czt. p. 568.

t American Journal of Psychology, 1. 125. The rate of decrease is

small but steady, and I cannot well understand what Professor J. means by
saying that his figures verify Weber’s law.

544 PSYCHOLOGY.

Sounds are less delicately discriminated in intensity than
lights. A certain difficulty has come from disputes as to
the measurement of the objective intensity of the stimulus.
Earlier inquiries made the perceptible increase of the stim-
ulus to be about + of the latter. Merkel’s latest results of
the method of just perceptible differences make it about
3, for that part of the scale of intensities during which
Weber’s law holds good, which is from 20 to 5000 of M.’s
arbitrary unit.* Below this the fractional increment must
be larger. Above it no measurements were made.

For pressure and muscular sense we have rather divergent
results. Weber found by the method of just-perceptible
differences that persons could distinguish an increase of
weight of 4; when the two weights were successively lifted
by the same hand. It took a much larger fraction to be
discerned when the weights were laid on a hand which
rested on the table. He seems to have verified his results
for only two pairs of differing weignts,t and on this founded
his ‘law.’ Experiments in Hering’s laboratory on lifting
11 weights, running from 250 to 2750 grams showed that
the least perceptible increment varied from ;'; for 250 grams
to ;4, for 2500. For 2750 it rose to j, again. Merkel’s
recent and very careful experiments, in which the finger
pressed down the beam of a balance counterweighted
by from 25 to 8020 grams, showed that between 200 and
2000 grams a constant fractional increase of about 7; was
felt when there was no movement of the finger, and of about
js when there was movement. Above and below these
limits the discriminative power grew less. It was greater
when the pressure was upon one square millimeter of sur-
face than when it was upon seven.

Warmth and taste have been made the subject of similar
investigations with the result of verifying something like
Weber’s law. The determination of the unit of stimu-
lus is, however, so hard here that I will give no figures.
The results may be found in Wundt’s Physiologische Psy-
chologie, 3d Ed. 1. 370-2.

* Philosophische Studien, v. 514-5.
+ Cf. G. E. Miller: Zur Grandlegung der Psychophysik, §$ 68-70.
¢ Philosophische Studien, v. 287 ff.

DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON. 545

The discrimination of lengths by the eye has been found
also to obey to a certain extent Weber’s law. The figures
will all be found in G. E. Miiller, op. cit., part 1, chap. x,
to which the reader is referred. Professor Jastrow has
published some experiments, made by what may be called
a modification of the method of equal-appearing differ-
ences, on our estimation of the length of sticks, by which it
would seem that the estimated intervals and the real ones
are directly and not logarithmically proportionate to each
other. This resembles Merkel’s results by that method
for weights, lights, and sounds, and differs from Jastrow’s
own finding about star-magnitudes.*

If we look back over these facts as a whole, we see that
itis not any fixed amount added to an impression that
makes us notice an increase in the latter, but that the
amount depends on how large the impression already is.
The amount is expressible as a certain fraction of the entire
impression to which it is added; and it is found that the
fraction is a well-nigh constant figure throughout an entire
region of the scale of intensities of the impression in ques-
tion. Above and below this region the fraction increases in
value. This is Weber’s law, which in so far forth expresses
an empirical generalization of practical importance, without
involving any theory whatever or seeking any absolute
measure of the sensations themselves. It is in the

Theoretic Interpretation of Weber's Law

that Fechner’s originality exclusively consists, in his as-
sumptions, namely, 1) that the just-perceptible increment
is the sensation-unit, and is in all parts of the scale the same
(mathematically expressed, 4s = const.); 2) that all our
sensations consist of sums of these units; and finally, 3) that
the reason why it takes a constant fractional increase of the
stimulus to awaken this unit les in an ultimate law of the
connection of mind with matter, whereby the quantities of
our feelings are related logarithmically to the quantities
of their objects. Fechner seems to find something in-
scrutably sublime in the existence of an ultimate ‘psycho-
physic’ law of this form.

* American J. of Psychology, 111. 44-7.

546 PSYCHOLOGY.

These assumptions are all peculiarly fragile. To begin
with, the mental fact which in the experiments corresponds
to the increase of the stimulus is not an enlarged sensation,
but a judgment that the sensation is enlarged. What Fech-
ner calls the ‘sensation’ is what appears to the mind as
the objective phenomenon of light, warmth, weight, sound,
impressed part of body, etc. Fechner tacitly if not openly
assumes that such a judgment of increase consists in the
simple fact that an icreased number of sensation-units
are present to the mind; and that the judgment is thus
itself a quantitatively bigger mental thing when it judges
large differences, or differences between large terms, than
when it judges small ones. But these ideas are really
absurd. The hardest sort of judgment, the judgment
which strains the attention most (if that be any criterion
of the judgment’s ‘size’), is that about the smallest things
and differences. But really it has no meaning to talk
about one judgment being bigger than another. And
even if we leave out judgments and talk of sensations
only, we have already found ourselves (in Chapter VI)
quite unable to read any clear meaning into the notion that
they are masses of units combined. ‘To introspection, our
feeling of pink is surely not a portion of our feeling of
scarlet; nor does the light of an electric are seem to con-
tain that of a tallow-candle in itself. Compound things
contain parts ; and one such thing may have twice or three
times as many parts as another. But when we take a sim-
ple sensible quality like light or sound, and say that there
is now twice or thrice as much of it present as there was
a moment ago, although we seem to mean the same thing
as if we were talking of compound objects, we really mean
something different. We mean that if we were to arrange
the various possible degrees of the quality in a scale of
serial increase, the distance, interval, or difference between
the stronger and the weaker specimen before us would
seem about as great as that between the weaker one and
the beginning of the scale. Jt is these RELATIONS, these DIS-
TANCES. which we are measuring and not the composition of the
qualities themselves, as Fechner thinks. Whilst if we turn
to objects which are divisible, surely a big object may be
known in a little thought. Introspection shows moreover

DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON. 547

that in most sensations a new kind of feeling invariably ac-
companies our judgment of an increased impression ; and
this is a fact which Fechnevr’s formula disregards.*

But apart from these a priori difficulties, and even sup-
posing that sensations did consist of added units, Fechner’s
assumption that all equally perceptible additions are equally
great additions is entirely arbitrary. Why might not a
small addition to a small sensation be as perceptible as a
large addition to a large one? In this case Weber’s law
would apply not to the additions themselves, but only to
their perceptibility. Our noticing of a difference of units in
two sensations would depend on the latter being in a fixed
ratio. But the difference itself would depend directly on
that between their respective stimuli. So many units added
to the stimulus, so many added to the sensation, and if
the stimulus grew in a certain ratio, in exactly the same
ratio would the sensation also grow, though its perceptibility
grew according to the logarithmic law.t

If 4 stand for the smallest difference which we perceive,
then we should have, instead of the formula 4s = const.,

8
= const., a formula

which is Fechner’s, the formula

which interprets all the facts of Weber’s law, in an entirely
different theoretic way from that adopted by Fechner.
The entire superstructure which Fechner rears upon the

* Cf. Stumpf, Tonpsychologie, pp. 397-9. ‘‘ One sensation cannot be a
multiple of another. If it could, we ought tc be able to subtract the one
from the other, and to feel the remainder by itself. Every sensation pre-
sents itself as an indivisible unit.’’ Professor von Kries, in the Viertel-
jahrschrift fiir wiss. Philosophie, v1. 257 ff., shows very clearly the ab-
surdity of supposing that our stronger sensations contain our weaker ones
as parts. They differ as qualitative units. Compare also J. Tannery in
Delbeeuf’s Eléments de Psychophysique (1883), p. 184 ff.; J. Ward in Mind,
1. 464; Lotze, Metaphysik, § 258.

4 F. Brentano, Psychologie, 1. 9, 88 ff.—Merkel thinks that his results
with the method of equal-appearing intervals show that we compare con-
siderable intervals with each other by a different law from that by which
we notice barely perceptible intervals. The stimuli form an arithmetical
series (a pretty wild one according to his figures) in the former case, a
geometrical one in the latter—at least so I understand this valiant experi-
menter but somewhat obscure if acute writer.

t This is the formula which Merkel thinks he has verified (if 1 under-
stand him aright) by his experiments by method 4.

548 PSYCHOLOGY.

facts is thus not only seen to be arbitrary and subjective,
but in the highest degree improbable as well. The depart-
ures from Weber’s law in regions where it does not obtain,
he explains by the compounding with it of other unknown
laws which mask its effects. As if any law could not be
found in any set of phenomena, provided one have the wit to
invent enough other coexisting laws to overlap and neutral-
ize it! The whole outcome of the discussion, so far as
Fechner’s theories are concerned, is indeed nil. Weber’s
law alone remains true as an empirical generalization of fair
extent: What we add to a large stimulus we notice less
than what we add to a small one, unless it happen rela-
tively to the stimulus to be as great.

Weber's law is probably purely physiological.

One can express this state of things otherwise by saying
that the whole of the stimulus does not seem to be effective
in giving us the perception of ‘more,’ and the simplest in-
terpretation of such a state of things would be physical.
The loss of effect would take place in the nervous system.
If our feelings resulted from a condition of the nerve-
molecules which it grew ever more difficult for the stimulus
to increase, our feelings would naturally grow at a slower
rate than the stimulus itself. An ever larger part of the
latter’s work would go to overcoming the resistances, and
an ever smaller part to the realization of the feeling-bring-
ing state. Weber’s law would thus be a sort of law of
friction in the neural machine.* Just how these inner
resistances and frictions are to be conceived is a specu-
lative question. Delbeuf has formulated them as fa-
tigue ; Bernstein and Ward, as irradiations. The latest,
and probably the most ‘ real,’ hypothesis is that of Ebbing-
haus, who supposes that the intensity of sensation depends
on the number of neural molecules which ar2 disintegrated
in the unit of time. There are only a certain number at
any time which are capable of disintegrating ; and whilst
most of these are in an average condition of instability,

* Elsas: Ueber die Psychophysik (1886), p. 41. When the pans of
a balance are already loaded, but in equilibrium, it takes a proportionally
larger weight added to one of them to incline the beam.

DISCRIMINATION ANB COMPARISON. 549

some are almost stable and some already near to decom-
position. The smallest stimuli affect these latter molecules
only ; and as they are but few, the sensational effect from
adding a given quantity of stimulus at first is relatively
small. Medium stimuli affect the majority of the mole-
cules, but affect fewer and fewer in proportion as they have
already diminished their number. The latest additions to
the stimuli find all the medium molecules already disinte-
grated, and only affect the small relatively indecomposable
remainder, thus giving rise to increments of feeling which
are correspondingly small. (Pfluger’s Archiv. 45, 113.)

It is surely in some such way as this that Weber’s law
is to be interpreted, if it ever is. The Fechnerian Maas-
jormel and the conception of it as an ultimate ‘ psychophysic
law’ will remain an ‘idol of the den,’ if ever there was one.
Fechner himself indeed was a German (relehrter of the ideal
type, at once simple and shrewd, a mystic and an experi-
mentalist, homely and daring, and as loyal to facts as to his
theories. But it would be terrible if even such a dear old
man as this could saddle our Science forever with his
patient whimsies, and, in a world so full of more nutritious
objects of attention, compel all future students to plough
through the difficulties, not only of his own works, but of
the still drier ones written in his refutation. Those who
desire this dreadful literature can find it; it has a ‘ disci-
plinary value; but I will not even enumerate it in a foot-
note. Theonly amusing part of it is that Fechner’s critics
should always feel bound, after smiting his theories hip
and thigh and leaving not a stick of them standing, to
wind up by saying that nevertheless to him belongs the
imperishable glory, of first formulating them and thereby
turning psychology into an exact science,

‘*«: And everybody praised the duke
Who this great fight did win.’
‘But what good came of it at last?*
Quoth littie Peterkin.
‘Why, that I cannot tell,’ said he,
‘ But ’twas a famous victory !’”

CHAPTER XIV.*
ASSOCIATION.

AFTER discrimination, association! Already in the last
chapter I have had to invoke, in order to explain the im-
provement of certain discriminations by practice, the ‘as-
sociation’ of the objects to be distinguished, with other more
widely differing ones. It is obvious that the advance of our
knowledge must consist of both operations ; for objects at
first appearing as wholes are analyzed into parts, and
objects appearing separately are brought together and ap-
pear as new compound wholes to the mind. Analysis and
synthesis are thus the incessantly alternating mental
activities, a stroke of the one preparing the way for a stroke
of the other, much as, in walking, a man’s two legs are
alternately brought into use, both being indispensable for
any orderly advance.

The manner in which trains of imagery and consideration
follow each other through our thinking, the restless flight
of one idea before the next, the transitions our minds make
between things wide as the poles asunder, transitions which
at first sight startle us by their abruptness, but which,
when scrutinized closely, often reveal intermediating links
of perfect naturalness and propriety—all this magical, im-
ponderable streaming has from time immemorial excited
the admiration of all whose attention happened to be caught
by its omnipresent mystery. And it has furthermore
challenged the race of philosophers to banish something
of the mystery by formulating the process in simpler
terms. The problem which the philosophers have set
themselves is that of ascertaining principles of connection
between the thoughts which thus appear to sprout one out

*The theory propounded in this chapter, and a good many pages of
the text, were originally published in the Popular Science Monthly for

March, 1880.
550

ASSOCTATION. 551

of the other, whereby their peculiar succession or coexist-
ence may be explained.

But immediately an ambiguity arises: which sort of
connection is meant? connection thought-of, or connection
between thoughts? These are two entirely different things,
and only in the case of one of them is there any hope of
finding ‘principles.’ The jungle of connections thought of
can never be formulated simply. Every conceivable con-
nection may be thought of—of coexistence, succession, re-
semblance, contrast, contradiction, cause and effect, means
and end, genus and species, part and whole, substance
and property, early and late, large and small, landlord
and tenant, master and servant,—Heaven knows what, for
the list is literally inexhaustible. The only simplification
which could possibly be aimed at would be the reduction
of the relations to a smaller number of types, like those
which such authors as Kant and Renouvier call the ‘ cate-
gories’ of the understanding.* According as we followed
one category or another we should sweep, with our thought,
through the world in this way or in that. And all the cate-
gories would be logical, would be relations of reason. They
would fuse the items into a continuum. Were this the sort
of connection sought between one moment of our thinking
and another, our chapter might end here. For the only
summary description of these infinite possibilities of transi-
tion, is that they are all acts of reason, and that the mind
proceeds from one object to another by some rational path
of connection. The trueness of this formula is only equalled
by its sterility, for psychological purposes. Practically it
amounts to simply referring the inquirer to the relations
between facts or things, and to telling him that his thinking
follows them.

But as a matter of fact, his thinking only sometimes
follows them, and these so-called ‘transitions of reason’
are far from being all alike reasonable. If pure thought
runs all our trains, why should she run some so fast and
some so slow, some through dull flats and some through

* Compare Renouvier’s criticism of associationism in his Essais de
Critique générale, Logique, 11. p. 493 foll.

552 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

gorgeous scenery, some to mountain-heights and jewelled
mines, others through dismal swamps and darkness ?—and
run some off the track altogether, and into the wilderness
of lunacy? Why do we spend years straining after a
certain scientific or practical problem, but all in vain—
thought refusing to evoke the solution we desire? And
why, some day, walking in the street with our attention
miles away from that quest, does the answer saunter into
our minds as carelessly as if it had never been called for—
suggested, possibly, by the flowers on the bonnet of the
lady in front of us, or possibly by nothing that we can dis-
cover ? If reason can give us relief then, why did she not
do so earlier ?

The truth must be admitted that thought works under
conditions imposed ab extra. The great law of habit itself
—that twenty experiences make us recall a thing better
than one, that long indulgence in error makes right thinking
almost impossible—seems to have ne essential foundation
in reason. The business of thought is with truth—the
number of experiences ought to have nothing to do with
her hold of it; and she ought by right to be able to hug it
all the closer, after years wasted out of its presence. The
contrary arrangements seem quite fantastic and arbitrary,
but nevertheless are part of the very bone and marrow of
our minds. Reason is only one out of a thousand possi-
bilities in the thinking of each of us. Who can count all
the silly fancies, the grotesque suppositions, the utterly
irrelevant reflections he makes in the course of a day? Who
can swear that his prejudices and irrational beliefs con-
stitute a less bulky part of his mental furniture than his
clarified opinions? It is true that a presiding arbiter
seems to sit aloft in the mind, and emphasize the better
suggestionsinto permanence, while it ends by droopping out
and leaving unrecorded the confusion. But this is all the
difference. The mode of genesis of the worthy and
the worthless seems the same. The laws of our actual
thinking, of the cogitatum, must account alike for the bad
and the good materials on which the arbiter has to decide,
for wisdom and for folly. The laws of the arbiter, of the
cogitandum, of what we ought to think, are to the former as the

ASSOCIATION. 503

laws of ethics are to those of history. Who but an hegelian
historian ever pretended that reason in action was per se a
sufficient explanation of the political changes in Europe ?

There are, then, mechanical conditions on which thought
depends, and which, to say the least, determine the order in
which is presented the content or material for her compari-
sons, selections, and decisions. It is a suggestive fact that
Locke, and many more recent Continental psychologists,
have found themselves obliged to invoke a mechanical
process to accovnt for the aberrations of thought, the ob-
structive preprocessions, the frustrations of reason. This
they found in the law of habit, or what we now call As-
sociation by Contiguity. But it never occurred to these
writers that a process which could go the length of actually
producing some ideas and sequences in the mind might
safely be trusted to produce others too; and that those
habitual associations which further thought may also come
from the same mechanical source as those which hinder it.
Hartley accordingly suggested habit as a sufficient explana-
tion of all connections of our thoughts, and in so doing
planted himself squarely upon the properly psychological
aspect of the problem of connection, and sought to treat
both rational and irrational connections from a single
point of view. The problem which he essayed, however
lamely, to answer, was that of the connection between our
psychic states considered purely as such, regardless of the
objective connections of which they might take cognizance.
How does a man come, after thinking of A, to think of
B the next moment? or how does he come to think A
and B always together? These were the phenomena which
Hartley undertook to explain by cerebral physiology. I
believe that he was, in many essential respects, on the
right track, and I propose simply to revise his conclusions
by the aid of distinctions which he did not make.

But the whole historic doctrine of psychological asso-
ciation is tainted with one huge error—that of the construc-
tion of our thoughts out of the compounding of themselves
together of immutable and incessantly recurring ‘simple
ideas.’ It is the cohesion of these which the ‘ principles of

654 PSYCHOLOGY.

association’ are considered to account for. In Chapters VI
and IX we saw abundant reasons for treating the doctrine
of simple ideas or psychic atoms as mythological ; and, in
all that follows, our problem will be to keep whatever truths
the associationist doctrine has caught sight of without
weighing it down with the untenable incumbrance that the
association is between ‘ideas.’

Association, so far as the word stands for an effect, is
between THINGS THOUGHT OF—it is THINGS, not ideas, which are
associated in the mind. We ought to talk of the association
of objects, not of the association of ideas. And so far as
association stands for a cause, it is between processes in the
brain—it is these which, by being associated in certain
ways, determine what successive objects shall be thought.
Let us proceed towards our final generalizations by survey-
ing first a few familiar facts.

The laws of motor habit in the lower centres of the ner-
vous system are disputed by no one. A series of move-
ments repeated in a certain order tend to unroll themselves
with peculiar ease in that order for ever afterward. Num-
ber one awakens number two, and that awakens number
three, and so on, till the last is preduced. A habit of this
kind once become inveterate may go on automatically. And
so it is with the objects with which our thinking is con-
cerned. With some persons each note of a melody, heard
but once, will accurately revive in its proper sequence.
Small boys at school learn the inflections of many a Greek
noun, adjective, or verb, from the reiterated recitations
of the upper classes falling on their ear as they sit at their
desks. All this happens with no voluntary effort on their
part and with no thought of the spelling of the words. The
doggerel rhymes which children use in their games, such as
the formula

‘«« Ana mana mona mike
Barcelona bona strike,”

used for ‘counting out, form another familiar example of
things heard in sequence cohering in the same order in the
memory.

ASSOCIATION. 555

In touch we have a smaller number of instances, though
probably every one who bathes himself in a certain fixed
manner is familiar with the fact that each part of his body
over which the water is squeezed from the sponge awakens
a premonitory tingling consciousness in that portion of skin
which is habitually the next to be deluged. Tastes and
smells form no very habitual series in our experience. But
even if they did, it is doubtful whether habit would fix the
order of their reproduction quite so well as it does that of
other sensations. In vision, however, we have a sense in
which the order of reproduced things is very nearly as
much influenced by habit as is the order of remembered
sounds. Rooms, landscapes, buildings, pictures, or persons
with whose look we are very familiar, surge up before the
mind’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, will
seem to see each successive word, before they utter it, ap-
pear in its order on an imaginary page. A certain chess-
player, one of those heroes who train themselves to play
several games at once blindfold, is reported to say that in
bed at night after a match the games are played all over
again before his mental eye, each board being pictured as
passing in turn through each of its successive stages. In
this case, of course, the intense previous voluntary strain
of the power of visual representation is what facilitated the
fixed order of revival.

Association occurs as amply between impressions of
different senses as between homogeneous sensations. Seen
things and heard things cohere with each other, and with
odors and tastes, in representation, in the same order in
which they cohered as impressions of the outer world.
Feelings of contact reproduce similarly the sights, sounds,
and tastes with which experience has associated them. In
fact, the ‘objects’ of our perception, as trees, men, houses,
microscopes, of which the real world seems composed, are
nothing but clusters of qualities which through simulta-
neous stimulation have so coalesced that the moment one
is excited actually it serves as a sign or cue for the idea of
the others to arise. Leta person enter his room in the

556 PSYCHOLOGY.

dark and grope among the objects there. The touch of the
matches will instantaneously recall their appearance. If
his hand comes in contact with an orange ou the table, the
golden yellow of the fruit, its savor and perfume will forth-
with shoot through his mind. In passing the hand over
the sideboard or in jogging the coal-scuttle with the foot,
the large glossy dark shape of the one and the irregular
blackness of the other awaken like a flash and constitute
what we call the recognition of the objects. The voice of
the violin faintly echoes through the mind as the hand is
laid upon it in the dark, and the feeling of the garments or
draperies which may hang about the room is not understood
till the look correlative to the feeling has in each case been
resuscitated. Smells notoriously have the power of recall-
ing the other experiences in whose company they were wont
to be felt, perhaps long years ago; and the voluminous
emotional character assumed by the images which sud-
denly pour into the mind at such a time forms one of the
staple 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 train or the yell
of its whistle, without thinking of its long, jointed appear-
ance and its headlong speed, nor catch a familiar voice in
a crowd without recalling, with the name of the speaker,
also his face. But the most notorious and important case
-of the mental combination of auditory with optical impres-
sions originally experienced together is furnished by lan-
guage. The child is offered a new and delicious fruit and
is at the same time told that it is called a ‘fig.’ Or looking
out of the window he exclaims, “‘ What a funny horse!” and
is told that it is a ‘piebald’ horse. When learning his let-
ters, the sound of each is repeated to him whilst its shape
is before his eye. Thenceforward, long as he may live, he
will never see a fig, a piebald horse, or a letter of the alpha-
bet without the name which he first heard in conjunction
with each clinging to it in his mind; and inversely he will

ASSOCIATION. 5d7

never hear the name without the faint arousal of the image
of the object.*

THE RAPIDITY OF ASSOCIATION.

Reading exemplifies this kind of cohesion even more
beautifully. It is an uninterrupted and protracted recall
of sounds by sights which have always been coupled with
them in the past. I find that I can name six hundred let-
ters in two minutes on a printed page. Five distinct acts
of association between sight and sound (not to speak of all
the other processes concerned) must then have occurred in
each second in my mind. In reading entire words the speed
is much more rapid. Valentin relates in his Physiology
that the reading of a single page of the proof, containing
2629 letters, took him 1 minute and 32 seconds. In this
experiment each letter was understood in =; of a second,
but owing to the integration of letters into entire words,
forming each a single aggregate impression directly associ-
ated with a single acoustic image, we need not suppose as
many as 28 separate associations in a sound. ‘The figures,
however, suffice to show with what extreme rapidity an
actual sensation recalls its customary associates. Both in
fact seem to our ordinary attention to come into the mind
at once.

The time-measuring psychologists of recent days have
tried their hand at this problem by more elaborate methods.
Galton, using a very simple apparatus, found that the sight
of an unforeseen word would awaken an associated ‘idea’
in about % of a second.t Wundt next made determinations

*Unless the name belong to a rapidly uttered sentence, when no sub-
stantive image may have time to arise.

+ In his observations he says that time was lost in mentally taking in
the word which was the cue, ‘‘owing to the quiet unobtrusive way in
which I found it necessary to bring it into view, so as not to distract the
thoughts. Moreover, a substantive standing by itself is usually the equiv-
alent of 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 mind
possibly hesitates amidst an obscure sense of many alternations that cannot
blend together. But limit the idea to say a landau, and the mental asso-
ciation declares itself more quickly.” (Inquiries, etc., p. 190.)

558 PSYCHOLOGY.

in which the ‘cue’ was given by single-syllabled words
called out by an assistant. The person experimented on
had to press a key as soon as the sound of the word awak-
ened an associated idea. Both word and reaction were
chronographically registered, and the total time-interval
between the two amounted, in four observers, to 1.009,
0.896, 1.037, and 1.154 seconds respectively. From this the
simple physiological reaction-time and the time of merely
identifying the word’s sound (the ‘apperception-time,’ as
Wundt calls it) must be subtracted, to get the exact time
required for the associated idea to arise. These times were
separately determined and subtracted. ‘The difference,
called by Wundt the association-time, amounted, in the same
four persons, to 706, 723, 752, and 874 thousandths of a
second respectively.* The length of the last figure is due
to the fact that the person reacting (President G. 8. Hall)
was an American, whose associations with German words
would naturally be slower than those of natives. The short-
est association-time noted was when the word ‘Sturm’ sug-
gested to Prof. Wundt the word ‘ Wind’ in 0.341 second. t—
Finally, Mr. Cattell made some interesting observations
upon the association-time between the look of letters and
their names. “I pasted letters,” he says, “on a revolving
drum, and determined at what rate they could be read
aloud as they passed by a slit ina screen.” He found it
to vary according as one, or more than one letter, was visi-
ble at a time through the slit, and gives half a second as
about the time which it takes to see and name a single
letter seen alone.

‘‘ When two or more letters are always in view, not only do the pro-
cesses of seeing and naming overlap, but while the subject is seeing one
letter he begins to see the ones next following, and so can read them
more quickly. Of the nine persons experimented on, four could. read
the letters faster when five were in view at once, but were not helped
by a sixth letter ; three were not helped by a fifth, and two not by a
fourth letter. This shows that while one idea is in the centre, two,

* Physiol. Psych., 11. 280 fol.

+ For interesting remarks on the sorts of things associated, in these ex-
periments, with the prompting word, see Galton, op. cit. pp. 185-203, and
Trautscholdt in Wundt’s Psychologische Studien, 1. 213.

ASSOCIATION. 559

three, or four additional ideas may be in the background of conscious-
ness. The second letter in view shortens the time about jj, the third
gis, the fourth ;4,, the fifth 54, see.

‘*T find it takes about twice as long to read (aloud, as fast as pos-
sible) words which have no connection as words which make sentences,
and letters which have no connection as letters which make words.
When the words make sentences and the letters words, not only do the
processes of seeing and naming overlap, but by one mental effort the
subject can recognize a whole group of words or letters, and by one
will-act choose the motions to be made in naming, so that the rate
at which the words and letters are read is really only limited by the
maximum rapidity at which the speech-organs can be moved. As the
result of a large number of experiments, the writer found that he had
read words not making sentences at the rate of $ sec., words making
sentences (a passage from Swift) at the rate of 4sec., per word... .
The rate at which a person reads a foreign language is proportional to
his familiarity with the language. For example, when reading as fast
as possible the writer’s rate was, English 138, French 167, German 250,
Italian 327, Latin 434, and Greek 484; the figures giving the thou-
sandths of a second taken to read each word. Experiments made on
others strikingly confirm these results. The subject does not know
that he is reading the foreign language more slowly than his own ; this
explains why foreigners seem to talk so fast. This simple method of
determining a person’s familiarity with a language might be used in
school examinations.

‘‘The time required to see and name colors and pictures of objects
was determined in the same way. The time was found to be about the
same (over } sec.) for colors as for pictures, and about twice as long as
for words and letters. Other experiments I have made show that we
can recognize a single color or picture in a slightly shorter time than a
word or letter, but take longer to name it. This is because, in the case
of words and letters, the association between the idea and name has
taken place so often that the process has become automatic, whereas in
the case of colors and pictures we must by a voluntary effort choose
the name.*

In later experiments Mr. Cattell studied the time for
various associations to be performed, the termini (i.e., cue
and answer) being words. A word in one language was to
call up its equivalent in another, the name of an author the
tongue in which he wrote, that of a city the country in
which it lay, that of a writer one of his works, etc. ‘The
mean variation from the average is very great in all these
experiments ; and the interesting feature which they show

* Mind, xr. 64-5.

560 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

is the existence of certain constant differences between as-
sociations of different sorts. Thus:

From country to city, My. C.’s time was 0.340 sec.

“season = ** month, “ ce OO aoe
« language “ author, “ BC A es
“ author “ work, < 6" Soo

The average time of two observers, experimenting on
eight different types of association, was 0.420 and 0.436
sec. respectively.* The very wide range of variation is
undoubtedly a consequence of the fact that the words used

* This value is much smaller than that got by Wundt as above. No
reason for the difference is suggested by Mr. Cattell. Wundt calls atten-
tion to the fact that the figures found by him give an average, 0.720", ex-
actly equal to the téme interval which in his experiments (vide infra, chapter
on Time) was reproduced without error either way, and to that required,
according to the Webers, for the legsto swing in rapid locomotion. ‘‘ It is
not improbable,” he adds, ‘‘ that this psychic constant, of the mean asso-
ciation-time and of the most correct appreciation of a time-interval, may
have been developed under the influence of the most usual bodily move-
ments, which also have determined the manner in which we tend to sub-
divide rhythmically longer periods of time.” (Physiol. Psch., 1. 286).
The rapprochement is or that tentative sort which it is no harm for psy-
chologists to make. provided they recollect how very itctitious and incom-
parable mutually all these averages derived from different observers, work-
ing under different conditions, are. Mr. Cattell’s figure throws Wundt’s
ingenious parallel entirely out of line —The only measurements of asso-
ciation-time which so far seem likely to have much theoretic importance
are a few made on insane patients by Von Tschisch (Mendel’s Neurolo-
gisches Centralblatt, 15 Mai, 1885, 3 Jhrg., p. 217). The simple reaction
time was found about normal in three patients, one with progressive
paralysis, one with inveterate mania of persecution, one recovering from
ordinary 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 the
sufferer from delusions of persecution and hallucinations it was twice as
great as normal (1.39" instead of 0.7"). This latter patient’s time was six-
fold that of the paralytic. Herr von Tschisch remarks on the connection
of the short times with diminished power for clear and consistent processes
of thought, and on that of the long times with the persistent fixation of the
attention upon monotonous objects (delusions). Miss Marie Walitzky
(Revue Philosophique, xxvuit. 583) has carried Von Tschisch’s observations
still farther, making 18,000 measurements in all. She found association-
time increased in paralytic dementia and diminished i. mania. Choice
time, on the contrary, is increased in mania.

ASSOCIATION. 561

as cues, and the different types of association studied, differ
much in their degree of familiarity.

‘*For example, B is a teacher of mathematics; C has busied him-
self more with literature. C knows quite as well as B that 7 + 5 = 12,
yet he needs +45 of a second longer to call it to mind ; B knows quite as
well as C that Dante was a poet, but needs 55 of a second longer to
think of it. Such experiments lay bare the mental life in a way that
is startling and not always gratifying.” *

THE LAW OF CONTIGUITY.

Time-determinations apart, the facts we have run over
can all be summed up in the simple statement that objects
once experienced together tend to become associated in the imagi-
nation, so that when any one of them is thought of, the others
are likely to be thought of also, in the same order of sequence or
coexistence as before. This statement we may name the law
of mental association by contiguity.t

I preserve this name in order to depart as little as pos-
sible from tradition, although Mr. Ward’s designation of
the process as that of association by continuity ¢ or Wundt’s
as that of external association (to distinguish it from the
internal association which we shall presently learn to know
under the name of association by similarity) § are perhaps
better terms. Whatever we name the law, since it ex-
presses merely a phenomenon of mental habit, the most
natural way of accounting for it is to conceive it as a result

* Mind, xi. 67-74.

+ Compare Bain’s law of Association by Contiguity: ‘‘ Actions, Sensa-
tions, and States of Feeling, occurring together or in close succession,
tend to grow together, or cohere, in such a way that, when any one of
them is afterwards presented to the mind, the others are apt to be brought
up in idea” (Senses and Intellect, p. 327). Compare also Hartley’s formula-
tion: ‘Any sensations A, B, C, etc., by being associated with one another
a sufficient Number of Times, get such a power over the corresponding
Tdeas, a, , ¢, etc., that any one of the sensations A, when impressed alone,
shall be able to excite in the Mind 0. ¢. etc., the ideas of the rest.” (Ob-
servations on Man, parti. chap. 1. § 2, Prop. x.) The statement in the
text differs from these in holding fast to the objective point of view. It is
things, and objective properties in things, which are associated in our
thought.

t Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th Ed., article Psychology, p. 60, col. 2.

§ Physiol. Psych., 2d ed. 1. 300.

562 PSYCHOLOG Y.

of the laws of habit in the nervous system ; in other words,
it is to ascribe it to a physiological cause. If it be truly
a law of those nerve-centres which co-ordinate sensory
and motor processes together that paths once used for
coupling any pair of them are thereby made more permea-
ble, there appears no reason why the same law should not
hold good of ideational centres and their coupling-paths as
well.* Paris of these centres which have once been in
action together will thus grow so linked that excitement at
one point will irradiate through the system. ‘The chances
of complete irradiation will be strong in proportion as the
previous excitements have been frequent, and as the
present points excited afresh are numerous. [If all points
were originally excited together, the irradiation may be
sensibly simultaneous throughout the system, when any
single point or group of points is touched off. But where
the original impressions were successive—the conjugation of

* The difficulty here as with habit w#berhaupt is in seeing how new
paths come first to be formed (cf. above, 109). Experience shows that a
new path zs formed between centres for sensible impressions whenever
these vibrate together or in rapid succession. A child sees a certain bottle
and hears it called ‘ milk,’ and thenceforward thinks the name when he again
sees the bottle. But why the successive or simultaneous excitement of two
centres independently stimulated from without, one by sight and the
other by hearing, should result in a path between them, one does not im-
mediately see. Wecan only make hypotheses. Any bypothesis of the
specific mode of their formation which tallies well with the observed facts
of association will be in so far forth credible, in spite of possible obscurity.
Herr Miinsterberg thinks (Beitriige zur exp. Psychologie, Heft 1, p. 182)
that between centres excited successively from without no path ought to
be formed, and that consequently all contiguous association is between
simultaneous experiences. Mr. Ward (/oc. cits) thinks. on the contrary, that
it can only be between successive experiences: ‘‘ The association of objects
simultaneously presented can be resolved into an association of objects
successively attended to. . . . It seems hardly possible to mention a case
in which attention to the associated objects could not have been successive.
In fact, an aggregate of objects on which attention could be focussed at
once vould be already associated.”” Between these extreme possibilities,
I have refrained from deciding in the text, and have described contiguous
association as holding between both successively and coexistently pre-
sented objects. The physiological question as to how we may conceive
the paths to originate had better be postponed till it comes to us again in
the chapter on the Wili, where we can treat it in a broader way. It is
enough here to have called attention to it as a serious problem.

