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AMERICAN  SCIENCE  SERIES-ADVANCED   COURSE 


THE    PRINCIPLES 


OP 


PSYCHOLOGY 


BY 

WILLIAM  JAMES 

/  y 
PROFESSOR   OF   PSYCHOLOGY   IN    HARVARD   UNIVERSITY 


IN  TWO   VOLUMES 


VOL.  I 


NEW  YORK 
HENRY   HOL'J'  AND   COMPANY 


COPYRIGHT,    1890 

BY 
HENRY    HOLT    &    CO 


COPYRIGHT,     1918 

BY 

ALICE    H.     JAMES 
August,  1931 


BF 


I8<f0 

YJ 


PRINTED    IN    THE 
UNITED    STATES    OF    AMERICA 


TO 
MY    DEAR   FRIEND 

FRANCOIS    PILLON. 

AS   A   TOKEN   OF   AFFECTION, 

AND   AN   ACKNOWLEDGMENT   OF   WHAT  I  OWE 
TO   THE 

CRITIQUE  PHILOSOPHIQUE. 


PREFACE. 


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  aesthetic  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  etivas  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  23,  24,  25, 
and  26,  and  thence  to  return  to  the  first  volume  again. 
Chapter  20,  on  Space-perception,  is  a  terrible  thing,  which, 
unless  written  with  all  that  detail,  could  not  be  fairly 
treated  at  all.  An  abridgment  of  it,  called  '  The  Spatial 
Quale,'  which  appeared  in  the  Journal  of  Speculative 
Philosophy,  vol.  xm.  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.  Every  natural  science  assumes  cer- 


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  it  is  to  keep  the  results  of  idealism  out  of 
physics. 

I  have  therefore  treated  our  passing  thoughts  as  inte- 


PREFACE.  Vll 

gers,  and  regarded  tlie  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  Yolkmar's 
Lehrbuch  der  Psychologic  (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,  Benouvier,  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. 

PA09 

THE  SCOPE  OF  PSYCHOLOGY, 1 

Mental  Manifestations  depend  on  Cerebral  Conditions,  1. 
Pursuit  of  ends  and  choice  are  the  marks  of  Mind's  presence,  6. 

CHAPTER  II. 
THE  FUNCTIONS  OF  THE  BRAIN, 12 

Reflex,  semi-reflex,  and  voluntary  acts,  12.  The  Frog's  nerve- 
centres,  14.  General  notion  of  the  hemispheres,  20.  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,  73.  Conclusions,  78. 

CHAPTER  III. 
ON  SOME  GENERAL  CONDITIONS  OF  BRAIN-ACTIVITY,         .    81 

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

CHAPTER  IV. 
HABIT, 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.  Reasons  for  it,  133.  Reasons 
against  it,  138. 

iz 


X  CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER  VI. 

P40B 

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  hypothesis,  180.  Conclusion,  182. 

CHAPTER  VII. 

THE  METHODS  AND  SNARES  OF  PSYCHOLOGY,      .        .        .  183 

Psychology  is  a  natural  Science,  183.  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  «.  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,  .  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  material,  265.  Thought  and  lan 
guage,  267.  Consciousness  is  cognitive,  271.  The  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.  J 

CHAPTER  X. 
THE  CONSCIOUSNESS  OF  SELF,      ...  291 

The  Empirical  Self  or  Me,  291.     Its  constituents,  292*    The 

material  self,  292.    The  Social  Self,  293.    The  Spiritual  Self,  296 

acuity  of  apprehending  Thought  as  a  purely  spiritual  activity' 


CONTENTS.  XI 

PAGK 

299.  Emotions  of  Self,  305.  Rivalry  and  conflict  of  one's  different 
selves,  309.  Their  hierarchy,  313.  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  Association ist 
theory,  350.  3)  The  Transcendentalist  theory,  360.  The  muta 
tions  of  the  Self,  373.  Insane  delusions,  375.  Alternating  selves, 
379.  Mediumships  or  possessions,  393.  Summary,  400. 

CHAPTER  XI. 
ATTENTION, 402 

Its  neglect  by  English  psychologists,  402.  Description  of  it, 
404.  To  how  many  things  can  we  attend  at  ouce?  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,  453.  Acquired  Inattention,  455. 

CHAPTER  XII. 
CONCEPTION, 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  sensations  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.  The  sensation  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,  523.  The  perception  of  likeness,  528. 
The  magnitude  of  differences,  530.  The  measurement  of  dis- 


xii  CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

criminative  sensibility  :  Weber's  law,  533.     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,  553.  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, 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,  653.  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. 


CHAPTEK  I. 

THE  SCOPE  OF  PSYCHOLOGY. 

PSYCHOLOGY  is  the  Science  of  Mental  Life,  both  of  its 
phenomena  and  of  their  conditions.  The  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  mod&d  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 
Keasoning,  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  in  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  aad  bricks.  The  '  association- 
ist'  schools  of  Herbart  in  Germany,  and  of  Hume  the 
Mills  and  Bain  in  Britain  have  thus  constructed  a  psychology 
ivithout  a  soid  by  taking  discrete  'ideas,'  faint  or  vivid, 
and  showing  how,  by  their  cohesions,  repulsions,  and  forms 


2  PSYCHOLOGY. 

of  succession,  such  tilings  as  reminiscences,  perceptions, 
emotions,  volitions,  passions,  theories,  and  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  Kecollective 
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  01 
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/  knoics  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  PSYCHOLOGY.  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  witl 
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  exist  absolutely,  but  ivorks  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  cue,  and  that  something  must  al 
ways  precede  and  remind  us  of  whatever  we  are  to  recollect 
"  An  idea  /"  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,  jet  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  dc  ? 

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


4  PSYCHOLOGY. 

a  copy,  somewhat  mutilated  and  altered,  of  the  order  of 
j  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- 
Ariences  of  the  body  are  thus  one  of  the  conditions  of  the 
llfaculty  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  j 
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 
i  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 
•jbook  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 
i  account.      The  spiritualist  and  the  associationist  must  both 
\be  'centralists,'  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.  6 

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  parteante  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  I  do  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  ivhich  is  not  accompanied  orfolloiued  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  o| 
articulation  in  him,  but  will  some  day  make  him  speak,  01 
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-  I 
sorbed   in    other    things.      The    performances   of    animal 
instinct   seern   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 
m,  chap,  in,  §§  9,  12. 


6  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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,' 
j  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  into  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.  Blo~w 
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  Borneo  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.  Borneo  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  jf  breath  will  soon  make  him  also  long  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

activity  from  its  outset  and  soliciting  or  drawing  it  into 
being  by  a  sort  of  vis  afronte.  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  f of 
their  attainment  arq  thus  the  mark  and  criterion  of  the  presence 
of  mentality  in  a  phenomenon.  We  all  use  this  test  to  dis 
criminate  between  an  intelligent  and  a  mechanical  per 
formance.  Wo  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  have  a 
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/or  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  PSYCHO  LOOT.  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  physiologist  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  j  / 
left  foot  to  the  spot  and  wipe  the  offending  material  away. 

Pfliiger  and  Lewes  reason  from  such  facts  in  the  follow 
ing  way  :  If  the  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  barrel 
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  natural 
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  lobes  and  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  mental  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 
y  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- 
I  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. 

*  Zur  Analysis  der  Wirklichkeit,  p.  489. 


THE  SCOPE  OF  PSYCHOLOGY.  11 

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  shoiv  a  choice  of    /y 
means,  can  be  called  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  i 
they  directly  subserve   consciousness,  it  will   be  well   to  j 
give  some  little  account. 

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


CHAPTER  II. 
THE  FUNCTIONS  OF  THE  BRAIN. 

IF  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  light, 
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 
lachrymation  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.  It  is  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  tve  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  oi'  physiological  mechanism  pure 


14  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  PROG'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 
FIO.  \.—c  H,  cerebral  hemispheres  and  the  lower  lobes.  This 

Hemispheres;  O  Th,     ,  .  .,,     ,  T  i       i  •  j 

Optic  fhaiaini;  o  L,  sharp   conception   will    have   didactic   ad- 

Optic    Lobes;      C6,  „  .,      .          „,  ,  ,• 

Cerebellum ;    M  o,  vantages,    lor   it   is  olten  very    instructive 

Medulla  Oblonjrata;   .  .,,  •         i  <•  i  j 

s  c,  spinal  Cord,  to  start  with  too  simple  a  iormula  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  distinc 
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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  Eobin,  on  tickling 
the  breast  of  a  criminal  an  hour  after  decapitation,  saw  the 
arm  and  hand  move  towards  the  spot.  Of  the  lower  func 
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 
iarther  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 

lexes  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 

irns  over  from   his  back;  but  still   drops  off  his  tilted 

' . 

be  said  that  this  particular  cut  commonlv  proves  fatal      The 
he  rare  cases  which  survive. 


THE  FUNCTIONS  OF  TUB  BRAIN.  17 

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, 
crawling  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,  etc. 
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  contractions  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- 
arrangernent  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  in  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. 

*  I  confine  myself  to  the  frog  for  simplicity's  sake.  In  higher  animals, 
especially  the  ape  and  man,  it  would  seem  as  if  not  only  determinate  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,  (7, 
below  the  hemispheres  to  a  direct  circuit  from  sense- 
organ  to  muscle  along  the  line  S...C...Moi  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  eartli  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  catarrlial 
reminiscences,  which  prevail  over 
the  instigations  of  sense,  and  make  FlQ* 

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  higheJ  animals  have  so 
to  deal ;  and  the  more  complex  the  features,  the  higher  we 
call  the  animals.  The  fewer  of  his  acts,  i/ien,  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  poi  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  attractive-ness  of  the  bait,  and 
of  all  volition  to  remain  hungry  a  little  while  longer, 
is  the  direct  measure  of  his  lowness  in  the  mental  scale. 
And  those  fishes  which,  like  our  cunners  and  sculpins, 
are  no  sooner  thrown  back  from  the  hook  into  the  water, 
than  they  automatically  seize  the  hook  again,  would  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.  Copulation  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  aesthetic  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 
fyorn  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  be  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  ivhich  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 

*  I  hope  that  the  reader  will  take  no  umbrage  at  my  so  mixing  the 

\  physical  and  mental,  and  talking  of  reflex  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, 

I  and  that  whilst  so  conceiving  it  one  need  make  no  mention  of  •  ideas,' 
I  yet  suspect  that  point  of  view  of  being  an  unreal  abstraction.  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  '  ideationa] 
orocess'  for  'idea.' 


FUNCTIONS  OF  THE  BRAIN. 


FIG.  3. 


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  sl  in  the  hemispheres  ;  let 

the  feeling  of  the  arm's  exten 
sion  also  send  up  a  current 
which  leaves  a  trace  of  itself, 
in1  ;  let  tli3  burnt  finger  leave 
an  analogous  trace,  sa  ;  and 
let  the  movement  of  retrac 
tion  leave  m2.  These  four 
processes  will  now,  by  virtue 
of  assumption  2),  be  associ 
ated  together  by  the  path 
6-1  —  ra1—  s2  —  m2  ,  running  from 

+l,a  fivc-f  fn  fLa  Incf  GO  -fTmf  if 
tne  first  tO  tlie  last»  SO  ttiat  " 

anything  touches   off  s1,  ideas 
of  the  extension,  of  the  burnt 
finger,  and  of  the   retraction  will  pass  in  rapid  succession 


FIG.  4.—  The  dotted  lines  stand  for  affer- 
ent  paths,  the  broken  lines  for  paths 

for  effe"eutepathtses;  the  entlre  lilies 


26  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  mn ,  which  natively  is  sensa 
tion  sn's  partner,  becomes  through  the  hemispheres  the 
partner  of  sensation  s1 ,  s2  or  s3 .  It  is  like  the  great  corn- 
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 

*  I  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  o* 


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  place,  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  with  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  con 
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- 

sensations  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  forebruiu,  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  like  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 
dements.  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 
bomunculus. 

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.  "All nervous  centres,"  says  Dr.  Hugh- 
lings  Jackson,f  "  from  the  lowest  to  the  very  highest  (the 

*Gescnichte  des  Materialismus,  3d  ed.,  n.  p.  345. 
f  West  Riding  Asylum  Reports,  1876,  p.  267. 


30  PSYCHOLOGY. 


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  BftAIN.  31 

spheres  were  not  locally  separated,  but  carried  on  each  by 
the  aid  of  the  whole  organ.  Hitzig  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 
Kolando,  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  oi  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  i&  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  movements  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  reflex  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.  At  first  it  seems  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  Fra^ois-Franck's 
'  Le9ons  sur  les  Fonctions  Motrices  du  Cerveau  '  (1887),  Le?on  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  straight  forward.  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  slight  chloroformization 
will  reproduce  the  disturbances,  even  then.  There  is  a  cer 
tain  appearance  of  ataxic  in-coordination  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,  II,  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.  Dr0  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  all  the  processes 
of  innervation  towards  the  side  opposed  to  the  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  Physiologic  des  Grosshirns;;   Pflliger'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 


FIG.  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  :  PflUger's  Arcbiv,  XLII.  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,  f 


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,  a~e,  etc.  Figs.  8  and  9  show  the  result  of 

*  '  Hemiplegia '  means  one-sided  palsy. 

^  f  Philosophical  Transactions,  vol.  179,  pp.  6.  10  (1888).  In  a  later  paper 
(HM.  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 


PSYCHOLOGY. 


169  cases  carefully  studied  by  Exner.     The  parts  shaded 
are  regions  where  lesions  produced  no  motor  disturbance. 


FIG.  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 


FIG.  9.— Right  Hemisphere  of  Human  Brain.    Mesial  Surface. 


the  cortical  substance  is  profound  in  man,  the  paralysis  is 
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    '  Pyramidenbalm '    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  nhown  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 ;  or  a  few  meaningless  stock  phrases  form  his  only  speech  ; 
or  else  he  speaks  incoherently  and  confusedly,  mispronounc- 


38 


PSYCHOLOGY. 


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- 

Cort/ca/ 


•M  spinal  __J>. 

FIG.  lO.-Sehematic  Transverse  Section  of  Brain  showing  Motor  Strand  -After 

-Ldinger. 

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. 
Broca  first  noticed  this  fact  in  1861,  and  since  then  the 
gyrus  has  gone  by  the  name  of  Broca's  convolution.  The 


Fio.  11.— Schematic  Profile 
destru 


jhematic  Profile   of   T,eft  Hemisphere,  with  the  parts  shaded  whose 
ction  causes  motor  ('  Broca  ')  and  sensory  ('  Weruicke  ')  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  then 
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  gov 
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. 

Yictims  of  motor  aphasia  generally  have  other  disorders. 
One  which  interests  us  in  this  connection  has  been  called 
agraphia:  they  have  lost  the  power  to  ivrite.  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,  i.e.  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  associate 
ing  these  together.  But  their  minute  discussion  belongs  to 
medicine  rather  than  to  general  psychology,  and  I  can  only 
use  them  here  to  illustrate  the  principles  of  motor  locali 
zation,  f  Under  the  heads  of  sight  and  hearing  I  shall 
have  a  little  more  to  say. 

*  Nothuagel  und  Naunyn  ;  Die  Localization  in  den  Geliirnkrankheiten 
(Wiesbaden,  1887),  p.  34. 

f  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  vn. 


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  denning  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  angular  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  his  ruin  as  an  authority.  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  resti 
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  ccelo  in  these  respects 
with  certain  simply  blinded  pigeons  who  were  kept  with 

*  The  history  up  to  1885  may  be  found  in  A.  Christian! :  Zur  Physi 
ologie  des  Gehirnes  'Berlin.  18sT>\. 


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  is  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  in  a  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-Sequard  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. 
Christian!' s  observations  and  discussions  seem  conclusively 

*  Pfl  tiger's  Archiv,  vol.  44,  p.  176.  Munk  (Berlin  Academy  Sitzsungs- 
berichte,  1889,  xxxi)  returns  to  the  charge,  denying  the  extirpations  of 
Schrader  to  be  complete  :  ' '  Microscopic  portions  of  the  SelispMre  must 


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  retinae,  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 
cal.  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  loth  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.  If  a  dog  has  right  hemiamblyopia, 
say,  and  two  pieces  of  meat  are  hung  before  him  at  once, 
he  invariably  turns  first  to  the  one  on  his  left.  But  if  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.  Christian!:  Zur  Physiol.  d.  Gehirnes  (Berlin,  1885), chaps,  n,  in,  iv. 
H.  Munk  :  Berlin  Akad.  Stzgsb.  1884,  xxiv. 


FUNCTIONS  OF  THE  BRAIN. 


45 


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


FIG.  12.  FIG.  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  Sehsphare  more  than  once,  and  found  a  sort 
of  crude  indiscriminating  sight  of  objects  to  return  in  a 
few  Aveeks.*  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  obstacles.  This  no  really 
blind  dog  would  do.  Luciani  tested  his  dogs  when  hungry 
(a  condition  which  sharpens  their  attention)  by  strewing 

*  Luciani  und  Scppili :  Die  Functions-Localization  auf  dev  Grosshirn- 
rinde  (Deutsch  von  Fraeukel),  Leipzig,  1886,  Dogs  M,  N,  and  S.  Goltz  in 
Pfluger's  Archiv,  vol.  84,  pp.  490-6;  vol.  42,  p.  454.  Cf.  also  Munk:  Berlin 
Akad.  Stzgsb.  1886,  vii,  vm,  pp.  113-121,  and  Loeb:  Pfluger'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  producing  complete  blindness  by  complete  extirpa 
tion  of  his  '-Sehsphare.'  *  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,  vii,  vm,  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  ID  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  in  man.  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  oi 

*  H.  Munk:  Functionen  der  Grosshirnrinde  (Berlin,  1881),  pp.  36-40 
Ferrier  :  Functions,  etc.,2ded.,  chap,  ix,  pt.  i.  Brown  and  Schaefer. 
Philos.  Transactions,  vol.  179,  p.  321.  Luciani  u.  Seppili,  op.  cit.  pp. 
131-138.  Lannegrace  found  traces  of  sight  with  both  occipital  lobes  de 
stroyed,  and  in  one  monkey  even  when  angular  gyri  and  occipital  lobes 
were  destroyed  altogether.  His  paper  is  in  the  Archives  de  Medeciue 
Experimentale  for  January  and  March,  1889.  I  only  know  it  from  the 
abstract  in  the  Neurologisches  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

fibres  proceeding  from  the  occipital  lobe.  There  seem  to 
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  strict  application  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,  f  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  limitation  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. 

t  For  cases  see  Flecbsig  :  Die  Leitungsbahnen  iu  Gehiru  u.  Riickenmark 
(Leipzig,  1876),  pp.  112,  272;  Exner'sUntersuchungen,  etc.,  p.  83  ;  Ferrier  s 
Localization,  etc.,  p.  11;  Francois-Franck's  Cerveau  Moteur,  p.  63,  note. 

|  E.  C.  Seguin  :  Hemianopsia  of  Cerebral  Origin,  in  Journal  of  Nervous 
and  Mental  Disease,  vol.  xnr.  p.  30.  Notbuagel  und  Naunyn  :  Ueber  die 
Localization  der  Gehirnkrankbeiten  (Wiesbaden,  1887),  p.  10. 


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 


L  T.  r. 


R.N. 


L.O.S  L  0.0 

FIQ.  15.— Scheme  of  the  mechanism  of  vision,  after  Seguin.  The  cuneus  convolution 
(0u)  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.  F  O  are 
the  intra-hemispheric  optical  fibres.  P.  O.  C.  is  the  region  of  the  lower  optic  cen 
tres  (corpora  geuiculata  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  2' of  the  rteht 
retina;  and  F.  C.  8  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

cases  of  extensive  injury  about  the  fronto-teinporal  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,  etc. 
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  wow-optical  images  which  makes  us  mentally 
blind,  just  as  it  is  that  of  our  wow-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,  I  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  sufficient  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. 
t  Archiv  f.  Psychiatric,  vol.  21,  p.  222. 


FUNCTIONS  OF  THE  BRAIN.  51 

sight  altogether.*  Kecent  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 
needj  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  (loc.  cit.  p.  22)  says  :  "  Dies  trifft  aber  niclitzu."  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  that 
I  do  not  know  whether  it  is  an  observation  of  fact  or  an  a  priori  as 
sumption. 

f  In  a  case  published  by  C.  S.  Freund :  Archiv  f.  Psychiatric,  vol.  xx,  the 
occipital  lobes  were  injured,  but  their  cortex  was  not  destroyed,  on  both 
sides.  There  was  still  vision.  Of.  pp.  291-5. 

\  I  say  '  need, '  for  I  do  not  of  course  deny  the  possible  coexistence  of  the 
two  symptoms.  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  optZsche  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.  Wilbraud,  whose  painstaking  monograph  on  mental 
blindness  was  referred  to  a  moment  ago,  gives  none  but  a  priori  reasons  for 
his  belief  that  the  optical  'Erinnerungsfeld  '  must  be  locally  distinct  from 
the  Wahrnehmungsfeld  (cf.  pp.  84,  93).  The  a  priori  reasons  are  really  the 
other  way.  Mauthner  ('  Gehirn  u.  Auge  '  (1881),  p.  487  ff.)  tries  to  show 
that  the  '  mental  blindness'  of  Muuk's  dogs  and  apes  after  occipital  mutila 
tion  was  not  such,  but  real  dimness  of  sight.  The  best  case  of  mental 
blindness  yet  reported  is  that  by  Lissauer,  as  above.  The  reader  will  also 
do  well  to  read  Bernard  :  De  1'Aphasie  (1885)  chap,  v;  Ballet :  Le  Laugage 
Interieur  (1886),  chap,  vin  ;  and  Jas.  Koss'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  apraxia  is 
the  result.  The  commonest  articles  are  not  understood. 
The  patient  will  put  his  breeches  on  one  shoulder  and  his 
hat  upon  the  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  ;  f  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  in 
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  Lelirb.  d.  Gehirnkrankhciten  vol   n  p 
554  (1881). 

f  The  latest  account  of  them  is  the  paper  '  Uber  die  optischen  Cenlren 
Bahnen'  by  von  Monakow  in  the  Archiv  fur  Psychiatric,  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. 