ASSOCIATION. 563

a Greek verb, for example—awakening nerve-tracts in a
definite order, they will now, when one of them awakens,
discharge into each other in that definite order and in no
other way.

The reader will recollect all that has been said of in-
creased tension in nerve-tracts and of the summation of
stimuli (p. 82 ff.). We must therefore suppose that in these
ideational tracts as well as elsewhere, activity may be
awakened, in any particular locality, by the summation
therein of a number of tensions, each incapable alone of
provoking an actual discharge. Suppose for example the
locality M to be in functional continuity with four other
localities, K, L, N, and O. Suppose moreover that on
four previous occasions it has been separately combined
with each of these localities in a common activity. M may
then be indirectly awakened by any cause which tends to
awaken either K, L, N, or O. But if the cause which
awakens K, for instance, be so slight as only to increase
its tension without arousing it to full discharge, K will
only succeed in slightly increasing the tension of M. But
if at the same time the tensions of L, N, and O are simi-
larly increased, the combined effects of all four upon M may
be so great as to awaken an actual discharge in this latter
locality. In like manner if the paths between M and
the four other localities have been so slightly excavated by
previous experience as to require a very intense excitement
in either of the localities before M can be awakened, a less
strong excitement than this in any one will fail to reach
M. Butif all four at once are mildly excited, their com-
pound effect on M may be adequate to its full arousal.

The psychological law of association of objects thought of
through their previous contiguity in thought or experience
would thus be an effect, within the mind, of the physical fact
that nerve-currents propagate themselves easiest through those
tracts of conduction which have been already most in use. Des-
cartes and Locke hit upon this explanation, which modern
science has not yet succeeded in improving.

‘‘Custom,” says Locke, *‘settles habits of thinking in the under.

standing, as well as of determining in the will, and of motions in the
body ; all which seem to be but trains of motion in the animal spirits

564 PSYCHOLOG Y.

[by this Locke meant identically what we understand by newral pro
cesses| which, once set agoing, continue in the same steps they have
been used to, which by often treading are worn into a smooth path,
and the motion in it becomes easy and, asit were, natural.” *

Hartley was more thorough in his grasp of the prin-
ciple. The sensorial nerve-currents, produced when objects
are fully present, were for him ‘ vibrations,’ and those which
produce ideas of objects in their absence were ‘ miniature
vibrations.’ And he sums up the cause of mental associa-
tion in a single formula by saying:

‘¢ Any vibrations, A, B, C, ete., by being associated together a suffi-
cient Number of Times, get such a Power over a, 6, ¢, etc., the corre-
sponding Miniature Vibrations, that any of the Vibrations A, when
impressed alone, shall be able to excite 6, ¢, etc., the Miniatures of the
rest.” ¢

It is evident that if there be any law of neural habit
similar to this, the contiguities, coexistences, and succes-
sions, met with in outer experience, must inevitably be
copied more or less perfectly in our thought. ILABCDE
be a sequence of outer impressions (they may be events

* Essay, bk. 11. chap. xxx. § 6. Compare Hume, who, like Locke,
only uses the principle to account for unreasonable and obstructive mental
associations :

«’Twould have been easy to have made an imaginary dissection of the
brain, and have shown why, upon our conception of any idea, the animal
spirits run into all the contiguous traces, and rouse up the other ideas that
are related to it. But though I have neglected any advantage which I
might have drawn from this topic in explaining the relations of ideas, I am
afraid I must here have recourse to it, in order to account for the mistakes
that arise from these relations. I shall therefore observe, that as the mind
is endowed with a power of exciting any idea it pleases; whenever it dis-
patches the 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 proper
traces, and rummage that cell which belongs to the idea. Butas their mo-
tion is 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, pre
sent other related ideas in lieu of that which the mind desired at first to
survey. This change we are not always sensible of ; but continuing still
the same train of thought, make use of the related idea which is presented
to us, and employ it in our reasoning, as if it were the same with what we
demanded. This is the cause of many mistakes and sophisms in philoso-
phy; as will naturally be imagined, and as it would be easy to show, if there
Was occasion.”

+ Op. cit. prop. XI.

ASSOCIATION. 565

or they may be successively experienced properties of an
object) which once gave rise to the successive ‘ ideas,’ abcde,
then no sooner will A impress us again and awaken the
a, than b c d e will arise as ideas even before BCD E
have come in as impressions. In other words, the order of
impressions will the next time be anticipated ; and the men-
tal order will so far forth copy the order of the outer
world. Any object when met again will make us expect its
tormer concomitants, through the overflowing of its brain-
tract into the paths which lead to theirs. And all these
suggestions will be effects of a material law.

Where the associations are, as here, of successively ap-
pearing things, the distinction I made at the outset of the
chapter, between a connection thought of and a connection of
thoughts, is unimportant. For the connection thought of is
concomitance or succession ; and the connection between
the thoughts is just the same. The ‘objects’ and the
‘ideas ’ fit into parallel schemes, and may be described in
identical language, as contiguous things tending to be
thought again together, or contiguous ideas tending to recur
together.

Now were these cases fair samples of all association, the
distinction I drew might well be termed a Spitzfindigkeit or
piece of pedantic hair-splitting, and be dropped. But as a
matter of fact we cannot treat the subject so simply. The
same outer object may suggest either of many realities for-
merly associated with it—for in the vicissitudes of our outer
experience we are constantly liable to meet the same thing
in the midst of differing companions—and a philosophy of
association that should merely say that it will suggest one
of these, or even of that one of them which it has oftenest
accompanied, would go but a very short way into the ra-
tionale of the subject. This, however, is about as far as
most associationists have gone with their ‘ principle of con-
tiguity.’ Granted an object, A, they never tell us before-
hand which of its associates it will suggest ; their wisdom is
limited to showing, after it has suggested a second object,
that that object was once an associate. They have had to
supplement their principle of Contiguity by other princi-

566 PSYCHOLOGY.

ples, such as those of Similarity and Contrast, before they
could begin to do justice to the richness of the facts.

THE ELEMENTARY LAW OF ASSOCIATION.

I shall try to show, in the pages which immediately
follow, that there is no other elementary causal law of asso-
ciation than the law of neural habit. All the materials of
our thought are due to the way in which one elementary
process of the cerebral hemispheres tends to excite what-
ever other elementary process.it may have excited at some
former time. The number of elementary processes at
work, however, and the nature of those which at any time
are fully effective in rousing the others, determine the
character of the total brain-action, and, as a consequence
of 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 as-
sociation by similarity, or contrast, or whatever other sorts
we may have recognized as ultimate. Its production, how-
ever, is, in each one of these cases, to be explained by a
merely quantitative variation in the elementary brain-pro-
cesses momentarily at work under the law of habit, so that
psychic contiguity, similarity, etc., are derivatives of a sin-
gle profounder kind of fact.

My thesis, stated thus briefly, will soon become more
clear; and at the same time certain disturbing factors,
which co-operate with the law of neural habit, will come to
view.

Let us then assume as the basis of all our subsequent
reasoning this law: When two elementary brain-processes
have been active together or in immediate succession, one of
them, on reoccurring, tends to propagate its excitement into the
other.

But, as a matter of fact, every elementary process has
found itself at different times excited in conjunction with
many other processes, and this by unavoidable outward
causes. Which of these others it shall awaken now be-
comes a problem. Shall 6 or ¢ be aroused next by the
present 0? We must make a further postulate, based, liow-
ever, on the fact of tension in nerve-tissue, and on the fact

ASSOCIATION. 567

of summation of excitements, each incomplete or latent in
itself, into an open resultant.* The process 0, rather than
ce, will awake, if in addition to the vibrating tract @ some
other tract d is in a state of sub-excitement, and formerly
was excited with 6 alone and not with a. In short, we may
say :

The amount of activity at any given point in the brain-cor-
tex is the sum of the tendencies of all other points to discharge
into it, such tendencies being proportionate (1) to the number of
times the excitement of each other point may have accompanied
that of the point in question; (2) to the intensity of such excite-
ments ; and (3) to the absence of any rival point functionally
disconnected with the first point, into which the discharges might
be diverted.

Expressing the fundamental law in this most compli-
cated way leads to the greatest ultimate simplification.
Let us, for the present, only treat of spontaneous trains of
thought and ideation, such as occur in revery or musing.
The case of voluntary thinking toward a certain end shall
come up later.

Take, to fix our ideas, the two verses from ‘ Locksley
Fall’:

“T, the heir of all the ages in the foremost files of time,”

and—
“For I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs.”

Why is it that when we recite from memory one of these
lines, and get as far as the ages, that portion of the other
line which follows, and, so to speak, sprouts out of the ages,
does not also sprout out of our memory, and confuse the
sense of our words? Simply because the word that fol-
lows the ages has its brain-process awakened not simply by
the brain-process of the ages alone, but by it plus the brain-
processes of all the words preceding the ages. The word
ages at its moment of strongest activity would, per se, indif-
ferently discharge into either ‘in’ or ‘one.’ So would
the previous words (whose tension is momentarily much
less strong than that of ages) each of them indifferently dis-

* See Chapter III, pp. 82-5.

568 PSYCHOLOG Y¥.

charge into either of a large number ot other words with
which they have been at different times combined. But
when the processes of ‘J, the heir of all the ages, simul-
taneously vibrate in the brain, the last one of them in a
maximal, the others in a fading phase of excitement; then
the strongest line of discharge will be that which they all
alike tend to take. ‘Jn’ and not ‘one’ or any other word
will be the next to awaken, for its brain-process has previ-
ously vibrated in unison not only with that of ages, but with
that of all those other words whose activity is dying away.
It is a good case of the effectiveness over thought of what
we called on p. 258 a ‘ fringe.’

But if some one of these preceding words—heir,’ for
example—had an intensely strong association with some
brain-tracts entirely disjoined in experience from the poem
of ‘ Locksley Hall ’—if the reciter, for instance, were tremu-
lously awaiting the opening of a will which might make
him a millionaire—it is probable that the path of discharge
through the words of the poem would be suddenly inter-
rupted at the word ‘heir. His emotional interest in that
word would be such that its own special associations would
prevail over the combined ones of the other words. He
would, ag we say, be abruptly reminded of his personal
situation, and the poem would lapse altogether from his
thoughts.

The writer of these pages has every year to learn the
names of a large number of students who sit in alphabeti-
cal order in a lecture-room. He finally learns to call them
by name, as they sit in their accustomed places. On meet-
ing one in the street, however, early in the year, the face
hardly ever recalls the name, but it may recall the place of
its owner in the lecture-room, his neighbors’ faces, and con-
sequently his general alphabetical position; and then,
usually as the common associate of all these combined
data, the student’s name surges up in his mind.

A father wishes to show to some guests the progress of
his rather dull child in Kindergarten instruction. Holding
the knife upright on the table, he says, “ What do you call
that, my boy ?” “TI calls it a knife, I does,” is the sturdy re-
ply, from which the child cannot be induced to swerve by

ASSOCIATIUN. 569

any alteration in the form of question, until the father
recollecting that in the Kindergarten a pencil was used, and
not a knife, draws a long one from his pocket, holds it in
the same way, and then gets the wished-for answer, “TI calls
it vertical.” All the concomitants of the Kindergarten ex-
perience had to recombine their effect before the word
‘vertical’ could be reawakened.

Professor Bain, in his chapters on ‘ Compound Associa-
tion,’ has treated in a minute and exhaustive way of this
type of mental sequence, and what he has done so well
need not be here repeated.*

Impartial Redintegration.

The ideal working of the law of compound association,
were it unmodified by any extraneous influence, would be
such as to keep the mind in a perpetual treadmill of con-
crete reminiscences from which no detail could be omitted.
Suppose, for example, we begin by thinking of a certain
dinner-party. The only thing which all the components of
the dinner-party could combine to recall would be the first
concrete occurrence which ensued upon it. All the details
of this occurrence could in turn only combine to awaken the
next following occurrence, and so on. If a, b,c, d, e, for in-
stance, be the elementary nerve-tracts excited by the last
act of the dinner-party, call this act A, and J, m, n, 0, p be
those of walking home through the frosty night, which we
may call B, then the thought of A must awaken that of B,
because a, b, c, d, e, will each and all discharge into 1
through the paths by which their original discharge took -
place. Similarly they will discharge into m,n, 0, and p;
and these latter tracts will also each reinforce the other’s
action because, in the experience B, they have already
vibrated in unison. The lines in Fig. 40, p. 570, symbolize
the summation of discharges into each of the components
of B, and the consequent strength of the combination of
influences by which B in its totality is awakened.

Hamilton first used the word ‘ redintegration ° to desig-
nate all association. Such processes as we have just de-

*T strongly advise the student to read his Senses and Intellect, pp. 544
556.

570 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

scribed might in an emphatic sense be termed redintegra-
tions, for they would necessarily lead, if unobstructed, to
the reinstatement in thought of the entire content of large
trains of past experience. From this complete redintegra-
tion there could be no escape save through the irruption of
some new and strong present impression of the senses, or
through the excessive tendency of some one of the elemen-
tary brain-tracts to discharge independently into an aber-
rant quarter of the brain. Such was the tendency of the

Fie. 40.

word ‘heir’ in the verse from ‘ Locksley Hall,’ which was
our first example. How such tendencies are constituted
we shall have soon to inquire with some care. Unless they
are present, the panorama of the past, once opened, must
unroll itself with fatal literality to the end, unless some
outward sound, sight, or touch divert the current of thought.

Let us call this process impartial redintegration. Whether
it ever occurs in an absolutely complete form is doubtful.
We all immediately recognize, however, that in some minds
there is a much greater tendency than in others for the
flow of thought to take this form. Those insufferably gar-
rulous old women, those dry and fanciless beings who spare
you no detail, however petty, of the facts they are recount-
ing, and upon the thread of whose narrative all the irrele-
yant items cluster as pertinaciously as the essential ones,

ASSOCIATION. 571

the slaves of literal fact, the stumblers over the smallest
abrupt step in thought, are figures known to all of us.
Comic literature has made her profit out of them. Juliet’s
nurse is a classical example. George Eliot’s village char-
acters and some of Dickens’s minor personages supply
excellent instances.

Perhaps as successful a rendering as any of this mental
type is the character of Miss Bates in Miss Austen’s ‘ Em-
ma.’ Hear how she redintegrates :

‘“«* But where could you hear it ? cried Miss Bates. ‘ Where could you
possibly hear it, Mr. Knightley ? For it is not five minutes since I received
Mrs. Cole’s note—no, it cannot be more than five—or at least ten—for
I had got my bonnet and spencer on, just ready to come out—I was
only gone down to speak to Patty again about the pork—Jane was
standing in the passage—were not you, Jane ?—for my mother was so
afraid that we had not any salting-pan large enough. SoTI said I would
go down and see, and Jane said: ‘‘ Shall I go down instead ? for I think
you 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 Haw-
kins—that’s all I know—a Miss Hawkins, of Bath. But, Mr. Knightley,
how could you possibly have heard it ? for the very moment Mr. Cole
told Mrs. Cole of it, she sat down and wrote to me. A Miss Hawkins—’ ”

But in every one of us there are moments when this
complete reproduction of all the items of a past experience
occurs. What are those moments? They are moments of
emotional recall of the past as something which once was,
but is gone for ever—moments, the interest of which con-
sists in the feeling that our self was once other than it now
is. When this is the case, any detail, however minute,
which will make the past picture more complete, will also
have its effect in swelling that total contrast between now
and then which forms the central interest of our contempla-
tion.

ORDINARY OR MIXED ASSOCIATION.

This case helps us to understand why it is that the
ordinary spontancous flow of our ideas does not follow the
law of impartial redintegration. In no revival of a past ex-
perience are all the items of our thought equally operative in
determining what the next thought shall be. Always some in-
gredient is prepotent over the rest. Its special suggestions or

572 PSYCHOLOGY.

associations in this case will often be different from those
which it has in common with the whole group of items;
and its tendency to awaken these outlying associates will
deflect the path of our revery. Just as in the original
sensible experience our attention focalized it self upon a
few of the impressions of the scene before us, so here in
the reproduction of those impressions an equal partiality
is shown, and some items are emphasized above the rest.
What these items shall be is, in most cases of spontaneous
revery, hard to determine beforehand. In subjective terms
we say that the prepotent items are those which appeal most
to our INTEREST.

Expressed in brain-terms, the law of interest will be:
some one brain-process is always prepotent above its concomi-
tants in arousing action elsewhere.

‘‘Two processes,” says Mr. Hodgson,* ‘‘are constantly going on in
redintegration. The one a process of corrosion, melting, decay; the
other a process of renewing, arising, becoming. . . . No object of repre-
sentation remains long before consciousness in the same state, but
fades, decays, and becomes indistinct. Those parts of the object, how-
ever, which possess an interest resist this tendency to gradual decay of
the whole object. . . . This inequality in the object—some parts, the un-
interesting, submitting to decay; others, the interesting parts, resisting
it—when it has continued for a certain time, ends in becoming a new
object.”

Only where the interest is diffused equally over all the
parts (as in the emotional memory just referred to, where,
as all past, they al! interest us alike) is this law departed
from. Ii will be least obeyed by those minds which have
the smallest variety and intensity of interests—those who,
by the general flatness and poverty of their esthetic nature,
are kept for ever rotating among the literal sequences of
their local and personal history.

Most of us, however, are better organized than this, and

* Time and Space, p. 266. Compare Coleridge: ‘‘ The true practical
general iaw of association is this: that whatever makes certain parts of a
total impression more vivid or distinct than the rest will determine the mind
to recall these, in preference to others equally linked together by the com-
mon condition of contemporaeity or of contiguity. But the will itself, by
confining and intensifying the attention, may arbitrarily give vividness or
distinctness to any object whatsoever.” (Biographia Litteraria, Chap. V.)

ASSOCIATION. 573

our musings pursue an erratic course, swerving continu-
ally into some new direction traced by the shifting play
of interest as it ever falls on some partial item in each
complex representation that is evoked. Thus it so often
comes about that we find ourselves thinking at two nearly
adjacent moments of things separated by the whole diam-
eter of space and time. Not till we carefully recall each
step of our cogitation do we see how naturally we came by
Hodgson’s law to pass from one to the other. Thus, for
instance, after looking at my clock just now (1879), I found
myself thinking of a recent resolution in the Senate about
our legal-tender notes. The clock called up the image of
the man who had repaired its gong. He suggested the
jeweller’s shop where I had last seen him ; that shop, some
shirt-studs which I had bought there; they, the value of
gold and its recent decline; the latter, the equal value of
greenbacks, and this, naturally, the question of how long
they were to last, and of the Bayard proposition. Hach of
these images offered various points of interest. Those
which formed the turning-points of my thought are easily
assigned. The gong was momentarily the most interesting
part of the clock, because. from having begun with a beau-
tiful tone, it had become discordant and aroused disap-
pointment. But for this the clock might have suggested
the friend who gave it to me, or any one of a thousand cir-
cumstances connected with clocks. The jeweller’s shop
suggested the studs, because they alone of all its contents’
were tinged with the egoistic interest of possession. This
interest in the studs, their value, made me single out the
material as its chief source, etc., to the end. Every reader
who will arrest himself at any moment and say, “ How
came I to be thinking of just this ?” will be sure to trace a
train of representations linked together by lines of conti-
suity and points of interest inextricably combined. This
is the ordinary process of the association of ideas as it
spontaneously goes on in average minds. We may cad i
ORDINARY, OY MIXED, ASSOCIATION.

Another example of it is given by Hobbes in a passage
which has been quoted so often as to be classical :

574 PSYCHOLOGY.

‘‘TIn a discourse of our present civil war, what could seem more im.
pertinent than to ask (as one did) what was the value of a Roman
penny? Yet the coherence to me was manifest enough. For the
thought of the war introduced the thought of the delivering up the
King to his enemies; the thought of that brought in the thought of the
delivering up of Christ; and that again the thought of the thirty
pence, which was the price of that treason: and thence easily followed
that malicious question; and all this in a moment of time; for thought
is quick.” *

Can we determine, now, when a certain portion of the
going thought has, by dint of its interest, become so pre-
potent as to make its own exclusive associates the dominant
features of the coming thought—can we, I say, determine
which of its own associates shall be evoked? For they are
many. As Hodgson says:

‘*The interesting parts of the decaying object are free to combine
again with any objects or parts of objects with which at any time they

have been combined before. All the former combinations of these
parts may come back into consciousness; one must; but which will?”

Mr. Hodgson replies :

‘‘There can be but one answer : that which has been most habitually
combined with them before. This new object begins at once to form
itself in consciousness, and to group its parts round the part still re-
maining from the former object; part after part comes out and arranges
itself in its old position ; but scarcely has the process begun, when the
original law of interest begins to operate on this new formation, seizes
on the interesting parts and impresses them on the attention to the ex-
clusion of the rest, and the whole process is repeated again with end-
less variety. I venture to propose this as a complete and true account
of the whole process of redintegration.”

In restricting the discharge from the interesting item
into that channel which is simply most habitual in the sense
of most frequent, Hodgson’s account is assuredly imperfect.
An image by no means always revives its most frequent
associate, although frequency is certainly one of the most
potent determinants of revival. If I abruptly utter the
word swallow, the reader, if by habit an ornithologist, will
think of a bird ; if a physiologist or a medical specialist in
throat diseases, he will think of deglutition. If I say date,

* Leviathan, pt. 1. chap. m1., ct.

ASSOCIATION. 575

he will, if a fruit-merchant or an Arabian traveller, think of
the produce of the palm ; if an habitual student of history,
figures with a.D. or B.c. before them will rise in his mind.
If I say bed, bath, morning, his own daily toilet will be in-
vincibly suggested by the combined names of three of its
habitual associates. But frequent lines of transition are
often set at naught. The sight of C. Giring’s ‘System der
kritischen Philosophie’ has most frequently awakened in
me thoughts of the opinions therein propounded. The
idea of suicide has never been connected with the volumes.
But a moment since, as my eye fell upon them, suicide was
the thought that flashed into my mind. Why? Because
but yesterday I received a letter from Leipzig informing me
that this philosopher’s recent death by drowning was an
act of self-destruction. Thoughts tend, then, to awaken
their most recent as well as their most habitual associates.
This is a matter of notorious experience, too notorious, in
fact, to need illustration. If we have seen our friend this
morning, the mention of his name now recalls the circum-
stances of that interview, rather than any more remote
details concerning him. If Shakespeare’s plays are men-
tioned, and we were last night reading ‘ Richard IT.,’ ves-
tiges of that play rather than of ‘ Hamlet’ or ‘Othello’
float through our mind. Excitement of peculiar tracts, or
peculiar modes of general excitement in the brain, leave a
sort of tenderness or exalted sensibility behind them which
takes days to dieaway. As long as it lasts, those tracts or
those modes are liable to have their activities awakened by
causes which at other times might leave them in repose.
Hence, recency in experience is a prime factor in determining
revival in thought.*

Vividness in an original experience may also have the
same effect as habit or recency in bringing about likelihood
of revival. If we have once witnessed an execution, any
subsequent conversation or reading about capital punish-
ment will almost certainly suggest images of that particular

* T refer to a recency of a few hours. Mr. Galton found that experi-
ences from boyhood and youth were more likely to be suggested by words
seen at random than experiences of later years. See his highly interesting
account of experiments in bis Inyuiries into Human Faculty, pp. 191- 203.

576 PSYCHOLOG Y.

scene. Thus it is that events lived through only once, and
in youth, may come in after-years, by reason of their excit-
ing quality or emotional intensity, to serve as types or
instances used by our mind to illustrate any and every
occurring topic whose interest is most remotely pertinent
to theirs. Ifa man in his boyhood once talked with Napo-
leon, any mention of great men or historical events, battles
or thrones, or the whirligig of fortune, or islands in the
ocean, will be apt to draw to his lips the incidents of that
one memorable interview. If the word tooth now suddenly
appears on the page before the reader’s eye, there are fifty
chances out of a hundred that, if he gives it time to awaken
any image, it will be an image of some operation of den-
tistry in which he has been the sufferer. Daily he has
touched his teeth and masticated with them; this very
morning he brushed them, chewed his breakfast and picked
them ; but the rarer and remoter associations arise more
promptly because they were so much more intense.*

A fourth factor in tracing the course of reproduction is
congruity in emotional tone between the reproduced idea and
our mood. The same objects do not recall the same asso-
ciates when we are cheerful as when we are melancholy.
Nothing, in fact, is more striking than our utter inability
to keep up trains of joyous imagery when we are depressed
in spirits. Storm, darkness, war, images of disease, poverty,
and perishing afflict unremittingly the imaginations of mel-
ancholiacs. And those of sanguine temperament, when their
spirits are high, find it impossible to give any permanence
to evil forebodings or to gloomy thoughts. In an instant
the train of association dances off to flowers and sunshine,
and images of spring and hope. The records of Arctic or
African travel perused in one mood awaken no thoughts
but those of horror at the malignity of Nature; read at
another time they suggest only enthusiastic reflections on
the indomitable power and pluck of man. Few novels so
overflow with joyous animal spirits as ‘The Three Guards-
men’ of Dumas. Yet it may awaken in the mind of a

* For other instances see Wahle, in Vierteljsch f. Wiss. Phil., rx. 144
417 (1885)

ASSOCIATION. 577

reader depressed with sea-sickness (as the writer can per-
sonally testify) a most dismal and woful consciousness of
the cruelty and carnage of which heroes like Athos, Por-
thos,and Aramis make themselves guilty.

Habit, recency, vividness, and emotional congruity are, then,
all reasons why one representation rather than another
should be awakened by the interesting portion of a depart-
‘ng thought. We may say with truth that in the majority
of cases the coming representation will have been either
habitual, recent, or vivid, and will be congruous. Tf all
these qualities unite in any one absent associate, we may
predict almost infallibly that that associate of the going
thought will form an important ingredient in the coming
thought. In spite of the fact, however, that the succession
of representations is thus redeemed from perfect indeter-
minism and limited to a few classes whose characteristic
quality is fixed by the nature of our past experience, it
must still be confessed that an immense number of terms
in the linked chain of our representations fall outside of all
assignable rule. To take the instance of the clock given
on page 586. Why did the jeweller’s shop suggest the shirt-
studs rather than a chain which I had bought there more
recently, which had cost more, and whose sentimental as-
sociations were much more interesting? Both chain and
studs had excited brain-tracts simultaneously with the shop.
The only reason why the nerve-stream from the shop-tract
switched off into the stud-tract rather than into the chain-
tract must be that the stud-tract happened at that moment to
lie more open, either because of some accidental alteration in
its nutrition or because the incipient sub-conscious tensions
of 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 in-
stances. It thus remains true that to a certain extent, even
in those forms of ordinary mixed association which lhe
nearest to impartial redintegration, which associate of the
interesting item shall emerge must be called largely a mat-
ter of accident—accident, that is, for our intelligence. No
doubt it is determined by cerebral causes, but they are too
subtile and shifting for our analysis.

578 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

ASSOCIATION BY SIMILARITY.

In partial or mixed association we have all along sup-
posed the interesting portion of the disappearing thought
to be of considerable extent, and to be sufficiently com-
plex to constitute by itself a concrete object. Sir Wil-
liam Hamilton relates, for instance, that after thinking of
Ben Lomond he found himself thinking of the Prussian
system of education, and discovered that the links of asso-
ciation were a German gentleman whom he had met on Ben
Lomond, Germany, etc. The interesting part of Ben
Lomond, as he had experienced it, the part operative in
determining the train of his ideas was the complex image
of a particular man. But now let us suppose that that
selective agency of interested atteution, which may thus
convert impartial redintegration into partial association—
let us suppose that it refines itself still further and accen-
tuates a portion of the passing thought, so small as to be
no longer the image of a concrete thing, but only of an
abstract quality or property. Let us moreover suppose
that the part thus accentuated persists in consciousness (or,
in cerebral terms, has its brain-process continue) after the
other portions of the thought have faded. This small sur-
viving portion will then surround itself with its own associates
after the fashion we have already seen, and the relation
between the new thought’s object and the object of the
faded thought will be a relation of similarity. The pair of
thoughts will form an instance of what is called ‘ Associa-
tion by Similarity.’ *

The similars which are here associated, or of which the
first is followed by the second in the mind, are seen to be
compounds. Experience proves that this is always the

*T retain the title of association by similarity in order not to depart
from common usage. The reader will observe, however, that my nomen-
clature is not based on the same principle throughout. Impartial redinte-
gration connotes neural processes ; similarity is an objective relation per-
ceived by the mind; ordinary or mixed association is a merely denotative
word. Total recall, partial recall, and focalized recall, of associates, would be
better terms. But as the denotation of the latter word’ is almost identical
with that of association by similarity, I think it better to sacrifice propriety
to popularity, and to keep the latter well-worn phrase.

ASSOCIATION. 579

case. There is no tendency on the part of SIMPLE ‘ ideas,’ attri-
butes, or qualities to remind us of their like. The thought of
one shade of blue does not remind us of that of another
shade of blue, etc., unless indeed we have in mind some
general purpose like naming the tint, when we should
naturally think of other blues of the scale, through ‘mixed
association’ of purpose, names, and tints, together. But
there is no elementary tendency of pure qualities to awaken
their similars in the mind.

We saw in the chapter on Discrimination that two com-
pound things are similar when some one quality or group
of qualities is shared alike by both, although as regards
their 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 each
other. When we affirm the similarity of two compound
things, we should always say in what respect it obtains.
Moon and gas-jet are similar in respect of luminosity,
and nothing else; moon and foot-ball in respect of ro-
tundity, and nothing else. Foot-ball and gas-jet are
in no respect similar—that is, they possess no common
point, no identical attribute. Similarity, in compounds, is
partial identity. When the same attribute appears in two
phenomena, though it be their only common property, the
two phenomena are similar in so far forth. To return now
to our associated representations. If the thought of the
moon is succeeded by the thought of a foot-ball, and that
by the thought of one of Mr. X’s railroads, it is because
the attribute rotundity in the moon broke away from all the
rest and surrounded itself with an entirely new set of com-
-panions—elasticity, leathery integument, swift mobility in
obedience to human caprice, etc.; and because the last-
named attribute in the foot-ball in turn broke away from its
companions, and, itself persisting, surrounded itself with
such new attributes as make up the notions of a ‘railroad
king,’ of a rising and falling stock-market, and the like.

The gradual passage from impartial redintegration to
similar association through what we have called ordinary
mixed association may be symbolized by diagrams. Fig.
41 is impartial redintegration, Fig. 42 is mixed, and Fig. 43

580 PSYCHOLOGY.

similar association. A in each is the passing, B the coming
thought. In ‘impartial,’ all parts of A are equally opera-

tive in 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 previous

case, and after awakening its new set of associates, instead
of fading out itself, it continues persistently active along
with them, forming an identical part in the two ideas, and
making these, pro tanto, resemble each other.

A
B

Fie. 43.

Why a single portion of the passing thought should
break 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. Pos-
sibly a minuter insight into the laws of neural action will

ASSOCIATION. 581

some day clear the matter up; possibly neural laws will
not suffice, and we shall need to invoke a dynamic reaction
of the form of consciousness upon its content. But into
this we cannot enter now.

To sum up, then, we see that the difference between the
three kinds of association reduces itself to a simple difference in
the amount of that portion of the nerve-tract supporting the
going thought which is operative in calling up the thought which
comes. But the modus operandi of this active part is the
same, be it large or be it small. The items constituting
the coming object waken in every instance because theii
nerve-tracts once were excited continuously with those ot
the going object or its operative part. This ultimate physio-
logical law of habit among the neural elements is what runs
the train. The direction of its course and the form of its
transitions, whether redintegrative, associative, or similar,
are due to unknown regulative or determinative conditions
which accomplish their effect by opening this switch and
closing that, setting the engine sometimes at half-speed,
and coupling or uncoupling cars.

This last figure of speech, into which I have glided un-
wittingly, affords itself an excellent instance of association
by similarity. I was thinking of the deflections of the
course of ideas. Now, from Hobbes’s time downward,
English writers have been fond of speaking of the train of
our representations. This word happened to stand out in
the midst of my complex thought with peculiarly sharp
accentuation, and to surround itself with numerous details
of railroad imagery. Only such details became clear, how-
ever, aS had their nerve-tracts besieged by a double set of
influences—those from train on the one hand, and those from
the movement of thought cn the other. It may possibly be
that the prepotency of the suggestions of the word train at
this moment were due to the recent excitation of the rail-
road brain-tract by the instance chosen a few pages back of
a railroad king playing foot-ball with the stock-market.

It is apparent from such an example how inextricably
complex are all the contributory factors whose resultant is
the line of our reverie. It would be folly in most cases to

582 -~SYCHOLOGY.

attempt to trace them out. From an instance like the above,
where the pivot of the Similar Association was formed by
a definite concrete word, train, to those where it is sosubtile
as utterly to elude our analysis, the passage is unbroken.
We can form a series of examples. When Mr. Bagehot says
that the mind of the savage, so far from being in a state of
nature, is tattooed 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 uni-
formity of nature, the congruity of the future with the past,
to a man rowing one way and looking another, and steering
his boat by keeping her stern in a line with an object behind
him, the operative link becomes harder to dissect out. It
is subtler still in Dr. Holmes’s phrase, that stories in pass-
ing from mouth to mouth make a great deal of lee-way in
proportion to their headway; or in Mr. Lowell’s descrip-
tion of German sentences, that they have a way of yawing
and going stern-foremost and not minding the helm for sey-
eral minutes after it has been put down. And finally, it is
a real puzzle when the color pale-blue is said to have femi-
nine and blood-red masculine affinities. And if I hear a
friend describe a certain family as having blotting-paper
voices, the image, though immediately felt to be appo-
site, bafiles the utmost powers of analysis. The higher
poets all use abrupt epithets, which are alike intimate and
remote, and, as Emerson says, sweetly torment us with in-
vitations to their inaccessible homes.

In these latter instances we must suppose that there is

an identical portion in the similar objects, and that its brain-
tract is energetically operative, without, however, being suffi-
ciently isolable in its activity as to stand out per se, and form
the condition of a distinctly discriminated ‘abstract idea.’
We cannot even by careful search see the bridge over which
we passed from the heart of one representation to that of
the next. In some brains, however, this mode of transition
is extremely common. It would be one of the most impor-
tant of physiological discoveries could we assign the me-
chanical or chemical difference which makes the thoughts
of one brain cling close to impartial redintegration, while
those of another shoot about in all the lawless revelry of

ASSOCIATION. 583:

similarity. Why, in these latter brains, action should tend
to focalize itself in small spots, while in the others it fills
patiently its broad bed, it seems impossible to guess.
Whatever the difference may be, it is what separates the
man of genius from the prosaic creature of habit and rou-
tine thinking. In Chapter XXII we shall need to recur
again to this point.