FIG.  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.' f 
Terrible  recriminations  have,  as  usual,  ensued  between  the 
investigators,  Ferrier  denying  that  Brown  and  Schaefer's 
ablations  were  complete,  J  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. 
f  Philos.  Trans.,  vol.  179,  p.  312. 
$  Brain,  vol.  xi.  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  which  he  can  understand,  only  not  talk ;  and 
to  ascribe  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,  f  In  the  seven  cases 
oipure  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.  In  a  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. 

f  '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  ultimate  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  understanding  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  visucd  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  Fig. 
17).  With  this  result  Dr.  Starr's  analysis  of  purely  sensory 
cases  agrees. 


Pio.  li. 

In  a  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. f  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  Koss,  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.  eit.,  plates. 

f  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. 


Smell. 


Everything  conspires  to  point  to  the  median  descending 
part  of  the  temporal  lobes  as  being  the  organs  of  smell. 
Even  Terrier  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 
LucianiandSeppili's  diagram  of  the  dog's  smell-centre.*  Of 


*For  details,  see  Ferrier's  'Functions,'  chap,  ix.  pt.  m,  and  Chas. 
K.  Mills :  Transactions  of  Congress  of  American  Physicians  and  Sur 
geons,  1888,  vol.  i.  p.  278. 


58 


PSYCHOLOGY. 

Taste 


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

Touch. 

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


Fia.  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,  etc.  Fer- 
rier  meanwhile  denied  that  there  was  any  true  anaesthesia 
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.*  Munkf  and  Schiff  J,  on  the 

*  Functions  of  the  Brain,  chap.  x.  §  14. 
tUeber  die  Functionen  d.  Grosshirnrinde  (1881),  p.  50 
JLezioni  di   Fisiologia  sperirnentale   sul   sistema  nervoso  encefalico 
(1  73),  p.  527  ff.     Also  'Brain/  vol.  ix.  p.  298. 


FUNCTIONS  OF  THE  BRAIN.  69 

contrary,  conceive  of  the  '  motor  zone '  as  essentially  sen 
sory,  and  in  different  ways  explain  the  motor  disorders  as 
secondary  results  of  the  anaesthesia  which  is  always  there, 
Munk  calls  the  motor  zone  the  Fiihlsphare  of  the  animal's 
limbs,  etc.,  and  makes  it  coordinate  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  anaesthesia  from  motor-zone  ablationsv 
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  anaesthesia,  for  in  certain  rare  cases  they  have  been 
observed  to  exist  not  only  without  insensibility,  but  with 
actual  hypersesthesia  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,f  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  insensibility  is  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,J  and 
Horsley  and  Schaefer  consider  it  by  no  means  necessarily 


*Bechterew  (Pfluger's  Archiv.,  vol.  35,  p.  137)  found  no  anaesthesia  in 
a  cat  with  motor  symptoms  from  ablation  of  sigmoid  gyrus.  Luciani  got 
hypersesthesia  coexistent  with  cortical  motor  defect  in  a  dog,  by  simulta 
neously  hemisecting  the  spinal  cord  (Luciani  u.  Seppili,  op.  cit.  p.  234). 
Goltz  frequently  found  hyperaesthesia  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). 

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

|  Functions,  p.  375, 


60  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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

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


FIG.  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.ll  The  lower  we  go  in  the  animal  scale  the 


*  Pp.  15-17.        f  Luciani  u.  Seppili,  op.  cit.  pp.  275-288. 
t  Op.  cit.  p.  18.  §  Trans,  of  Congress,  etc.,  p.  272. 

j  See  Exner's  Unters.  lib.  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  anaesthesia  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."  f  He  fails,  however,  to  convince  more  competent 
critics  than  the  present  writer,:]:  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,  iv  and  chap,  x,  §§  6  to  9. 
f  Op.  cit.  p.  17. 

\  E.g.  Starr,  loc.  cit.  p  272;  Leyden,  Beitrilge  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  midtvards  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. 
G-oltz  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 

kascible  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  symptoms  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  sensorial 
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."  f 

*  Philos.  Trans.,  vol.  179,  p.  3. 

f  Trans,  of  Congress  of  Am.  Phys.  and  Surg.  1888,  vol.  i.  p.  343. 
Beevor  and  Horsley's  paper  on  electric  stimulation  of  the  monkey's  bruin 
is  the  most  beautiful  work  yet  done  for  precision.  See  Phil.  Trans.,  vol. 
179,  p.  205,  especially  the  plates. 


64 


PSYCHOLOGY. 


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  ;f  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.).  J  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  en  p.  30  is  on  the  whole 
most  satisfactorily  corroborated 
by  subsequent  objective  research. 
The  highest  centres  do  probably 

FIG.  21. -Dog's  motor  centres,  right  contain    nothing     but    arrangements 

hemisphere,  according  to  Paneth.  y 

—The  points  of  the  motor  region  for    representing     impressions     and 

are  correlated  as   follows   with-'  "  "  * 

mnscies:  the  loops  with  the  orbi-  movements,  and  other  arrangements 

culans  palpebrarum;  the  plain  .  * 

crosses twith  the  flexor,  the  crosses  for     coupling      the     activity     O/     these 

inscribed  in  circles  with  the  ex-  J  Jf      "V  ^ 

tensor,  digitorum  communis  of  arrangements    together. §      Currents 

the  fore-paw;    the  plain  circles  ° 

with    the    abductor    poiiicis  pouring  in  from  the  sense-organs 

longus;  the  doutle  crosses  with    r  3 

the  extensor  communis  of  the  first    excite    some     arrangements, 

hind-limb. 

*  Pfltiger's  Archiv,  vol.  37,  p.  523  (1885). 

f  By  Lays  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'  (Grundzuge  d.  Pbysiologischen 
Psychologic,  3d  ed..  vol.  i.  p.  233  If.),  but  1  confess  myself  unable  to  appre 
hend  clearly  the  Wundtian  philosophy  so  far  as  this  word  enters  into  it.  se 
must  be  contented  with  this  bare  reference.— Until  quite  recently  it  wae 


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  Panethf  have 
shown  that  by  cutting  round  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  ;  J  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   HEMISPHEBES. 

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 
in  any  good  hypnotic  subject  by  a  bare  wave  of  his  opera- 
common  to  talk  of  an  '  ideational  centre  '  as  of  something  distinct  from  the 
aggregate  of  other  centres.  Fortunately  this  custom  is  already  on  the 
wane. 

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

f  Ptiiiger's  Archiv,  vol.  44,  p.  544. 

\  I  ought  to  add,  however,  that  Fra^ois-Franck  (Fonctious  Motrices, 
p.  370)  got,  in  two  dogs  and  a  cat,  a  different  result  from  this  sort  of  '  cir 
fjumvallation."' 


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,  f  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,  i.e.  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.$  If  there 

*  For  this  word,  see  T.  K.  Clifford's  Lectures  and  Essays  (1879),  vol.  n. 
p.  72. 

f  See  below,  Chapter  VIII. 

\  Cf.  Ferrier's  Functions,  pp.  120,  147,  414.  See  also  Vulpian:  Le9ons 
sur  la  Physiol.  du  Syst.  Nerveux,  p.  548;  Luciani  u.  Seppili,  op.  cit.  pp. 
404-5;  H.  Maudsley:  Physiology  of  Mind  (1876),  pp.  138  ff.,  197  ff.,  and 
241  ff.  In  G.  H.  Lewes's  Physical  Basis  of  Mind,  Problem  IV: '  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  ive 
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- 
Sequard  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  naccidity  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  vase-motor  centres,  centres  for  erec- 


68  PSYCHOLOGY. 

tion,  for  control  of  the  sphincters,  etc.,  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 
uew  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,  f 
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  day4  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  :  Pfltiger's  Archiv,  vol.  8,  p.  460;  Freusberg:  ibid.  vol.  10,  p.  174 

f  Goltz :  Verrichtungen  des  Grosshirns,  p.  78. 

$  Loeb  :  Pfltiger's  Archiv,  vol.  89,  p.  276. 

§  Ibid.  p.  289. 

||  Schrader :  ibid.  vol.  44,  p.  21& 


FUNCTIONS  OF  THE  BRAIN.  69 

of  the  system ;  *  and  Brown-Sequard  has  for  years  been 
accumulating  examples  to  show  how  far  its  influence  ex 
tends,  f  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.  J 

On  the  other  hand,  if  we  admit  no  re-education  of  cen 
tres,  we  not  only  fly  in  the  face  of  an  a  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  ivhich  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.  §  If  the  opposite  side  were  really  the  seat  of  the 
restored  function,  the  original  palsy  should  have  appeared 
again  and  been  permanent.  But  it  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,  in,  vi;  also  in 
Brain,  vol.  xi.  p.  361. 

f  Brown-Sequard  has  given  a  resume  of  his  opinions  in  the  Archives 
de  Physiologic  for  Oct.  1889,  5rne.  Serie,  vol.  I.  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,1 
p.  154  ff.,  and  also  '  Nature/  vol.  27,  p.  419  ff. 

§  E.g.  Herzen,  Herman  u.  Schwalbe's  Jahres-bericht  for  1886,  PhysioL 
AJbth.  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,  J  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  a  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 

*  Fran9ois-Franck :  op.  cit.  p.  382.    Results  are  somewhat  contradictory. 

t  Pfluger's  Archiv,  vol.  42,  p.  419. 

j  Neurologisches  Centralblatt,  1889,  p.  372. 

§  Op.  cit.  p.  387.  See  pp.  378  to  388  for  a  discussion  of  the  whole 
question.  Compare  also  Wundt's  Physiol.  Psych.,  3d  ed.,  i.  225  ff.,  and 
Luciani  u.  Seppili,  pp.  243,  293. 


FUNCTIONS  OP  THE  BRAIN.  71 

weeks  into  the  same  canine  muscles  into  which  it  used  to 
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  ivithin  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.  If  they  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  of  exit 
again,  the  thrill  of  satisfaction  which  the  consciousness 
connected  with  the  whole  residual  brain  then  receives  wil] 
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  that  that  is  one  of  its  essential 
uses,  into  an  unshakable  conviction. 


72  PSYCHOLOGY. 

a  good  deal  more  to  say  upon  the  subject  when  we  come  to 
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  p'irt  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   OP   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  oi  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  f  give  an  idea  quite 
different  from  the  picture  of  these  creatures  which  is 
classically  current.  Steiner's  J  observations  on  frogs 

*  Pfltiger's  Archiv,  vol.  41,  p.  75  (1887).       \lbid.,  vol.  44,  p.  175  (1889) 
%  Untersuchuugeii  liber  die  Physiologic  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.  Steinerf  and  Yulpian  have  re 
marked  an  even  greater  vivacity  in  fishes  deprived  of  their 
hemispheres.  Vulpian  says  of  his  brainless  carps:):  that 
three  days  after  the  operation  one  of  them  darted  at  food 
and  at  a  knot  tied  on  the  end  of  a  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 


*  LOG.  cit.  pp.  80,  82-3.     Schrader  also  found  a  biting-rettex  developed 
when  the  medulla  oblongata  is  cut  through  just  behind  the  cerebellum, 
f  Berlin  Akad.  Sitzungsberichte  for  1886. 
j  Comptes  Rendus,  vol.  102,  p.  90. 


74  PSYCHOLOGY. 

her  mouth."*  Already  on  pp.  9-10,  as  the  reader  may  re* 
member,  we  instanced  those  adaptations  of  conduct  to  ne^ 
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  (Recti)  or  an  equally  distant  table  to  fly  to,  she  always 
gives  decided  preference  to  the  table.  Indeed  she  chooses 
the  table  even  if  it  is  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."  f 

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.  Eats  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  1'Acad.  d.  Sciences,  vol.  102,  p.  1530. 
f  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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.f 
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:  Ptiflger's  Archiv,  vol.  42,  p.  447  ;  Schrader:  ibid.  vol.  44,  p. 
219  ff .  It  is  possible  that  this  symptom  may  be  an  effect  of  traumatic 
inhibition,  however. 

f  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 
(Pfltiger's  Archiv,  vol.  37,  p.  202).  In  the  Neurologisches  Centralblatt 
for  1889,  p.  513,  Bechterew  returns  to  the  subject  on  Soltmann's  side  with 
out,  however,  noticing  Paneth's  work. 


FUNCTIONS  OF  THE  BRAIN.  77 

to  be  tabulae  rasce  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  pays  none  to  her  young.  The 
brood  may  follow  the  mother  ceaselessly  calling  for  food, 
but  they  might  as  well  ask  it  from  a  stone.  .  .  .  The  hemi- 


*  Milnsterberg  (Die  Willenshaudlung,  1888,  p.  134)  challenges  Meynert's 
scheme  in  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  reflex  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  schesra  postulates  must 
in  the  nature  of  things  antedate  recollection.  Bit  it  s^oa  to  me  that 
Munsterberg's  rejection  of  the  scheme  may  pcsaibl/  be  correct  as  regards 
reflexes  from  the  lower  centres.  Everywhere  in  this  department  0*  P«v 
chogenesis  we  are  made  to  feel  how  ignorant  wt,  really  an,. 


78  PSYCHOLOGY. 

Bphereless  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,  f 

*  Pfltiger's  Archiv,  vol.  44,  p.  230-1. 

f  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-consciousness,  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.  ix.  Goltz  (Nervencentren  des  Frosches 
1869,  pp.  102-130)  thinks  that  the  frog's  cord  has  no  adaptative  power.  This 
may  be  the  case  in  such  experiments  as  his,  because  the  beheaded  frog'a 


FUNCTIONS  OF  THE  BRAIN.  79 

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,  f  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.  Sitzuugsberichte,  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  paths  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. 

f  See  Schrader's  Observations,  loc.  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. 

THE  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 
led  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,  oui 
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 


*  I  shall  myself  in  later  places  indulge  in  much  of  this  schematization. 
The  reader  will  understand  once  for  all  that  it  is  symbolic;  and  that  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  p* 
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  stimuli^  which  itiould  be  inadequate  by 
itself  to  excite  a  nerve-centre  to  effective  discharge  may,  by  acting 
ivith  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 
ness  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.  gesanimt.  Physiol.,  1873,  p.  458.  Stirling: 
Leipzig  Acad.  Berichte,  1875,  p.  372  (Journal  of  Physiol.,  1875).  J 
Ward :  Archiv  f.  (Anut.  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.  i/Thl.' 
u.  p.  31.  Frangors-Franck  :  Lecons  sur  les  Fonctions  tuotrices  du  Cer- 


GENERAL   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 : 

"  If  wo  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  following 
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  ft'.,  339.— For  the  process  of  summation  in  nerves  and  muscles, 
cf.  Hermann:  ibid.  Thl.  i.  p.  109,  and  vol.  i.  p.  40.  Also  Wundt: 
Physiol.  Psych. ,  i.  243  ff . ;  Ricliet  :  Travaux  du  Laboratoire  de  Marey,  1877, 
p.  97  ;  L'Homme  et  1'Intelligence,  pp.  24  ff.,  468 ;  Revue  Philosophique, 
t.  xxi.  p.  564.  Kronecker  u.  Hall:  Archiv  f.  (Anat.  u.)  Physiol.,  1879; 
Schoulein :  ibid.  1882,  p.  357.  Sertoli  (Hofinann  and  Schwalbe's  Jahres- 
bericht,  1882.  p.  25.  De  Watteville :  Neurologisches  Ceutralblatt,  1883, 
No.  7.  Grilnhagen  :  Arch.  f.  d.  ges.  Physiol.,  Bd.  34,  p.  301  (1884). 

*Bubnoff  und  Heidenhain  :  UeberErreguugs-  uncl  Hemmmigsvorgauge 
innerhalb  der  motorisclieii  Hirucentren.  Archiv  f.  d.  ges.  Physiol.,  Bd. 
26,  p.  156(1881). 


84  PSYCHOLOGY. 

cation  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  th  3  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."  t 
"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."  J  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  (ibid. 
Bd.  28,  p.  497  (1882)  )  that  the  summation  here  occurs  in  the  spinal  cord. 
It  makes  no  difference  where  this  particular  summation  occurs,  so  far  as 
the  general  philosophy  of  summation  ?oes. 

f  G  H.  Lewes  :  Physical  Basis  of  Mind,  p.  479,  where  many  similar 
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  tne  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,  etc. 

Instances  of  summation  might  be  multiplied  indefinitely, 
but  it  is  hardly  worth  while  to  forestall  subsequent  chapters. 
Those  on  Instinct,  the  Stream  of  Thought,  Attention,  Dis 
crimination,  Association,  Memory,  ^Esthetics,  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  '  eripuit  ccelo  fulmen,'  fore- 

*  See  a  similar  instance  in  Mach  :  Beitrage  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  after  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  Mental  State  of  the  Blind,  and  Deaf,  and  Dumb  (Salisbury, 
1843),  p.  14.) 


86  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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. 


J         I 


Reaction-  line 
Time-line. 


FIG.  21. 


One  type  is  that  of  the  revolving  drum  covered  with  smoLed 
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  j-fas  of  a  second.  The  signal  (by  an  appropriate  electric 


FIG.  2-2.— Bowditeh'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  in 
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  T  is  a 
tongue  fixed  to  the  carriage  of  the  fork,  and  at  K  an  electric  key  which  the  tongue 
opens  and  with  which  the  electric  pen  is  connected.  At  the  instant  of  opening,  the 
t>en  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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,  f  The  time 
usually  elapsing  between  stimulus  and  movement  lies  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  in  a  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. 

*  The  reader  will  find  a  great  deal  about  chronographic  apparatus  in 
J.  Marey :  La  Methode  Grapbique,  pt.  n.  chap.  n.  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. 

I  See,  for  a  few  modifications,  Cattell,  Mind,  xi.  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 
aivareness  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.,  n.  221-2.  Cf.  also  the  first  edition,  728-9.  I  must 
confess  to  finding  all  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,  i.  149,  which  may  be  supposed  official.  For  a 
minute  criticism  of  Wundt's  'apperception,'  see  Marty.  Vierteljahrschrift 
f.  wiss.  Philos. ,  x.  346. 

f  By  Exner,  for  example,  Pfluger's  Archiv,  vn.  628  ff. 


90  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  ivhat  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,  ivould,  undoubt 
edly,  all  be  links  of  the  process  under  other  conditions, f  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  ivhose  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  him  for  the  time  being  of  a  new 
path  or  arc  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  heightened 
irritability  by  the  expectant  attention,  that  the  signal  is 
instantaneously  sufficient  to  cause  the  overflow.^  No  other 
*  P.  222.  Cf.  also  Riohet,  Rev.  Philos.,  vi.  395-6.  ~ 
t  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. 

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


GENEEAL   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  ivrong  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  voli 
tion,  the  time  becomes  quite  disproportionately  long  (a 
second  or  more,  according  to  Exner  t),  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 
4  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  arc 
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  witli  perspiration 
and  excessively  fatigued  although  I  had  sat  quietly  in  my  chair  all  the 
while."  (Exner,  loc.  cit.  vn.  618.) 

*  Wundt,  Physiol.  Psych.,  n.  226. 

f  Pfliiger's  Archiv,  vn.  616. 

\  In  short,  what  M.  Delboeuf  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.  vui.  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.  Exuer  '  reduces  '  his  times 
by  eliminating  the  physiological  process  of  conduction.  His  'reduced 


92  PSYCHOLOGY. 

I  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-reflexes  due  to  practice."  *  The  means  of  his  conver. 
sion  are  certain  experiments  performed  in  his  laboratory 
by  Herr  L.  Lange,  t  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  (ibid.  531),  whilst  his  reduced  reac 
tion-time  is  0.0828  (itrid.  vn.  637).  These  figures  have  really  no  scientific 
value  beyond  that  of  showing,  according  to  Exner's  own  belief  (vn.  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." — Wundt  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.,  II. 
226).— Mr.  Cattell's  view  is  identical  with  the  one  I  defend.  "I  think," 
he  says,  "that  if  the  processes  of  perception  and  willing  are  present  at  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  .  ..  in  a  state 
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,  xi.  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  01  conscious  will. 

*  Physiol.  Psych.,  3d  edition  (1887),  vol.  n.  p.  266. 

f  Philosophische  Studien,  vol.  iv.  p.  479  (1888). 