ASSOCIATION IN VOLUNTARY THOUGHT.

Hitherto we have assumed the process of suggestion of
one object by another to be spontaneous. The train of
imagery wanders at its own sweet will, now trudging in sober
grooves of habit, now with a hop, skip, and jump darting
across the whole field of time and space. This is revery,
or musing; but great segments of the flux of our ideas
consist of something very different from this. They are
guided by a distinct purpose or conscious interest. As
the Germans say, we nachdenken, or think towards a certain
end. It is now necessary to examine what modification is
made in the trains of our imagery by the having of an end
in view. The course of our ideas is then called voluntary.

Physiologically considered, we must suppose that a
purpose means the persistent activity of certain rather
definite brain-processes throughout the whole course of
thought. Our most usual cogitations are not pure reveries,
absolute driftings, but revolve about some central interest
or topic to which most of the images are relevant, and to-
wards which we return promptly after occasional digres-
sions. This interest is subserved by the persistently active
brain-tracts we have supposed. In the mixed associations
which we have hitherto studied, the parts of each object
which form the pivots on which our thoughts successively
turn have their interest largely determined by their con-
nection with some general interest which for the time has
seized upon the mind. If we call Z the brain-tract of gen-
eral interest, then, if the object abe turns up, and 6 has
more associations with Z than have either a or c, b will be-
come the object’s interesting, pivotal portion, and will call up
its own associates exclusively. For the energy of 6’s brain-
tract will be augmented by Z’s activity,—an activity which,

584 PSYCHOLOGY.

from lack of previous connection between Z and a or ¢,
does not influence a ore. If, for instance, I think of Paris
whilst I am hungry, I shall not improbably find that its
restaurants have become the pivot of my thought, etc., ete.

But in the theoretic as well as in the practical life there
are interests of a more acute sort, taking the form of defi-
nite images of some achievement, be it action or acquisition,
which we desire to effect. The train of ideas arising under
the influence of such an interest constitutes usually the
thought of the means by which the end shall be attained.
If the end by its simple presence does not instantaneously
suggest the means, the search for the latter becomes an in-
tellectual problem. The solution of problems is the most
characteristic 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 pro-
cesses, walking, speaking, writing, etc., which lead up to it.
Where the end is in the first instance only ideal, as in lay-
ing out a place of operations, the steps are purely imagi-
nary. In both of these cases the discovery of the means
may forma new sort of end, of an entirely peculiar nature,
an end, namely, which we intensely desire before we have
attained it, but of the nature of which, even whilst most
strongly craving it, we have no distinct imagination what-
ever. Such an end is a problem.

The same state of things occurs whenever we seek to
recall something forgotten, or to state the reason for a
judgment which we have made intuitively. The desire
strains and presses in a direction which it feels to be right
but towards a point which itis unable to see. In short,
the absence of an item is a determinant of our representa-
tions quite as positive as its presence can ever be. The
gap becomes no mere void, but what is called an aching
void. If we try to explain in terms of brain-action how a
thought which only potentially exists can yet be effective,
we seem driven to believe that the brain-tract thereof must
actually be excited, but only in a minimal and sub-con-
scious way. Try, for instance, to symbolize what goes on
in a man who is racking his brains to remember a thought
which occurred to him last week. The associates of the

ASSOCIATION. 585

thought are there, many of them at least, but they refuse
to awaken the thought itself. We cannot suppose that they
do not irradiate at all into its brain-tract, because his mind
quivers on the very edge of its recovery. Its actual rhythm
sounds in his ears; the words seem on the imminent point
of following, but fail. What it is that blocks the discharge
and keeps the brain-excitement here from passing beyond
the nascent into the vivid state cannot be guessed. But we
see in the philosophy of desire and pleasure, that such nas-
cent excitements, spontaneously tending to a crescendo,
- but inhibited or checked by other causes, may become
potent mental stimuli and determinants of desire. All
questioning, wonder, emotion of curiosity, must be referred
to cerebral causes of some such form as this. The great
difference between the effort to recall things forgotten and
the search after the means to a given end, is that the latter
have not, whilst the former have, already formed a part of
our experience. If we first study the mode of recalling a
thing forgotten, we can take up with better understanding
the voluntary quest of the unknown.

The forgotten thing is felt by us as a gap in the midst of
certain other things. If itis a thought, we possess a dim
idea of where we were and what we were about when it oc-
curred to us. We recollect the general subject to which it
relates. But all these details refuse to shoot together into
a solid whole, for the lack of the vivid traits of this missing
thought, the relation whereof o each detail forms now the
main interest of the latter. We keep running over the de-
tails in our mind, dissatisfied, craving something more.
From each detai: there radiate lines of association forming
so many tentative guesses. Many of these are immediately
seen to be irrelevant, are therefore void of interest, and
lapse immediately from consciousness. Others are asso-
elated with the other details present, and with the missing
thought as well. When these surge up, we have a peculiar
feeling that we are ‘warm,’ as the children say when they
play hide and seek ; and such associates as these we clutch
at and keep before the attention. Thus we recollect suc-
cessively that when we had the thought in question we
were at the dinner-table ; then that our friend J. D. was

586 PSYCHOLOG Y.

there; then that the subject talked about was so and so;
finally, that the thought came @ propos of a certain anecdote,
and then that it had something to do with a French quota-
tion. Now all these added associations arise independently
of the will, by the spontaneous process we know so well. _All
that the will does is to emphasize and linger over those which
seem pertinent, and ignore the rest. Through this hovering of
the attention in the neighborhood of the desired object, the
accumulation of associates becomes so great that the com-
bined tensions of their neural processes break through the
bar, and the nervous wave pours into the tract \7vhich has
so long been awaiting its advent. And as the expectant,
sub-conscious itching there, bursts into the fulness of vivid
feeling, the mind finds an inexpressible relief.

The whole process can be rudely symbolized in a dia-
gram. Call the forgotten thing Z, the first facts with which
we felt it was related, a, b, and c, and the details finally
operative in calling it up, J, m, and n. Each circle will
then stand for the brain-process underlying the thought of
the object denoted by the letter contained within it. The
activity in Z will at first be a mere tension; but as the ac-
tivities in a, b, and ¢ little by little irradiate into 1, m, and n,

cia 44.

and as all these processes are somehow connected with Z,
their combined irradiations upon Z, represented by the cen-
tripetal arrows, succeed in helping the tension there to
overcome the resistance, and in rousing Z also to full ac-
tivity.

ASSOCIATION. 587

The tension present from the first in Z, even though 1%
keep below the threshold of discharge, is probably to some
degree co-operative with a, b,c in determining that /, m, n
shall awake. Without Z’s tension there might be a slower
accumulation 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 it
were, to recognize their relative values and brood over
some of them, whilst others are let drop. As when we have
lost a material object we cannot recover it by a direct ef-
fort, but only through moving about such neighborhoods
wherein it is likely to lie, and trusting that it will then
strike our eye ; so here, by not letting our attention leave
the neighborhood of what we seek, we trust that it will end
by speaking to us of its own accord.*

Turn now to the case of finding the unknown means to
a distinctly conceived end. The end here stands in the
place of a, b, c, in the diagram. It is the starting-point of
the irradiations of suggestion; and here, as in that case,
what the voluntary attention does is only to dismiss some
of the suggestions as irrelevant, and hold fast to others
which are felt to be more pertinent—let these be symbolized
by 1, m,n. These latter at last accumulate sufficiently to
discharge all together into Z, the excitement of which pro-
cess is, in the mental sphere, equivalent to the solution of
our problem. The only difference between this case and
the last, is that in this one there need be no original sub-
excitement in Z, co-operating from the very first. When

* No one has described this process better than Hobbes: ‘‘ Sometimes
aman seeks what he hath lost; and from that place and time wherein
he misses it, his mind runs back from place to place and time to time to
find where and when he had it; that is to say, to find some certain and
limited 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 what
action or other occasion might make him lose it. This we call Remem-
brance, or calling to mind. Sometimes a man knows a place determinate,
within the compass whereof he is to seek ; and then his thoughts run over
all the parts thereof, in the same manner as one would sweep a room to find
a jewel, or as a spaniel ranges the field till he find a scent, or asa man
should run over the alphabet to start a rhyme.” (Leviathan, 165, p. 10.}

588 PSYCHOLOGY.

we seek a forgotten name, we must suppose the name’s
centre to be in astate of active tension from the very out-
set, because of that peculiar feeling of recognition which we
get at the moment of recall. The plenitude of the thought
seems here but a maximum degree of something which our
mind divined in advance. It instantaneously fills a socket
completely moulded to its shape ; and it seems most natural
to ascribe the identity of quality in our feeling of the gaping
socket and our feeling of what comes to fill it, to the
sameness of a nerve-tract excited in different degrees. In
the solving of a problem, on the contrary, the recognition
that we have found the means is much less immediate.
Here, what we are aware of in advance seems to be its
relations with the items we already know. It must bear a
causal relation, or it must be an effect, or it must contain
an attribute common to two items, or it must be a uniform
concomitant, or what not. We know, in short, a lot about
it, whilst as yet we have no knowledge of acquaintance with
it (see p. 221), or in Mr. Hodgson’s language, “we know
what we want to find beforehand, in a certain sense, in its
second intention, and do not know it, in another sense, in
its first intention.” * Our intuition that one of the ideas
which turn up is, at last, our guesitum, is due to our recog-
nition that its relations are identical with those we had
in mind, and this may be a rather slow act of judgment.
In fact, every one knows that an object may be for some
time present to his mind before its relations to other mat-
ters are perceived. ‘To quote Hodgson again:

‘*The mode of operation is common to voluntary memory and
reason. . . . But reasoning adds to memory the function of comparing
or judging the images which arise. . . . Memory aims at filling the gap
with an image which has at some particular time filled it before, rea-
soning with one which bears certain time- and space-relations to the
images before and after”’—

or, to use perhaps clearer language, one which stands in
determinate logical relations to those data round about the
gap which filled our mind at the start. This feeling of the
blank form of relationship before we get the material quality

* Theory of Practice, vol. 1 p 394.

ASSQCIATION. 589

of the thing related will surprise no one who has read
Chapter IX.

From the guessing of newspaper enigmas to the plot-
ting of the policy of an empire there is no other proces:
than this. We trust to the laws of cerebral nature to pre-
sent us spontaneously with the appropriate idea :

‘Our only command over it is by the effort we make to keep the
painful unfilled gap in consciousness.* . . . Two circumstances are
important to notice: the first is, that volition has no power of calling
up images, but only of rejecting and selecting from those offered by
spontaneous redintegration.t But the rapidity with which this selee-
tion is made, owing to the familiarity of the ways in which spontaneous
redintegration runs, gives the process of reasoning the appearance of
evoking images that are foreseen to be conformable to the purpose.
There is no seeing them before they are offered; there is no summoning
them before they are seen. The other circumstance is, that every kind
of reasoning is nothing, in its simplest form, but attention.”t

It is foreign to our purpose here to enter into any
detailed analysis of the different classes of mental pursuit.
In a scientific research we get perhaps as rich an example
as can be found. The inquirer starts with a fact of which
he seeks the reason, or with an hypothesis of which he
seeks the proof. In either case he keeps turning the
matter incessantly in his mind until, by the arousal of asso-
ciate upon associate, some habitual, some similar, one arises
which he recognizes to suit his need. This, however, may
take years. No rules can be given by which the investi-
gator may proceed straight to his result; but both here
and in the case of reminiscence the accumulation of helps
in the way of associations may advance more rapidly by
the use of certain routine methods. In striving to recall a
thought, for example, we may of set purpose run through
the successive classes of circumstance with which it may

* Ibid. p. 394.

+ All association is called redintegration by Hodgson.

¢ Ibid. p. 400. Compare Bain, Emotions and Will, p. 377. ‘‘The out
goings of the mind are necessarily random; the end alone is the thing that
is clear to the view, and with that there is a’perception of the fitness of
avery passing suggestion. The volitional energy keeps up the attention on
the active search; and the moment that anything in point rises before
the mind, it springs upon that like a wild beast upon its prey.”

590 PSYCHOLOGY.

possibly have been connected, trusting that when the righ
member of the class has turned up it will help the thought’s
revival. Thus we may run through all the places in which
we may have had it. We may run through the persons
whom we remember to have conversed with, or we may call
up successively all the books we have lately been reading.
If we are trying to remember a person we may run through
a list of streets or of professions. Some item out of the
lists thus methodically gone over will very likely be asso-
ciated with the fact we are in need of, and may suggest it
or help to doso. And yet the item might never have arisen
without such systematic procedure. In scientific research
this accumulation of associates has been methodized by
Mill under the title of ‘The Four Methods of Experi-
mental Inquiry.’ By the ‘method of agreement,’ by that
of ‘difference,’ by those of ‘residues’ and ‘concomitant
variations’ (which cannot here be more nearly defined), we
make certain lists of cases; and by ruminating these lists
in our minds the cause we seek will be more likely to
emerge. But the final stroke of discovery is only prepared,
not effected, by them. The brain-tracts must, of their own
accord, shoot the right way at last, or we shall still grope
in darkness. That in some brains the tracts dv shoot the
right way much oftener than in others, and that we cannot
tell why,—these are ultimate facts to which we must never
close our eyes. Even in forming our lists of instances
according to Mill’s methods, we are at the mercy of the
spontaneous workings of Similarity in our brain. How
are a number of facts, resembling the one whose cause we
seek, to be brought together in a list unless the one will
rapidly suggest the other through association by similarity ?

SIMILARITY NO ELEMENTARY LAW.

Such is the analysis I propose, first of the three main
types of spontaneous association, and then of voluntary
association. It will be observed that the object called up
may bear any logical relation whatever to the one which sug-
gested it. The law requires only that one condition should
be fulfilled. The fading object must be due to a brain-
process some of whose elements awaken thrceugh habit

ASSOCIATION. 591

some of the elements of the brain-process of the ob-
ject which comes to view. This awakening is the opera-
tive machinery, the causal agency, throughout, quite as
much so in the kind of association I have called by the
name of Similarity, as in any other sort. The similarity
between the objects, or between the thoughts (if similarity
there be between these latter), has no causal agency in
carrying us from one to the other. It is but a result—the
effect of the usual causal agent when this happens to work
in a certain particular and assignable way. But ordinary
writers talk as if the similarity of the objects were itself an
agent, co-ordinate with habit, and independent of it, and
like it able to push objects before the mind. This is quite
unintelligible. The similarity of two things does not exist
till both things are there—it is meaningless to talk of it as
an agent of production of anything, whether in the physical
or the psychical realms.* It is a relation which the mind
perceives after the fact, just as it may perceive the relations
of superiority, of distance, of causality, of container and
content, of substance and accident, or of contrast, between
an object and some second object which the associative
machinery calls up.t

There are, nevertheless, able writers who not only insist
on preserving association by similarity as a distinct ele-
mentary law, but who make it the most elementary law,
and seek to derive contiguous association from it. Their
reasoning is as follows: When the present impression A

* 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, 1. 458; Rabier, ibid, 460;
Pillon, iid. u. 55; B. P. Bowne, Introduction to Psych. Theory, 92;
Ward, Encyclop. Britt. art. Psychology, p. 60; Wahle, Vierteljahrsch. f.
wiss. Philos. rx. 426-481.

+ Dr. McCosh is accordingly only logical when he sinks similarity in
what he calls the ‘‘ Law of Correlation, according to which, when we have
discovered a relation between things, the idea of one tends to bring up the
others” (Psychology, the Cognitive Powers, p. 130). The relations men-
tioned by this author are Identity, Whole and Parts, Resemblance, Space,
Time, Quantity, Active Property, and Cause and Effect. If perceived
relations among objects are to be treated as grounds for their appearance
before the mind, similarity has of course no right to an exclusive, or even
to a predominant, place.

592 PSYCHOLOGY.

awakens the idea b of its past contiguous associate B, how
can this occur except through first reviving an image a of
its own past occurrence. Tis is the term directly con-
nected with 6; so that the process instead of being simply
A—bd is A—a—b. Now A anda are similars; therefore no
association by contiguity can occur except through a previ-
ous association by similarity. The most important suppo-
sition here made is that every impression on entering the
mind must needs awaken an image of its past self, in the
light of which itis ‘apperceived’ or understood, and through
the intermediation of which it enters into relation with the
mind’s other objects. This assumption is almost univer-
sally made ; and yet itis hard to find any good reason for it.
It first came before us when we were reviewing the facts of
aphasia and mental blindness (see p. 50 ff.). But we then
saw no-need of optical and auditory images to interpret opti-
cal and auditory sensations by. On the contrary, we agreed
that auditory sensations were understood by us only so far
as they awakened non-auditory images, and optical sensa-
tions only so far as they awakened non-optical images. In
the chapters on Memory, on Reasoning, and on Percep-
tion the same assumption will meet us again, and again
will have to be rejected as groundless. The sensational
process A and the ideational process a probably occupy
essentially the same tracts. When the outer stimulus
comes and those tracts vibrate with the sensation A, they
discharge as directly into the paths which lead to Bas
when there is no outer stimulus and they only vibrate with
the idea a. To say that the process A can only reach these
paths by the help of the weaker process a is like saying
that we need a candle to see the sun by. A replaces a,
does all that a does and more; and there is no intelligible
meaning, to my mind, in saying that the weaker process
coexists with the stronger. I therefore consider that these
writers are altogether wrong. The only plausible proof
they give of the coexistence of a with Ais when A gives us
a sense of familiarity but fails to awaken any distinct
thought of past contiguous associates. In a later chapter
I shall consider this case. Here I content myself with say-
ing that it does not seem conclusive as to the point at issue ;

ASSOCIATION. 593

and that I still believe association of coexistent or sequent
impressions to be the one elementary law.

Contrast has also been held to be an independent agent in
association. But the reproduction of an object contrasting
with one already in the mind is easily explained on our
principles. Recent writers, in fact, all reduce it either
to similarity or contiguity. Contrast always presupposes
generic similarity; it is only the extremes of a class which
are contrasted, black and white, not black and sour, or
white and prickly. A machinery which reproduces a simi-
lar at all, may reproduce the opposite similar, as well as
any intermediate term. Moreover, the greater number of
contrasts are habitually coupled in speech, young and old,
life and death, rich and poor, ete., and are, as Dr. Bain
says, in everybody’s memory.*

I trust that the student will now feel that the way to a
deeper understanding of the order of our ideas lies in the
direction of cerebral physiology. 'The elementary process
of revival can be nothing but the law of habit. Truly the
day is distant when physiologists shall actually trace from
cell-group to cell-group the irradiations which we have hypo-
thetically invoked. Probably it will never arrive. The
schematism we have used is, moreover, taken immediately
from the analysis of objects into their elementary parts,
and only extended by analogy to the brain. And yet it is
only as incorporated in the brain that such a schematism
can represent anything causal. This is, to my mind, the con-
clusive reason for saying that the order of presentation of
the mind’s materials is due to cerebral physiology alone.

The law of accidental prepotency of certain processes
over others falls also within the sphere of cerebral proba-
bilities. Granting such instability as the brain-tissue re-
quires, certain points must always discharge more quickly
and strongly than others; and this prepotency would shift
its place from moment to moment by accidental causes,

* Cf. Bain, Senses and Intellect, 564 ff.; J. S. Mill, Note 39 to J. Mill’s
Analysis ; Lipps, Grundtatsachen, 97.

594 PSYCHOLOGY.

giving us a perfect mechanical diagram of the capricious
play of similar association in the most gifted mind. The
study of dreams confirms this view. The usual abundance
of paths of irradiation seems, in the dormant brain, reduced.
A few only are pervious, and the most fantastic sequences
occur because the currents run—‘like sparks in burnt-up
paper ’—wherever the nutrition of the moment creates an
opening, but nowhere else.

The effects of interested attention and volition remain.
These activities seem to hold fast to certain elements, and
by emphasizing them and dwelling on them, to make their
associates the only ones which are evoked. This is the
point at which an anti-mechanical psychology must, if any-
where, make it stand in dealing with association. Every-
thing else is pretty certainly due to cerebral laws. My
own opinion on the question of active attention and spirit-
ual spontaneity is expressed elsewhere. But even though
there be a mental spontaneity, it can certainly not create
ideas or summon them ex abrupto. Its power is limited to
selecting amongst those which the associative machinery
has already introduced or tends to introduce. If it can
emphasize, reinforce, or protract for a second either one of
these, it can do all that the most eager advocate of free will
need demand ; for it then decides the direction of the next
associations by making them hinge upon the emphasized
term ; and determining in this wise the course of the man’s
thinking, it also determines his acts.

THE HISTORY OF OPINION CONCERNING ASSOCIATION

may be briefly glanced at ere we end the chapter.* Aris-
totle seems to have caught both the facts and the principle
of explanation; but he did not expand his views, and it was
not till the time of Hobbes that the matter was again touched
on ina definite way. Hobbes first formulated the problem
of the succession of our thoughts. He writes in Leviathan,
chapter 11, as follows:

——_—__—

* See, for farther details, Hamilton’s Reid, Appendices D** and D***;
and L. Ferri, La Psychologie de l'Association (Paris, 1883). Also Robert-
son, art. Association in Encyclop. Britannica.

ASSOCIATION. 595

‘“ By consequence, or train of thoughts, I understand that succession
of one thought to another which is called, to distinguish it from dis-
course in words, mental discourse. When a man thinketh on anything
whatsoever, his next thought after is not altogether so casual as it
seems to be. Not every thought to every thought succeeds indiffer-
ently. But as we have no imagination, whereof we have not formerly
had sense, in whole or in parts; so we have no transition from one
imagination to another, whereof we never had the like before in our
senses. The reason whereof is this. All fancies are motions within us,
relics of those made in the sense: and those motions that immediately
succeeded one another in the sense continue also together after sense :
insomuch as the former coming again to take place, and be predomi-
nant, the latter followeth, by coherence of the matter moved, in such
manner, as water upon a plane table is drawn which way any one part
of it is guided by the finger. But because in sense, to one and the same
thing perceived, sometimes one thing, sometimes another succeedeth, it
comes to pass in time that, in the imagining of anything, there is no
certainty what we shall imagine next; only this is certain, it shall be
something that succeeded the same before, at one time or another.
This train of thoughts, or mental discourse, is of two sorts. The first is
unguided, without design, and inconstant ; wherein there is no pas-
sionate thought, to govern and direct those that follow, to itself, as
the end and scope of some desire, or other passion. . . . The second
is more constant; as being regulated by some desire and design. For
the impression made by such things as we desire, or fear, is strong and
permanent, 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 the
thought of some means we have seen produce the like of that which we
aim at; and from the thought of that, the thought of means to that
mean; and so continually, till we come to some beginning within our
own power. And because the end, by the greatness of the impression,
comes often to mind, in case our thoughts begin to wander, they are
quickly again reduced into the way: which observed by one of the
seven wise men, made him give men this precept, which is now worn
out, Respice finem ; that is to say, in all your actions, look often upon
what you would have, as the thing that directs all your thoughts in the
way to attain it.

‘The train of regulated thoughts is of two kinds; one, when of
an effect imagined we seek the causes, or means that produce it: and
this is common to man and beast. The other is, when imagining any-
thing whatsoever, we seek all the possible effects that can by it be pro-
duced ; that is to say, we imagine what we can do with it, when we
have it. Of which I have not at any time seen any sign, but in man
only ; for this is a curiosity hardly incident to the nature of any living
creature that has no other passion but sensual, such as are hunger,
thirst, lust. and anger. In sum, the discourse of the mind, when it is
governed by design, is nothing but seeking, or the faculty ot invention,

596 PSYCHOLOG Y.

which the Latins called sagacitas, and sollertia ; a hunting out of the
causes, of some effect, present or past ; or of the effects, of some present
or past cause.”

The most important passage after this of Hobbes is
Hume’s:

‘‘ As all simple ideas may be separated by the imagination, and
may be united again in what form it pleases, nothing would be more
unaccountable than the operations of that faculty, were it not guided
by some universal principles, which render it, in some measure, uniform
with itself in all times and places. Were ideas entirely loose and un-
connected, chance alone would join them; and ’tis impossible the same
simple ideas should fall regularly into complex ones (as they commonly
do) without some bond of union among them, some associating quality,
by which one idea naturally introduces another. This uniting princi-
ple among ideas is not to be considered as an inseparable connection ;
for that has been already excluded from the imagination. Nor yet are
we to conclude that without it the mind cannot join two ideas ; for
nothing is more free than that faculty : but we are only to regard it as
a gentle force, which commonly prevails, and is the cause why, among
other things, languages so nearly correspond to each other; nature in
a manner pointing to every one those simple ideas which are most
proper to be united in a complex one. The qualities from which this
association arises, and by which the mind is after this manner con-
veyed from one idea to another, are three, viz., RESEMBLANCE, CON-
TIGUITY in time or place, and CAUSE and EFFECT.

‘*T believe it will not be very necessary to prove that these qualities
produce an association among ideas, and upon the appearance of one
idea naturally introduce another. Tis plain that in the course of our
thinking, and in the constant revolution of our ideas, our imagination
runs easily from one idea to any other that resembles it, and that this
quality alone is to the fancy a sufficient bond and association. ’Tis
likewise evident, that as the senses, in changing their objects, are
necessitated to change them regularly, and take them as they lie con-
tiguous to each other, the imagination must by long custom acquire
the same method of thinking, and run along the parts of space and
time in conceiving its objects. As to the connection that is made by
the relation of cause and effect, we shall have occasion afterwards te
examine it to the bottom, and therefore shall not at present insist upon
it. ’Tis sufficient to observe that there is no relation which produces
a stronger connection in the fancy, and makes one idea more readily
recall another, than the relation of cause and effect betwixt their ob-
jects. . . . These are therefore the principles of union or cohesion
among our simple ideas, and in the imagination supply the place of
that inseparable connection by which they are united in our memory.
Here is a kind of ATTRACTION, which in the mental world will be found

ASSOCIATION. 597

to have as extraordinary effects as in the natural, and to show itself in
as many and as various forms. Its effects are everywhere conspicuous ;
but as to its causes, they are mostly unknown, and must be resolved
into original qualities of human nature, which I pretend not to
explain.” *

Hume did not, however, any more than Hobbes, follow
out the effects of which he speaks, and the task of populariz-
ing the notion of association and making an effective school
based on association of ideas alone was reserved for Hart-
leyt and James Mill.t These authors traced minutely the
presence of association in all the cardinal notions and op-
erations of the mind. The several ‘faculties’ of the Mind
were dispossessed ; the one principle of association between
ideas did all their work. As Priestley says:

‘¢ Nothing is requisite to make any man whatever he is, but a
sentient principle with this single law. . . . Not only all our intel-
lectual pleasures and pains but all the phenomena of memory, imagina-
tion, volition, reasoning and every other mental affection and operation,
are but different modes or cases of the association of ideas.” §

An eminent French psychologist, M. Ribot, repeats
Hume’s comparison of the law of association with that of
gravitation, and goes on to say:

‘*Tt is remarkable that this discovery was made so late. Nothing is
simpler, apparently, than to notice that this law of association is the
truly fundamental, irreducible phenomenon of our mental life; that it
is at the bottom of all our acts; that it permits of no exception ; that
neither dream, revery, mystic ecstasy, nor the most abstract reasoning
can exist without it ; that its suppression would be equivalent to that of
thought itself. Nevertheless no ancient author understood it, for one
cannot seriously maintain that a fewscattered lines in Aristotle and
the Stoics constitute a theory and clear view of the subject. It is to
Hobbes, Hume, and Hartley that we must attribute the origin of these
studies on the connection of our ideas. The discovery of the ultimate
law of our psychologic acts has this, then, in common with many other
discoveries : it came late and seems so simple that it may justly astonish
us.

‘* Perhaps it is not superfluous to ask in what this manner of ex-
planation is superior to the current theory of Faculties. The most

* Treatise of Human Nature, part 1. § Tv.

+ Observations on Man (London, 1749).

¢ Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829).
§ Hartley’s Theory, 2d ed. (1790) p. xxvm.

|| (Current, that is, in France.—W. J.]

598 PSYCHOLOGY.

extended usage consists, as we know, in dividing intellectual phenom-
ena into classes, in separating those which differ, in grouping together
those of the same nature and in giving to these a common name and in
attributing them to the same cause ; itis thus that we have come to dis-
tinguish those diverse aspects of intelligence which are called judgment,
reasoning, abstraction, perception, etc. This method is precisely the
one followed in Physics, where the words caloric, electricity, gravity,
designate the unknown causes of certain groups of phenomena. If one
thus never forgets that the diverse faculties are only the unknown
causes of known phenomena, that they are simply a convenient means
of classifying the facts and speaking of them, if one does not fall into
the common fault of making out of them substantial entities, creations
which now agree, now disagree, so forming in the intelligence a little
republic; then, we can see nothing reprehensible in this distribution
into faculties, conformable as it is to the rules of a sound method and
of a good natural classification. In what then is Mr. Bain’s procedure
superior to the method of the faculties? It is that the latter is simply
a classification while his is an explanation. Between the psychology
which traces intellectual facts back to certain faculties, and that which
reduces them to the single law of association, there is, according to our
way of thinking, the same difference that we find in Physics between
those who attribute its phenomena to five or six causes, and those who
derive gravity caloric, light, etc., from motion. The system of the
faculties explains nothing because each one of them is only a flats vocis
which is of value merely through the phenomena which it contains, and
signifies nothing more than these phenomena. The new theory, on the
contrary, shows that the different processes of intelligence are only
diverse cases of a single law; that imagination, deduction, induction,
perception, etc., are but so many determinate ways in which ideas may
combine with each other ; and that the differences of faculties are only
differences of association, It explains all intellectual facts, certainly
not after the manner of Metaphysics which demands the ultimate and
absolute reason of things; but after the manner of Physics which seeks
only their secondary and immediate cause.” *

The inexperienced reader may be glad of a brief indica-
tion of the manner in which all the different mental oper-
ations may be conceived to consist of images of sensation
associated together.

Memory is the association of a present image with others
known to belong to the past. Hapectation the same, with
future substituted for past. Fancy, the association of
images without temporal order.

Beliej in anything not present to sense is the very lively,

* La Psychologie Angloise, p. 242.

ASSOCIATION. 599

strong, and steadfast association of the image of that thing
with some present sensation, so that as long as the sensation
persists the image cannot be excluded from the mind.

Judgment is ‘transferring the idea of truth by associ-
ation from one proposition to another that resembles it.’*

Reasoning is the perception that “ whatever has any mark
has that which it is a mark of”; in the concrete case the
mark or middle term being always associated with each of
the other terms and so serving as a link by which they are
themselves indirectly associated together. This same kind
of transfer of a sensible experience associated with another
to a third also associated with that other, serves to explain
emotional facts. When we are pleased or hurt we express
it, and the expression associates itself with the feeling.
Hearing the same expression from another revives the as-
sociated feeling, and we sympathize, i.e. grieve or are glad
with him.

The other social affections, Benevolence, Conscientiouness,
Ambition, etc., arise in like manner by the transfer of the
bodily pleasure experienced as a reward for social service,
and hence associated with it, to the act of service itself, the
link of reward being dropped out. Just so Avarice when
the miser transfers the bodily pleasures associated with
the spending of money to the money itself, dropping the
link of spending.

Fear is a transfer of the bodily hurt associated by ex-
perience with the thing feared, to the thought of the thing,
with the precise features of the hurt leftout. Thus we fear
a dog without distinctly imagining his bite.

Love is the association of the agreeableness of certain
sensible experiences with the idea of the object capable of
affording them. The experiences themselves may cease to
be distinctly imagined after the notion of their pleasure has
been transferred to the object, constituting our love there-
for.

Volition is the association of ideas of muscular motion
with the ideas of those pleasures which the motion pro-
duces. The motion at first occurs automatically and results

* Priestley, op. cit. p. XXX.

600 PSYCHOLOGY.

in a pleasure unforeseen. The latter becomes so associated
with the motion that whenever we think of it the idea of the
motion arises; and the idea of the motion when vivid causes
the motion to occur. This is an act of will.

Nothing is easier than for a philosopher of this school
to explain from experience such a notion as that of infinitude.

‘* He sees in it an ordinary manifestation of one of the laws of the
association of ideas,—the law that the idea of a thing irresistibly sug-
gests the idea of any other thing which has been often experienced in
close conjunction with it, and not otherwise. As we have never had
experience of any point of space without other points beyond it, nor of
any point of time without others following it, the law of indissoluble
association makes it impossible for us to think of any point of space or
time, however distant, without having the idea irresistibly realized, in
imagination, of other points still more remote. And thus the supposed
original and inherent property of these two ideas is completely explained
and accounted for by the law of association ; and we are enabled to see
that if Space or Time were really susceptible of termination, we should
be just as unable as we now are to conceive the idea.” *

These examples of the Associationist Psychology are with
the exception of the last, very crudely expressed, but they
suffice for our temporary need. Hartley and James Millt
improved upon Hume so far as to employ but a single prin-
ciple of association, that of contiguity or habit. Hartley
ignores resemblance, James Mill expressly repudiates it in
a passage which is assuredly one of the curiosities of liter-
ature :

‘*T believe it will be found that we are accustomed to see like things
together. When we see a tree, we generally see more trees than one ;
a sheep, more sheep than one ; aman, more men than one. From this
observation, 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 con-
struct a Psychology which ignores Association by Simi-
larity,t and in a chapter, which also is a curiosity, he tries

* Review of Bain’s Psychology, by J. 8. Mill, in Edinb. Review, Oct. 1,
1859, p. 293.

+ Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, J. S. Mill’s edition,
VOlotapeoke i.

¢ On the Associability of Relations between Feelings, in Principles of
Psychology, vol. 1. p. 259. It is impossible to regard the “ cohering of each
feeling with previously-experienced feelings of the same class, order,

ASSOCIATION. 601

to explain the association of two ideas by a conscious refer-
ence of the first to the point of time when its sensation was
experienced, which point of time is no sooner thought of
than its content, namely, the second idea, arises. Messrs.
Bain and Mill, however, and the immense majority of con-
temporary psychologists retain both Resemblance and Con-
tiguity as irreducible principles of Association.

Professor Bain’s exposition of association is by common
consent looked upon as the best expression of the English
school. Perception of agreement and difference, retentive-
ness, and the two sorts of association, contiguity and similar-
ity, are by him regarded as constituting all that is meant by
intellect proper. His pages are painstaking and instructive
from a descriptive point of view; though, after my own at-
tempt to deal with the subject causally, I can hardly
award to them any profound explanatory value. Associa-
tion by Similarity, too much neglected by the British school
before Bain, receives from him the most generous exempli-
fication. As an instructive passage, the following, out of
many equally good, may be chosen to quote:

‘¢ We may have similarity in form with diversity of use, and similar-
ity of use with diversity of form. A rope suggests other ropes and
cords, if we look to the appearance; but looking to the wse, it may sug-
gest an iron cable, a wooden prop, an iron girding, a leather band, or
bevelled gear. In spite of diversity of appearance, the suggestion turns
on what answers a common end. If we are very much attracted by
sensible appearances, there will be the more difficulty in recalling
things that agree only in the use; if, on the other hand, we are pro-
foundly sensitive to the one point of practical efficiency as a tool, the
peculiarities not essential to this will be little noticed, and we shall be
ever ready to revive past objects corresponding in use to some one pres-
ent, although diverse in all other circumstances. We become oblivious
to the difference between a horse, a steam-engine, and a waterfall,
when our minds are engrossed with the one circumstance of moving
power. The diversity in these had no doubt for a long time the effect
of keeping back their first identification; and to obtuse intellects, this
identification might have been for ever impossible. A strong concen-
tration of mind upon the single peculiarity of mechanical force, and a
degree of indifference to the general aspect of the things themselves,

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 for
what is commonly known as Association by similarity.

602 PSYCHOLOG Y.

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 existing
machinery might arise in the mind of a mechanical inventor. When it
first occurred to a reflecting mind that moving water had a property
identical with human or brute force, namely, the property of setting
other masses in motion, overcoming inertia and resistance,—when the
sight of the stream suggested through this point of likeness the power
of the animal,—a new addition was made to the class of prime movers,
and when circumstances permitted, this power could become a substi-
tute for the others. It may seem to the modern understanding, famil-
iar with water-wheels and drifting rafts, that the similarity here was an
extremely obvious one. But if we put ourselves back into an early
state of mind, when running water affected the mind by its brilliancy,
its roar, and irregular devastation, we may easily suppose that to iden-
tify this with animal muscular energy was by no means an obvious.
effect. Doubtless when a mind arose, insensible by natural constitution
to the superficial aspects of things, and having withal a great stretch of
identifying intellect, such a comparison would then be possible. We
may pursue the same example one stage further, and come to the dis-
covery of steam power, or the identification of expanding vapor with
the previously known sources of mechanical force. To the common eye,
for ages, vapor presented itself as clouds in the sky; or as a hissing
noise at the spout of a kettle, with the formation of a foggy curling
cloud at a few inches’ distance. The forcing up of the lid of a kettle
may also have been occasionally observed. But how long was it ere
any one was struck with the parallelism of this appearance with a blast
of wind, a rush of water, or an exertion of animal muscle? The dis-
cordance was too great tobe broken through by such a faint and limited
amount of likeness. In one mind, however, the identification did take
place, and was followed out into its consequences. The likeness had
occurred to other minds previously, but not with the same results.
Such minds must have been in some way or other distinguished above
the millions of mankind; and we are now endeavoring to give the ex-
planation of their superiority. The intellectual character of Watt con-
tained all the elements preparatory to a great stroke of similarity in
such a case;—a high susceptibility, both by nature and by education,
to the mechanical properties of bodies; ample previous knowledge or
familiarity; and indifference to the superficial and sensational effects
of things. It is not only possible, however, but exceedingly probable,
that many men possessed all these accomplishments; they are of a kind
not transcending common abilities. They would in some degree attach
to a mechanical education almost as a matter of eourse. That the dis-
covery was not sooner made supposes that something farther, and not
of common occurrence, was necessary; and this additional endowment
appears to be the identifying power of Similarity in general; the ten-
dency to detect likeness in the midst of disparity and disguise. This

ASSOCIATION. 603

supposition accounts for the fact, and is consistent with the known in-
tellectual character of the inventor of the steam-engine.” *

Dr. Hodgson’s account of association is by all odds the
best yet propounded in English.t All these writers hold
more or less explicitly to the notion of atomistic ‘ideas’
which recur. In Germany, the same mythological suppo-
sition has been more radically grasped, and carried out to
a still more logical, if more repulsive, extreme, by Her-
bart { and his followers, who until recently may be said to
have reigned almost supreme in their native country.§
For Herbart each idea is a permanently existing entity, the
entrance whereof into consciousness is but an accidental
determination of its being. So far as it succeeds in occu-
pying the theatre of consciousness, it crowds out another
idea previously there. This act of inhibition gives it, how-
ever, 2 sort of hold on the other representation which on
all later occasions facilitates its following the other into the
mind. The ingenuity with which most special cases of as-
sociation are formulated in this mechanical language of
struggle and inhibition, is great, and surpasses in analytic
thoroughness anything that has been done by the British
school. This, however, is a doubtful merit, in a case where
the elements dealt with are artificial ; and I must confess
that to my mind there is something almost hideous in the
glib Herbartian jargon about Vorstellangsmassen and their
Hemmungen and Hemmungssummen, and sinken and erheben
and schweben, and Verschmelzungen and Complexionen. Herr
Lipps, the most recent systematic German Psychologist,
has, I regret to say, carried out the theory of ideas in a
way which the great originality, learning, and acuteness he

* The Senses and the Intellect, pp. 491-3.

+ See his Time and Space, chapter v, and his Theory of Practice, §§ 53
to 57.

t Psychologie als Wissenschaft (1824), 2.

§ Prof. Ribot, in chapter 1 of his ‘Contemporary German Psychol-
ogy,’ has given a good account of Herbart and his school, and of Beneke,
his rival and partial analogue. See also two articles on the Herbartian
Psychology, by G. F. Stout, in Mind for 1888. J. D. Morrell’s Outlines of
Mental Philosophy (2d ed., London. 1862) largely follows Herbart and
Beneke. I know of no other English book which does so.

604 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

shows make only the more regrettable.* Such elaborately
artificial constructions are, it seems to me, only a burden
and a hindrance, not a help, to our science.t

In French, M. Rabier in his chapter on Association,
handles the subject more vigorously and acutely than any
one. His treatment of it, though short, seems to me for
general soundness to rank second only to Hodgson’s.

In the last chapter we already invoked association to
account for the effects of use in improving discrimination.
In later chapters we shall see abundant proof of the im-
mense part which it plays in other processes, and shall
then readily admit that few principles of analysis, in any
science, have proved more fertile than this one, however
vaguely formulated it often may have been. Our own attempt
to formulate it more definitely, and to escape the usual con-
fusion between causal agencies and relations merely known,
must not blind us to the immense services of those by
whom the confusion was unfelt. From this practical point
of view it would be a true ignoratio elenchi to flatter one’s
self that one has dealt a heavy blow at the psychology of
association, when one has exploded the theory of atomistic
ideas, or shown that contiguity and similarity between
ideas can only be there after association is done.§¢ The
whole body of the associationist psychology remains stand-
ing after you have translated ‘ideas’ into ‘ objects,’ on the
one hand, and ‘brain-processes’ on the other; and the
analysis of faculties and operations is as conclusive in these
terms as in those traditionally used.

* See his Grundtatsachen des Bewusstseins (1883), chap. vi e¢ passim,
especially pp. 106 ff., 364.

+ The most burdensome and utterly gratuitous of them are perhaps
Steinthal’s, in his Einleitung in die Psychologie, 2te Aufl. (1881). Cf. also
G. Glogau: Steinthal’s Psychologische Formeln (1886).

t Lecons de Philosophie, 1. Psychologie, chap. Xv1 (1884).

§ Mr. F. H. Bradley seems to me to have been guilty of something very
like this gnoratio elenchi in the, of course, subtle and witty but decidedly
long-winded critique of the association of ideas, contained in book wu.
part . chap. 1. of his Principles of Logic.

CHAPTER XV.*
THE PERCEPTION OF TIME.

In the next two chapters I shall deal with what is some-
times called internal perception, or the perception of time,
and of events as occupying a date therein, especially when
the date is a past one, in which case the perception in
question goes by the name of memory. To remember a
thing as past, itis necessary that the notion of ‘ past’ should
be one of our ‘ideas.’ We shall seein the chapter on Mem-
ory that many things come to be thought by us as past,
not because of any intrinsic quality of their own, but rather
because they are associated with other things which for us
signify pastness. But how do these things get their past-
ness? What is the original of our experience of pastness,
from whence we get the meaning of the term? It is this
question which the reader is invited to consider in the pres-
ent chapter. We shall see that we have a constant feeling
sur generis of pastness, to which every one of our experi-
ences in turn falls a prey. To think a thing as past is to
think it amongst the objects or in the direction of the ob-
jects which at the present moment appear affected by this
quality. This is the original of our notion of past time,
upon which memory and history build their systems. And
in this chapter we shall consider this immediate sense
of time alone.

If the constitution of consciousness were that of a string
of 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

* This chapter is reprinted almost verbatim from the Journal of Specu-
lative Philosophy, vol. xx. p. 374.
605

606 PSYCHOLOGY.

incapable of acquiring experience. - . . Even if our ideas were associ-
ated in trains, but only as they are in imagination, we should still be
without the capacity of aequiring knowledge. One idea, upon this
supposition, would follow another. But that would be all. Each of
our successive states of consciousness, the moment it ceased, would be
gone forever. Each of those momentary states would be our whole
being.” *

We might, nevertheless, under tnese circumstances, act
in a rational way, provided the mechanism which produced
our trains of images produced them in a rational order.
We should make appropriate speeches, though unaware of
any word except the one just on our lips; we should decide
upon the right policy without ever a glimpse of the total
grounds of our choice. Our consciousness would be like a
slow-worm spark, illuminating the point it immediately
covered, but leaving all beyond in total darkness. Whether
a very highly developed practical life be possible under
such conditions as these is more than doubtful ; it is, how-
ever, conceivable.

I make the fanciful hypothesis merely to set off our
real nature by the contrast. Our feelings are not thus con-
tracted, and our consciousness never shrinks to the dimen-
sions of a glow-worm spark. The knowledge of some other
part of the stream, past or future, near or remote, is always
mixed in with our knowledge of the present thing.

A simple sensation, as we shall hereafter see, is an abstrac-
tion, and all our concrete states of mind are representations
of objects with some amount of complexity. Part of the com-
plexity is the echo of the objects just past, and, in a less
degree, perhaps, the foretaste of those just to arrive. Ob-
jects fade out of consciousness slowly. If the present
thought is of ABCDEFG, the next one will be of
BCDEFGH, and the one after that of CDEFG H I—
the lingerings of the past dropping successively away, and
the incomings of the future making up the loss. These
lingerings of old objects, these incomings of new, are the
germs of memory and expectation, the retrospective and the
prospective sense of time. They give that continuity ta

* James Mill, Analysis. vol. 1. p. 319 (J. S. Mill’s Edition).

THE PERCEPTION OF TIME. 607

consciousness without which it could not be called a
stream.*

* «« What I find, when I look at consciousness at all, is, that what I can-
not divest myself of, or not have in consciousness, if I have consciousness
at all, isa sequence of different feelings. . . . The simultaneous percep-
tion of both sub-feelings, whether as parts of a coexistence or of a sequence,
is the total feeling—the minimum of consciousness—and this minimum has
duration. . . . Time-duration, however, is inseparable from the minimum,
notwithstanding that, in an isolated moment, we could not tell which part
of it came first, which last. . . . We do not require to know that the sub-
feelings come in sequence, first one, then the other; nor to know what
coming in sequence means. But we have, in any artificially isolated mini-
mum of consciousness, the rudiments of the perception of former and latter
in time, in the sub-feeling that grows fainter, and the sub-feeling that
grows stronger, and the change between them... .

“Tn the next place, I remark that the rudiments of memory are involved
in the minimum of consciousness. The first beginnings of it appear in that
minimum, just as the first beginnings of perception do. As each member
of the change or difference which goes to compose that minimum is the
rudiment 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 consciousness
is difference or change in feelings, is the ultimate explanation of memory
as well as of single perceptions. A former anda latter are included in the
minimum of consciousness; and this is what is meant by saying that all
consciousness is in the form of téme, or that time is the form of feeling, the
form of sensibility. Crudely and popularly we divide the course of time
into 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 strict present. What we call, loosely,
the present, is an empirical portion of the course of time, containing at
Jeast a minimum of consciousness, in which the instant of change is the
present time-point. . . . If we take this as the present time-point, it is clear
that the minimum of feeling contains two portions—a sub-feeling that goes
and a sub-feeling that comes. One is remembered, the other imagined.
The limits of both are indefinite at beginning and end of the minimum, and
ready to melt into other minima, proceeding from other stimuli.

‘Time and consciousness do not come to us ready marked out into
minima; we have to do that by reflection, asking ourselves, What is the
least empirical moment of consciousness? That least empirical moment is
what we usually call the present moment; and even this is too minute for
ordinary use; the present moment is often extended practically to a few
seconds, or even minutes, beyond which we specify what length of time we
mean, as the present hour, or day, or year, or century.

«* But this popular way of thinking imposes itself on great numbers even
of philosophically-minded people, and they talk about the present as if it
was a datum—as if time came to us marked into present periods like a

608 PSYCHOLOGY.

THE SENSIBLE PRESENT HAS DURATION.

Let any one try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or
attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most
baflling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It
has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in
the instant of becoming. As a poet, quoted by Mr. Hodg-
son, says,

‘*Le moment ot je parle est déja loin de moi,”

and it is only as entering into the living and moving organ-
ization of a much wider tract of time that the strict present
is apprehended at all. It is, in fact, an altogether ideal
abstraction, not only never realized in sense, but probably
never even conceived of by those unaccustomed to philo-
sophic meditation. Reflection leads us to the conclusion

measuring-tape.” (8. H. Hodgson: Philosophy of Reflection, vol. 1. pp.
248-254.)

‘‘The representation of time agrees with that of space in that a certain
amount of it must be presented together—included between its initial and
terminal limit. A continuous ideation, flowing from one point to another,
would indeed occupy time, but not represent it, for it would exchange one
element of succession for another instead of grasping the whole succession
at once. Both points—the beginning and the end—are equally essential to
the 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 reg-
ular intervals in a consciousness otherwise void. When the first one is
over, 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. . . . Thus
does the simple repetition of the sound provide all the elements of time-
perception. The first sound [as it is recalled by association] gives the
beginning, the second the end, and the persistent image in the fancy repre-
sents the length of the interval. At the moment of the second impression,
the entire time-perception exists at once, for then all its elements are
presented together, the second sound and the image in the fancy immedi-
ately, and the first impression by reproduction. But, in the same act, we
are aware of a state in which only the first sound existed, and of another
in which only its image existed in the fancy. Such a consciousness as this
is that of time. ... In it no succession of ideas takes place.” (Wundt:
Physiol. Psych., 1st ed. pp. 681-2.) Note here the assumption that the
persistence and the reproduction of an impression are two processes which
may go on simultaneously. Also that Wundt’s description is merely an
attempt to analyze the ‘ deliverance’ of a time-perception, and no explanation
of the manner in which it comes about.

s

THE PERCEPTION OF TIME. 609

that it must exist, but that it does exist can never be a fact
of our immediate experience. The only fact of our imme-
diate experience is what Mr. E. R. Clay has well called ‘the
specious present.’ His words deserve to be quoted in full:*

‘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 re
ferred to by the datum is a very different thing from the conterminous
of 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—a
recent past—delusively given as being a time that intervenes between
the past and the future. Let it be named the specious present, and let
the 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 the
present. All the changes of place of a meteor seem to the beholder to be
contained 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—the
past, which does not exist, the future, which does not exist, and their
conterminous, the present; the faculty from which it proceeds lies to
us 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 own
on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two
directions into time. The unit of composition of our per-
ception of time is a duration, with a bow and a stern, as it
were—a rearward- and a forward-looking end.t+ It is only

* The Alternative, p. 167.

+ Locke, in his dim way, derived the sense of duration from reflec-
tion on the succession of our ideas (Essay, book 11. chap. xtv. § 3; chap.
xv. § 12). Reid justly remarks that if ten successive elements are to make
duration, ‘‘then one must make duration, otherwise duration must be
made up of parts that have no duration, which is impossible. . . . I con-
clude, therefore, that there must be duration in every single interval or
element of which the whole duration is made up. Nothing, indeed, is
more certain than that every elementary part of duration must have dura-
tion, as every elementary part of extension must have extension. Now, it
must be observed that in these elements of duration, or single intervals of
successive ideas, there is no succession of ideas, yet we must conceive them
to have duration; whence we may conclude with certainty that there is a
conception of duration where there is no succession of ideas in the mind.”
(Intellectual Powers, essay 111. chap. Vv.) ‘‘Qu’on ne cherche point,” says
Royer Collard in the Fragments added to Jouffroy’s Translation of Reid,

610 PSYCHOLOGY.

as parts of this dwration-block that the relation ot succession
of one end to the other is perceived. We do not first feel
one end and then feel the other after it, and from the per-
ception of the succession infer an interval of time between,
but we seem to feel the interval of time as a whole, with its
two ends embedded in it. The experience is from the out-
set a synthetic datum, not a simple one; and to sensible
perception its elements are inseparable, although attention
looking back may easily decompose the experience, and
distinguish its beginning from its end.

When we come to study the perception of Space, we
shall find it quite analogous to time in this regard. Date
in time corresponds to position in space; and although we
now mentally construct large spaces by mentally imagin-
ing remoter and remoter positions, Just as we now construct
great durations by mentaily prolonging a series of success-
ive dates, yet the original experience of both space and
time is always of something already given as a unit, inside
of which attention afterward discriminates parts in relation
to each other. Without the parts already given as in a time
and in a space, subsequent discrimination of them could
hardly do more than perceive them as different trom each
other; it would have no motive for calling the difference
temporal order in this instance and spatial position in that.

And just as in certain experiences we may be conscious
of an extensive space full of objects, without locating each
of them distinctly therein ; so, when many impressions fol-
low in excessively rapid succession in time, although we
may be distinctly aware that they occupy some duration,
and are not simultaneous, we may be quite at a loss to tell
which comes first and which last; or we may even invert
their real order in our judgment. In complicated reaction-
time experiments, where signals and motions, and clicks
of the apparatus come in exceedingly rapid order, one is
at first much perplexed in deciding what the order is, yet
of the fact of its occupancy of time we are never in doubt.

“1a durée dans la succession; on ne l’y trouvera jamais; Ja durée a précédé
Ja succession: la notion de la durée a précédé la notion de la succession.
Elle en est donc tout-d-fait indépendante, dira-t-on? Oui, elle en est tout-
a-fait indépendante.”’

THE PERCEPTION OF TIME. 61)

ACCURACY OF OUR ESTIMATE OF SHORT DURATIONS.

We must now proceed to an account of the facts of time-
perception in detail as preliminary to our speculative con-
clusion. Many of the facts are matters of patient experi-
mentation, others of common experience.

First of all, we note a marked difference between the ele-
mentary sensations of duration and those of space. The former
have a much narrower range ; the time-sense may be called
a myopic organ, in comparison with the eye, for example.
The eye sees rods, acres, even miles, at a single glance, and
these totals it can afterward subdivide into an almost infi-
nite number of distinctly identified parts. The units of
duration, on the other hand, which the time-sense is able
to take in at a single stroke, are groups of a few seconds,
and within these units very few subdivisions—perhaps
forty at most, as we shall presently see—can be clearly
discerned. The durations we have practically most to deal
with—minutes, hours, and days—have to be symbolically
conceived, and constructed by mental addition, after the
fashion of those extents of hundreds of miles and up-
ward, which in the field of space are beyond the range of
most men’s practical interests altogether. To ‘realize’ a
quarter of a mile we need only look out of the window and
feel its length by an act which, though it may in part result
from organized associations, yet seems immediately per-
formed. ‘To realize an hour, we must count ‘now !—now!
—now !—now !—’ indefinitely. Each ‘now’ is the feeling
of a separate bit of time, and the exact sum of the bits
never 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 extremely
short, most if they come to us in compound groups, each
including smaller bits of its own.

Hearing is the sense by which the subdivision of dura-
tions 1s most sharply made. Almost all the experimental
work on the time-sense has been done by means of strokes
of sound. How long a series of sounds, then, can we group
in the mind so as not to confound it with a longer or a
shorter series ?

612 PSYCHOLOG ¥Y.

Our spontaneous tendency is to break up any monotos
nously given series of sounds into some sort of a rhythm,
We involuntarily accentuate every second, or third, or
fourth beat, or we break the series in still more intricate
ways. Whenever we thus grasp the impressions in rhythmic
form, we can identify a longer string of them without con-
fusion.

Each variety of verse, for example, has its ‘law’; and
the recurrent stresses and sinkings make us feel with pe-
cular readiness the lack of a syllable or the presence of
oue too much. Divers verses may again be bound together
in the form of a stanza, and we may then say of another
stanza, “Its second verse differs by so much from that of
the first stanza,” when but for the felt stanza-form the two
differing verses would have come to us too separately to be
compared at all. But these superposed systems of rhythm
soon reach their limit. In music, as Wundt* says, “ while
the measure may easily contain 12 changes of intensity of
sound (as in 12 time), the rhythmical group may embrace
6 measures, and the period consist of 4, exceptionally of 5
[8 ?] groups.”

Wundt and his pupil Dietze have both tried to deter-
mine experimentally the maximal extent of our immediate
distinct consciousness for successive impressions.

Wundt found + that twelve impressions cculd be distin-
guished clearly as a united cluster, provided they were
caught ina certain rhythm by the mind, and succeeded each
other at intervals not smaller than 0.3 and not larger than
0.5 of a second. This makes the total time distinctly ap-
prehended to be equal to from 3.6 to 6 seconds.

Dietze ¢ gives larger figures. The most favorable inter-
vals for clearly catching the strokes were when they came at
from 0.5 second to 0.18 second apart. Forty strokes might
then be remembered as a whole, and identified without error
when repeated, provided the mind grasped them in five sub-
groups of eight, or in eight sub-groups of five strokes eaciu.
When no grouping of the strokes beyond making couples at

— ————— —— -- _—_—

* Physiol. Psych.,” 1. 54, 55.
+ Ibid. 11. 213.
t Philosophische Studien, 11. 362.

THE PERCEPTION OF TIME. 613

them by the attention was allowed—and practically it was
found impossible not to group them in at least this simplest
of all ways—16 was the largest number that could be clearly
apprehended as a whole.* This would make 40 times 0.3
second, or 12 seconds, to be the maximum filled duration of
which we can be both distinctly and immediately aware.

The maximum unfilled, or vacant duration, seems to lie
within the same objective range. Estel and Mehner, also
working in Wundt’s laboratory, found it to vary from 5 or
6 to 12 seconds, and perhaps more. The differences seemed
due to practice rather than to idiosyncrasy.t

These figures may be roughly taken to stand for the most
important part of what, with Mr. Clay, we called, a few
pages back, the specious present. The specious present has,
in addition, a vaguely vanishing backward and forward
fringe ; but its nucleus is probably the dozen seconds or
less that have just elapsed.

If these are the maximum, what, then, is the minimum
amount of duration which we can distinctly feel ?

The smallest figure experimentally ascertained was by
Exner, who distinctly heard the doubleness of two success-
ive clicks of a Savart’s wheel, and of two successive snaps

* Counting was of course not permitted. It would have given a sym-
bolic concept and no intuitive or immediate perception of the totality of
the series. With counting we may of course compare together series of
any length—series whose beginnings have faded from our mind, and of
whose totality we retain no sensible impression at all. To counta series of
clicks is an altogether different thing from merely perceiving them as dis-
continuous. In the latter case we need only be conscious of the bits of
empty duration between them ; in the former we must perform rapid acts
of association between them and as many names of numbers.

+ Estel in Wuadt’s Philosophische Studien, m. 50. Mehner, ibid. m1.
571. In Dietze’s experiments even numbers of strokes were better caught
than odd ones, by the ear. The rapidity of their sequence hada great influ-
ence on the result. At more than 4 seconds apart it was impossible to per-
Ceive series of them as units in all (cf. Wundt, Physiol. Psych., m. 214).
They were simply counted as so many individual strokes. Below 0.21 to
0.11 second, according to the observer, judgment again became confused.
It was found that the rate of succession most favorable for grasping long
series 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 odd
numbers, 3, 5, 7 were the series easiest caught ; next, 9,15; hardest of all,
11 and 13 ; and 17 was impossible to apprehend

614 PSYCHOLOGY.

of an electric spark, when their interval was made as smal]
as about 45 of a second.*

With the eye, perception is less delicate. Two sparks,
made to fall beside each other in rapid succession on the
centre of the retina, ceased to be recognized as successive by
Exner when their interval fell below 0.044’”.+

Where, as here, the succeeding impressions are only two
in number, we can easiest perceive the interval between
them. President Hall, who experimented with a modified
Savart’s wheel, which gave clicks in varying number and at
varying intervals, says: t

‘<TIn order that their discontinuity may be clearly perceived, four or
even three clicks or beats must be farther apart than two need to be.
When two are easily distinguished, three or four separated by the same
interval . . . are often confidently pronounced to be two or three
respectively. it would be well if observations were so directed as to
ascertain, at least up to ten or twenty, the increase [of interval] re-
quired by each additional click in a series for the sense of discontinuity
to remain constant throughout.” §

* The exact interval of the sparks was 0.00205'. The doubleness of
their snap was usually replaced by a single-seeming sound when it fell to
0.00198", the sound becoming Jowder when the sparks seemed simultaneous,
The difference between these two intervals is only zo745g5 Of a second; and,
as Exner remarks, our ear and brain must be wonderfully efficient organs
to get distinct feelings from so slight an objective difference as this. See
Pfliiger’s Archiv, Bd. x1.

+ Ibid. p. 407. When the sparks fell so close together that their irradi-
ation-circles overlapped, they appeared like one spark moving from the posi-
tion of the first to that of the second; and they might then follow each
other as close as 0.015” without the direction of the movement ceasing to be
clear. When one spark fell on the centre, the other on the margin, of the
retina, the time-interval for successive apprehension had to be raised to
0.076".

¢ Hall and Jastrow: Studies of Rhythm, Mind, xr. 58.

§ Nevertheless, multitudinous impressions may be felt as discontinuous,
though separated by excessively minute intervals of time. Grinhagen
says (Pfliiger’s Archiv, v1. 175) that 10,000 electric shocks a second are felt
as interrupted, by the tongue (!). Von Wittich (cid. 11. 329), that between
1000 and 2000 strekes « second are felt as discrete by the finger. W.
Preyer, on the other hand (Die Grenzen des Empfindungsvermégens, etc.,
1868, p. 15), makes contacts appear continuous to the finger when 36.8 of
them foilow in uw second. Similarly, Mach (Wiener Sitzgsb., L1. 2, 142}
gives about 36. Lalanne (Comptes Rendus, Lxxxit. p. 1314) found summa-
tion of finger contacts after 22 repetitions ina second. Such discrepan
figures are of doubtful worth. On the retina 20 to30 impressions a second

THE PERCEPTION OF TIME. 615

Where the first impression falls on one sense, and the
second on another, the perception of the intervening time
tends to be less certain and delicate, and it makes a differ-
ence which impression comes first. Thus, Exner found*
the smallest perceptible interval to be, in seconds:

From sight to touch..... Jaclacreee mene OLOGL
nen touch to sight... .c6.. +<...... 0.053
Prem sieht to Nearness 2. eee sows OLG
From hearing to sight....... Soros aie
From one ear to another.............. 0.064

To be conscious of a time interval at all is one thing ; to
tell whether it be shorter or longer than another interval is a
different thing. A number of experimental data are on hand
which give us a measure of the delicacy of this latter per-
ception. The problem is that of the smallest difference
between two times which we can perceive.

The difference is at its minimum when the times them-
selves are very short. Exner,t reacting as rapidly as possi-
ble with his foot, upon a signal seen by the eye (spark),
noted all the reactions which seemed to him either slow or
fast in the making. He thought thus that deviations of
about ;4, of a second either way from the average were

at the very utmost can be feit as discrete when they fall on the same spot.
The ear, which beginsto fuse stimuli together into a musical tone when they
follow at the rate of a little over 30 a second, can still feel 132 of them a
second as discontinuous when they take the shape of ‘beats’ (Helmholtz,
Tonempfindungen, 3d ed. p. 270).

* Pfliiger’s Archiv, x1. 428. Also in Herrmann’s Hdbh. d. Physiol., 2
Bd., I. Thl. pp. 260-262.

+ Pfliiger’s Archiv, vii. 639. Tigerstedt (Bihang tiii Kong]. Svenska
Vetenskaps-Akad. Handi., Bd. 8, Hiifte 2, Stockholm, 1884) revises Exner’s
figures, and shows that his conclusions are exaggerated. According to
Tigerstedt. two observers almost always rightly appreciated 0.05” or 0.06”
of ieaction-time difference. Half the time they did it rightly when the
difference sank to 003", though from 0.03’ and 0.06” differences were
often not roticed at all. Buccola found (Le Legge del Tempo nei Fenom-
eni dei Fensiero, Miiano. 1883, p. 371) that, after much practice in making
rapid reacticns upon a signai, he estimated directly, in figures, his own
reaction-time, in 10 experiments, with an error of from 0.010" to 0.018";
iz 6, with one of C.005" to 0.009"; in one, with one of 0.002"; and in 3,
with one of 0.003".

616 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

correctly noticed by him at the time. The average was
here 0.1840”. Hall and Jastrow listened to the intervals
between the clicks of their apparatus. Between two such
equal intervals of 4.27” each, a middle interval was includ-
ed, which might be made either shorter or longer than the
extremes. ‘ After the series had been heard two or even
three times, no impression of the relative length of the
middle interval would often exist, and only after hearing
the fourth and last [repetition of the series] would the
judgment incline to the plus or minus side. Inserting the
variable between two invariable and like intervals greatly
facilitated judgment, which between two unlike terms is far
less accurate.” * Three observers in these experiments
made no error when the middle interval varied ;1; from the
extremes. When it varied ;$,, errors occurred, but were
few. This would make the minimum absolute difference
perceived as large as 0.355.”

This minimum absolute difference, of course, increases
as the times compared grow long. Attempts have been
made to ascertain what ratio it bears to the times them-
selves. According to Fechner’s ‘Psychophysic Law’ it
ought always to bear the same ratio. Various observers,
however, have found this not to be the case.t On the con-
trary, very interesting oscillations in the accuracy of judg-
ment and in the direction of the error—oscillations depen-
dent upon the absolute amount of the times compared—
have been noticed by all who have experimented with the
question. Of these a brief account may be given.

In the first place, in every list of intervals experimented
with there will be found what Vierordt calls an ‘ INDIFFERENCE-
POINT;’ that is to say, an interval which we judge with max-
imum accuracy, atime which we tend to estimate as neither
longer or shorter than it really is, and away from which,

* Mind, xr. 61 (1886).

+ Mach, Wiener Sitzungsb., t1, 2, 133 (1865); Estel, loc. cit. p. 65,
Mehner, Joc. cit. p. 586, Buccola, op. cit. p. 378. Fechner labors to prove
that his law is only overlaid by other interfering laws in the figures re
corded by these experimenters; but his case seems to me to be one of des.
perate infatuation with a hobby. (See Wundt’s Philosophische Studien
i. 1.)

THE PERCEPTION OF TIME. 617

in both directions, errors increase their size.* This time
varies from one observer to another, but its average is re-
markably constant, as the following table shows.t
The times, noted by the ear, and the average indiffer-
ence-points (given in seconds) were, for—
UA TEE ISSR BS pet SRA ty eS 0.72
CEOS TEES Ae eG age a lg i 5

tel PTOUADEY) i... cio Meiseceieec cess, OTD

Meohner....... Pr aee elec ek Valens sta OE Ik
Stevens|...... tee ore as en Dia ete USCk
1. (305) oats a ie ee Bea toa eke tate A ve (sae

Paccola (about) * 62056205 2.6 sess ==. 040

The odd thing about these figures is the recurrence they
show in so many men of about three fourths of a second,

—

* Curious discrepancies exist between the German and the American ob-
servers with respect to the direction of the error below and above the point
of indifference—differences perhaps due to the fatigue involved in the
American method. The Germans lengthened intervals below it and short-
ened those above. With seven Americans experimented on by Stevens
this was exactly reversed. The German method was to passively listen to
the intervals, then judge; the American was to reproduce them actively
by movements of the hand. In Mehner’s experiments there was found a
second indifference-point at about 5 seconds, beyond which times were
judged again too long. Glass, whose work on the subject is the latest
(Philos. Studien, rv. 428), found (when corrections were allowed for) that
all times except 0.8 sec. were estimated too short. He found a series of
points of greatest relative accuracy (viz., at 1.5, 2.5, 3.75, 5, 6.25, etc.,
seconds respectively, and (thought that his observations roughly corrobo-
rated Weber's law. As ‘maximum’ and ‘minimum’ are printed inter-
changeably in Glass’s article it is hard to follow.

+ With Vierordt and his pupils the indifference point lay as high as
from 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 repro-
duced, after a short pause, by movements of the hand, which were re-
corded. Wundt gives good reasons (Physiol. Psych., 11. 289, 290) for re-
jecting Vierordt’s figures as erroneous. Vierordt’s book, it should be said,
is full of important matter, nevertheless.

¢ Physiol. Psych., 11. 286, 290.

§ Philosophische Studien, 1. 86.

|| Mind, x1. 400.

“J Loc. cit. p. 144.

** Op. cit. p. 376. Mach’s and Buccola’s figures, it will be observed,
are about one half of the rest—sub-multiples, therefore. It ought to be
observed, however, that Buccola’s figure has little value, his observations
not being well fitted to show this particular point.

618 PSYCHOLOGY.

as the interval of time most easy to catch and reproduce,
Odder still, both Estel and Mehner found that multiples of
this time were more accurately reproduced than the time-
intervals of intermediary length ;* and Glass found a certain
periodicity, with the constant increment of 1.25 sec., in his
observations. There would seem thus to exist something
like a periodic or rhythmic sharpening of our time-sense, of
which the period differs somewhat from one observer to
the next.

Our sense of time, like other senses, seems subject to
the law of contrast. It appeared pretty plainly in Estel’s
observations that an interval sounded shorter if a long one
had immediately preceded it, and longer when the opposite
was the case.

Like other senses, too, our sense of time is sharpened
by practice. Mehner ascribes almost all the discrepancies
between other observers and himself to this cause alone.t

Tracts of time filled (with clicks of sound) seem longer
than vacant ones of the same duration, when the latter
does not exceed a second or two.t This, which reminds
one of what happens with spaces seen by the eye, becomes
reversed when longer times are taken. It is, perhaps, in
accordance with this law that a loud sound, limiting a short
interval of time, makes it appear longer, a slight sound
shorter. In comparing intervals marked out by sounds,
we must take care to keep the sounds uniform.$

There is a certain emotional feeling accompanying the
intervals of time, as is well known in music. The sense of
haste goes with one measure of rapidity, that of delay with
another ; and these two feelings harmonize with different
mental moods. Vierordt listened to series of strokes per-
formed by a metronome at rates varying from 40 to 200a

* Estel’s figures led him to think that aid the multiples enjoyed this priv-
lege; with Mehner, on the other band, only the odd multiples showed
diminution of the average error; thus, 0.71, 2.15, 3.55, 5, 6.4, 7.8, 9.3, and
10.65 second were respectively registered with the least error. Cf. Phil
Studien, 1. pp. 57, 562-565.