GENERAL  CONDITIONS  OF  BRAIN- ACTIVITY.          93 

one  keeps  one's  mind  as  intent  as  possible  upon  the  ex 
pected  signal,  and '  purposely  avoids '  *  thinking  of  the  move 
ment  to  be  executed ;  in  the  t  extreme  muscular '  way  one 
1  does  not  think  at  all '  t  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. 
Wuudt  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  Wundtia.n  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  reactor  has  succeeded  by  repeated  and  conscientious 
practice  in  bringing  about  an  extremely  precise  co-ordina 
tion  of  his  voluntary  impulse  with  his  sense-impression 
do  we  get  times  which  can  be  regarded  as  typical  sensorial 
reaction-times/'  J  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  typical 
sensorial  time  which  is  attained  by  practice  is  probably 
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  is  a 
highly  important  one,  and  that  the  'extreme  muscular 


*Loc.  cit.  p.  488.  f  Loc-  cit.  p.  487.  \Loc.  cit.  p.  489. 

§  Lange  has  an  interesting  hypothesis  as  to  the  brain-process  concerned 
in  the  latter,  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 
(T.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 
in  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  possible  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 
liminary  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  ail  time-measurements.  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 
signals  of  one  sense  (Buccola,  p.  147),  but  not  of  others. 
Old  and  uncultivated  people  have  it  long  (nearly  a  second, 
in  an  old  pauper  observed  by  Exner,  Pfliiger's  Archiv,  VII. 
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  pauper's  time  was,  after 
much  practice,  reduced  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  has  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,  Thl.  ii.  pp.  252-280;  aJso  Ribot's  Contemp.  Germ.  Psych 
chap.  vm. 


GENERAL   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  : 

u  I  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.  vtriSSS. 

Sound 0.167  sec.  0.0221  sec. 

Light 0.222    u  0.0219    " 

Electric  skin-sensation 0.201    "  0.0115    " 

Touch-sensations 0.213    "  0.0134    " 

"I  here  bring  together  the  averages  which  have  been  obtained  by 
some  other  observers  : 

Hirsch.  Hankel.  Exner. 

Sound 0.149  0.1505  0.1360 

Light 0.200  0.2246  0.1506 

Skin-sensation 0.182  0. 1546  0. 1337  "  t 

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  Vintsehgau, 


*The  nature  of  the  movement  also  seems  to  make  it  vary.  Mr.  B.  I. 
Oilman  and  I  reacted  to  the  same  signal  by  simply  raising  our  hand,  and 
again  by  carrying  our  hand  towards  oiir  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.,  u.  223. 


96  PSYCHOLOGY. 

Buccola,  and  Beaunis.  They  are  slow,  averaging  about 
half  a  second  (cf.  Beaunis,  Recherches  exp.  sur  1'Activite 
Cerebrale,  1884,  p.  49  ff.). 

It  will  be  observed  that  sound  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  Ox/.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.,  n.  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  Hdbli.,  p.  270). 

Intoxicants  alter  the  time.  Coffee  and  tea  appear  to 
shorten  it.  Small  doses  of  ivine  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,  vm.  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,  vm. 
170 ;  James,  Proc.  Am.  Soc.  for  Psych.  Kesearch,  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,  ibid.,  1889,  1885). 

An  immense  amount  of  work  has  been  done  on  reaction- 
time,  of  which  I  have  cited  but  a  small  part.  It  is  a  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,  Le^on  xxn. 


98  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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


FIG.  23.— Sphymographic  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  afflux  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,  f 
this  physiologist  was  enabled  to  let  the  brain-pulse  record 
itself  diroctly  by  a  tracing.  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. 

t  Ueber  den  Kreislauf  des  Blutes  im  menschlicheii  Gehirn  (1881). 
chap.  ii.  The  Introduction  gives  the  history  of  our  previous  knowledge 
:>f  the  subject. 


GENERAL  CONDITIONS  OF  BRAIN-ACTIVITY. 

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 
voom3  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  afflux  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."f  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 

*  In  this  conclusion  M.  Gley  (Archives  de  Pbysiologie,  1881,  p.  742) 
agrees  with  Professor  Mosso.     Gley  found  his  pulse  rise  1-3  beats,  his 
carotid  dilate,  and  his  radial  artery  contract  during  hard  mental  work. 
f  Address  before  Med.  and  Chirurg.  Society  of  Maryland,  1879 
^  See  his  book.  "Experimental  Researches  on  the  Regional  Tempera 
lure  of  the  Head"  (London.  1879). 


100  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  of  heat  beyond 
finding  that  it  was  in  both  hemispheres,  whatever  might  be 
the  sensation  applied,  t  Dr.  E.  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. 

f  The  most  convenient  account  of  Schiff's  experiments  is  by  Prof, 
fierzen,  in  the  Revue  Philosophique,  vol.  in.  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.  '  Ohm 
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.  All  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. 


1TJ2  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  PO6  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,  f  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). 

f  Without  multiplying  references,  I  will  simply  cite  Mendel  (Archiv  f . 
Psychiatric,  vol.  in,  1871),  Mairet  (Archives  de  Neurologic,  vol.  ix,  1885), 
and  Beaunis  (Rech.  Experimentales  sur  1'Activite  Cerebrale,  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  of  all.  I  refer  to  the  aptitude  of  the  brain 
for  acquiring  habits.  But  I  will  treat  of  that  in  a  chapter 
by  itself. 


OHAPTEK  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,  as 
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  wliich  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  bottom  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.  Leon  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  ot 
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  resistentice,  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  forcible  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  of  health.  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 


*  Revne  Philosophique,  i,  324. 


HABIT.  107 

struck  into  new  paths  ?  In  other  words,  can  we  say  just 
what  mechanical  facts  the  expression  '  change  of  habit1 
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, 
1  nothing  but  concatenated  discharges  in  the  nerve-centres, 
lue  to  the  presence  there  of  systems  of  reflex  paths,  so 
>rganized  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  quern.  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.  If  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 f (motion  fait  V organs.' 

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-j 
vious.  But,  as  a  given  point  of  the  system  may  belong,' 
actually  or  potentially,  to  many  different  paths,  and,  as  the 

i  play  of  nutrition  is  subject  to  accidental  changes,  blockf 
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,  f 
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  ouce,  have 
been  impulsive  or  reflex.  It  is  this  very  first  occurrence  of  all  that  we 
consider  in  the  text. 

f  Those  who  desire  a  more  definite  formulation  may  consult  J.  Fiske's 
'Cosmic  Philosophy,' vol.  n.  pp.  142-146  and  Spencer's  'Principles  of 
Biology,'  sections  302  and  803,  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 
arcs  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. 


fix  the  impressed  modification,  rather  than  to  counter- 
jact  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  :* 

"  It  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-Sequard'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 


f  •  Mental  Physiology  '  (1874.)  pp.  339-345. 

t [See,  later,  Masius  in  Van  Benedens'  and  Van  Bambeke's  'Archives 
de  Biologie,'  vol.  I  (Liege,  1880).— W.  J.] 


HABIT.  Ill 

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  I 

/  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  external  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  a  part  of 
the  constitution  of  the  adult,  the  acquired  mechanism  is  thenceforth  K 
maintained  in  the  ordinary  course  of  the  nutritive  operations,  so  as  to  j  /< 
be  ready  for  use  when  called  upon,  even  after  long  inaction. 

"What  is  so  clearly  true  of  the  nervous  apparatus  of  animal  life  can 
scarcely  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  aro  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  nutrition,  simply  express — the  former  in  terms  of  mind, 


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  pur 
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  incessant  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  fixed  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 
scar  of  a  wound." 

Dr.  Carpenter's  phrase  that  our  nervous  system  groivs  to 
the  modes  in  which  it  has  been  exercised  expresses  the  philos 
ophy  of  habit  in  a  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. 

1 '  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  latter  on  the  ear.  The  more  often  the  process 


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  ^normous,  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  :  f 

"If  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.  vm. 

f  Physiology  of  Mind,  p.  155. 


114  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  occasion  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 
matic  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  loith  which  our  acts  are  performed. 

One  may  state  this  abstractly  thus  :  If  an  act  require  for 
its  execution  a  chain,  A,  B,  C,  D,  E,  F,  G,  etc.,  of  successive 
nervous  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,  A,  B,  C,  J},  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 
glance  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.  115 

thing.  Who  is  there  that  has  never  wound  up  his  watch  on 
taking  oft*  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  tell  the  answer  ;  yet  my  hand 
never  makes  a  mistake.  iSo  one  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 
sioned  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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

G* 


FIG.  24. 


Let  A,  B,  C,  D,  E,  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,  A,  B,  C,  D,  E,  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  see  if  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  A,  than  A,  through  the  sensation  a  of  its  own 
occurrence,  awakens  B  reflexly ;  B  then  excites  C  through 
by  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,  6,  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, 
I,  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  sounds  (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  four  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,  1),  c,  d,  e,  /,  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

even  this,  they  can  only  be  centripetal  nerve-currents,  not 
sufficient  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,  grows  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."! 

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  ivrong.  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  Hartraann  devotes  a  chapter  of  his  '  Philosophy  of  the  Uncon 
scious  '  (English  translation,  vol.  i.  p.  72)  to  proving  that  they  must  be 
both  ideas  and  unconscious. 

f  '  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  everyone  who  practises,  apparently  automatically,  along- 
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 
occurs."  * 

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  : 

"  It  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,  44& 


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.  The  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 


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."  t 

Kiderless  cavalry-horses,  at  many  a  battle,  have  been 

seen  to  come  together  and  go  through  their  customary 

I  evolutions  at  the  sound  of  the  bugle-call.     Most  trained 

domestic  animals,  dogs  and  oxen,  and  omnibus-  and  car- 

*  'Der  menschliche  Wille,'  p.  439.  The  last  sentence  is  rather  freely 
translated — the  sense  is  uualtered. 


f  Huxley's  'Elementary  Lessons  in  Physiology,'  lesson 


xn. 


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  travelling  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 
bewildered  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  through  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. 

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


122  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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 

j  nervous  system  our  ally  instead  of  our  enemy.      It  is  to  fund 

*  and  capitalize  our  acquisitions,  aiid  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  cant 
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  is  habitual  but  indecision,  and 
for  whom  the  lighting  of  every  cigar,  the  drinking  of  every 

,  cup,  the  time  of  rising  and  going  to  bed  every  day,  and 
the  beginning  of  every  bit  of  work,  are  subjects  of  express 

'  volitional  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 
consciousness  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  first 


HABIT.  123 

is  tliat  in  the  acquisition  of  a  new  habit,  or  the  leaving  off 
of  an  old  one,  we  must  take  care  to  launch  ourselves  with  as  A 
strong  and  decided  an  initiative  as  possible.  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  habit  is  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." 

The  need  of  securing  success  at  the  outset  is  imperative. 
Failure  at  first  is  apt  to  dampen  the  energy  of  all  future 
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  I  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  would 
agree  that  abrupt  acquisition  of  the  new  habit  is  the  best 
way,  'if  there  be  a  real  possibility  of  carrying  it  out.  We 
must  be  careful  not  to  give  the  will  so  stiff  a  task  as  to  in 
sure  its  defeat  at  the  very  outset;  but,  provided  one  can 
stand  it,  a  sharp  period  of  suffering,  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  unbroken 
.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 
experience  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  :  'Beitrage  zu  Charakterologie  '  (1867),  vol.  i.  p.  209. 