+ Cf. especially pp. 558-561.

t Wundt: Physiol. Psych., m. 287. Hall and Jastrow: Mind, x1. 62.

§ Mehner: Joc. cit. p. 558.

THE PERCEPTION OF TIME. 619

minute, and found that they very naturally fell into seven
categories, from ‘very slow’ to ‘very fast.’* Each category
of feeling included the intervals following each other within
a certain range of speed, and no others. This is a qualita-
tive, not a quantitative judgment—an esthetic judgment,
in fact. The middle category, of speed that was neutral,
or, as he calls it, ‘ adequate,’ contained intervals that were
grouped about 0.62 second, and Vierordt says that this
made what one might almost call an agreeable time.t

The feeling of time and accent in music, of rhythm, is
quite independent of that of melody. Tunes with marked
rhythm can be readily recognized when simply drummed
on the table with the finger-tips.

WE HAVE NO SENSE FOR EMPTY TIME.

Although subdividing the time by beats of sensation
aids our accurate knowledge of the amount of it that
elapses, such subdivision does not seem at the first glance
essential to our perception of its flow. Let one sit with
closed eyes and, abstracting entirely from the outer world,
attend exclusively to the passage of time, like one who
wakes, as the poet says, “to hear time flowing in the middle
of the night, and all things moving to a day of doom.”
There seems under such circumstances as these no variety
in the material content of our thought, and what we notice
appears, if anything, to be the pure series of durations
budding, 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 sort
of special sense for pure time—a sense to which empty
duration is an adequate stimulus; while if it be an illusion,
it must be that our perception of time’s flight, in the expe-
riences quoted, is due to the filling of the time, and to our
memory of a content which it had a moment previous, and
which we feel to agree or disagree with its content now.

It takes but a small exertion of introspection to show

*The number of distinguishable differences of speed between these limits
is as, he takes care to remark, very much larger than 7 (Der Zeitsinn, p,
137).

7p, 19) § 18) p: 112:

620 PSYCHOLOGY.

that the latter alternative is the true one, and that we can
no more intuit a duration than we can intuit an extension,
devoid of all sensible content. Just as with closed eyes we
perceive a dark visual field in which a curdling play of ob-
scurest luminosity is always going on; so, be we never so
abstracted from distinct outward impressions, we are always
inwardly immersed in what Wundt has somewhere called
the twilight of our general consciousness. Our heart-beats,
our breathing, the pulses of our attention, fragments of
words or sentences that pass through our imagination, are
what people this dim habitat. Now, all these processes are
rhythmical, and are apprehended by us, as they occur, in
their totality ; the breathing and pulses of attention, as
coherent successions, each with its rise and fall; the heart-
beats similarly, only relatively far more brief ; the words not
separately, but in connected groups. In short, empty our
minds as we may, some form of changing process remains for
us to feel, and cannot be expelled. And along with the sense
of the process and its rhythm goes the sense of the length
of time it lasts. Awareness of change is thus the condition
on which our perception of time’s flow depends; but there
exists no reason to suppose that empty time’s own changes
are sufficient for the awareness of change to be aroused.
The change must be of some concrete sort—an outward
or inward sensible series, or a process of attention or voli-
tion.*

* T leave the text just as it was printed in the Journal of Speculative
Philosophy (for ‘ Oct. 1886’) in 1887. Since then Miinsterberg in his
masterly Beitriige zur experimentellen Psychologie (Heft 2, 1889) seems to
have made it clear what the sensible changes are by which we measure the
lapse of time. When the time which separates two sensible impressions is
less than one third of a second, he thinks it is almost entirely the amount to
which the memory-image of the first impression has faded when the second one
overtakes it, which makes us feel how wide they are apart (p. 29). When the
time is longer than this, we rely, he thinks, exclusively upon the feelings
of muscular tension and relaxation, which we are constantly receiving
although we give to them so little of our direct attention. These feelings
are primarily in the muscles by which we adapt our sense-organs in attending
to the signals used, some of the muscles being in the eye and ear them-
selves, some of them in the head, neck, etc. We here judge two time-
intervals to be equal when between the beginning and end of each we feel
exactly similar relaxations and subsequent expectant tensions of these

THE PERCEPTION OF TIME. 621

And here again we have an analogy with space. The
earliest form of distinct space-perception is undoubtedly
that of a movement over some one of our sensitive surfaces,
and this movement is originally given as a simple whole of
feeling, and is only decomposed into its elements—succes-
sive positions successively occupied by the moving body—
when our education in discrimination is much advanced.

muscles to have occurred. In reproducing intervals ourselves we try to
make our feelings of this sort just what they were when we passively heard
the interval. These feelings by themselves, however, can only be used
when the intervals are very short, for the tension anticipatory of the terminal
stimulus naturally reaches its maximum very soon. With longer intervals
we take the feeling of our inspirations and expirations into account. With our
expirations ail the other muscular tensions in our body undergo a rhythmi-
cal decrease; with our inspirations the reverse takes place. When, there-
fore, 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 number
and amount of these respiratory changes combined with sense-organ
adjustments with which they are filled. Mimsterberg has studied care-
fully in his own case the variations of the respiratory factor. They are
many ; but he sums up his experience by shying that whether he meas-
ured by inspirations that were divided by momentary pauses into six parts,
or by inspirations that were continuous ; whether with sensory tension dur-
ing inspiration and relaxation during expiration, or by tension during both
inspiration and expiration, separated by a sudden interpolated relaxation ;
whether with special notice taken of the cephalic tensions, or of those in
the trunk and shoulders, in all cases alike and without exception he in-
voluntarily endeavored, whenever he compared two times or tried to make
one the same as the other, to get exactly the same respiratory conditions
and conditions of tension, all the subjective conditions, in short, exactly the
same during the second interval asthey were during the first. Miinsterberg
corroborated his subjective observations by experiments. The observer of
the time had to reproduce as exactly as possible an interval between two
sharp sounds given him by an assistant. The only condition imposed upon
him was that he should not modify his breathing for the purposes of
measurement. It was then found that when the assistant broke in at
random with his signals, the judgment of the observer was vastly less
accurate than when the assistant carefully watched the observer’s breathing
and made both the beginning of the time given him and that of the time
which he was to give coincide with identical phases thereof.—Final'y,
Minsterberg with great plausibility tries to explain the discrepancies ke-
tween the results of Vierordt, Estel, Mehner, Glass, etc., as due to the fact
that they did not all use the same measure. Some breathe a little faster,
some a little slower. Some break their inspirations into two parts, some
do not, etc. The coincidence of the objective times measured with definite
natural phases of breathing would very easily give periodical maxima of
facility in measuring accurately.

622 PSYCHOLOG Y.

But a movement is a change, a process; so we see that in
the time-world and the space-world alike the first known
things are not elements, but combinations, not separate
units, but wholes already formed. The condition of being
of the wholes may be the elements; but the condition of
our knowing the elements is our having already felt the
wholes as wholes.

In the experience of watching empty time flow—‘empty °
to be taken hereafter in the relative sense just set forth—
we tell it off in pulses. We say ‘now! now! now!’ or we
count ‘more! more! more!’ as we feel it bud. This com-
position out of units of duration is called the law of time’s
discrete flow. The discreteness is, however, merely due to
the fact that our successive acts of recognition or appercep-
tion of what it is are discrete. The sensation is as continu-
ous as any sensation can be. All continuous sensations are
named in beats. We notice that a certain finite ‘more’ of
them is passing or already past. To adopt Hodgson’s
image, the sensation is the measuring-tape, the perception
the dividing-engine which stamps its length. As we listen
to a steady sound, we take it in in discrete pulses of recog-
nition, calling it successively ‘the same! the same! the
same!’ The case stands no otherwise with time.

After a small number of beats our impression of the
amount we have told off becomes quite vague. Our only
way of knowing it accurately is by counting, or noticing the
clock, or through some other symbolic conception.* When
the times exceed hours or days, the conception is absolutely
symbolic. We think of the amount we mean either solely
as a name, or by running over a few salient dates therein,
with no pretence of imagining the full durations that lie
between them. Noone has anything like a perception of the
greater length of the time between now and the first century
fan of ‘iin between now and the tenth. To an historian,

* “ Any one wishing yet further examples of this mental substitution
wil: find one on observing how habitually he thinks of the spaces on the
clock-face instead of the periods they stand for; how, on discovering it to
be half an hour later than he supposed, he does not represent the half hour
in its duration, but scarcely passes beyond the sign of it marked by the
finger.” (H. Spencer: Psychology, § 336.)

THH PERCEPTION OF TIME. 623

it is true, the longer interval will suggest a host of additional
dates and events, and so appear a more multitudinous thing.
And for the same reason most people will think they directly
perceive the length of the past fortnight to exceed that of
the past week. But there is properly no comparative time
intuition in these cases at all. It is but dates and events,
representing time; their abundance symbolizing its length.
Tam sure that this is so, even where the times compared
are no more than an hour or so in length. It is the same
with Spaces of many miles, which we always compare with
each other by the numbers which measure them.*

* The only objections to this which I can thinkof are: (1) The accuracy
with which some men judge of the hour of day or night without looking
at 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 was
kept of the lapse of time per se. But this cannot be admitted until it is
proved that there are no physiological processes, the feeling of whose course
may serve as a sign of how much time has sped, and so lead us to infer the
hour. That there are such processes it is hardly possible to doubt. An
ingenious friend of mine was long puzzled to know why each day of
the week had such a characteristic physiognomy to him. That of Sunday
was soon noticed to be due to the cessation of the city’s rumbling, and the
sound of people’s feet shuffling on the sidewalk; of Monday, to come from
the clothes drying in the yard and casting a white reflection on the ceiling;
of Tuesday, to a cause which I forget ; andI think my friend did not get
beyond Wednesday. Probably each hour in the day has for most of us
some outer or inner sign associated with it as closely as these signs with the
days of the week. It must be admitted, after all, however, that the great
improvement of the time-perception during sleep and trance is a mystery
not as yet cleared up All my life I have been struck by the accuracy with
which I will wake at the same eract minute night after night and morning
after morning, if only the habit fortuitously begins. The organic registra-
tion in me is independent of sleep. After lying in bed a long time awake
I suddenly rise without knowing the time, and for days and weeks together
will do so at an identical minute by the clock, as if some inward physio-
logical process caused the act by punctually running down.—lIdiots are
said sometimes to possess the time-measuring faculty in a marked degree.
I have an interesting manuscript account of an idiot girl which says: ‘* She
was punctual almost to a minute in her demand for food and other regular
attentions. Her dinner was generally furnished her at 12.30 p.M., and at
that hour she would begin to scream if it were not forthcoming. If on
Fast-day or Thanksgiving it were delayed, in accordance with the New
England custom, she screamed from her usual dinner-hour until the food
was carried to her, On the next day, however, she again made known her
wants promptly at 12.30. Any slight attention shown her on one day was

624 PSYCHOLOGY.

From this we pass naturally to speak of certain familiat
variations in our estimation of lengths of time. In general,
a time filled with varied and interesting experiences seems
short 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-seeing
may subtend an angle more like three weeks in the memory ;
and a month of sickness hardly yields more memories than
aday. The lengtk in retrospect depends obviously on the
multitudinousness of the memories which the time affords.
Many objects, events, changes, many subdivisions, immedi-
ately widen the view as we look back. Emptiness, monot-
ony, familiarity, make it shrivel up. In Von Holtei’s
‘ Vagabonds’ one Anton is described as revisiting his native
village.

‘‘ Seven years,” he exclaims, ‘‘seven years since I ran away! More
like seventy it seems, so much has happened. I cannot think of it all
without becoming dizzy—at any rate not now. And yet again, when 1
look at the village, at the church-tower, it seems as if I could hardly
have been seven days away.”

Prof. Lazarus * (from whom I borrow this quotation),
thus explains both of these contrasted illusions by our
principle of the awakened memories being multitudinous
or few:

‘The circle of experiences, widely extended, rich in variety, which
he had in view on the day of his leaving the village rises now in his
mind as its image lies before him. And with it—in rapid succession
and violent motion, not in chronologic order, or from chronologic
motives, but suggesting each other by all sorts of connections—arise
massive images of all his rich vagabondage and roving life. They roll
and wave confusedly together, first perhaps one from the first year,
then from the sixth, soon from the second, again from the fifth, the

demanded on the next at the corresponding hour. If an orange were given
her at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, at the same hour on Thursday she made
known her expectation, and if the fruit were not given her she continued
to call for it at intervals for two or three hours. At four on Friday the
process would be repeated but would last iess long ; and so on for two or
three 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 the
next day,” etc., etc.—For these obscure matters consult C. Du Prel: The
Philosophy of Mysticism, chap. 11m § 1.
* Tdeale Fragen (1878). p. 219 (Essay, ‘Zeit und Weile ’).

THE PERVEPTION OF TIME. 625

first, etc., until it seems as if seventy years must have been there, and
he reels with the fulness of his vision. . . . Then the inner eye turns
away from all this past. The outer one turns to the village, especially
to the church-tower. The sight of it calls back the old sight of it, so
that the consciousness is filled with that alone, or almost alone. The
one vision compares itself with the other, and looks so near, so un:
changed, that it seems as if only a week of time could have come be
tween.”

The same space of time seems shorter as we grow older—
that is, the days, the months, and the years do so; whether
the hours do so is doubtful, and the minutes and seconds to
all appearance remain about the same.

‘‘ Whoever counts many lustra in his memory need only question
himself to find that the last of these, the past five years, have sped
much more quickly than the preceding periods of equal amount. Let
any one remember his last eight or ten school years: it is the space of a
century. Compare with them the last eight or ten years of life: it is
the space of an hour.”

So writes Prof. Paul Janet,* and gives a solution which can
hardly be said to diminish the mystery. There isa law, he
says, by which the apparent length of an interval at a given
epoch of a man’s life is proportional to the total length of
the life itself. A child of 10 feels a year as +, of his whole
life—a man of 50 as 5, the whole life meanwhile apparently
preserving a constant length. This formula roughly ex-
presses the phenomena, it is true, but cannot possibly be
an elementary psychic law; and it is certain that, in great
part at least, the foreshortening of the years as we grow
older is due to the monotony of memory’s content, and the
consequent simplification of the backward-glancing view.
In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, sub-
jective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension
is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that
time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting
travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous, and long-
drawn-out. But as each passing year converts some of this
experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at
all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recol-
lection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and
collapse.

* Revue Philosophique, vol. 1. p. 496.

626 PSYCHOLOGY.

So much for the apparent shortening of tracts of time in
retrospect. They shorten in passing whenever we are so
fully oceupied with their content as not to note the actual
time itself. A day full of excitement, with no pause, is said
to pass ‘ere we know it.’ On the contrary, a day full of
waiting, of unsatisfied desire for change, will seem a small
eternity. Todium, ennui, Langweile, boredom, are words for
which, probably, every language known to man has its
equivalent. It comes about whenever, from the relative
emptiness of content of a tract of time, we grow attentive
to the passage of the time itself. Expecting, and being
ready for, a new impression to succeed; when it fails to
come, we get an empty time instead of it; and such experi-
ences, ceaselessly :enewed, make us most formidably aware
of the extent of the mere time itself.* Close your eyes and
simply wait to hear somebody tell you that a minute has
elapsed. The full length of your leisure with it seems in-
credible. You engulf yourself into its bowels as into those
of that interminable first week of an ocean voyage, and find
yourself wondering that history can have overcome many
such periods in its course. All because you attend so
closely to the mere feeling of the time per se, and because
your attention to that is susceptible of such fine-grained
successive subdivision. The odiousness of the whole expe-
rience comes from its insipidity ; for stimulation is the indis-
pensable requisite for pleasure in an experience, and the
feeling of bare time is the least stimulating experience we
can have.t The sensation of tedium is a protest, says
Volkmann, against the entire present.

* «Empty time is most strongly perceived when it comes as a pause in
music or in speech. Suppose a preacher in the pulpit, a professor at his
desk, to stick still in the midst of his discourse; or let a composer (as is
sometimes purposely done) make all his instruments stop at once; we await
every instant the resumption of the performance, and, in this awaiting, per-
ceive, more than in any other possible way, the empty time. To change
the example, let, in a piece of polyphonic music—a figure, for instance, in
which a tangle of melodies are under way—suddenly a single voice be
heard, which sustains a long note, while all else is hushed. . . . This one
note will appear very protracted—why? Because we expect to hear accom-
panying it the notes of the other instruments, but they fail to come.”
(Herbart: Psychol. als W., § 115.)—Compare also Minsterberg, Beitrige,

Heft 2, p. 41.
+ A night of pain will seem terribly long; we keep looking forward te

THE PERCEPTION OF TIM@. 627

Exactly parallel variations occur in our consciousness
of space. A road we walk back over, hoping to find at each
step an object we have dropped, seems to us longer than
when we walked over it the other way. A space we meas-
ure by pacing appears longer than one we traverse with no
thought of its length. And in general an amount of space
attended to in itself leaves with us more impression of spa-
ciousness than one of which we only note the content.*

I do not say that everything in these fluctuations of esti-
mate can be accounted for by the time’s content being
crowded and interesting, or simple and tame. Both in the
shortening of time by old age and in its lengthening by
ennut some deeper cause may be at work. This cause can
only be ascertained, if it exist, by finding out why we per-
ceive time at all. To this inquiry let us, though without
much hope, proceed.

THE FEELING OF PAST TIME IS A PRESENT FEELING.

If asked why we perceive the light of the sun, or the
sound of an explosion, we reply, “Because certain outer
forces, ether-waves or air-waves, smite upon the brain,
awakening therein changes, to which the conscious percep-
tions, light and sound, respond.” But we hasten to add
that neither light nor sound copy or mirror the ether- or
air-waves ; they represent them only symbolically. The
cn'y case, says Helmholtz, in which such copying occurs,
and in which

a moment which never comes—the moment when it shall cease. But the
odiousness of this experience is not named ennui or Langweile, like the
odiousness of time that seems long from its emptiness. The more positive
odiousness 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 the
suffering, not the suffering of the long time per se.

* On these variations of time-estimate, cf. Romanes, Consciousness of
Time, in Mind, vol. 11. p. 297; J. Sully, Illusions, pp. 245-261, 302-305;
W. Wundt. Physiol. Psych., 1. 287, 288; besides the essays quoted from
Lazarus and Janet. In German, the successors of Herbart have treated of
this subject: compare Volkmann’s Lehrbuch d. Psych., § 89, and for refer-
ences to other authors his note 3 to this section. Lindner (Lbh. d. empir.
Psych.), as a parallel effect, instances Alexander the Great’s life (thirty-
three years), which seems to us as if it must be long, because it was so
eventful. Similar.y the English Commonwealth, ete.

628 PYSCHOLOGY.

‘our perceptions can truly correspond with outer reality, is that of
the time-succession of phenomena. Simultaneity, succession, and the
regular return of simultaneity or succession, can obtain as well in sen-
sations as in outer events. Events, like our perceptions of them, take
place in time, so that the time-relations of the latter can furnish a true
copy of those of the former. The sensation of the thunder follows the
sensation of the lightning just as the sonorous convulsing of the air by
the electric discharge reaches the observer's place later than that of the
{uminiferous ether.” *

One experiences an almost instinctive impulse, in pur-
suing such reflections as these, to follow them to a sort of
crude speculative conclusion, and to think that he has at
last got the mystery of cognition where, to use a vulgar
phrase, ‘the wool is short.’ What more natural, we say,
than that the sequences and durations of things should be-
come known? ‘The succession of the outer forces stamps
itself as a like succession upon the brain. The brain’s
successive changes are copied exactly by correspondingly
successive pulses of the mental stream. The mental stream,
feeling itself, must feel the time-relatious of its own states.
But as these are copies of the cutward time-relations, so
must it kuow them too. That is to say, these latter time-
relations arouse their own cognition; or, in other words,
the mere existence of time in those changes out of the mind
which affect the mind is a sufficient cause why time is per-
ceived by the mind.

This philosophy is unfortunately too crude. Even
though we were to conceive the outer successions as forces
stamping their image on the brain, and the brain’s succes-
sicns as forces stamping their image on the mind,t still,
between the mind’s own changes being successive, and
knowing their own succession, lies as broad a chasm as be-
tween the object and subject of any casv of cognition in the
world. A succession of feelings, in and of itself, is not a feel-
ing of succession. And since, to our successive feelings, a feei-
ing of their own succession is added, that must be treated as an

* Physiol. Optik, p. 445.

+ Succession, time per se, 7s no force. Our talk about its devouring
tooth, etc.. is all elliptical. Its contents are what devour. The law of in-
ertia is incompatible with time’s being assumed as an efficient cause of
anything.

——

THE PERCEPTION OF TIME. 629

additional fact requiring its own special elucidation, which this
talk about outer time-relations stamping copies of them-
selves within, leaves all untouched.

I have shown, at the outset of the article, that what is
past, to be known as past, must be known with what is
present, and during the ‘present’ spot of time. As the
clear understanding of this point has some importance, let
me, at the risk of repetition, recur to 1t again. Volkmann
has expressed the matter admirably, as follows:

‘‘One might be tempted to answer the question of the origin of the
time-idea by simply pointing to the train of ideas, whose various mem-
bers, starting from the first, successively attain to full clearness. But
against this it must be objected that the successive ideas are not yet
the idea of succession, because succession 77 thought is not the thought
of succession. If idea A follows idea B, consciousness simply exchanges
one for another. That B comes after A is for our consciousness a non-
existent fact; for this after is given neither in B norin A; and no
third idea has been supposed. The thinking of the sequence of B upon
A is anotlter kind of thinking from that which brought forth A and
then brought forth B; and this first kind of thinking is absent so long
as 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 if
A and B are to be represented as occurring in succession they must be
simultaneously represented ; if we are to think of them as one after the
other, we must think them both at once.” *

If we represent the actual ‘time-stream of our thinking
by an horizontal line, the thought of the stream or of any
segment of its length, past, present, or to come, might be
figured in a perpendicular raised upon the horizontal at a
certain point. The length of this perpendicular stands for
a certain object or content, which in this case is the time
thought of, and all of which is thought of together at the
actual moment of the stream upon which the perpendicular
is raised. Mr. James Ward puts the matter very well in
his masterly article ‘Psychology’ in the ninth edition of
the Encyclopedia Britannica, page 64. He says:

‘*We may, if we represent succession as a line, represent simul-
taneity as a second line at right angles to the first; empty time—or
time-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

——

* Lehrbuch d. Psych., § 87. Compare also H. Lotze, Metaphysik, § 154.

630 PSYCHOLOGY.

as it 1s, and with the latter in treating of our intuition of time, where,
just as in a perspective representation of distance, we are confined to
lines in a plane at right angles to the actual line of depth. Inasucces-
sion of events, say of sense-impressions, A BC DE. . ., the presence
of B means the absence of A and C, but the presentation of this succes-
siou involves the simultaneous presence in some mode or other of two
or more of the presentations A BCD. In reality, past, present, and
future are differences in time, but in presentation all that corresponds
to these differences is 1n consciousness simultaneously.”

There is thus a sort of perspective projection of past ob-
jects upon present consciousness, similar to that of wide
landscapes upon a camera-screen.

And since we saw a while ago that our maximum dis-
tinct ¢ntwition of duration hardly covers more than a dozen
seconds (while our maximum vague intuition is probably
not more than that of a minute or so), we must suppose that
this amount of duration is pictured fairly steadily in each
passing instant of consciousness by virtue of some fairly con-
stant feature in the brain-process to which the conscious-
ness is tied. This feature of the brain-process, whatever it be,
must be the cause of our perceiving the fact of time at all.* The
duration thus steadily perceived is hardly more than the
‘specious present,’ as it was called a few pages back. Its
content is in a constant flux, events dawning into its forward
end as fast as they fade out of its rearward one, and each
of them changing its time-coefficient from ‘not yet,’ or ‘not
quite yet,’ to ‘just gone’ or ‘ gone,’ as if passes by. Mean-
while, the specious present, the intuited duration, stands
permanent, like the rainbow on the waterfall, with its own
quality unchanged by the events that stream through it.
Each of these, as it slips out, retains the power of being
reproduced ; and when reproduced, is reproduced with the
duration and neighbors which it originally had. Please
cbserve, however, that the reproduction of an event, after
it has once completely dropped out of the rearward end of
the specious present, is an entirely different psychic fact
from its direct perception in the specious present as a thing
immediately past. A creature might be entirely devoid of
reproductive memory, and yet have the time-sense ; but the

* The cause of the perceiving, not the object perceived !

THE PERCEPTION OF TIME. 631

jatter would be limited, in his case, to the few seconds im-
mediately passing by. Time older than that he would never
recall. I assume reproduction in the text, because I am
speaking of human beings who notoriously possess it. Thus
memory gets strewn with dated things—dated in the sense
of being before or after each other.* The date of a thing
is a mere relation of before or after the present thing or some
past or future thing. Some things we date simply by men-
tally tossing them into the past or future direction. So in
space we think of England as simply to the eastward, ot
Charleston as lying south. But, again, we may date an event
exactly, by fitting it between two terms of a past or future
series explicitly conceived, just as we may accurately think
of England or Charleston being just so many miles away. t

The things and events thus vaguely or exactly dated
become thenceforward those signs and symbols of longer
time-spaces, of which we previously spoke. According as
we think of a multitude of them, or of few, so we imagine
the time they represent to be long or short. But the original
paragon and prototype of all conceived times is the specious
present, the short duration of which we are immediately and in-
cessantly sensible.

* « «No more’ and ‘not yet’ are the proper time-feelings, and we are
aware of time in no other way than through these feelings,” says Volk-
mann (Psychol., § 87). This, which is not strictly true of our feeling of
time per se, as an elementary bit of duration, is true of our feeling of date
in its events.

+ We construct the miles just as we construct the years. Travelling in
the cars makes a succession of different fields of view pass before our eyes.
When those that have passed from present sight revive in memory, they
maintain their mutual order because their contents overlap. We think
them as having been before or behind each other; and, from the multitude
of the views we can recali behind the one now presented, we compute the
total space we have passed through.

It is often said that the perception of time develops later than that of
space, because children have so vague an idea of all dates before yesterday
and after to-morrow. But no vaguer than they have of extensions that
exceed as greatiy their unit of space-intuition. Recently I heard my child
of four tella visitor that he had been ‘as much as one week’ inthe country.
As he had been there three months, the visitor expressed surprise; where-
upon the child corrected himself by saying he had been there ‘twelve
years.’ But the child made exactly the same kind of mistake when he
asked if Boston was not one hundred miles from Cambridge, the distance
being three miles.

632 PSYCHOLOGY.

TO WHAT CEREBRAL PROCESS IS THE SENSE OF TIME DUE?

Now, to what element in the brain-process may this sensibil-
ity be due? It cannot, as we have seen, be due to the mere
duration itself of the process ; it must be due to an element
present at every moment of the process, and this element
must bear the same inscrutable sort of relation to its cor-
relative feeling which all other elements of neural activity
bear to their psychic products, be the latter what they
may. Several suggestions have been made as to what the
element is in the case of time. Treating of them in a
note, * I will try toexpress briefly the only conclusion which

* Most of these explanations simply give the signs which, adhering to
impressions, lead us to date them within a duration, or, in other words, to
assign to them their order. Why it should be a time-order, however, is
not explained. Herbart’s would-be explanation is a simple description of
time-perception. He says it comes when, with the last member of a series
present to our consciousness, we also think of the first; and then the whole
series revives in our thought at once, but with strength diminishing in the
backward direction (Psychol. als Wiss., § 115; Lehrb. zur Psychol., §§ 171,
172,175). Similarly Drobisch, who adds that the series must appear as one
already elapsed (durchlaufene), a word which shows even more clearly the
question-begging nature of this sort of account (Empirische Psychol., § 59).
Th. Waitz is guilty of similar question-begging when he explains our time-
consciousness to be engendered by a set of unsuccessful attempts to make
our percepts agree with our expectations (Lehrb. d. Psychol., § 52). Volk-
mann’s mythological account of past representations striving to drive pres-
ent ones out of the seat of consciousness, being driven back by them, etc.,
suffers from the same fallacy (Psychol., § 87). But all such accounts agree
in implying one fact—viz., that the brain-processes of various events must
be active simultaneously, and in varying strength, for a time-perception to
be 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 and 2, go through this process simultaneously,
or as one precedes or follows the other, the phases of their fading will agree
or differ; and the difference will be proportional to the time-difference
between their several moments of beginning. Thus there are differences
of quality in the images, which the mind may trans/ate into corresponding
differences of their temporal order. There is no other possible middle
term between the objective time-relations and those in the mind than these
differences of phase.” (Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens, p. 588.) Lipps
accordingly calls them ‘ temporal signs,’ and hastens explicitly to add that
the soul’s translation of their order of strength into a time-order is entirely
inexplicable (p. 591). M. Guyau’s account (Revue Philosophique, xrx. 353)
hardly differs from that of his predecessors, except in picturesqueness of
style. Every change leaves a series of trainées lumineuses in the mind like

THE PERCEPTION OF TIME. 633

seems to emerge from a study of them and of the facts—
unripe though that conclusion be.

the passage of shooting stars. Each image is in a more fading phase,
according as its original was more remote. This group of images gives
duration, the mere time-form, the ‘bed’ of time. The distinction of past,
present, and future within the bed comes from our active nature. The
future (as with Waitz) is what I want, but have not yet got, and must wait
for. Al]l this is doubtless true, but is no explanation.

Mr. Ward gives, in his Encyclopedia 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, acd, there may inter-
vene the representation of that movement of attention of which we are aware
in passing from one object to another. In our present reminiscence we
have, it must be allowed, little direct proof of this intervention ; though
there is, I think, indirect evidence of it in the tendency of the flow of ideas
to follow the order in which the presentations were at first attended to.
With the movement itself when the direction of attention changes, we are
familiar enough, though the residua of such movements are not ordinarily
conspicuous. These residua, then, are our temporal signs. . . . But tem-
poral signs alone will not furnish all the pictorial exactness of the time-per-
spective. These give us only a fixed series; but the law of obliviscence, by
insuring a progressive variation in intensity as we pass from one member of
the series to the other, yields the effect which we call time-distance. By
themselves such variations in intensity would leave us liable to confound
more vivid representations in the distance with fainter ones nearer the
present, but from this mistake the temporal signs save us; where the
memory-continuum is imperfect such mistakes continually occur. On
the other hand, where these variations are slight and imperceptible, though
the memory-continuum preserves the order of events intact, we have still no
such distinct appreciation of comparative distance in time as we have nearer
to the present, where these perceptive effects are considerable. . . . Locke
speaks of our ideas succeeding each other ‘ at certain distances not much
unlike the images in the inside of a lantern turned round by the heat of a
candle,’ and ‘guesses’ that ‘this appearance of theirs in train varies not
very much in a waking man.’ Now what is this ‘distance’ that separates
a from b, b from c, and so on ; and what means have we of knowing that it
is tolerably constant in waking life? Ji 7, probably, that, the residuum of
which I have called a temporal sign; or, in other words, it is the movement of
attention from a to b.” Nevertheless, Mr. Ward does not call our feeling
of this movement of attention the original of our feeling of time, or its
brain-process the brain-process which directly causes us to perceive time.
He says, a moment later, that ‘“‘though the fixation of attention does of
course really occupy time, it is probably not in the first instance perceived
as time—i.e. as continuous ‘ protensity,’ to use a term of Hamilton’s—but
as intensity. Thus, if this supposition be true, there is an element in our
concrete time-perceptions which has no place in our abstract conception of
Time. In Time physicaliy conceived there is no trace of intensity ; in time

634 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

The phenomena of ‘summation of stimuli’ in the nervous
system prove that each stimulus leaves some latent activity

psychically experienced, duration is primarily an intensive magnitude, and
so far literally a perception.”’ Its ‘ original’ is, then, if I understand Mr.
Ward, something like a feeling which accompanies, as pleasure and pain
may accompany, the movements of attention. Its brain-process must, it
would seem, be assimilated in general type to the brain-processes of pleasure
and pain. Such would seem more or less consciously to be Mr. Ward’s
own view, for he says: ‘‘ Everybody knows what it is to be distracted by a
rapid succession of varied impressions, and equally what it is to be wearied
by the slow and monotonous recurrence of the same impressions. Now
these ‘ feelings’ of distraction and tedium owe their characteristic qualities
to movements of attention. In the first, attention is kept incessantly on
the move; before it is accommodated to a, it is disturbed by the sudden-
ness, intensity, and novelty of 6; in the second, it is kept all but stationary
by the repeated presentation of the same impression. Such excess and
defect of surprises make one realize a fact which in ordinary life is so
obscure as to escape notice. But recent experiments have set this fact in a
more striking light, and made clear what Locke had dimly before his mind
in 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 for
which the mean of a number of estimates is correct, while shorter periods
are on the whole over-, and longer periods under-estimated. I take this to
be evidence of the time occupied in accommodating or fixing attention.’
Alluding to the fact that a series of experiences, abcde, may seen
short in retrospect, which seemed everlasting in passing, he says: ‘‘ What
tells in retrospect is the series abc de, etc.; what tells in the present is the
intervening 7, ts ¢s, etc., or rather the original accommodation of which
these temporal signs are the residuum.” And he concludes thus: ‘‘ We
seem to have proof that our perception of duration rests ultimately upon
quasi-motor objects of varying intensity, the duration of which we do not
directly 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 connection
between the time-feeling and the succession of distinctly ‘apperceived ’
objects before the mind. The ‘association-time’ is also equal to about
three fourths of asecond. This association-time he regards as a sort of
internal standard of duration to which we involuntarily assimilate all inter-
vals which we try to reproduce, bringing shorter ones up to it and longer
ones down. [In the Stevens result we should have to say contrast instead
of assimilate, for the longer intervals there seem longer, and the shorter
ones shorter still.] ‘‘ Singularly enough,” he adds (Physiol. Psych., 1.
286), ‘‘ this time is about that in which in rapid walking, according to the
Webers, our legs perform their swing. It seems thus not unlikely that
both psychical constants, that of the average speed of reproduction and that
of the surest estimation of time, have formed themselves under the influ-
ence of those most habitual movements of the body which we also use when
we try to subdivide rhythmically longer tracts of time.”