HABIT.  125 

No  matter  how  full  a  reservoir  of  maxims  one  may  pos 
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, 
lis  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  practical  fruit  is 
worse  than  a  chance  lost;  it  works  so  as  positively  to 
hinder  future  resolutions  and  emotions  from  taking  the 
normal  path  of  discharge.  There  is  no  more  contemptible 
type  of  human  character  than  that  of  the  nerveless  senti 
mentalist  and  dreamer,  who  spends  his  life  in  a  weltering  - 
sea  of  sensibility  and  emotion,  but  who  never  does  a  manly 
concrete  deed.  Rousseau,  inflaming  all  the  mothers  oft 
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  P8YGHOLOQ7. 

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  do  not  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  law  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- 

I  I  thing  like  this :  Keep  the  faculty  of  effort  alive  in  you  by  a 
little  gratuitous  exercise  every  day.  That  is,  be  systematic 
ally  ascetic  or  heroic  in  little  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 
Ho  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.  Scudde* 
on 'Musical  Devotees  aiid  Morals/ in  the  Andover  Keview  for  January 
1887. 


HABIT.  127 

daily  inured  himself  to  habits  of  concentrated  attention,    j  ^  j^ 
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  \/)  X) 
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  or  evil,  and  never  to  be  undone.  Every  smallest 
stroke  of  virtue  or  of  vice  leaves  its  never  so  little  scar. 
The  drunken  Kip  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  a  kind  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  v\re  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  wre 
become  saints  in  the  moral,  and  authorities  and  experts  in 
the  practical  and  scientific  spheres,  by  so  many  separate  f 
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  poiver  oj  ^ 
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-lieartedness  in  youths  embarking  on  arduous 
careers  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  sui 
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, 

138 


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  j 
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  PSYCHOLOGY, 

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  }^et  failed 
'  k>  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 
\  jj  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 
i,  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  backed  by 
less  refined  metaphysical  considerations. t 

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

f  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  links 


A  UTOMA  TON-  THEOR  Y.  131 

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  of  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  j 
automatism  of  brutes.  ...  It  is  quite  true  that,  to  the  best  of  my  I 
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 
trams,  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  o? 
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. 
Jf  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 
crabbed  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 


A  UTOMA  TON-  THEOR  T.  1 33 

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  in 
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-  1 1 . 
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. 

REASON'S  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  aesthetic  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. 
Yfhen  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 


A  UTOMA  TON-THEOR  Y.  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  efficacity  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    i 
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  Svstem  aud  the  Mind  (1888),  p.  9. 


136  PSYCHOLOGY. 

nature  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, 
conceivable  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 
Vv-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 

*  On.  <&.  v  ?  t. 


AUTOMATON-THEORY.  137 

be  a  '  reason '  for  them,  and  something  must  '  determine ' 
the  laws.  And  when  one  seriously  sits  down  to  con- 
^ider  what  sort  of  a  thing  one  means  when  one  asks 

i  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 
ihis  is  so,  then  common-sense,  though  the  intimate  nature 
of  causality  and  of  the  connection  of  things  in  the  universe 

i  lies  beyond  her  pitifully  bounded  horizon,  has  the  root  and 
gist  of  the  truth  in  her  hands  when  she  obstinately  holds 

i  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  quasi. 
metaphysical  grounds,  is  an  unwarrantable  impertinence  in 
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 
consciousness  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- 


A  UTOMA  TON-  THEOR  7.  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  or  a  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  cf  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  its  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  aa 


AUTOMATON-THEORY.  141 

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  if  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 
qonsciousness  into  the  midst,  survival  ceases  to  be  a  mere 
hypothesis.  No  longer  is  it,  "  if  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  !"  Real  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  to 
be  a  fighter  for  ends,  of  which  many,  but  for  its  presence, 
vvould  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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.  Hoiu  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  it  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  sinks  to  a  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  end,  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 

i   has  no  ideals  to  pursue.     A  locomotive  will  carry  its  train 


A  UTOMA  TON-  THEOR  Y.  143 

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.  Borne  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  XXVI I  shall  return  to  this 
again. 

There  is  yet  another  set  of  facts  which  seem  explicable 
on  the  supposition  that  consciousness  has  causal  efficacy. 
It  is  a  ivell-knoivn  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  ^Esthetics  ; 
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 
tile  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.  On«  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  '  mind- stuff'  is  the  theory  that  our  mental 
states  are  compounds,  expressed  in  its  most  radical  form. 

145 


146  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  evo 
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  b«  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."  I 
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  is  no  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.  f  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  motious  and  feelings  011  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  surb  analogies  obtain,  the  things  do  have 
something-  in  cominoa. 


148  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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.:f  It  is  true  that  the  word  signifies  not  yet 

*  Psychology,  §  131.  t '  Nature,'  as  above,  317-8. 

\  '  Nascent '  is  Mr.  Spencer's  great  word.  lu  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  by  a  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  differences  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 
aie  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 
are  useless.  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— &  consciousness 
that  becomes  higher  as  the  succession  becomes  more  rapid  and  the  corre 
spondence  more  complete."  (Ibid.  §  179.) 

It  is  true  that  in  the  Fortnightly  Review  (vol.  xiv.  p.  716)  Mr.  Spencer 
denies  thnt  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.  §§  43,  110,  244)  not  to  be  taken  as  a  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  tlie  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  ef 
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.  Tick,  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  been  as  yet  impossible  to  make  corresponding 
experiments  with  regard  to  sensibility  to  cold."  (Lehrb.  d.  Anat.  u 
Physiol.  d.  Siuuesorgane  (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  a  and  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.  Tick,  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,  Tick  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  another 
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  pitch  ;  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  various  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,  thrfee,  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.  158 

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  theJnstant  after);  which  state  of  consciousness  caused  by  a 
blow  may  be  tSten  as  the  primitive  and  typical  form  of  the  nervous 
shock.  The  fa'ct  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  tl# 
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  call  a  nervous  shock  is  the 
ultimate  unit  of  consciousness  ;  and  that  all  the  unlikenes^es  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 


PSYCHOLOGY. 
INSUFFICIENCY  OF  THESE  PKOOPS. 


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  is  a  transformation,  reduc 
tion,  or  fusion.  The  question  is,  Where  ? — in  the  nerve* 


One  second  of  time. 

FIG.  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 — b  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  theevents  in  successively  higher  orders  of  nerve- 
cells,  and  tll|  horizontal  marks  for  the  facts  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  by  a  single  blow,  and  swing 
back.  Will  it  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 
eft'ect.  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  suo 
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  supposejfcblows  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  ivliole,  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  afte-' 
the  other  to  reach  a  distant  point. 
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 
is  done,  and  all  arrive  together 
FIG.  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  a  case  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-stufkouglit  to  float  off  from  the  nerve-matter  on 
either  side*c^pt,  and  come  together  over  it  and  fuse,  just 
as  well  as  i^t  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  tertium  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  is  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  vi.  chao.  iv.  §  3. 


158  PSYCHOLOGY, 

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,'  UPONSOME  ENTITY 
OTHER  THAN  THEMSELVES.  Without  this  featu^U  a  medium 
or  vehicle,  the  notion  of  combination  has  noWvi 

"  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,  "f 

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  leinon  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 
on  the  one  hand  and  the  sugar-sweet  on  the  other.  These  tastes  are 
absent  utterly.  Ths  entirely  new  taste  which  is  present  resembles,  it  is  true, 
both  those  tastes  ;  but  in  Chapter  XIII  we  shall  see  that  resemblance  can 
not  always  be  held  to  involve  partial  identity. 

i  E.  Montgomery,  in  'Mind.'  v.  18-19.     See  also  Dp.  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  H2  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. 

"  Aggregations  are  organized  wholes  only  when  they  behave  as  such 
in  the  presenajji  other  things.  A  statue  is  an  aggregation  of  par 
ticles  of  marb^^Bbt  as  such  it  has  no  unity.  For  the  spectator  it  is 
one;  in  itself  ro^Pan  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,'  vi.  p.  376.  Lotze  has  set  forth  the  truth  of  this  law 
more  clearly  and  copiously  than  any  other  writer.  Unfortunately  lie  is  too 
lengthy  to  quote.  See  his  Microco&mus,  bk.  ir.  ch.  i.  §  5;  Metaphysik, 
§§  242,  260  ;  Outlines  of  Metaphysics,  part  n.  chap.  i.  §§  3,  4,  5.  Compare 
ulso  Reid's  Intellectual  Powers,  essay  v,  chap,  mad  Jin.,-  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  mew ,  see  W.  K.  Clifford:  '  Mind,'  in.  57  (re 
printed  in  his  'Lectures  and  Essays,'  n.  71);  G.  T.  Fechner,  Psycho 
physik,  Bd.  n.  cap.  XLV;  H.  Taiue:  on  Intelligence,  bk.  in;  E.  Haeckel: 
'  Zellseelen  u.  Seelenzellen  '  in  Gesammelte  pop.  Vortrage,  Bd.  i.  p.  143;  W. 
S.  Duncan  ;  Conscious  Matter,  pasttim;  H.  Z5llner:  Natur  d.  Cometen,  pp. 
320  ff.;  Alfred  Barratt:  '  Physical  Ethic  'and  '  Physical  Metempiric, ' pas- 
wm;  J.  Soury:  '  Hylozoismus,'  in  '  Kosmos,'  V.  Jahrg.,  Heft  x.  p.  241;  A. 
Main:  'Mind,'  i.  292,  431,  566;  n.  129,  402;  Id.  Revue  Philos.,  n.  86,  88, 
419;  m.  51,502;  iv.  402;  F.  W.  Fraukland:  'Mind.'  vi.  116;  Whittaker: 
'Mind,'  vi.  498  (historical);  Morton  Prince:  The  Nature  of  Mind  and 
Human  Automatism  (1885);  A.  Riehl:  Der  philosophische  Kriticismus,  Bd. 
n.  Theil  2,  2ter  Absclmitt,  2tes  Cap.  (1887).  The  clearest  of  all  these 
Statements  is,  as  far  as  it  goes,  that  of  Prince. 


160  PSYCHOLOGY. 

"Where  the  elemental  units  are  supposed  to  be  feelings, 
the  case  is  in  no  wise  altered.  Take  a  hundred  of  them, 
shuffle  them  and  pack  them  as  close  together  as  you  can 
(whatever  that  may  mean) ;  still  each  remains  the  same  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  should  emerge.  And  this  101st  feel 
ing  would  be  a  totally  new  fact ;  the  100  original  feelings 
might,  by  a  curious  physical  law,  be  a  signa^tkits  creation, 
when  they  came  together;  but  they  woulc^lpive  no  sub 
stantial  identity  with  it,  nor  it  with  them,  Ima  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  thai],  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 


*"  Someone  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:  Psychologic,  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  b. 
Therefore,  they  say,  there  is  an  idea  of  a  -f-  &,  or  of  a  and  b 
together.  Which  is  like  saying  that  the  mathematical 
square  of  a  plus  that  of  b  is  equal  to  the  square  of  a  -\-  b, 
a  palpable  untruth.  Idea  of  a  -j-  idea  of  b  is  not  identical 
with  idea  of  (a  -{-  b).  It  is  one,  they  are  two ;  in  it,  what 
knows  a  also  knows  &;  in  them,  what  knows  a  is  expressly 
posited  as  not  knowing  b ;  etc.  In  short,  the  two  separate 
ideas  can  never  by  any  logic  be  made  to  figure  as  one  and 
the  same  tl^fl^is  the  'associated'  idea. 

This  is  J^P  the  spiritualists  keep  saying  ;  and  since  we 
do,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  have  the  '  compounded  '  idea,  and  do 
know  a  and  b  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  l  compounded ' 
idea,  if  you  please  so  to  call  it ;  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,  ive  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  ab^^her  about  the 
logic  of  the  mind-stuff  theory,  about  whether  it  can  ea^KBthe  constitution 
of  higher  mental  states  by  viewing  them  as  identv^^Hlih  lower  ones 
summed  together.  We  say  the  two  sorts  of  fact  are  not  icrentical :  a  higher 
state  is  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,  if  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 
IX  will  be  mainly  devoted  to  the  proof  of  this  fact.  But  such  emergence 
is  that  of  a  new  psychic  entity,  and  is  ioto  coslo  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  Encyclopaedia  Britannica,  speak 
ing  of  the  hypothesis  that  "a  series  of  feelings  can  be  aware  of  itself  as 
a  series,"  says  (p.  39):  "  Paradox  is  too  mild  a  word  for  it,  even  contradiction 
will  hardly  suffice."  Whereupon,  Professor  Bain  takes  him  thus  to  task: 
"  As  to  'a  series  of  states  being  aware  of  itself,  I  confess  I  see  no  insur 
mountable  difficulty.  It  may  be  a  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,'  xt.  459).  Prof.  Bain  thinks,  then,  that  all  the  bother  is  about  the 
difficulty  of  seeing  how  a  series  of  feelings  can  have  the  knowledge  of 
itself  added  to  it  f  !  !  As  if  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  I  are  troubled  about  is  merely 
the  silliness  of  the  mind-stuffists  and  associationists  continuing  to  say  that 
the  '  series  of  states '  is  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  THEORY.  153 

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  oi?r  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 
roundabou^^til  it  is  a  bog  of  logical  liquefaction,  into  the 
midst  of  NN^^V  all  definite  conclusions  of  any  sort  may  be 
trusted  ere  J^g  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  in  it  all 
contradictions  find  their  reconciliation ;  and  that  it  is  just 
because  the  i'acts  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  but  overreaches  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  uncon 
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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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.  Leifrjta  calls  the 
total  consciousness  an  '  aperception,'  the  su^^Bd  insensi 
ble  consciousness  by  the  name  of  l  petites^^eptions* 

"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."  f 

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  Unconscious,  vol. 
i,  and  by  E,  Colsenet :  La  vie  luconsciente  de  1'Esprit  (1880).  Consult  also 
T.  Laycock  :  Mind  and  Brain,  vol.  i.  chap,  v  (1860);  W.  B.  Carpenter: 
Mental  Physiology,  chap,  xin;  F.  P.  Cobbe :  Darwinism  in  Morals  and 
other  Essays,  essay  xi,  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.  n.  cbap.  x,  arid  also  Prob. 
in.  chap,  ii :  D.  G.  Thompson:  A  System  of  Psychology,  chap,  xxxni1 
J.  M.  Baldwin,  Hand-book  of  Psychology,  chap.  rv. 

i  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  itsell 
"  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  Jf^kf'-  Iu  a^  acquired  dexterities  and  habits, 
secondarilj^BDmatic  performances  as  they  are  called,  we 
do  what  or^finally  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-off 
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.f 

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  '  wwcon- 

*  J.  S.  Mill,  Exam,  of  Hamilton,  chap.  xv. 
f  Cf.  Dugald  Stewart,  Elements,  chap.  n. 


166  PSYCHOLOGY. 

sciously,'  and  in  that  state  affected  the  sequence  of  oui 
ideas. 

Reply.  Here  again  we  have  a  choice  between  more 
plausible  explanations.  Either  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  wak^  Somnam 
bulists  do  rational  things.  We  awaken  pi^^kally  at  an 
hour  predetermined  overnight,  etc.  Uncons^HI  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.  In  a  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  wre  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,^hat  the  pattern  of  our  furniture  is,  or  whether  the  door 
opens  to  thn^^^t  or  left,  or  out  or  in.  But  how  quickly  should  we 
notice  a  chai^^B  any  of  these  things  !  Think  of  the  door  you  have 
most  often  opSR,  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  shall  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.  E.  Maude:  'The  Unconscious  in  Education,' in  'Education'  vol 
L  p.  401  (1882). 


168  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  it  impossible  for  the  latter 
to  react  upon  things  just  as  it  did  before  ;  an^the  result  of 
the  difference  may  be  a  tendency  to  act,  thou^^ith  no  idea, 
much  as  we  should  if  we  were  consciously  WRing  about 
the  subject.  The  becoming  conscious  of  tli^Tatter  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  XYIII  will  give 
abundant  additional  examples  both  of  the  truthful  andilhi' 


TEE  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  ^  i  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. f  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."  V 

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  his  arguments  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  Lichtsiune  (1878). 

f  Cf.  Wundt:  Ueber  den  Einfiuss  dcr  Philosoplrie,  etc.  — Antritlsrede 
11876),  pp.  10-11;— Heliiiholt/:  Die  Thatsacheu  in  der  Walnuelmmug, 
1879),  p.  27. 


170  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  bo  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.  Zolluer's  Natui 
der  Kometen,  pp.  342  ff..  ami  425 


THE  MIND-STUFF   THEORY.  171 

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  i'eelings 
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  it  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  element  is  the  laryngeal  sound  with  which  they  are 
uttered,  surds  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  rerlly  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 
^hat  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  iu   Chapter 
XIII. 


172  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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 
therefore  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 
intelligent  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  about  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  sensations  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,  it  is  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 
of  cerebral  activity.  It  is  unbelievable  that  two  mentaJ 


THE  MIND-STUFF  THEORY.  173 

states  so  different  as  the  passive  reception  of  a  sound  as  a 
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  is  the  second  in  an  '  un 
conscious  '  form.  It  is  an  absolute  psychic  difference,  even 
greater  than  that  between  the  stages  to  which  two  different 
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  sui 
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  coelo  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- 
scious  idea.  Either  of  these  things  may  perform  much  tha 
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  wo  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  distinc 


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  /  have  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  iu 
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  thai,  on  the  whole,  our  early  ideas  are 
superseded  by  later  onos,  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  represents 


THE  MIND-STUFF  THEORY.  175 

fcive  function  as  dealing  with  the  same  objects.  Identity  oi 
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- 
lenlebeus  (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  similar  to 
what  I  have  myself  written  that  I  must  quote  them  in  a  note.  After 
proving  that  dimness  and  clearness,  incompleteness  and  completeness  do 
not  pertain  to  a  state  of  mind  as  such — since  every  state  of  mind  must  be 
txactly  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  a1.  There  will  probably 
be  a  considerable  difference  between  a  and  a1.  The  colors  of  a  will  be 
varied  and  intense,  and  will  be  sharply  bounded  by  each  other ;  those  of 
a1  will  be  less  luminous,  and  less  strongly  contrasted,  and  will  approach 
a  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  a1  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  a  and  a}.  I  am  convinced,  moreover,  that  a  represents  A 
better  than  does  a1.  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  as  if  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  distiucter  and  of  a 
less  distinct  consciousness  of  A,  whereas  I  am  only  justified  in  talking  of 
two  consciousnesses,  a  and  a},  equally  distinct  in  se,  but  to  which  the  sup 
posed  external  obiect  A  corresponds  with  different  degrees  of  distinctness." 
(P.  38-9  ) 


176  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  plausible  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  ivhole,  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.  177 

deafness  and  blindness,  of  auditory  and  optical  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  no 
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  solved  (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-pnysic 
law. 

Our  own  formula  escapes  the  unintelligibility  of  psychic 
atoms  by  taking  t/ie  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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,  lor  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  is  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  c£  the  views  w© 
have  ourselves  discussed.  It  may  be  called  the  theory  of 
polyzoism  or  multiple  monadism;  and  it  conceives  tho  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  our  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. 

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


180  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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 
it  as  a  unit.  The  cell  is  no  more  a  unit,  materially  con 
sidered,  than  the  total  brain  is  a  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,  although  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 
atiord  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.  If  there  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

If  it  does  not  strictly  explain  anything,  it  is  at  any  rate 
less  positively  objectionable  fchan  either  mind-stuff  or  a 
material-monad  creed.  The  bare  PHENOMENON,  hoivever,  the 
IMMEDIATELY  KNOWN  thing  which  on  the  mental  side  is  in  appo 
sition  ivith  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  knc  w  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 
ivhich  contents  itself  ivith  verifiable  laivs,  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. 


CHAPTEB  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,  there  is  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 
a  real  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  this  is  true  of  him  when 

183 


184  PSYCHOLOGY. 

lie  reflects  on  liis  own  conscious  states,  how  much  truer  is  it 
when  he  treats  of  those  of  others  !  In  German  philosophy 
since  Kant  the  word  Urkenntnisstheorie,  criticism  of  the 
faculty  of  knowledge,  plays  a  great  part.  Now  the  psychol 
ogist  necessarily  becomes  such  an  Erkenntnisstheoretiker. 
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  uberhaupt.  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  : 


1 

The 
Psychologist 

2 

The  Thought 
Studied 

3 

The  Thought's 
Object 

4 
The  Psycholo 
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  all.  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.  vm.  p.  1,  and  J.  Ward,  $>id.  p.  153 ;  J.  Dewey, 
ibid.  vol.  ix.  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  I  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.  /  regard  this  belief  as  the  most  }.; 
fundamental  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,'  4'eltness,'  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   oivn  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."  t 

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  \e,  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,  "t 

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.  i.  chap,  in   §§  2,  3. 
f  Logic,  §  40.  J  Psychologic,  bk.  n.  chap.  in.  §§  1,  2. 


188  PSYCHOLOGY. 

own  minds  at  all.  A  deliverance  of  Auguste  Comte  to  thia 
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  external,  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  such 
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  Philosophic  Positive,  i.  34-8. 