Oe

THE PERCEPTION OF TIME. 635

behind it which only gradually passes away. (See above,
pp. 82-85.) Psychological proof of the same fact is
afforded by those ‘after-images’ which we perceive when a
sensorial stimulus is gone. We may read off peculiarities
in an after-image, left by an object on the eye, which we
failed to note in the original. We may ‘hark back’ and
take in the meaning of a sound several seconds after it has
ceased. Delay for a minute, however, and the echo itself
of the clock or the question is mute; present sensations
have banished it beyond recall. With the feeling of the
present thing there must at all times mingle the fading echo
of all those other things which the previous few seconds
have supplied. Or, to state it in neural terms, there is at
every moment a cumulation of brain-processes overlapping each
other, of which the fainter ones are the dying phases of processes
which but shortly previous were active in a maximal degree.
The AMOUNT OF THE OVERLAPPING determines the feeling of the
DURATION OCCUPIED. WHAT EVENTS shall appear to occupy the
duration depends on just WHAT PROCESSES the overlapping pro-
cesses are. We know so little of the intimate nature of the
brain’s activity that even where a sensation monotonously
endures, we cannot say that the earlier moments of it do

Finally, Prof. Mach makes asuggestion more specific still. After say-
ing very rightly that we have a real sensation of time—how otherwise should
we 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?
—he says ‘‘it is probable that this feeling is connected with that organic
consumption which is necessarily linked with the production of conscious-
ness, and that the time which we feel is probably due to the [mechanical ?]
work of {the process of ?] attention. When attention is strained, time seems
jong; during easy occupation, short, etc. . . . The fatigue of the organ of
consciousness, as long as we wake, continually increases, and the work of
attention augments as continually. Those impressions which are conjoined
with a greater amount of work of attention appear to us as the dater.”” The
apparent relative displacement of certain simultaneous events and certain
anachronisms of dreams are held by Mach to be easily explicable as effects
of a splitting of the attention between two objects, one of which consumes
most of it (Beitrige zur Analyse der Empfindungen, p. 108 foll.). Mach’s
theory seems worthy of being better worked out. It is hard to say now
whether he, Ward, and Wundt mean at bottom the same thing or not. The
theory advanced in my own text, it will be remarked, does not pretend ta
be an explanation, but only an elementary statement of the ‘law’ which
makes us aware of time. The Herbartian mythology purports to explain

636 PSYCHOLOG Y.

not leave fading processes behind which coexist with those
of the present moment. Duration and events together form
our intuition of the specious present with its content.* Why
* such an intuition should result from such a combination of
brain-processes I do not pretend to say. All I aim at is te
state the most elemental form of the psycho-physical con-
junction.

I have assumed that the brain-processes are sensational
ones. Processes of active attention (see Mr. Ward’s account
in the long foot-note) will leave similar fading brain-pro-
cesses behind. If the mental processes are conceptual, a
complication is introduced of which I will in a moment
speak. Meanwhile, still speaking of sensational processes, a
remark of Wundt’s will throw additional light on the
account I give. As is known, Wundt and others have
proved that every act of perception of a sensorial stimulus
takes an appreciable time. When two different stimuli—
e.g. a sight and a sound—are given at once or nearly at
once, we have difficulty in attending to both, and may
wrongly judge their interval, or even invert their order.
Now, as the result of his experiments on such stimuli,
Wundt lays down this law: + that of the three possible de-
terminations we may make of their order—

‘“‘namely, simultaneity, continuous transition, and discontinuous tran-
sition—only the first and last are realized, never the second. Invari-
ably, when we fail to perceive the impressions as simultaneous, we
notice a shorter or longer empty time between them, which seems to
correspond to the sinking of one of the ideas and to the rise of the
other. . . . For our attention may share itself equally between the
two impressions, which will then compose one total percept [and be
simultaneously felt]; or it may be so adapted to one event as to cause

* It would be rash to say definitely just how many seconds long this
specious present must needs be, for processes fade ‘asymptotically,’ and
the distinctly intuited present merges into a penumbra of mere dim recency
before 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 place
between two other things will, nevertheless, come to us with this feeling of
belonging to anear past. Thissense of recency is a feeling sud generis, and
may affect things that happened hoursago. It would seem to show that
their brain-processes are still in a state modified by the foregoing excite-
ment, still in a ‘fading’ phase, in spite of the long interval.

+ Physiol. Psych., 11. 263.

THE PERCEPTION OF TIME. 637

it to be perceived immediately, and then the second event can be per-
ceived only after a certain time of latency, during which the attention
reaches its effective maximum for it and diminishes for the first event.
In this case the events are perceived as two, and in successive order—
that is, as separated by a time-interval in which attention is not sufficient-
ly accommodated to either to bring a distinct perception about. .
While we are hurrying from one to the other, everything between them
vanishes in the twilight of general consciousness.” *

One might call this the law of discontinuous succession in
time, of percepts to which we cannot easily attend at once. Each
percept then requires a separate brain-process ; and when
one brain-process is at its maximum, the other would ap-
pear perforce to be in either a waning or a waxing phase.
If our theory of the time-feeling be true, empty time must
then subjectively appear to separate the two percepts, no
matter how close together they may objectively be; for,
according to that theory, the feeling of a time-duration is
the immediate effect of such an overlapping of brain-pro-

*T leave my text as it was printed before Miinsterberg’s essay appeared
(see above page 620, note). He denies that we measure any but minimal
durations by the amount of fading in the ideational processes, and talks
almost exclusively of our feelings of muscular tension in his account,
whereas I have made no mention of such things in mine. I cannot, how-
ever, see that there is any conflict between what he and I suggest. I «sm
mainly concerned with the consciousness of duration regarded as a specific
sort of object, he is concerned with this object’s measurement exclusively.
Feelings of tension might be the means of the measurement, whilst overlap-
ping processes of any and every kind gave the object to be measured. The
accommodative and respiratory movements from which the feelings of
tension come form regularly recurring sensations divided by their ‘ phases’
into intervals as definite as those by which a yardstick is divided by the
marks upon its length.

Let a', a’, a, a+: be homologous phases in four successive movements
of this kind. If four outer stimuli 1, 2, 8, 4, coincide each with one of
these successive phases, then their ‘distances apart’ are felt as equal, other-
wise not. But there is no reason whatever to suppose that the mere over-
lapping of the brain-process of 2 by the fading process of 1, or that of 3 by
that of 2, etc., does not give the characteristic quality of content which we
call ‘distance apart’ in this experience, and which by aid of the muscular
feelings gets judged to be equal. Doubtless the muscular feelings can
give us the object ‘time’ as well as its measure, because their earlier
phases leave fading sensations which constantly overlap the vivid sensation
of the present phase. But it would be contrary to analogy to suppose that
they should be the only experiences which give this object. I do not
understand Herr Miinsterberg to claim this for them. He takes our
sense of time for granted, and only discusses its measurement.

638 PSYCHOLOGY.

wherever and from whatever

cesses of different phase
cause it may occur.

To pass, now, to conceptual processes: Suppose I think
of the Creation, then of the Christian era, then of the battle
of Waterloo, all within afew seconds. These matters have
their dates far outside the specious present. The pro-
cesses by which I think them, however, all overlap. What
events, then, does the specious present seem to contain ?
Simply my successive acts of thinking these long-past
things, not the long-past things themselves. As the in-
stantly-present thought may be of a long-past thing, so the
just-past thought may be of another long-past thing. When
a long-past event is reproduced in memory and conceived
with its date, the reproduction and conceiving traverse the
specious present. The immediate content of the latter is
thus all my direct experiences, whether subjective or ob-
jective. Some of these meanwhile may be representative of
other experiences indefinitely remote.

The number of these direct experiences which the
specious present and immediately-intuited past may em-
brace measures the extent of our ‘ primary,’ as Exner calls
it, or, as Richet calls it, of our ‘elementary’ memory.* The
sensation resultant from the overlapping is that of the
duration which the experiences seem to fill. As is the num-
ber of 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 ‘realizing
sense. The variations in our appreciation of the same
amount of real time may possibly be explained by altera-
tions in the rate of fading in the images, producing changes
in the complication of superposed processes, to which
changes changed states of consciousness may correspond.
But however long we may conceive a space of time to be, the
objective amount of it which is directly perceived at any one
moment by us can never exceed the scope of our ‘ primary
memory’ at the moment in question.t

* Exner in Hermann’s Hdbch. d. Physiol., Bd. m.Thl. 1. p. 281.
Richet in Revue Philosophique, xx1. 568 (juin, 1886). See the next chap-
ter, pp. 642-646.

+ I have spoken of fading brain- processes alone, but only for simplicity’s
sake. Dawning processes probably play as important a part in giving the
feeling of duration to the specious present.

THE PERCEPTION OF TIME. 639

We have every reason to think that creatures may possi-
bly differ enormously in the amounts of duration which they
intuitively feel, and in the fineness of the events that may
fill it. Von Ber has indulged* in some interesting compu-
tations of the effect of such differences in changing the
aspect of Nature. Suppose we were able, within the length
of a second, to note 10,000 events distinctly, instead of barely
10, as now; if our life were then destined to hold the same
number of impressions, it might be 1000 times as short. We
should live less than a month, and personally know nothing
of the change of seasons. If born in winter, we should believe
in summer as we now believe in the heats of the Carbonifer-
ous era. The motions of organic bemgs would be so slow
to our senses as to be inferred, not seen. The sun would
stand still in the sky, the moon be almost free from change,
and so on. But now reverse the hypothesis and supp: se a
being to get only one 1000th part of the sensations that
we get in a given time, and consequently to live 1000 times
as long. Winters and summers will be to him like quarters
of an hour. Mushrooms and the swifter-growing plants will
shoot into being so rapidly as to appear instantaneous
creations ; annual shrubs will rise and fall from the earth
like restlessly boiling-water springs ; the motions of animals
will be as invisible as are to us the movements of bullets
and cannon-balls ; the sun will scour through the sky like
a meteor, leaving a fiery trail behind him, etc. That such
imaginary cases (barring the superhuman longevity) may
be realized somewhere in the animal kingdom, it would be
rash to deny.

‘© A gnat’s wings,” says Mr. Spencer,} ‘‘ make ten or fifteen thousand
strokes a second. Each stroke implies a separate nervous action. Each
sucn nervous action or change in a nervous centre is probably as ap-
preciable by 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 by
a given external change, measured by many movements in the one
case, must seem much longer than in the other case, when measured
by one movement.”

In hashish-intoxication there is a curious increase in the
apparent time-perspective. We utter a sentence, and ere

* Reden (St. Petersburg, 1864), vol I pp. x55-268.
{ Psychology, § 91.

640 PSYCHOLOGY.

the end is reached the beginning seems already to date from
indefinitely long ago. We enter a short street, and it is as
if we should never get to the end of it. This alteration
might conceivably result from an approach to the condition
of Von Ber’s and Spencer’s short-lived beings. If our dis-
crimination of successions became finer-grained, so that we
noted ten stages in a process where previously we only
noted one; and if at the same time the processes faded ten
times as fast as before; we might have a specious present
of the same subjective length as now, giving us the same
time-feeling and containing as many distinguishable suc-
cessive events, but out from the earlier end of it would
have dropped nine tenths of the real events it now contains.
They would have fallen into the general reservoir of merely
dated memories, reproducible at will. The beginning of
our sentences would have to be expressly recalled ; each
word would appear to pass through consciousness at a tenth
of its usual speed. The condition would, in short, be ex-
actly analogous to the enlargement of space by a micro-
scope ; fewer real things at once in the immediate field of
view, but each of them taking up more than its normal
room, and making the excluded ones seem unnaturally far
away.

Under other conditions, processes seem to fade rapidly
without the compensating increase in the subdivisibility of
successions. Here the apparent length of the specious
present contracts. Consciousness dwindles to a point, and
loses all intuitive sense of the whence and whither of its
path. Express acts of memory replace rapid bird’s-eye
views. In my own case, something like this occurs in ex-
treme fatigue. Long illnesses produce it. Occasionally, it
appears to accompany aphasia.* It would be vain to seek

*<« The patient cannot retain the image of an object more than a
moment. His memory is as short for sounds, letters, figures, and printed
words. If we cover a written or printed word with a sheet of paper in
which a little window has been cut, so that only the first letter is visible
through the window, he pronounces this letter. If, then, the sheet is
moved so as to cover the first letter and make the second one visible, he pro-
nounces the second, but forgets the first, and cannot pronounce the first
and second together.” And so forth to the end. ‘‘If he closes his eyes and
draws his finger exploringly over a well-known object like a knife or key,

’

THE PERCEPTION OF TIME. 641

to imagine the exact brain-change in any of these cases.
But we must admit the possibility that to some extent the
variations of time-estimate between youth and age, and ex-
citement and ennui, are due to such causes, more immedi-
ate than to the one we assigned some time ago.

But whether our feeling of the time which immediuiely-past *
events have filled be of something long or of something short, it
is not what it is because those events are past, but because they
have left behind them processes which are present. To those pro-
cesses, however caused, the mind would still respond by feeling a
specious present, with one part of it just vanishing or vanished
into the past. As the Creator 1s supposed to have made
Adam with a navel—sign of a birth which never occurred—
so He might instantaneously make a man with a brain in
which were processes just like the ‘fading’ ones of an ordi-
nary brain. The first real stimulus after creation would set
up a process additional to these. The processes would over-
lap; and the new-created man would unquestionably have
the feeling, at the very primal instant of his life, of havin,
been in existence already some little space of time.

he cannot combine the separate impressions and recognize the object. But
if it is put into his hand so that he can simultaneously touch it with several
fingers, he names it without difficulty. This patient has thus lost the ca-
pacity for grouping successive . . . impressions . . . into a whole and per-
ceiving them as a whole.” (Grashey, in Archiv fiir Psychiatrie, Bd. xvi.
pp. 672-673.) It is hard to believe that in such a patient the time intuited
was not clipped off like the impressions it held, though perhaps not so much
of it.

I have myself often noted a curious exaggeration of time-perspective at
the moment of a falling asleep. A person will be moving or doing some-
thing in the room, and a certain stage of his act (whatever it may be) will be
my last waking perception. Then a subsequeni stage will wake me to a new
perception. The two stages of the act will not be more than a few seconds
apart ; and yet it always seems to me asif, between the earlier and the later
one, a long interval has passed away. I conjecturally account for the
phenomenon thus, calling the two stages of the act a and 6 respectively :
Were I awake, @ would leave a fading process in my sensorium which
would overlap the process of 6 when the latter came, and both would then
appear in the same specious present, a belonging to its earlier end. But
the sudden advent of the brain-change called sleep extinguishes a’s fading
process abruptly. When d then comes and wakes me, @ comes back, it is
true, but not as belonging to the specious present. It has to be specially
revoked in memory. ‘This mode of revocation usually characterizes long-
past things—whence the illusion.

* Again I omit the future, merely for simplicity’s sake. .

642 PSYCHOLOG Y.

Let me sum up, now, by saying that we are constantly con.
scious of a certain duration—the specious present—varying
in length from a few seconds to probably not more than a
minute, and that this duration (with its content perceived
as having one part earlier and the other part later) is the
original intuition of time. Longer times are conceived by
adding, shorter ones by dividing, portions of this vaguely
bounded unit, and are habitually thought by us symboli-
cally. Kant’s notion of an intuition of objective time as an
infinite necessary continuum has nothing to support it.
The cause of the intuition which we really have cannot be
the duration of our brain-processes or our mental changes.
That duration is rather the object of the intuition which,
being realized at every moment of such duration, must be
due to a permanently present cause. This cause—probably
the simultaneous presence of brain-processes of different
phase—fluctuates ; and hence a certain range of variation
in the amount of the intuition, and in its subdivisibility,
accrues.

CHAPTER XVI.
MEMORY.

In the last chapter what concerned us was the direct
intuition of time. We found it limited to intervals of con-
siderably less than a minute. Beyond its borders extends
the immense region of conceived time, past and future, into
one direction or another of which we mentally project all
the events which we think of as real, and form a systematic
order of them by giving to eachadate. The relation of con-
ceived to intuited time is just like that of the fictitious space
pictured on the flat back-scene of a theatre to the actual
space of the stage. The objects painted on the former (trees,
columns, houses in a receding street, etc.) carry back the
series of similar objects solidly placed upon the latter, and
we think we see things in a continuous perspective, when
we really see thus only a few of them and imagine that we
see the rest. The chapter which lies before us deals with
the way in which we paint the remote past, as it were, upon
a canvas in onr memory, and yet often imagine that we
have direct vision of its depths.

The stream of thought flows on; but most of its seg-
ments fall 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 means
of which they may be recalled as long as life endures. Can
we explain these differences?

PRIMARY MEMORY.

The first point to be noticed is that for a state of mind
to survive in memory it must have endured for a certain length
of time. In other words, it must be what I call a substan-
tive state. Prepositional and conjunctival states of mind
are not remembered as independent facts—we cannot recall

643

644 PSYCHOLOG Y.

just how we felt when we said ‘how’ or ‘notwithstanding.’
Our consciousness of these transitive states is shut up to
their own moment—hence one difficulty in introspective
psychologizing.

Any state of mind which is shut up to its own moment
and fails to become an object for succeeding states of
mind, is as if it belonged to another stream of thought. Or
rather, it belongs only physically, not intellectually, to its
own stream, forming a bridge from one segment of it to
another, but not being appropriated inwardly by former seg-
ments or appearing as part of the empirical self, in the
manner explained in Chapter X. All the intellectual value
for us of a state of mind depends on our after-memory of it.
Only then is it combined in a system and knowingly made
to contribute to a result. Only then does it count for us.
So that the EFFECTIVE consciousness we have of our states is the
after-consciousness ; and the more of this there is, the more
influence does the original state have, and the more perma-
nent a factor is it of our world. An indelibly-imprinted
pain 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 acute

and intense it might be, provided it should last only a hundredth of a
second, and leave after it neither reverberation nor recall.” *

Not that a momentary state of consciousness need be
practically resultless. Far from it: such a state, though
absolutely unremembered, might at its own moment deter-
mine the transition of our thinking in a vital way, and de-
cide our action irrevocably.t But the idea of it could not

* L’Homme et |’Intelligence, p. 32.

+ Professor Richet has therefore no right to say, as he does in another
place (Revue Philosophique, xxt. 570): ‘‘ Without memory no conscious
sensation, without memory no consciousness.” All he is entitled to say is:
** Without memory no consciousness known outside of itself.” Of the
sort of consciousness that is an object for later states, and becomes as it
were permanent, he givesa good example: ‘‘ Who of us. alas! has not ex-
perienced a bitter and profound grief, the immense laceration cause by the
death of some cherished fellow-being? Well, in these great griefs the
present endures neither for a minute, for an hour, nor for a day, but for
weeks and months. The memory of the cruel moment will not efface
itself from consciousness. It disappears not, but remains living, present,

MEMORY. 645

afterwards determine transition and action, its content
could not be conceived as one of the mind’s permanent
meanings: that is all I mean by saying that its intellectual
value lies in after-memory.

As a rule sensations outlast for some little time the ob-
jective stimulus which occasioned them. This phenomenon
is the ground of those ‘after-images’ which are familiar in
the physiology of the sense-organs. If we open our eyes
instantaneously upon a scene, and then shroud them in
complete darkness, it will be as if we saw the scene in ghostly
light through the dark screen. We can read off details in
it which were unnoticed whilst the eyes were open.*

In syery sphere of sense, an intermittent stimulus, often
enough repeated, produces a continuous sensation. This
is because the after-image of the impression just gone by
blends with the new impression coming in. The effects of
stimuli may thus be superposed upon each other many
stages deep, the total result in consciousness being an in-
crease in the feeling’s intensity, and in all probability, as
we saw in the last chapter, an elementary sense of the lapse

of time (see p. 635).

coexisting with the multitude of other sensations which are juxtaposed in
consciousness alongside of this one persistent emotion which fs felt always
in the present tense. A long time is needed ere we can attain to forgetting
it, ere we can make it enter intothe past. Heret later letalis arundo.”
(Ibid 583 )

* This is the primary positive after-image. According to Helmholtz,
one third of a second is the most favorable length of exposure to the light
for producing it. Longer exposure, complicated by subsequent admission
of light to the eye, results in the ordinary negative and complementary
after-images, with their changes, which may (if the original impression
was bwilliant and the fixation long) last for many minutes. Fechner gives
the name of memory-after images (Psychophysik, 11 492) to the instan-
taneous positive effects, and distinguishes them from ordinary after-images
by the following characters: 1) Their originals must have been attended
to, only such parts of a compound original as have been attended to ap-
pearing. This is not the case in common visual after-images. 2) The
sirain of attention towards them is inward, as in ordinary remembering,
not outward, as in observing a common after-image. 3) A short fixation
cf the original is better for the memory-after-image, a long one for the
erdinary after-image. 4) The colors of the memory-after-image are
never complementary of those of the original.

646 PSYCHOLOGY.

Exner writes:

‘Impressions to which we are inattentive leave so brief an image in
the memory that it is usually overlooked. When deeply absorbed, we
do not hear the clock strike. But our attention may awake after the
striking has ceased, and we may then count off the strokes. Such ex-
amples are often found in daily life. We can also prove the existence
of this primary memory-image, as it may be called, in another person,
even when his attention is completely absorbed elsewhere. Ask some-
one, e.g., to count the lines of a printed page as fast as he can, and
whilst this is going on walk a few steps about the room. Then, when
the person has done counting, ask him where you stood. He will
always reply quite definitely that you have walked. Analogous experi-
ments may be made with vision. This primary memory-image is,
whether attention have been turned to the impression or not, an ex-
tremely lively one, but is subjectively quite distinct from every sort of
after-image or hallucination. ... It vanishes, if not caught by atten-
tion, in the course of a few seconds. Even when the original impression
is attended to, the liveliness of its image in memory fades fast.” *

The physical condition in the nerve-tissue of this pri-
mary memoty is called by Richet ‘elementary memory.’+ I
much prefer to reserve the word memory for the conscious
phenomenon. What happens in the nerve-tissue is but an
example of that plasticity or of semi-inertness, yielding
to change, but not yielding instantly or wholly, and never
quite recovering the original form, which, in Chapter V, we
saw to be the groundwork of habit. Elementary habit
would be the better name for what Professor Richet means.
Well, the first manifestation of elementary habit is the
slow dying away of an impressed movement on the neural
matter, and its first effect in consciousness is this so-called
elementary memory. But what elementary memory makes
us aware of is the just past. The objects we feel in this
directly intuited past differ from properly recollected ob-
jects. An object which is recollected, in the proper sense
of that term, is one which has been absent from conscious-
ness altogether, 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 from
view. But an object of primary memory is not thus

* Hermann’s Hdbch., 11. 2. 282.
+ Rev. Philos., 562.

MEMORY, 647

brought back ; it never was lost; its date was never cut
off in consciousness from that of the immediately present
moment. In fact it comes to us as belonging to the rear-
ward portion of the present space of time, and not to the
genuine past. In the last chapter we saw that the por-
tion of time which we directly intuit has a breadth of
several seconds, a rearward and a forward end, and may be
called the specious present. All stimuli whose first nerve-
vibrations have not yet ceased seem to be conditions of
our getting this feeling of the specious present. They give
rise to objects which appear to the mind as events just
past.*

When we have been exposed to an unusual stimulus for
many minutes or hours, a nervous process is set up which
results in the haunting of consciousness by the impression
for a long time afterwards. The tactile and muscular feel-
ings of a day of skating or riding, after long disuse of
the exercise, will come back to us all through the night.
Images of the field of view of the microscope will annoy
the observer for hours after an unusually long sitting at the
instrument. A thread tied around the finger, an unusual
constriction in the clothing, will feel as if still there, long
after they have been removed. These revivals (called phe-
nomena of Sinnesgeddchtniss by the Germans) have some-
thing periodical in their nature.t They show that profound
rearrangements and slow settlings into a new equilibrium
are going on in the neural substance, and they form the
transition to that more peculiar and proper phenomenon of
memory, of which the rest of this chapter must treat. The

* Richet says: “‘ The present has a certain duration, a variable duration,
sometimes a rather long one, which comprehends all the time occupied by
the after-reverberation [7etentissement, after-image] of a sensation. For ex-
ample, if the reverberation of an electric shock within our nerves lasts
ten minutes, for that electric shock there is a present of ten minutes. On
the other hand, a feebler sensation will have a shorter present. But in
every case, for a conscious sensation [I should say for a remembered sensa-
tion] to occur, there must be a present of a certain duration, of a few sec-
onds at least.” We have seen in the last chapter that it is hard to trace the
backward limits of this immediately intuited duration, or specious present.
The figures which M. Richet supposes appear to be considerably too large.

+ Cf. Fechner, Psychophysik, 1. 499.

648 PSYCHOLOGY.

first condition which makes a thing susceptible of recall
after it has been forgotten is that the original impression
of it should have been prolonged enough to give rise to a
recurrent image of it, as distinguished from one of those pri-
mary after-images which very fleeting impressions may
leave behind, and which contain in themselves no guarantee
that they will ever come back after having once faded away.*
A certain length of stimulation seems demanded by the
inertia’ of the nerve-substance. Exposed to a shorter in-
fluence. its modification fails to ‘set,’ and it retains no
effective tendency to fall again into the same form of vibra-
tion at which the original feeling was due. This, as I
said at the outset, may be the reason why only ‘substantive’
and not ‘transitive’ states of mind are as a rule recol-
lected, at least as independent things. The transitive states
pass by too quickly.

ANALYSIS OF THE PHENOMENON OF MEMORY.

Memory proper, or secondary memory as it might be
styled, is the knowledge of a former state of mind after it
has already once dropped from consciousness ; or rather 7
is the knowledge of an event, or fact, of which meantime we
have not been thinking, with the additional consciousness that
we have thought or experienced it before.

* The primary after-image itself cannot be utilized if the stimulus is too
brief. Mr. Cattell found (Psychologische Studien, m1. p. 93 ff.) that the
color of a light must fall upon the eye fora period varying from 0.00275
to 0.006 of a second, in order to be recognized for what it is. Letters
of the alphabet and familiar words require from 0.00075 to 0.00175
sec.—truly an interval extremely short. Some letters, E for example, are
harder than others. In 1871 Helmholtz and Baxt had ascertained that
when an impression was immediately followed by another, the latter
quenched the former and prevented it from being known to later conscious-
ness. The first stimulus was letters of the alphabet, the second a bright
white disk. ‘‘ With an interval of 0.0048 sec. between the two excita-
tions [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 interval
of 0.0096 sec., letters appeared in the shimmer—one or two which could
be partially recognized when the interval increased to 0.0144 sec. When
the interval was made 0.0192 sec. the objects were a little more clearly
discerned ; at 0.00336 sec. four letters could be well recognized ; at 0 0482
sec., five letters; and at 0.0528 sec. all the letters could be read.” (Pfliger’s
Archiv, Iv. 325 ff.)

MEMORY. 649

The first element which such a knowledge involves would
seem to be the revival in the mind of an image or copy of
the original event.* And it is an assumption made by
many writerst that the revival of an image is all that is
needed to constitute the memory of the original occurrence.
But such a revival is obviously not a memory, whatever else
it may be; it is simply a duplicate, a second event, having
absolutely no connection with the first event except that it
happens toresemble it. The clock strikes to-day ; it struck
yesterday ; and may strike a million times ere it wears out.
The rain pours through the gutter this week ; it did so last
week; and will do so in secula seculorum. But does the
present clock-stroke become aware of the past ones, or the
present stream recollect the past stream, because they repeat
and resemblethem? Assuredly not. And letit not be said
that this is because clock-strokes and gutters are physical
and not psychical objects ; for psychical objects (sensations
for example) simply recurring in successive editions will
remember each other on that account no more than clock-
strokes do. No memory is involved in the mere fact of re-
currence. The successive editions of a feeling are so many

* When the past is recalled symbolically, or conceptually only, it is
true that no such copy need be there. Inno sort of conceptual knowledge
is it requisite that definitely resembling images be there (ef. pp. 471 ff.).
But as all conceptual knowledge stands for intuitive knowledge, and termi-
nates therein, I abstract from this complication, and confine myself to those
memories in which the past is directly imaged in the mind, or, as we say,
intuitively known.

+ E.g. Spencer, Psychology, 1. p. 448. How do the believers in the
sufficiency of the ‘image’ formulate the cases where we remember that
gomething did not happen—that we did not wind our watch, did not lock
the door, etc.? Itis very hard to account for these memories of omis-
sion. The image of winding the watch is just as present to my mind now
when 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 me
to such different conclusions in the two cases. When I remember that I
did wind it, I feel it grown together with its associates of past date and
place. When I remember that I did not, it keeps aloof ; the associates fuse
with each other, but not with it. _This sense of fusion, of the belonging
together of things, is a most subtle relation ; the sense of non-fusion is
an equally subtle one. Both relations demand most complex mental pro-
cesses to know them, processes quite different from that mere presence or
absence of an image which does such service in the cruder books.

650 PSYCHOLOG Y.

independent events, each snug in its own skin. Yesterday’s
feeling is dead and buried; and the presence of to-day’s is
no reason why it should resuscitate. A farther condition
is required before the present image can be held to stand
for a past original.

That condition is that the fact imaged be expressly referred
to the past, thought as in the past. But how can we think
a thing as in the past, except by thinking of the past to-
gether with the thing, and of the relation of the two? And
how can we think of the past? In the chapter on Time-per-
ception we have seen that our intuitive or immediate con-
sciousness of pastness hardly carries us more than a few
seconds backward of the present instant of time. Remoter
dates are conceived, not perceived; known symbolically by
names, such as ‘last week,’ ‘1850;’ or thought of by events
which happened in them, as the year in which we attended
such a school, or met with such a loss.—So that if we wish
to think of a particular past epoch,we must think of aname
or other symbol, or else of certain concrete events, associated
therewithal. Both must be thought of, to think the past
epoch adequately. And to ‘refer’ any special fact to the
past epoch is to think that fact with the names and events
which characterize its date, to think it, in short, with a lot
of contiguous associates.

But even this would not be memory. Memory requires
more than mere dating of a fact in the past. It must be
dated in my past. In other words, I must think that I di-
rectly experienced its occurrence. It must have that
‘warmth and intimacy’ which were so often spoken of in
the 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, a
particular date conceived as lying along that direction, and
defined by its name or phenomenal contents, an event im-
agined as located therein, and owned as part of my ex-
perience,—such are 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 in
that simple shape, as a separate ‘idea.’ Or at least, if it be
there as a separate idea, no memory will go with it. ‘What

MEMORY. 651

memory goes with is, on the contrary, a very complex rep-
resentation, that of the fact to be recalled plus its associates,
the whole forming one ‘ object’ (as explained on page 275,
Chapter IX), known in one integral pulse of consciousness
(as set forth on pp. 276 ff.) and demanding probably a
vastly more intricate brain-process than that on which any
simple sensorial image depends.

Most psychologists have given a perfectly clear analysis
of the phenomenon we describe. Christian Wolff, for ex-
ample, writes:

‘‘Suppose you have seen Mevius in the temple, but now afresh in
Titus’ house. I say you recognize Mevius, that is, are conscious of hav-
ing seen him before, because, although now you perceive him with your
senses along with Titus’ house, your imagination produces an image of him
along with one of the temple, and of the acts of your own mind reflecting
on Meviusin the temple. Hence the idea of Mevius which is reproduced in
sense is contained in another series of perceptions than that which
formerly contained it, and this difference is the reason why we are con-
scious of having had it before. . . . For whilst now you see Mevius in
the house of Titus, your imagination places him in the temple, and
renders you conscious of the state of mind which you found in yourself
when you beheld him there. By this you know that you have seen him
before, that is, you recognize him. But you recognize him because his
idea is now contained in another series of perceptions from that in which
you first saw him.” *

Similarly James Mill writes:

“‘In my remembrance of George III., addressing the two houses of
parliament, there is, first of all, the mere idea, or simple apprehension,
the conception, as it is sometimes called, of the objects. There is com-
bined with this, to make it memory, my idea of my having seen and
heard those objects. And this combination is so close that it is not in
my 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 his
voice while reading from it ; without having the other idea along with
it, that of my having been a witness of the scene... . If this ex-
planation of the case in which we remember sensations is understood,
the explanation of the case in which we remember ideas cannot occasion
much of difficulty. I have a lively recollection of Polyphemus’s cave,
and the actions of Ulysses and the Cyclops, as described by Homer. In
this recollection there is, first of all, the ideas, or simple conceptions of
the objects and acts ; and along with these ideas, and so closely com-

* Psychologia Empirica, § 174.

652 PSYCHOLOGY.

bined as not to be separable, the idea of my having formerly had those
same ideas. And this idea of my having formerly had those ideas is a
very complicated idea ; including the idea of myself of the present mo-
ment remembering, and that of myself of the past moment conceiving;
and the whole series of the states of consciousness, which intervened
between myself remembering, and myself conceiving.” *

Memory is then the feeling of belief in a peculiar com-
plex object; but all the elements of this object may be
known to other states of belief; nor is there in the particular
combination of them as they appear in memory anything
so peculiar as to lead us to oppose the latter to other sorts
of thought as something altogether sui generis, needing a
special faculty to account for it. When later we come to
our chapter on Belief we shall see that any represented
object which is connected either mediately or immediately
with our present sensations or emotional activities tends
to be believed in as a reality. The sense of a pecu-
liar active relation in it to ourselves is what gives to an
object the characteristic quality of reality, and a merely
imagined past event differs from a recollected one only in
the absence of this peculiar-feeling relation. The electric
current, so to speak, between it and our present self
does not close. But in their other determinations the re-
recollected past and the imaginary past may be much the
same. In other words, there is nothing unique in the object
of memory, and no special faculty is needed to account for
its formation. It is a synthesis of parts thought of as re-
lated together, perception, imagination, comparison and
reasoning being analogous syntheses of parts into complex
objects. The objects of any of these faculties may awaken
belief or fail to awaken it; the object of memory is only an
object imagined in the past (usually very completely imagined
there) to which the emotion of belief adheres.

* Analysis, 1. 830-1. Mill believed that the various things remembered,
the self included, enter consciousness in the form of separate ideas, but se
rapidly that they are ‘all clustered into one.’ ‘‘Ideas called up in close
conjunction . . . assume, even when there is the greatest complexity, the
appearance, not of many ideas, but of one ” (vol. 1. p. 128). This mythol-
ogy does not impsir the accuracy of his description of memory’s olect.

MEMORY. 653

MEMORY’S CAUSES.

Such being the phenomenon of memory, or the analysis
of its object, can we see how it comes to pass? can we
lay bare its causes ?

Its complete exercise presupposes two things :

1) The retention of the remembered fact;

2) Its reminiscence, recollection, reproduction, or recall.

Now the cause both of retention and of recollection is the taw
of habit in the nervous system, working as it does in the ‘ asso-
ciation of ideas.’

Associationists have long explained recollection by asso-
ciation. James Mill gives an account of it which Iam unable
to improve upon, unless it might be by translating his word
‘idea’ into ‘thing thought of,’ or ‘ object,’ as explained so
often before.

‘There is,” he says, ‘‘a state of mind familiar to all men, in which
we are said toremember. In this state it is certain we have not in the
mind the idea which we are trying to have in it.* How isit, then, that
we proceed in the course of our endeavor, to procure its introduction
into the mind? If we have not the idea itself, we have certain ideas
connected with it. We run over those ideas, one after another, in hopes
that 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 as
to 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 overa
number of names, in hopes that some of them may be associated with the
idea of the individual. I think of all the circumstances in which I have
seen him engaged ; the time when I krew him, the persons along with
whom 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 imme-
diately I have the recollection ; if not, my pursuit of it is vain.+ There
is another set of cases, very familiar, but affording very important evi-
dence on the subject. It frequently happens that there are matters
which we desire not to forget. What is the contrivance to which we
have recourse for preserving the memory—that is, for making sure that
it will be called into existence, when it is our wish that it should: All
men invariably employ the same expedient. They endeavor to form

* Compare, however, p. 251, Chapter IX.

+ Professor Bain adds, in a note to this passage of Mill’s: ‘‘ This process
seems best expressed by laying down a law of Compound or Composite
Association, under which a plurality of feeble links of connection may be
a substitute for one powerful and self-sufficing link.”

654 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

an association between the idea of the thing to be remembered, and
some sensation, or some idea, which they know beforehand will occur at
or 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 has
been formed occurs; the sensation, or idea, calls up the remembrance:
and the object of him who formed the association is attained. To use a
vulgar instance : aman receives a commission from his friend, and, that
he may not forget it, ties a knot in his handkerchief. How is this fact to
be explained? First of all, the idea of the commission is associated with
the making of the knot. Next, the handkerchief is a thing which it is
known beforehand will be frequently seen, and of course at no great
distance of time from the occasion on which the memory is desired.
The handkerchief being seen, the knot is seen, and this sensation re-
calls the idea of the commission, between which and itself the associ-
ation had been purposely formed.” *

In short, we make search in our memory for a forgotten
idea, just as we rummage our house for a lost object. In
both cases we visit what seems to us the probable neighbor-
hood of that which we miss. We turn over the things under
which, or within which, or alongside of which, it may
possibly 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 its associates. The machinery of recall is
thus the same as the machinery of association, and the
machinery of association, as we know, is nothing but the
elementary law of habit in the nerve-centres.

And this same law of habit is the machinery of retention
also. Retention means liability to recall, and it means noth-
ing more than such liability. The only proof of there being
retention is that recall actually takes place. The retention
of an experience is, in short, but another name for the pos-
sibility of thinking it again, or the tendency to think it again,
with its past surroundings. Whatever accidental cue may
turn this tendency into an actuality, the permanent ground
of the tendency itself lies in the organized neural paths by
which vhe cue calls up the experience on the proper occa-
sion, together with its past associates, the sense that the
self was there, the belief that it really happened, etc., etc.,
just as previously described. When the recollection is of
the ‘ready’ sort, the resuscitation takes place the instant

* Analysis, chap. x.

MEMORY. 656

the occasion arises; when it is slow, resuscitation comes
after delay. But be the recall prompt or slow, the condi-
tion which makes it possible at all (or in other words, the
‘retention’ of the experience) is neither more nor less than
the brain-paths which associate the experience with the
occasion and cue of the recall. When slumbering, these paths
are the condition of retention ; when active, they are the condi-
tion of recall.

A simple scheme will now make the whole cause of
memory plain. Let n be a past
event; o its ‘setting’ (concomi-
tants, date, self present, warmth
and intimacy, etc., etc., as already
set forth); and m some present
thought or fact which may appro-
priately become the occasion of its
recall. Let the nerve-centres, ac-
tive in the thought of m, n, and 0,
be represented by M, N, and O, re-
spectively ; then the existence of the paths M—N and N—O
will be the fact indicated by the phrase ‘retention of the
event min the memory, and the excitement of the brain along
these paths will be the condition of the event n’s actual re-
call. The retention of n, it will be observed, is no mysterious
storing up of an ‘idea’ in an unconscious state. It is nota
fact of the mental order at all. It is a purely physical phe-
nomenon, 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 a psycho-
physical phenomenon, with both a bodily and a mental side.
The bodily side is the functional excitement of the tracts
and paths in question; the mental side is the conscious
vision of the past occurrence, and the belief that we ex-
perienced it before.

These habit-worn paths of association are a clear ren-
dering of what authors mean by ‘ predispositions,’ ‘ vestiges,’
‘traces,’ etc., left in the brain by past experience. Most
writers leave the nature of these vestiges vague; few think

Fic. 45.

656 PSYCHOLOGY.

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 a
reproduction of the same nervous current, with the conscious addition
that it is a reproduction—it is the same idea plus the consciousness that
it is the same. The question then suggests itself, What is the physical
condition of this consciousness? What is the modification of the anatomi-
cal substrata of fibres and cells, or of their physiological activity, which
is the occasion of this plus element in the reproduced idea? It may be
supposed that the first activity did leave behind it, when it subsided,
some after-effect, some modification of the nerve-element, whereby the
nerve-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 disposition
when it becomes active or discharges its functions on the recurrence of
the particular mental experience. To assist our conception of what
may happen, let us suppose the individual nerve-elements to be en-
dowed with their own consciousness, and let us assume them to be, as
I have supposed, modified in a certain way by the first experience ; it
is hard to conceive that when they fall into the same action on another
occasion they should not recognize or remember it; for the second
action is a reproduction of the first, with the addition of what it con-
tains from the after-effects of the first. As we have assumed the process
to be conscious, this reproduction with its addition would be a memory
or remembrance.” *

In this passage Dr. Maudsley seems to mean by the
‘nerve-element, or ‘anatomical substratum of fibres and
cells,’ something that corresponds to the N of our diagram.
And the ‘ modification’ he speaks of seems intended to be
understood as an internal modification of this same particu-
lar group of elements. Now the slightest reflection will con-
vince anyone that there is no conceivable ground for suppos-
ing that with the mere re-excitation of N there should arise
the ‘conscious addition ’ that it is a re-excitation. The two
excitations are simply two excitations, their consciousnesses
are two consciousnesses, they have nothing to do with each
other. And a vague ‘modification,’ supposed to be left
behind by the first excitation, helps us not a whit. For,
according to all analogy, such a modification can only result
in making the next excitation more smooth and rapid. This
might make it less conscious, perhaps, but could not endow

* H. Maudsley, The Physiology of Mind (London, 1876), p 513.

MEMORY. 657

it with any reference to the past. The gutter is worn
deeper by each successive shower, but not for that reason
brought into contact with previous showers. Psychology
(whicn Dr. Maudsley in his next sentence says “affords us
not the ivast help in this matter”) puts us on the track of
ar at least possible brain-explanation. As it is the setting
o of the idea, when it recurs, which makes us conscious
of it as past, so it can be no intrinsic modification of the
‘nerve-element’ N which is the organic condition of mem-
ory, but something extrinsic to it altogether, namely, its con-
nections with those other nerve-elements which we called
O—that letter standing in the scheme for the cerebral sub-
stratum of a great plexus of things other than the principal
event remembered, dates, names, concrete surroundings,
"realized intervals, and what not. The ‘modification ’ is the
formation in the plastic nerve-substance of the system of
associative paths between N and O.

The only hypothesis, in short, to which the facts of
inward experience give countenance is that the brain-tracts
excited by the event proper, and those excited in its recall, are
in part different from each other. If we could revive the
past event without any associates we should exclude the
possibility cf memory, and simply dream that we were un-
dergoing the experience as if for the first time.* Wherever,

* The only fact which might plausibly be alleged against this view is the
familiar one that we may feel the lapse of time in an experience so monot-
onous that its earlier portions can have no ‘associates’ different from its
later ones. Sit with closed eyes, for example, and steadily pronounce some
vowel-sound, thus, a—a—a—a—a— . .. . thinking only of the sound.
Nothing changes during the time occupied by the experiment , and yet at
the end of it you know that its beginning was far away. I think, how-
ever, that a close attention to what happens during this experiment shows
that it does not violate in the least the conditions of recall laid down
in the text; and that if the moment to which we mentally hark back lie
many seconds behind the present instant, it always has different associates
by which we define its date. Thus it was when I had just breathed
out, or in ; or it was the ‘first moment’ of the performance, the one ‘ pre
ceded by silence ;’ or it was ‘one very ciose to that ;’ or it was ‘one when
we were looking forward instead of back, as now ;’ or it is simply repre:
sented by a number and conceived symbolically with no definite image
ofits date. It seems to me that I have no really intuitive discrimination
of the different past moments after the experience has gone on some little
time, but that back of the ‘specious present’ they all fuse into a single

658 PSYCHOLOGY.

in fact, the recalled event does appear without a definite
setting, it is hard to distinguish it from a mere creation of
fancy. But in proportion as its image lingers and recalls as-
sociates which gradually become more definite, it grows more
and more distinctly into a remembered thing. Forexample,
I enter a friend’s room and see on the wall a painting. At
first I have the strange, wondering consciousness, ‘ surely
L have seen that before,’ but when or how does not become
clear. There only clings to the picture a sort of penumbra
of familiarity,—when suddenly I exclaim: “I have it, it is
a copy of part of one of the Fra Angelicos in the Floren-
tine Academy—lI recollect it there!” But the motive to
the recall does not lie in the fact that the brain-tract now
excited by the painting was once before excited in a similar
way; it lies simply and solely in the fact that with that
brain-tract other tracts also are excited: those which sus-
tain my friend’s room with all its peculiarities, on the one
hand ; those which sustain the mental image of the Florence
Academy, on the other hand, with the circumstances of my
visit there ; and finally those which make me (more dimly)
think of the years I have lived through between these two
times. The result of this total brain-disturbance is a
thought with a peculiar object, uamely, that I who now
stand here with this picture before me, stood so many years
ago in the Florentine Academy looking at its original.

M. Taine has described the gradual way in which a
mental image develops into an object of memory, in his
usual vivid fashion. He says:

‘“‘T meet casually in the street a person whose appearance I am
acquainted with, and say to myself at once that I have seen him before.
Instantly the figure recedes into the past, and wavers about there
vaguely, without at once fixing itself in any spot. It persists in me for

conception of the kind of thing that has been going on, with a more or less
clear sense of the total time it has lasted, this latter being based on an
automatic counting of the successive pulses of thought by which the
process is from moment to moment recognized as being always the same.
Within the few seconds which constitute the specious present there is an
intuitive perception of the successive moments. But these moments, of
which we have a primary memory-image, are not properly recalled from
the past, our knowledge of them is in no way analogous to a memory prop-
erly so called. Cf. supra, p. 646.

MEMORY. 659

some time, and surrounds itself with new details. ‘When I saw him he
was bare-headed, with a working-jacket on, painting in a studio; he is
po-and-so, of such-and-such a street. But when wasit? It was not
yesterday, nor this week, nor recently. I have it: he told me that he
was waiting for the first leaves to come out to go into the country. It
was before ‘he spring. But at what exact date? I saw, the same day,
people carrying branches in the streets and omnibuses: it was Palm
Sunday !’ Observe the travels of the internal figure, its various shift-
ings to front and rear along the line of the past; each of these mental
sentences has been a swing of the balance. When confronted with
the present sensation and with the latent swarm of indistinct images
which repeat our recent life, the figure first recoiled suddenly to an
indeterminate distance. Then, completed by precise details, and con-
fronted with all the shortened images by which we sum up the proceed-
ings of a day or a week, it again receded beyond the present day, be-
yond yesterday, the day before, the week, still farther, beyond the
ili-defined mass constituted by our recent recollections. Then some-
thing said by the painter was recalled, and it at once receded again
beyond an almost precise limit, which is marked by the image of the
green leaves and denoted by the word spring. A moment afterwards,
thanks to a new detail, the recollection of the branches, it has shifted
again, but forward this time, not backward; and, by a reference to the
calendar, is situated at a precise point, a week further back than Easter,
and five weeks nearer than the carnival, by the double effect of the
contrary impulsions, pushing it, one forward and the other backward,
and which are, at a particular moment, annulled by one another.” *

THE CONDITIONS OF GOODNESS IN MEMORY.

The remembered fact being n, then, the path N—O is
what arouses for n its setting when it 7s recalled, and makes
it other than a mere imagination. The path M—N, on the
other hand, gives the cue or occasion of its being recalled
at all. Memory being thus altogether conditioned on brain-
paths, its excellence in a given individual will depend partly on
the number and partly on the persistence of these paths.

The persistence or permanence of the paths is a physi-
ological property of the brain-tissue of the individual, whilst
their number is altogether due to the facts of his mental
experience. Let the quality of permanence in the paths be
called 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

* On Intelligence, I. 258-9.

660 PSYCHOLOGY.

under a seal—no impression, however disconnected with
others, is wiped out. Others, like a jelly, vibrate to every
touch, but under usual conditions retain no permanent
mark. These latter minds, before they can recollect a fact,
must weave it into their permanent stores of knowledge.
They have no desultory memory. Those persons, on the
contrary, who retain names, dates and addresses, anecdotes,
gossip, poetry, quotations, and all sorts of miscellaneous
facts, without an effort, have desultory memory in a high
degree, and certainly owe it to the unusual tenacity of their
brain-substance for any path once formed therein. No
one probably was ever effective on a voluminous scale with-
out a high degree of this physiological retentiveness. In
the practical as in the theoretic life, the man whose acquisi-
tions stick is the man who is always achieving and advancing,
whilst his neighbors, spending most of their time in relearn-
ing what they once knew but have forgotten, simply hold
their own. A Charlemagne, a Luther, a Leibnitz, a Walter
Scott, any example, in short, of your quarto or folio editions
of mankind, must needs have amazing retentiveness of the
purely physiological sort. Men without this retentiveness
may excel in the quality of their work at this point or at
that, but will never do such mighty sums of it, or be influ-
ential contemporaneously on such a scale.*

* Not that mere native tenacity will make a man great. It must be
coupled with great passions and great intellect besides. Imbeciles some-
times have extraordinary desultory memory. Drobisch describes (Empi-
rische Psychol., p. 95) the case of a young man whom he examined. He
had with difficulty been taught to read and speak. ‘‘Butif two or three
minutes were allowed him to peruse an octavo page, he then could spell
the single words out from his memory as well as if the book lay open
before him. . . . That there was no deception I could test by means of a
new Latin law-dissertation which had just come into my hands, which he
never could have seen, and of which both subject and language were
unknown 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 experi-
ment had been made with a child’s story.”” Drobisch describes this case
as if it were one of unusual persistence in the visual image [‘ primary
memory,’ ide supra, p. 643]. But he adds that the youth ‘ remembered
his pages a long time.’ In the Journal of Speculative Philosophy for Jan.
1871 (v1. 6) isan account by Mr. W. D. Henkle (together with the stock
classic examples of preternatural memory) of an almost blind Pennsylvania
farmer who could remember the day of the week on which any date had

MEMORY. 661

But there comes a time of life for all of us when we can
do no more than hold our own in the way of acquisitions,
when the old paths fade as fast as the new ones form in our
brain, and when we forget in a week quite as much as we
can learn in the same space of time. This equilibrium may
last many, many years. In extremeold age it is upset in the
reverse direction, and forgetting prevails over acquisition,
or rather there is no acquisition. Brain-paths are so tran-
sient that in the course of a few minutes of conversation the
same question is asked and its answer forgotten half a dozen
times. Then the superior tenacity of the paths formed in
childhood becomes manifest: the dotard will retrace the
facts of his earlier years after he has lost all those of later
date.

So much for the permanence of the paths. Now for
their number.

It is obvious that the more there are of such paths as
M—N in the brain, and the more of such possible cues or
occasions for the recall of x in the mind, the prompter and
surer, on the whole, the memory of n will be, the more

fallen for forty-two years past, and also the kind of weather it was, and
what he was doing on each of more than fifteen thousand days. Pity that
such a magnificent faculty as this could not have found more worthy appli-
cation !

What these cases show is that the mere organic retentiveness of a man
need bear no definite relation to his other mental powers. Men of the
highest general powers will often forget nothing, however insignificant.
One of the most generally accomplished men I know has a memory of this
sort. He never keeps written note of anything, yet is never at a loss for a
fact which he has once heard. He remembers the old addresses of all his
New York friends, living in numbered streets, addresses which they them-
selves have long since moved away from and forgotten. He says that he
should probably recognize an individual fly, if he had seen him thirty
years previous—he is, by the way, an entomologist. As an instance of his
desultory memory, he was introduced to a certain colonel ata club. The
conversation fell upon the signs of age in man. The colonel challenged
him to estimate his age. He looked at him, and gave the exact day of his
birth, to the wonder ofall. But the secret of this accuracy was that, having
picked up some days previously an army-register, he had idly turned over
its list of names, with dates of birth, graduation, promotions, etc., attached,
and when the colonel’s name was mentioned to him at the club, these
figures, on which he had not bestowed a moment’s thought, involuntarily
surged up in his mind. Such a memory is of course a priceless boon.

662 PSYCHOLOGY.

frequently one will be reminded of it, the more avenues of
approach to it one will possess. In mental terms, the more
other facts a fact is associated with in the mind, the better pos-
session of it our memory retains. Each of its associates be-
comes a hook to which it hangs, a means to fish it up by
when sunk beneath the surface. Together, they form a
network of attachments by which it is woven into the
entire tissue of our thought. The ‘secret of a good mem-
ory’ is thus the secret of forming diverse and multiple
associations with every fact we care to retain. But this
forming of associations with a fact, what is it but thinking
about the fact as much as possible? Briefly, then, of two
men with the same outward experiences and the same
amount of mere native tenacity, the one who THINKS over his
experiences most, and weaves them into systematic rela-
tions with each other, will be the one with the best mem-
ory. We see examples of this on every hand. Most men
have a good memory for facts connected with their own
pursuits. The college athlete who remains a dunce at his
books will astonish you by his knowledge of men’s ‘ records’
in various feats and games, and will be a walking diction-
ary of sporting statistics. The reason is that he is con-
stantly going over these things in his mind, and comparing
and making series of them. They form for him not so
many odd facts, but a concept-system—so they stick. So the
merchant remembers prices, the politician other politicians’
speeches and votes, with a copiousness which amazes out-
siders, but which the amount of thinking they bestow on
these subjects easily explains. The great memory for facts
which a Darwin and a Spencer reveal in their books is not
incompatible with the possession on their part of a brain
with only a middling degree of physiological retentiveness.
Let a man early in life set himself the task of verifying
such a theory as that of evolution, and facts will soon
cluster and cling to him like grapes to their stem. Their
relations to the theory will hold them fast ; and the more
of these the mind is able to discern, the greater the erudition
will become. Meanwhile the theorist may have little, if
any, desultory memory. Unutilizable facts may be unnoted
by him and forgotten as soon as heard. An ignorance

MEMORY. 663

almost as encyclopedic as his erudition may coexist with
the latter, and hide, as it were, in the interstices of its web.
Those who have had much to do with scholars and savants
will readily think of examples of the class of mind I mean.

In a system, every fact is connected with every other by
some thought-relation. The consequence is that every fact
is retained by the combined suggestive power of all the
other facts in the system, and forgetfulness is well-nigh
impossible.

The reason why cramming is such a bad mode of study
is now made clear. I mean by cramming that way of pre-
paring for examinations by committing ‘points’ to memory
during a few hours or days of intense application immedi-
ately preceding the final ordeal, little or no work having
been performed during the previous course of the term.
Things learned thus in a few hours, on one occasion, for
one purpose, cannot possibly have formed many associations
with other things in the mind. Their brain-processes are
led into by few paths, and are relatively little liable to be
awakened again. Speedy oblivion is the almost inevitable
fate of all that is committed to memory in this simple way.
Whereas, on the contrary, the same materials taken in
gradually, day after day, recurring in different contexts,
considered in various relations, associated with other exter-
nal incidents, and repeatedly reflected on, grow into such a
system, form such connections with the rest of the mind’s
fabric, lie open to so many paths of approach, that they
remain permanent possessions. This is the intellectual rea-
son why habits of continuous application should be enforced
in educational establishments. Of course there is no moral
turpitude in cramming. If it led to the desired end of
secure learning it would be infinitely the best method of
study. But it does not; and students themselves should
understand the reason why.

ONE’S NATIVE RETENTIVENESS IS UNCHANGEABLE.

It will now appear clear that all improvement of the
memory lies in the line of ELABORATING THE ASSOCIATES of
each of the several things to be remembered. No amount
of culture would seem capable of modifyina a man’s GENERAL

664 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

retentiveness. This is a physiological quality, given once
for all with his organization, and which he can never hope
to change. It differs no doubt in disease and health; and
it is a fact of observation that it is better in fresh and
vigorous hours than when we are fagged or ill. We may
say, then, that a man’s native tenacity will fluctuate some-
what with his hygiene, and that whatever is good for his
tone of health will also be good for his memory. We may
even say that whatever amount of intellectual exercise is
bracing to the general tone and nutrition of the brain will
also be profitable tothe general retentiveness. But more
than this we cannot say; and this, it is obvious, is far less
than most people believe.

It is, in fact, commonly thought that certain exercises,
systematically repeated, will strengthen, not only a man’s
-remembrance of the particular facts used in the exercises,
but his faculty for remembering facts at large. And a
plausible case is always made out by saying that practice
in learning words by heart makes it easier to learn new
words in the same way.* If this be true, then what
I have just said is false, and the whole doctrine of mem-
ory as due to ‘paths’ must be revised. But I am dis-
posed to think the alleged fact untrue. I have carefully
questioned several mature actors on the point, and all have
denied that the practice of learning parts has made any
such difference as is alleged. What it has done for them
is to improve their power of studying a part systematically.
Their mind is now full of precedents in the way of intona-
tion, emphasis, gesticulation ; the new words awaken dis-
tinct suggestions and decisions ; are caught up, in fact, into
a pre-existing net-work, like the merchant’s prices, or the
athlete’s store of ‘records,’ and are recollected easier, al-
though the mere native tenacity is not a whit improved,
and is usually, in fact, impaired by age. It isa case of better
remembering by better thinking. Similarly when school-
boys improve by practice in ease of learning by heart, the
improvement will, I am sure, be always found to reside in

* Cf. Ebbinghaus: Ueber das Gediichtniss (1885), pp. 67, 45. One may
hear a person say: ‘‘I have a very poor memory, because 1 was never sys
tematically msde to learn poetry at schoui.’

MEMORY. 665

the mode of study of the particular piece (due to the greater
interest, the greater suggestiveness, the generic similarity
with other pieces, the more sustained attention, etc., etc.),
and not at all to any enhancement of the brute retentive
power.

The error I speak of pervades an otherwise useful and
judicious book, ‘How to Strengthen the Memory,’ by Dr.
Holbrook of New York.* The author fails to distinguish
between the general physiological retentiveness and the re-
tention of particular things, and talks as if both must be
benefited by the same means.

‘*T am now treating,” he says, ‘‘a case of loss of memory in a per-
son advanced in years, who did not know that his memory had failed
most remarkably till 1 told him of it. He is making vigorous efforts
to bring it back again, and with partial success. The method pursued
is 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 closest
attention to all that he learns, so that it shall be impressed on his mind
clearly. He is asked to recall every evening all the facts and expe-
riences of the day, and again the next morning. Every name heard is
written down and impressed on his mind clearly, and an effort made
to recall it at intervals. Ten names from among public men are or-
dered to be committed to memory every week. <A verse of poetry is to
be learned, also a verse from the Bible, daily. He is asked to remem-
ber the number of the page in any book where any interesting fact is
recorded. These and other methods are slowly resuscitating a failing
memory.” f

I find it very hard to believe that the memory of the
poor old gentleman is a bit the better for all this torture
except in respect of the particular facts thus wrought into
it, the occurrences attended to and repeated on those days,
the names of those politicians, those Bible verses, etc., ete.
In another place Dr. Holbrook quotes the account given by
the late Thurlow Weed, journalist and politician, of his
method of strengthening his memory.

‘“My memory was a sieve. I could remember nothing. Dates,
names, appointments, faces—everything escaped me. I said to my

wife, ‘Catherine, I shall never make a successful politician, for I can-
not remember, and that is a prime necessity of politicians.’ My wife

* How to Strengthen the Memory; or, The Natural and Scientific Meth-
ods of Never Forgetting. By M. H. Holbrook, M.D. New York (no date).
+ Page 39.

666 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

told me I must train my memory. So when Ii came home that night, 1
sat down alone and spent fifteen minutes trying silently to recall witk
accuracy the principal events of the day. I could remember but little
at first; now I remember that I could not then recall what I had for
breakfast. After a few days’ practice I found I could recall more.
Events came back to me more minutely, more accurately, and more
vividly 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 recalling
them to yourself? It would be interesting, and my interest in it would
be a stimulus to you.’ Having great respect for my wife’s opinion, I
began a habit of oral confession, as it were, which was continued for
almost fifty years. Every night, the last thing before retiring, I told
her everything I could remember that had happened to me or about me
during the day. I generally recalled the dishes I had had for break-
fast, 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 of
them. J mentioned all the letters I had sent and received, and the very
language used, as nearly as possible; when I had walked or ridden—1
told her everything that had come within my observation, I found I
could say my lessons better and better every year, and instead of the
practice growing irksome, it became a pleasure to go over again the
events of the day. I am indebted to this discipline for a memory of
somewhat unusual tenacity, and I recommend the practice to all who wish
to store up facts, or expect to have much to do with influencing men.” *

I do not doubt that Mr. Weed’s practical command
of his past experiences was much greater after fifty years
of this heroic drill than it would have been without it.
Expecting to give his account in the evening, he attended
better to each incident of the day, named and conceived it
differently, set his mind upon it, and in the evening went
over it again. He did more thinking about it, and it stayed
with him in consequence. But I venture to affirm pretty
confidently (although I know how foolish it often is to deny
a fact on the strength of a theory) that the same matter,
casually attended to and not thought about, would have stuck
in his memory no better at the end than at the beginning
of his years of heroic self-discipline. He had acquired a
better method of noting and recording his experiences, but
his physiological retentiveness was probably not a bit im-
proved.t

* Op. cit. p. 100.
+ In order to test the opinion so confidently expressed in the text, I have
tried to see whether a certain amount of daily training in learning poetry

MEMORY. 667

All improvement of memory consists, then, in the in-
provement of ones habitual methods of recording facts.

by heart will shorten the time it takes to learn an entirely different kind of
poetry. During eight successive days I learned 158 lines of Victor Hugo’s
‘Satyr.’ The total number of minutes required for this was 1315—it should
be said that I had learned nothing by heart for many years. I then, work-
ing for twenty-odd minutes daily, learned the entire first book of Paradise
Lost, occupying 38 days in the process. After this training I went back to
Victor Hugo’s poem, and found that 158 additional lines (divided exactly as
on the former occasion) took me 1514 minutes. In other words, i commit-
ted my Victor Hugo to memory before the training at the rate of a line in
50 seconds, after the training at the rate of a line in 57 seconds, just the
opposite result from that which the popular view would lead one to expect.
But as I was peceptibly fagged with other work at the time of the second
batch of Victor Hugo, I thought that might explain the retardation; so [
persuaded 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%. He then trained himself on Schiller’s
translation of the second book of the Aineid into German, 16 lines daily
for 26 consecutive days. On returning to the same quantity of In Memo-
riam again, he found his maximum time 20 minutes, minimum 10, average
1422. As he feared the outer conditions might not have been as favorable
this time as the first, he waited a few days and got conditions as near as
possible identical. The result was. minimum time 8 minutes ; maximum
193; average 14.

Mr. E. 8. Drown tested himself on Virgil for 16 days, then again for
16 days, after training himseif on Scott. Average time before training,
15 minutes 26 seconds; after training, 12 minutes 16 seconds. [Sixteen
days 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 himself
on 450 lines ‘of an entirely different verse,’ and then took 15 days more
of the former verse 10 lines a day. Average result: 3 minutes 41 seconds
before, 3 minutes 2 seconds after, training. [Same criticism as before. |

Mr. E. A. Pease tested himself on Idyls of the King, and trained him-
self on Paradise Lost. Average result of 6 days each time: 14 minutes 34
seconds before, 14 minutes 55 seconds after, training. Mr. Burnham hav-
ing suggested that to eliminate facilitating effect entirely from the training
verses one ought to test one’s self @ ja 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 record
is unfortunately lost ; but the resuit was a very considerable shortening of
the average time of the second series of nonsense-syliables, learned after
training. This seems to me, however, more to show the effects of rapid
habituation to the nonsense-verses themselves than those of the poetry
used 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 acquaintance
who had marvellously improved by practice his power of learning his

668 PSYCHOLOG Y.

In the traditional terminology methods are divided into
the mechanical, the ingenious, and the judicious.

The mechanical methods consist in the intensification, pro-
longation, and repetition of the impression to be remembered.
The modern method of teaching children to read by black-
board work, in which each word is impressed by the four-
fold channel of eye, ear, voice, and hand, is an example of
an improved mechanical method of memorizing.

Judicious methods of remembering things are nothing but
jogical ways of conceiving them and working them into
rational systems, classifying them, analyzing them into
parts, etc., etc. All the sciences are such methods.

Of ingenious methods, many have been invented, under the
name of technical memories. By means of these systems
it is often possible to retain entirely disconnected facts,
lists of names, numbers, and so forth, so multitudinous as
to be entirely unrememberable in a natural way. The
method consists usually in a framework learned mechani-
cally, of which the mind is supposed to remain in secure
and permanent possession. ‘Then, whatever is to be re-
membered is deliberately associated by some fanciful
analogy or connection with some part of this framework,
and this connection thenceforward helps its recall. The
best known and most used of these devices is the figure-
alphabet. Tio remember numbers, e.g., a figure-alphabet
is first formed, in which each numerical digitis represented
by one or more letters. The number is then translated into
such letters as will best make a word, if possible a word
suggestive of the object to which the number belongs.

sermons by heart, I wrote to the gentleman for corroboration. I append
his reply, which shows that the increased facility is due rather to a change
in his methods of learning than to his native retentiveness having grown
by exercise: ‘‘ As for memory, mine has improved year by year, except
when in ill-health, like a gymnast’s muscle. Before twenty it took three
or four days to commit an hour-long sermon; after twenty, two days, one
day, half a day, and now one slow analytic, very attentive or adhesive
reading does it. But memory seems to me the most physical of intellectual
powers. Bodily ease and freshness have much to do with it. Then there
isa great difference of facility in method. I used to commit sentence by
sentence. Now] take the idea of the whole, then its leading divisions,
then its subdivisions, then its sentences.”

MEMORY. 669

The word will then be remembered when the numbers
alone might be forgotten.
‘¢The most common figure-alphabet is this:

fe OS a5, 6: 78, 9. 0,
t, n, m, Tr, rE sh, g; 1 b, 8,

d, i; k, V, Pp, Cc,
eh, ¢, Z,
g, qu.

‘*To briefly show its use, suppose it is desired to fix 1142 feet ina
second as the velocity of sound: t, t, r, n, are the letters and order
required. Fill up with vowels forming a phrase, like ‘ tight run’ and
connect it by some such flight of the imagination as that if a man tried
to 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 to
get confused with the velocity of light, nor to think he had a hard run
which would be 3000 feet too fast.” *

Dr. Pick and others use a system which consists in
linking together any two ideas to be remembered by means
of an intermediate idea which will be suggested by the

first 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 combine
the ideas in this manner: garden, plant, hair of plant—hair ; hair,
bonnet, watchman ;—watchman, wake, study, philosophy ; philosophy,
chemistry, copper, ete. ete.” (Pick.) +

It is matter of popular knowledge that an impression
is 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. Of
two events of equal significance the remoter one will be
the one more likely to be forgotten. The memories of
childhood which persist in old age can hardly be compared
with the events of the day or hour which are forgotten, for
these latter are trivial once-repeated things, whilst the

* KE. Pick: Memory and its Doctors (1888), p. 7.
+ This system is carried out in great detail in a book called ‘Memory
Training,’ by Wm. L. Evans (1889).

670 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

childish reminiscences have been wrought into us during
the retrospective hours of our entire intervening life. Other
things equal, at all times of life recency promotes memory.
The only exception I can think of is the unaccountable
memory of certain moments of our childhood, apparently
not fitted by their intrinsic interest to survive, but which are
perhaps the only incidents we can remember out of the
year in which they occurred. Everybody probably has
isolated glimpses of certain hours of his nursery life, the
position in which he stood or sat, the light of the room,
what his father or mother said, ete. These moments so
oddly selected for immunity from the tooth of time proba-
bly owe their good fortune to historical peculiarities which
it is now impossible to trace. Very likely we were re-
minded of them again soon after they occurred ; that be-
came areason why we should again recollect them, ete.,
so that at last they became ingrained.

The attention which we lend to an experience is propor-
tional to its vivid or interesting character ; and it is a no-
torious fact that what interests us most vividly at the time
is, other things equal, what we remember best. Animpres-
sion may be so exciting emotionally as almost fo leave a
scar upon the cerebral tissues ; and thus originates a path-
ological delusion. “A woman attacked ie robbers takes
all the men whom she sees, even her own son, for brigands
bent on killing her. Another woman sees her child run
over by a horse; no amount of reasoning, not even the sight
of the living child, will persuade her that he is not killed.
A woman called ‘thief’ in a dispute remains convinced that
every one accuses her of stealing (Esquirol). Another, at-
tacked with mania at the sight oe the fires in her street
during the Commune, still after six months sees in her de-
lirium flames on every side about her (Luys), etc., ete.” *

On the general effectiveness of both attention and repe-
tition I cannot do better than copy what M. Taine has
written :

‘Tf we compare different sensations, images, or ideas, we find that
their antitudes for revival are not Pag A Bric number of them are

*Paulhan, L’Activité mental, et les Eléments de l'Esprit (1889), p. 70.

MEMORY. 671

obliterated, and never reappear through life; for instance, I drove
through Paris a day or two ago, and though I saw plainly some sixty
or eighty new faces, I cannot now recall any one of them ; some extra-
ordinary circumstance, a fit of delirium, or the excitement of haschish
would be necessary to give them a chance of revival. On the other
hand, there are sensations with a force of revival which nothing de-
stroys or decreases. Though, as a rule, time weakens and impairs our
strongest sensations, these reappear entire and intense, without having
lost a particle of their detail, or any degree of their force. M. Brierre
de 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 hair
pulled out under the treatment of the skwll-cap.’—For my own part,
after thirty years, | remember feature for feature the appearance of the
theatre to which I was taken for the first time. From the third row of
boxes, the body of the theatre appeared to me an immense well, red
and flaming, swarming with heads ; below, on the right, on a narrow
floor, two men and a woman entered, went out, and re-entered, made
gestures, 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 hid
behind a screen; the other, who was coming in, seemed angry, and
raised his arm. I was then seven, I could understand nothing of what
was 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, and
may distinguish in them a common character. The primitive impres-
sion has been accompanied by an eatraordinarg degree of attention,
either as being horrible or delightful, or as being new, surprising, and
out of proportion to the ordinary run of our life; this it is we express
by saying that we have been strongly impressed 7 that we were ab-
sorbed, that we could not think of anything else ; that our other sen-
sations were effaced ; that we were pursued all the next day by the re-
sulting image ; that it beset us, that we could not drive it away ; that
all distractions were feeble beside it. It is by force of this dispro-
portion that impressions of childhood are so persistent ; the mind being
quite fresh, ordinary objects and events are surprising. At present,
after seeing so many large halls and full theatres, it is impossible for
me, 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 expe-
rienced much suffering, both personally and in imagination, would be
less 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 re-
vival, and of complete revival, in proportion to the degree of atten-
tion with which we have considered the object or event. We put this
rule in practice at every moment in ordinary life. If we are apply-
ing ourselves to a book or are in lively conversation, while an air

672 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

is being sung in the adjoining room, we do not retain it; we know
vaguely that there is singing going on, and that is all. We then
stop our reading or conversation, we lay aside all internal preoccupa-
tions and external sensations which our mind or the outer world can
throw in our way ; we close our eyes, we cause a silence within and
about us, and, if the air is repeated, we listen. We say then that we
have 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 have
been transported, uplifted, ravished, that we have forgotten the world
and ourselves; that for some minutes our soul was dead to all but
sounds. . .

‘‘ This exclusive momentary ascendency of one of our states of 1aind
explains the greater durability of its aptitude for revival and for more
complete revival. As the sensation revives in the image, the image
reappears with a force proportioned to that of the sensation. What we
meet with in the first state is also to be met with in the second, since
the second is but a revival of the first. So, in the struggle for life, in
which all our images are constantly engaged, the one furnished at the
outset with most force retains in each conflict, by the very law of repe-
tition which gives it being, the capacity of treading down its adversa-
ries; this is why it revives, incessantly at first, then frequently, until
at last the laws of progressive decay, and the continual accession of
new 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. Every
one 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 and
exactly on the memory. This is how we contrive to retain a language,
airs of music, passages of verse or prose, the technical terms and propo-
sitions of a science, and still more so the ordinary facts by which our
conduct 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, we
magine its red tint and the brilliancy of a quivering slice, the images
in our mind are brightened by repetition. Whenever we eat, or drink,
or walk, or avail ourselves of any of our senses, or commence or con-
tinue any action whatever, the same thing happens. Every man and
every animal thus possesses at every moment of life a certain stock of
clear and easily reviving images, which had their source in the past in
a confluence of numerous experiences, and are now fed by a flow of re-
newed experiences.. When I want to go from the Tuileries to the Pan-
théon, or from my study to the dining-room, I foresee at every turn
the colored forms which will present themselves to my sight ; it is oth-
erwise in the case of a house where I have spent two bours, or of a
town where I have stayed three days ; after ten years have elapsed the
images will be vague, full of blanks, sometimes they will not exist, and
I shall have to seek my way or shall lose myself.—This new property of

MEMORY. 673

mages is also derived from the first. As every sensation tends to re-
vive in its image, the sensation twice repeated will leave after it a double
tendency, that is, provided the attention be as great the second time as
the first ; usually this is not the case, for, the novelty diminishing, the
interest diminishes ; but if other circumstances renew the interest, or if
the will renovates the attention, the incessantly increasing tendency
will incessantly increase the chances of the resurrection and integrity
af the image.’’*

If a phenomenon is met with, however, too often, and
with too great a variety of contexts, although its image is
retained and reproduced with correspondingly great facil-
ity, it fails to come up with any one particular setting, and
the projection of it backwards to a particular past date
consequently does not come about. We recognize but do
not remember 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 cer-
tain modification of the visual impression implies a certain distance ;
or that the thing he sees moving about is a live animal. To ask a man
whether he remembers that the sun shines, that fire burns, that iron is
hard, would be a misuse of language. Even the almost fortuitous con-
nections among our experiences cease to be classed as memories when
they have become thoroughly familiar. Though, on hearing the voice
of some unseen person slightly known to us, we say we recollect to
whom the voice belongs, we do not use the same expression respecting
the voices of those with whom we live. The meanings of words which
in childhood have to be consciously recalled seem in adult life to be
immediately present.” +

These are cases where too many paths, leading to too
diverse associates, block each other’s way, and all that the
mind gets along with its object is a fringe of felt familiarity
or sense that there are associates. A similar result comes
about when a definite setting is only nascently aroused. We
then feel that we have seen the object already, but when or
where we cannot say, though we may seem to ourselves to
be on the brink of saying it. That nascent cerebral excita-
tions can effect consciousness with a sort of sense of the
imminence of that which stronger excitations would make
us definitely feel, is obvious from what happens when we

* On Intelligence, 1. 77-82.
+ Psychology, § 201.

674 PSYCHOLOGY.

seek to remember a name. It tingles, it trembles on the
verge, but does not come. Just such a tingling and trem-
bling of unrecovered associates is the penumbra of recog-
nition that may surround any experience and make it
seem familiar, though we know not why.*

* Professor Héffding considers that the absence of contiguous associates
distinctly thought-of is a proof that associative processes are not concerned
in these cases of instantaneous recognition where we get astrong sense of
familiarity with the object, but no recall of previous time or place. His
theory of what happens is that the object before us, A, comes with a sense of
familiarity whenever it awakens a slumbering image, a, of its own past self,
whilst without this image it seems unfamiliar. The quality of familiarity
is due to the coalescence of the two similar processes A + a in the brain
(Psychologie, p. 188; Vierteljsch. f. wiss. Phil., xin. 482 [1889]). This
explanation is a very tempting one where the phenomenon of recognition is
reduced to itssimplest terms. Experiments bave been performed in Wundt’s
laboratory (by Messrs. Wolfe, see below, p. 679, and Lehmann (Philoso-
phische Studien,v. 96), in which a person had to tell out of several closely re-
sembling sensible impressions (sounds, tints of color) presented, which of
them was the same with one presented a moment before. And it does
seem here as if the fading process in the just-excited tract must combine
with the process of the new impression to give to the latter a peculiar sub-
jective tinge which should separate it from the impressions which the
other objects give. But recognition of this immediate sort is beyond our
power after a very short time has intervened. A couple of minutes’ in-
terval is generally fatal to it; so that it is impossible to conceive that
our frequent instantaneous recognition of a face, e.g., as having been
met before, takes place by any such simple process. Where we as-
sociate a head of classification with the object, the time-interval has
much less effect. Dr. Lehmann could identify shades of gray much
more successfully and permanently after mentally attaching names or
numbers to them. Here it is the recall of the contiguous associate,
the number or name, which brings about the recognition. Where an
experience is complex, each element of the total object has had the other
elements for its past contiguous associates. Each element thus tends to
revive the other elements from within, at the same time that the outward
object is making them revive from without. We have trus, whenever we
meet a familiar object, that sense of expectation gratified which is so large
a factor in our esthetic emotions; and even were there no ‘fringe of ten-
dency’ toward the arousal of extrinsic associates (which there certainly al-
ways is), still this intrinsic play of mutual association among the parts
would give a character of ease to familiar percepts which would make of
them a distinct subjective class. A process fills its old bed in a different
way from that in which it makes a new bed. One can appeal to introspec-
tion for proof. When, for example, I go into a slaughter-house into which
I once went years ago, and the horrid din of the screaming hogs strikes
me with the overpowering sense of identification, when the blood-stained
face of the ‘sticker,’ whom I had long ceased to think of, is immediately

MEMORY. 675

There is a curious experience which everyone seems to
have had—the feeling that the present moment in its com-
pleteness has been experienced before—we were saying just
this thing, in just this place, to just these people, etc. This
‘sense of pre-existence’’ has been treated as a great mys-
tery and occasioned much speculation. Dr. Wigan con-
sidered it due to a dissociation of the action of the two hemi-
spheres, one of them becoming conscious a little later than
the other, but both of the same fact.* I must confess that

recognized as the face that struck me so before; when the dingy and red-
dened woodwork, the purple-flowing floor, the smell, the emotion of dis-
gust, and ai/ the details, in a word, forthwith re-establish themselves as
familiar occupaats of my mind; the eatraneous associates of the past time
are anything but prominent. Again, in trying to think of an engraving,
say the portrait of Rajah Brooke prefixed to his biography, I can do so
only partially; but when I take down the book and, looking at the actual
face, am smitten with the intimate sense of its sameness with the one I was
striving to resuscitate,—where in the experience is the element of extrinsic
association? In both these cases it surely feels as if the moment when the
sense of recall is most vivid were also the moment when all extraneous
associates were most suppressed. The butcher’s face recalls the former
walls of the shambles; their thought recalls the groaning beasts, and they
the facé again, just as I now experience them, with no different past ingre-
lient. In like manner the peculiar deepening of my consciousness of the
Rajah'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 collateral
circumstances, whether of the present or of former experiences. But here
it is the nose preparing tracts for the eye, the eye preparing them for the
mouth, the mouth preparing them for the nose again, all these processes
involving paths of contiguous association, as defended in the text. I can-
not agree, therefore, with Prof. Héffding, in spite of my respect for him as
a psychologist, that the phenomenon of instantaneous recognition is only
explicable through the recall and comparison of the thing with its own
past image. Nor can I see in the facts in question any additional ground for
reinstating the general notion which we have already rejected (supra, p.
592) that a ‘sensation’ is ever received into the mind by an ‘image’ of
its own past self. It is received by contiguous associates; or if they form
too faint a fringe, its neural currents run into a bed which is still ‘ warm’
from just-previous currents, and which consequently feel different from
currents whose bed is cold. I agree, however, with Héffding that Dr.
Lehmann’s experiments (many of them) do not seem to prove the point
which he seeks to establish. Lehmann, indeed, seems himself to believe
that we recognize a sensation A by comparing it with its own past image
a (loc. cit. p. 114), in which opinion I altogether fail to concur.

* Duality of the Mind, p.84 The same thesis is defended by the late
Mr. R. H. Proctor, who gives some cases rather hard to reconcile with my
own proposed explanation, in ‘Knowledge’ for Nov. 8, 1884. See also
Ribot, Maladies de la Mémoire, p. 149 ff.

676 PSYCHOLOG Y.

the quality of mystery seems to me a little strained. I have
over and over again in my own case succeeded in resolving
the phenomenon into a case of memory, so indistinct that
whilst some past circumstances are presented again,
the others are not. The dissimilar portions of the past do
not arise completely enough at first for the date to be iden-
tified All we get is the present scene with a general sug-
gestiva of pastness about it. That faithful observer, Prof.
Lazarus, interprets the phenomenon in the same way ;* and
it is noteworthy that just as soon as the past context grows
complete and distinct the emotion of weirdness fades from
the experience.

EXACT MEASUREMENTS OF MEMORY

have recently been made in Germany. . Professor Eb-
binghaus, in a really heroic series of daily observations
of more than two years’ duration, examined the powers of
retention aud reproduction. He learned lists of meaning-
less syllables by heart, and tested his recollection of them
from day to day. He could not remember more than 7
after a single reading. It took, however, 16 readings to re-
member 12, 44 readings to remember 24, and 55 readings
to remember 26 syllables, the moment of ‘remembering’
being here reckoned as the first moment when the list could
be recited without a fault.t When a 16-syllable list was
read over a certain number of times on one day, and then
studied on the day following until remembered, it was
found that the number of seconds saved in the study on
the second day was proportional to the number of read-
ings on the first—proportional, that is, within certain rather
narrow limits, for which see the text.t No amount of repe-
tition spent on nonsense-verses over a certain length en-
abled Dr. Ebbinghaus to retain them without error for 24
hours. In forgetting such things as these lists of syllables,
the loss gees on very much more rapidly at first than later
on. He measured the loss by the number of seconds re-

* Zeitschr. f. Vélkerpsychologie u. s. w., Bd. v. p. 146.
+ Ueber das Gedichtniss, experimente}le ‘Untersuchungen (1885). p. 64

t Ibid. § 2.

MEMORY. 677

quired to relearn the list after it had been once learned.
Roughly speaking, if it took a thousand seconds to learn
the list, and five hundred to relearn it, the loss between the
two learnings would have been one half. Measured in this
way, full half of the forgetting seems to occur within the
first half-hour, whilst only four fifths is forgotten at the
end of a month. The nature of this result might have
been anticipated, but hardly its numerical proportions.
Dr. Ebbinghaus says:

‘‘ The initial rapidity, as well as the final slowness, as these were as-
certained under certain experimental conditions and for a particular
individual, . .. may well surprise us. An hour after the work of learn-
ing had ceased, forgetting was so far advanced that more than half of
the original work had to be applied again before the series of syllables
could once more be reproduced. Eight hours later two thirds of the
original labor had to be applied. Gradually, however, the process of
oblivion grew slower, so that even for considerable stretches of time
the losses were but barely ascertainable. After 24 hours a third, after
6 days a fourth, and after a whole month a good ‘ifth of the original
labor remain in the shape of its after-effects, and made the relearning
by so much the more speedy.” *

But the most interesting result of all those reached by
this author relates to the question whether ideas are re-
ealled only by those that previously came immediately be-
fore them, or whether an idea can possibly recall another
idea with which it was never in immediate contact, without
passing through the intermediate mental links. The ques-
tion is of theoretic importance with regard to the way in
which the process of ‘association of ideas’ must be con-
eeived ; and Dr. Ebbinghaus’s attempt is as successful as
{t is original, in bringing two views, which seem at first
sight inaccessible to proof, to a direct practical test, and
giving the victory to one of them. His experiments con-
clusively show that an idea is not only ‘ associated ’ directly
with the one that follows it, and with the rest through that,
but that it is directly associated with all that are near it,
though in unequal degrees. He first measured the time
needed to impress on the memory certain lists of syllables,
and then the time needed to impress lists of the same
syllables with gaps between them. Thus, representing the

* Op. cit., p. 103.

678 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

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 8 in the first list were learned in that order
merely by 1 calling up 2, and by 2 calling up 3, leaving out
the 2 ought to leave 1 and 38 with no tie in the mind; and
the second list ought to take as much time in the learning
as if the first list had never been heard of. If, on the other
hand, 1 has a direct influence on 3 as well as on 2, that in-
fluence should be exerted even when 2 is dropped out; and
a person familiar with the first list ought to learn the
second one more rapidly than otherwise he could. This
latter case is what actually occurs; and Dr. Ebbinghaus
has found that syllables originally separated by as many as
seven intermediaries still reveal, by the increased rapidity
with which they are learned in order, the strength of the
tie that the original learning established between them,
over the heads, so to speak, of all the rest. These last re-
sults ought to make us careful, when we speak of nervous
* paths,’ tc use the word in no restricted sense. They add
one more fact to the set of facts which prove that associa-
tion is subtler than consciousness, and that a nerve-process
may, without producing consciousness, be effective in the
‘same way in which consciousness would have seemed to be
effective if it had been there.* Evidently the path from 1

* All the inferences for which we can give no articulate reasons exem-
plify this law. In the chapter on Perception we shall have innumerable
examples of it. A good pathological illustration of it is given in the curi-
cus observations of M. Binet on certain hysterical subjects, with anzsthetic
hands, who saw what was done with their hands as an independent vision
but did not feel it. The hand being hidden by a screen, the patient was
ordered to look at another screen and to tell of any visual image which
might project itself thereon. Numbers would then come, corresponding
to the number of times the insensible member was raised, touched, ete.
Colored lines and figures would come. corresponding to similar ones traced
on 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 noth-
ing could ever be felt. The whole phenomenon shows how an idea which
remains itself below the threshold of a certain conscious self may occasion
associative -effects therein. The skin-sensations, unfelt by the patient’s
primary consciousness, awaken, nevertheless, their usual visual associates
thereio,

MEMORY. 679

to 3 (omitting 2 from consciousness) is facilitated, broad-
ened perhaps, by the old path from 1 to 3 through 2—only
the component which shoots round through this latter way
is too feeble to let 2 be thought as a distinct object.

Mr. Wolfe, in his experiments on recognition, used vi-—
brating metal tongues.

‘‘ These tongues gave tones differing by 2 vibrations only in the two
lower octaves, and by 4 vibrations in the three higher octaves. In the
first series of experiments a tone was selected, and, after sounding it
for one second, a second tone was sounded, which was either the same
as the first, or different from it by 4, 8, or 12 vibrations in different
series. The person experimented upon was to answer whether the
second tone was the same as the first, thus showing that he recognized
it, or whether it was different, and, if so, whether it was higher or
lower. Of course, the interval of time between the two tones was an
important factor. The proportionate number of correct judgments,
and the smallness of the difference of the vibration-rates of the two
tones, would measure the accuracy of the tone-memory. It appeared
that one could tell more readily when the two tones were alike than
when they were different, although in both cases the accuracy of the
memory was remarkably good. .. . The main point is the effect of the
time-interval between the tone and its reproduction. This was varied.
from 1 second to 30 seconds, or even to 60 seconds or 120 seconds in
some experiments. The general result is, that the longer the interval,
the smaller are the chances that the tone will be recognized; and this
process of forgetting takes place at first very rapidly, and then more
slowly. . .. This law is subjeet to considerable variations, one of which
seems to be constant and is peculiar; namely, there seems to bea
thythm in the memory itself, which, after falling, recovers slightly, and
then fades out again.” *

This periodical renewal of acoustic memory would seem

to be an important element in the production of the agree-
ableness of certain rates of recurrence in sound.

FORGETTING.

In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as im-
portant a 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 a
miracle; but yet there seems to be a constant decay of all our ideas,

*T copy from the abstract of Wolfe’s paper in ‘Science’ for Nov. 19,
1886. The original is in Psychologische Studien, 111. 534 ff.

680 PSYCHOLOGY

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 the
senses, or reflection on those kinds of objects which at first occasioned
them, 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; and
our minds represent to us those tombs to which we are fast approaching;
where, though the brass and marble remain, yet the inscriptions
are effaced by time, and the imagery moulders away. The pictures
drawn in our minds are laid in fading colors; and, if not sometimes
refreshed, vanish and disappear. How much the constitution of our
bodies, and the make of our animal spirits, are concerned in this;
and whether the temper of the brain makes this difference, that in some
it retains the characters drawn on it like marble, in others like free-
stone, and in others little better than sand, I shall not here inquire,
though it may seem probable that the constitution of the body does
sometimes influence the memory; since we oftentimes find a disease
quite strip the mind of all its ideas, and the flames of a fever in a few
days calcine all those images to dust and confusion, which seemed to
be as lasting as if graven in marble.” *

This peculiar mixture of forgetting with our remember-
ing is 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 we
remembered everything, we should on most occasions be
as ill off as if we remembered nothing. It would take as
long for us to recall a space of time as it took the original
time to elapse, and we should never get ahead with our
thinking. All recollected times undergo, accordingly, what
M. Ribot calls foreshortening ; and this foreshortening is
due to the omission of an enormous number of the facts
which filled them.

‘‘As fast as the present enters into the past, our states of consciousness
disappear and are obliterated. Passed in review at a few days’ distance,
nothing or little of them remains : most of them have made shipwreck
in that great nonentity from which they never more will emerge, and
they have carried with them the quantity of duration which was inher-
ent in their being. This deficit of surviving conscious states is thus a
deficit 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 the
entire series of terms which separate it from our present selves, memory
would become impossible on account of the length of the operation. We

* Essay conc. Human Understanding, 1. x. 5.

MEMORY. 681

thus reach the paradoxical result that one condition of remembering is
that we should forget. Without totally forgetting a prodigious number
of states of consciousness, and momentarily forgetting a large number,
we could not remember at all. Oblivion, except in certain cases, is
thus no malady of memory, but a condition of its health and its
life.” *

There are many irregularities in the process of forget-
ting which are as yet unaccounted for. A thing forgotten
on one day will be remembered on the next. Something
we have made the most strenuous efforts to recall, but all
in vain, will, soon after we have given up the attempt,
saunter into the mind, as Emerson somewhere says, as in-
nocently as if it had never been sent for. Experiences of
bygone date will revive after years of absolute oblivion,
often as the result of some cerebral disease or accident
which seems to develop latent paths of association, as the
photographer’s fluid develops the picture sleeping in the
collodion film. The oftenest quoted of these cases is Cole-
ridge’s:

‘‘In a Roman Catholic town in Germany, a young woman, who
couid neither read nor write, was seized with a fever, and was said
by the priests to be possessed of a devil, because she was heard talking
Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Whole sheets of her ravings were written
out, and found to consist of sentences intelligible in themselves, but
having slight connection with each other. Of her Hebrew sayings, only
a few could be traced to the Bible, and most seemed to be in the Rab-
binical dialect. All trick was out of the question; the woman was a
simple creature ; there was no doubt as to the fever. It was long be-
fore any explanation, save that of demoniacal possession, could be ob-
tained. At last the mystery was unveiled by a physician, who deter-
mined to trace back the girl’s history, and who, after much trouble,
discovered that at the age of nine she had been charitably taken by an
old Protestant pastor, a great Hebrew scholar, in whose house she lived
till his death. On further inquiry it appeared to have been the old man’s
custom for years to walk up and down a passage of his house into which
the kitchen opened, and to read to himself with a loud voice out of his
books. The books were ransacked, and among them were found sey-
eral of the Greek and Latin Fathers, together with a collection of Rab-
binical writings. In these works so many of the passages taken down
at the young woman’s bedside were identified that there could be no
reasonable doubt as to their source.” +

* Th. Ribot, Les Maladies dela Mémoire, p. 46.
+ Biographia Literaria, ed. 1847, 1. 117 (quoted in Carpenter’s Mental
Physiology, chapter x, which see for a number of other cases, all unfor-

682 PSYCHOLOG Y.

Hypnotic subjects as a rule forget all that has happened
in their trance. But in a succeeding trance they will often
remember the events of a past one. This is like what
happens in those cases of ‘double personality’ in which
no recollection of one of the lives is to be found in
the other. We have already seen in an earlier chapter
that the sensibility often differs from one of the alternate
personalities to another, and we have heard M. Pierre Janet’s
theory that anesthesias carry amnesias with them (see
above, pp. 385 ff). In certain cases this is evidently so;
the throwing of certain functional brain-tracts out of gear
with others, so as to dissociate their consciousness from
that of the remaining brain, throws them out for both sen-
sorial and ideational service. M. Janet proved in various
ways that what his patients forgot when anesthetic they
remembered when the sensibility returned. For instance,
he restored their tactile sense temporarily by means of
electric currents, passes, etc., and then made them handle
various objects, such as keys and pencils, or make particu-
lar movements, like the sign of the cross. The moment the
anesthesia returned they found it impossible to recollect
the objects or the acts. ‘They had had nothing in their
hands, they had done nothing,’ etc. The next day, however,
sensibility being again restored by similar processes, they
remembered perfectly the circumstance, and told what
they had handled or had done.

Ali these pathological facts are showing us that the
sphere of possible recollection may be wider than we think,
and that in certain matters apparent oblivion is no proof
against possible recall under other conditions. They give
no countenance, however, to the extravagant opinion that

tunately deficient, like this one, in the evidence of exact verification which
‘psychical research ’demands). Compare also Th. Ribot, Diseases of Mem.
ory. chap. tv. The knowledge of foreign words, etc., reported in trance
mediums, ¢tc., may perhaps often be explained by exaltation of memory.
An hystero-epileptic girl, whose case I quoted in Proc. of Am. Soc. for
Psychical Research, automatically writes an ‘ Ingoldsby Legend ’ in se eral
cantos, which her parents say she ‘had never read.’ Of course she must
have read or heard it. but perhaps never Jearned it. Of some macaronic
Latin-English verses about a sea-serpent which her hand alse wrote uncon
consciously, I have vainly sought the original (see Proc., ete., p 583)

MEMORY. 683

nothing we experience can be absolutely forgotten. In
real life, in spite of occasional surprises, most of what hap-
pens actually is forgotten. The only reasons for supposing
that if the conditions were forthcoming everything would
revive are of a transcendental sort. Sir Wm. Hamilton
quotes and adopts them from the German writer Schmid.
Knowledge being a ‘spontaneous self-energy’ on the part
of the mind.

‘‘this energy being once determined, it is natural that it should persist,
until again annihilated by other causes. This [annihilation] would be
the 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 an
energy of the self-active power of a subject one and indivisible : conse-
quently a part of the ego must be detached or annihilated, if a cogni-
tion once existent be again extinguished. Hence it is that the problem
most difficult of solution is not, how a mental activity endures, but how
it ever vanishes.” *

Those whom such an argument persuades may be |e!
happy with their belief. Other positive argument there 1s
none, none certainly of a physiological sort.t

When memory begins to decay, proper names are what
go first, and at all times proper names are harder to recol-
lect than those of general properties and classes of things.

This seems due to the fact that common qualities and
names have contracted an infinitely greater number of asso-
ciations in our mind than the names of most of the persons
whom we know. Their memory is better organized. Proper
names as well organized as those of our family and friends are
recollected as well as those of any other objects.{ ‘Organ-
ization’ means numerous associations; and the more numer-

ous the associations, the greater the number of paths of re-
eall. For the same reason adjectives, conjunctions, preposi-

tions, and the cardinal verbs, those words, in short, which
form the grammatical framework of all our speech, are the

——

* Lectures on Metaph., 17. 212.

+ Cf. on this point J Delbceuf, Le Sommeil et les Réves (1885), p. 119
ff.; R. Verdon, Forgetfulness, in Mind, 11. 437.

¢ (f. A. Maury, Le Sommeil et les Réves, p. 442.

684 PS YCHOLOG Y¥.

very iast to decay. Kussmaul* makes the following acute
remark on this subject:

‘The conereter a conception is, the sooner is its name forgotten.
This is because our ideas of persons and things are less strongly bound
up with their names than with such abstractions as their business, their
circumstances, their qualities. We easily can imagine persois and
things without their names, the sensorial image of them being more
important than that other symbolic image, their name. Abstract con-
ceptions, on the other hand, are only acquired by means of the words
which alone serve to confer stability upon them. This is why verbs,
adjectives, pronouns, and still more adverbs, prepositions, and con-
junctions are more intimately connected with our thinking than are
substantives.”

The disease called Aphasia, of which a little was said
in Chapter II, has let in a flood of light on the phenome-
non of Memory, by showing the number of ways in which
the use of a given object, like a word, may be lost by the
mind. We may lose our acoustic idea or our articulatory
idea of it; neither without the other will give us proper
command of the word. And if we have both, but have lost the
paths of association between the brain-centres which sup-
port the two, we are inas bad a plight. ‘Ataxic’ and ‘am-
nesic’ aphasia, ‘ word-deafness,’ and ‘associative aphasia’
are all practical losses of word-memory. We have thus, as
M. Ribot says, not memory so much as memories.t The
visual, the tactile, the muscular, the auditory memory may
all vary independently of each other in the same individual ;
and different individuals may have them developed in dif-
ferent degrees. As a rule, a man’s memory is good in the
departments in which his interest is strong; but those de-
partments are apt to be those in which his discriminative
sensibility is high, A man with a bad ear is not likely to
have practically a good musical memory, ora purblind per-
son to remember visual appearances well. Ih a later chap-
ter we shall see illustrations of the differences in men’s
imagining power.t It is obvious that the machinery of
memory must be largely determined thereby.

* Stérungen der Sprache, quoted by Ribot, Les Maladies dela M., p. 188.

+ Op. cit. chap. m1.

¢ ‘‘Those who have a good memory for figures are in general those
who know best how to handle them, that is, those who are most familiar

MEMORY. 685

Mr. Galton, in his work on English Men of Science,* has
given a very interesting collation of cases showing individ-
ual variations in the type of memory, where it is strong.
Some have it verbal. Others have it good for facts and
figures, others for form. Most say that what is to be re-
membered must first be rationally conceived and assimi-
lated.7

There is an interesting fact connected with remember-
ing, which, so far as I know, Mr. R. Verdon was the first
writer expressly to call attention to. We can set our mem-
ory as it were to retain things for a certain time, and then
let them depart.

‘¢ Individuals often remember clearly and weil up to the time when
they have to use their knowledge, and then, when it is no longer re-
quired, there follows a rapid and extensive decay of the traces. Many
schoolboys forget their lessons after they have said them, many barris-
ters forget details got up for a particular case. Thus a boy learns thir-
ty lines of Homer, says them perfectly, and then forgets them so that
he could not say five consecutive lines the next morning, and a barris-
ter may be one week learned in the mysteries of making cog-wheels,
put in the next he may be well acquainted with the anatomy of the ribs
instead.” ¢

The rationale of this fact is obscure ; and the existence
of it ought to make us feel how truly subtle are the nervous
processes which memory involves. Mr. Verdon adds that

‘‘ When the use of a record is withdrawn, and attention withdrawn
from it, and we think no more about it, we know that we experience a
feeling of relief, and we may thus conclude that energy is in some way

liberated. Jf the... attention is not withdrawn, so that we keep
the record in mind, we know that this feeling of relief does not take
-place. . . . Also we are well aware, not only that after this feeling of

relief 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 a
topic as we think, during the time in which we seem to be
merely retaining it subject to recall.

with their relations to each other and to things.” (A. Maury, Le Som-
meil et les Réves, p. 448.)

* Pp. 107-121.

+ For other examples see Hamilton’s Lectures, 11. 219, and A. Huber
Das Gediichtniss, p. 36 ff.

{ Mind, 11. 449.

686 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

‘ Practically,” says Mr. Verdon, ‘‘we sometimes keep a matter in
hand not exactly by attending to it, but by keeping our attention re-
ferred to something connected with it from time to time. Translating
this into the language of physiology, we mean that by referring atten-
tion to a part within, or closely connected with, the system of traces
[paths] required to be remembered, we keep it well fed, so that the
traces are preserved with the utmost delicacy.”

This is perhaps as near as we can get to an explana-
tion. Setting the mind to remember a thing involves a con-
tinual minimal irradiation of excitement into paths which
lead thereto, involves the continued presence of the thing
in the ‘ fringe’ of our consciousness. Letting the thing go
involves withdrawal of the irradiation, unconsciousness of
the thing, and, after a time, obliteration of the paths.

A curious peculiarity of our memory is that things are
impressed better by active than by passive repetition. I
mean that in learning by heart (for example), when we ai-
most know the piece, it pays better to wait and recollect by an .
effort from within, than to look at the book again. If we re-
eover the words in the former way, we shall probably know
them the next time; if in the latter way, we shall very likely
need the book once more. The learning by heart means the
formation of paths from a former set to a later set of cerebral
word-processes: call 1 and 2 in the diagram the processes
in question ; then when we remember by inward effort, the
path is formed by discharge from 1 to 2, just as it will af-

terwards be used. But when
we excite 2 by the eye, although
LZ the path 1—2 doubtless is then
shot through also, the phenome-
non which we are discussing
shows that the direct discharge
from 1 into 2, unaided by the
eyes, ploughs the deeper and
more permanent groove. There
Speech 1S, moreover, a greater amount
wv eri of tension accumulated in the
brain before the discharge from 1 to 2, when the latter
takes place unaided by the eye. This is proved by the gen-
eral feeling of strain in the effort to remember 2; and this

2

MEMORY. 687

also ought to make the discharge more violent and the
path more deep. A similar reason doubtless accounts for
the familiar fact that we remember our own theories, our
own discoveries, combinations, inventions, in short what-
ever ‘ideas’ originate in our own brain, a thousand times
better than exactly similar things which are communicated
to us from without.

A word, in closing, about the metaphysics imvolved
in remembering. According to the assumptions of this
book, thoughts accompany the brain’s workings, and those
thoughts are cognitive of realities. The whole relation is one
which we can only write down empirically, confessing that
no glimmer of explanation of it is yetin sight. That brains
should give rise to a knowing consciousness at all, this is the
one mystery which returns, no matter of what sort the con-
sciousness and of what sort the knowledge may be. Sen-
sations, aware of mere qualities, involve the mystery as
much as thoughts, aware of complex systems, involve it. To
the platonizing tradition in philosophy, however, this is
not so. Sensational consciousness is something quasi-ma-
terial, hardly cognitive, which one need not much wonder
at. elating consciousness is quite the reverse, and the
mystery of itis unspeakable. Professor Ladd, for exam-
ple, in his usually excellent book,* after well showing the
matter-of-fact dependence of retention and reproduction on
brain-paths, says:

‘In the study of perception psycho-physics can do much towards a
scientific explanation. It can tell what qualities of stimuli produce
certain qualities of sensations, it can suggest a principle relating the
quantity of the stimuli to the intensity of the sensation; it can investi-
gate the laws under which, by combined action of various excitations,
the sensations are combined [?] into presentations of sense ; it can show
how the time-relations of the sensations and percepts in consciousness
correspond to the objective relations in time of the stimulations. But
for that spiritual activity which actually puts together in consciousness
the sensations, it cannot even suggest the beginning of a physical
explanation. Moreover, no cerebral process can be conceived of, which
—in case it were known to exist—could possibly be regarded as a fitting
basis for this unifying actus of mind. Thus also, and even more em-
phatically, must we insist upon the complete inability of physiology to

* Physiological Psychology, pt. 1. chap. x. § 23.

688 PSYCHOLOG ¥.

suggest an explanation for conscious memory, in so far as it is memory
—that is, 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 ; or
this image of memory is the image of the percept I had at a certain
time—I do not remember precisely how long since. It would, then, be
quite contrary to the facts to hold that, when an image of memory ap-
pears in consciousness, it is recognized as belonging to a particular
original percept on account of its perceived resemblance to this percept.
The original percept does net exist and will never be reproduced. Even
more palpably false and absurd would it be to hold that any similarity
of the impressions or processes in end organs or central organs ex-
plains the act of conscious memory. Consciousness knows nothing of
such similarity ; knows nothing even of the existence of nervous im-
pressions and processes. Moreover, we could never know two impres-
sions or processes that are separated in time to be similar, without
involving the same inexplicable act of memory. It is a fact of con-
sciousness on which all possibility of connected experience and of
recorded and cumulative human knowledge is dependent that certain
phases or products of consciousness appear with a claim to stand for
(to represent)* past experiences to which they are regarded as in some
respect similar. It is this peculiar claim in consciousness which con-
stitutes the essence of an act of memory; it is this which makes the
memory wholly inexplicable as a mere persistence or recurrence of
similar impressions. It is this which makes conscious memory a
spiritual phenomenon, the explanation of which, as arising out of nery-
ous processes and conditions, is not simply undiscovered in fact, but
utterly incapable of approach by the imagination. When, then, we
speak of a physical basis of memory, recognition must be made of the
complete inability of science to suggest any physical process which can
be conceived of as correlated with that peculiar and mysterious actus
of the mind, connecting its present and its past, which constitutes the
essence of memory.”

This passage seems to me characteristic of the reigning
half-way modes of thought. It puts the difficulties in the
wrong places. At one moment it seems to admit with the
cruder sensationalists that the material of our thoughts is
independent sensations reproduced, and that the ‘ putting
together’ of these sensations would be knowledge, if it
could only be brought about, the only mystery being as to
the what ‘actus’ can brtng it about. At another moment it
seems to contend that even this sort of ‘ combining’ would
not be knowledge, because certain of the elements con-

* Why not say ‘know ’?—W. J.

MEMORY. 689

nected 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 and
unsatisfied intellectual desires. But why not ‘pool’ our
mysteries into one great mystery, the mystery that brain-
processes occasion knowledge at all? It is surely no dif-
ferent mystery to feel myself by means of one brain-pro-
cess writing at this table now, and by means of a different
brain-process a year hence to remember myself writing. All
that psychology can do is to seek to determine what the
several brain-processes are ; and this, in a wretchedly im-
perfect way, is what such writings as the present chapter
have begun to do. But of ‘images reproduced,’ and ‘ claim-
ing to represent, and ‘ put together by a unifying actus,’
I have been silent, because such expressions either signify
nothing, or they are only roundabout ways of simply say-
ing that the past is known when certain brain-conditions
are fulfilled, and it seems to me that the straightest and
shortest way of saying that is the best.

For a history of opinion about Memory, and other biblio-
graphic references, I must refer to the admirable little
monograph on the subject by Mr. W. H. Burnham in the
American Journal of Psychology, vols. 1 and m. Useful
books are: D. Kay’s Memory, What It Is, and How to
Improve It (1888); and F. Fauth’s Das Gedichtniss, Studie
zu einer Pidagogik, etc., 1888.

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