THE  METHODS  AND  SNARES  OF  PSYCHOLOGY.      189 

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

"  It  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  re 
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.f  And  as  in  the  naming,  classing,  and  know- 

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

f  Wundt  says:  "  The  first  rule  for  utilizing  inward  observation  con- 
gists  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  noi 
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  say  ing -I-f eel-tired,  of 
saying-I-f eel-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,1'  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 

••  «J  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,  n.  432.) 

*  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  tnat  applies. 


THE  METHODS  AND  SNARES  OF  PSYCHOLOGY.      191 

have  never  been  misled  into  thinking  we  were  not  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,  (  i  / 
about  weaker  feelings,  and  about  the  relations  to  each  other  !/f 
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  order 
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  very  much  alike  ?  For  instance,  where  an  object 
is  felt  now  against  the  back  and  now  against  the  cheek, 
which  feeling  is  most  extensive?  Who  can  be  sure  that 
two  given  feelings  are  or  are  not  exactly  the  same  ?  Who 
can  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  a 
collection  of  illustrations  of  the  difficulty  of  discovering  by 
direct  introspection  exactly  what  our  feelings  and  their 
relations  are,  we  need  not  anticipate  our  own  future  details, 
but  just  state  our  general  conclusion  that  introspection  is 
difficult  and  fallible;  and  that  the  difficulty  is  simply  that 
of  all  observation  of  whatever  kind.  Something  is  before 

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


192  PSYCHOLOGY. 

us ;  we  do  our  best  to  tell  what  it  is,  but  in  spite  of  oui 
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,  until 
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.  Such  a 
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  unteclmical  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  psychologj^  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.      103 

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 
BO  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  aijd  the  outward  stimuli  by  which  they  are 
aroused ;  2)  the  analysis  of  space-perceptionlnto  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 
/  j\  then  is  to  use  as  much  sagacity  as  you  possess,  and  to  be 
7  as  candid  as  you  can. 

THE  SOURCES  OF  ERROR  IN  PSYCHOLOGY. 

The  first  of  them  arises  from  the  Misleading  Influence  0} 
Speech.  Language  was  originally  made  by  men  who  were 
fSlf^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  aesthetic  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  OUT  attention  on  \ 
J;he  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- 
thiug-thought-of  and  the-thought-thinking-it,  which  in  German  is  expressed 
by  the  opposition  between  (jedachtes  and  Gedanke,  in  Latiu  by  that  between 
WQitfitum  and  cooitatda 


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  impeach  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  it» 
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  wrhich 
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  j 
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  is,  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  seems  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.  To  sum  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  ivorld  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  in  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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 
feel  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.  338,  xiv.  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 

Iii  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.f  Of  late  years,  or  rather,  one  may 


*  That  the  appearance  of  meutal  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. 

f  For  more  details,  cf.  Malebranche,  Rech.  de  la  Verite,  bk.  in.  chap, 
i;  J.  Locke,  Essay  cone.  H.  U.,  book  11.  ch.  i;  C.  Wolf,  Psychol. 


202  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  anaesthesia.  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  anaesthesias.  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  xvn; 
J.  Bascom,  Science  of  Mind,  §  12;  Th.  Jouffroy,  Melanges  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.  xi' 
p.  72;  Th.  Ribot,  Maladies  de  la  Personnalite,  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  anaesthesias  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  anaesthesia  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.  Biuet  t  have 
shown  that  during  the  times  of  anaesthesia,  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,"  saysM.  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  secrete 
aloud,  unrestrained  by  the  presence  of  unsuitable  auditors." 

*  L'Automatisme  Psychologique,  Paris,  1889,  passim. 
f  See  his  articles  in  the  Chicago   Open  Court,  for  July,  August  and 
November,  1889.     Also  in  the  Revue  Philosophique  for  1889  and  '90. 


204  PSYCHOLOGY. 

Now  M.  Janet  found  in  several  subjects  like  this  that  if  he 
came  up  behind  them  whilst  they  were  plunged  in  conversa 
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  '  ivriting,  of  a  secondary  consciousness's  existence,  is 
the  most  cogent  and  striking  one  ;  but  a  crowd  of  other  facts 
prove  the  same  thing.  If  I  run  through  them  rapidly,  the 
reader  will  probably  be  convinced. 

The  apparently  anaesthetic  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  call  it,  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  Leonie's  anaesthetic 
hand,  this  hand  opens  it  and  raises  it  towards  the  nose,  but 
half  way  thither  it  enters  the  field  of  vision  of  Leonie,  who 
sees  it  and  stops  stupefied  :  '  Why,'  says  she, '  I  have  an  eye 
glass  in  my  left  hand  !'"  M.  Binet  found  a  very  curious  sort 
of  connection  between  the  apparently  anaesthetic  skin  and 
the  mind  in  some  Salpetriere-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,  a  knife,  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,      205 

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,  etc.  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  anaesthetic  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.  The  skin-seusations  uufelt  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  given  in  this  spot, 
that  the  hysterical  blindness  is  no  real  blindness  at  all. 
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 
anaesthetic  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,  etc., 
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  OD 


THE  RELATIONS  OF  MINDS  TO  OTHER  THINGS.      207 

waking  she  should  not  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  anaesthesias,  paralyses,  contractions 
and  other  irregularities  from  which  hysterics  suffer  seem 
then  to  be  clue  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 
Jiypnotization  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  Salpetriere,  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 
between  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  anaesthetic. 


208  PSYCHOLOGY. 

Sometimes  the  mutual  ignorance  of  the  selves  leads  to 
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. 
"  I  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  small  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  anaesthetic  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."x" 

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. 
54S, 


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  mental  arithmetic, — would  in 
scribe  the  orders  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. 

"  I  tell  I/ucie  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,  Hay,  1887,  p. 
268  ff. 


210  PSYCHOLOGY. 

mand  her  to  weep,  and  when  awake  she  really  sobs,  but  continues  ir 
the  rnidst  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.  Leonie  3  *  writes  real  letters 
whilst  Leonie  1  believes  that  she  is  knitting ;  or  Lucie 
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,  etc. 
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  is  a  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.  In  a  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  pense  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.  Leonie'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  Leonie's 
normal  self  suspecting  the  fact. 

All  these  facts,  taken  together,  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,  hoiv- 
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  anaesthesia  by  word  of  command.  A  systematized 
anaesthesia  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 
Co  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.  He  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,  its  closure  makes  no 
difference  ;  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  anaesthesia. 
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  a  human  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

Let  us  turn  now  to  consider  the 

EOLATIONS    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  I  am  not  dynamically  present  there,  I  work 
no  effects.  To  my  brain,  however,  I  am  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  n.  chap.  3 


THE  RELATIONS  OF  MINDS  TO   OTHER  THINGS.      215 

ciple.  Ficlite  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.  Psychologic,  §  16,  Anm.  Complete 
references  to  Sir  W.  Hamilton  are  given  in  J.  E.  Walter,  Perception  of 
Space  and  Matter,  pp.  65-6. 

f  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.  in.  ch.  2.  Metaphysic,  bk.  in.  ch.  5.  Outlines  of  Psychol., 
part  n.  ch.  3.  See  also  ft-  T.  Fechner,  Psychophysik,  chap,  xxxvn. 


216  PSYCHOLOGY. 


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,  but  it  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 
crete  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  b? 
'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  knoiv,  or  only  think ;  and 
though  his  knowledge  is  of  course  that  of  a  fallible  mortal, 
uhere  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  ;  or  if  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  toivards  cognition  will  be  so 
important  in  the  sequel  that  we  must  not  leave  it  until  it  is 
made  perfectly  clear.  It  is  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 
woild,  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  mental  state.  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- 

*  I  disregard  consequences  which  may  later  come  to  the  thing  from  the 
f*M*t  that  it  is  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  are  a  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.     Of.     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-dbout.  Most  languages  ex 
press  the  distinction;  thus,  yrtiorai,  eidevai\  noscere,  scire; 
kennen,  ivissen;  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- 

*  Of.    John  Grote  :    Explorutio   Philosophica,  p.    60 ;   H.    Helmholtz, 
Popular  Scientific  Lectures,  London,  p.  308-9. 


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!  eccoj  voild !  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  have  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.  I  use  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 '  foi 
January  1884. 

324 


THE  STREAM  OF  THOUGHT.  225 

stating  tlio  fact  most  simply  and  with  the  minimum  of  as 
sumption.  As  we  cannot,  we  must  simply  say  that  thought 
goes  on. 

FIVE  CHAKACTEES  IN  THOUGHT. 

How  does  it  go  on  ?  We  notice  immediately  five  impor 
tant  characters  in  the  process,  of  which  it  shall  be  the  dutj 
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  in  a 
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,  l  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  oivned.  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  wil? 
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,  mislej 
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,  etc.,  of  which  we  studied  a  few  in  the  last  chapter. 
The  buried  feelings  and  thoughts  proved  now  to  exist  in 
hysterical  anaesthetics,  in  recipients  of  post-hypnotic  sug 
gestion,  ttc.,  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  given  them.  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  anaesthetic  somnambulist  Lucie.  He 
found  that  when  this  young  woman's  attention  was  absorbed 


228  PSYCHOLOGY, 

in  conversation  with  a  third  party,  her  anaesthetic  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?"  "  I  don't 
knoiu"  "  There  must  be  some  one  who  hears  me."  "  Yes." 
"  Who  ?"  "  Someone  other  them  Lucie."  "  Ah  !  another  per 
son.  Shall  we  give  her  a  name?"  "No."  "Yes,  it  will 
be  more  convenient."  "  Well,  Adrienne,  then."  "  Once  bap< 
tized,  the  subconscious  personage,"  M.  Janet  continues* 
"  grows  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  I  am  pinching  the  arm  or  touching  the  little 
linger  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 
1  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. f 

*  L'  Automatisme  Psychologique,  p.  318. 

f  Cf.  A.  Constaus  :  Relation  sur  uue  Epidemic  d'hyslero-demonopathie 
en  1861.  2rne  ed.  Paris,  1863.— Chiap  e  Franzolini:  L'Epidemia  d'istero- 
demonopatie  in  Verzegnis.  Reggio,  1879. — See  also  J.  Kernel's  little 
work  :  Nachricht  von  dem  Vorkornmen  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  of  their  own  identity,  M.  Janet  thinks  that  the 
tacts  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  anaesthetic,  the  same  thing  may  happen. 
The  anaesthetic  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."  f  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 
ness. 

2)    Thought  is  in  Constant  Change. 

I  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  oil  the  Will 
*  Loc.  cit.  p.  316. 


230  PSYCHOLOGY. 

The  change  which  I  have  more  particularly  in  view  is  thai 
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  witli  ivhat  it  ivas  before.  Let  us 
begin  with  Mr.  Shadworth  Hodgson's  description  : 

"  I  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  1 
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 
diff Brents."  * 

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  in  a  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  ideas9  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  cora- 
bination  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,  i.  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  tioice  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  realj  Sensational  effect. 
We  take  no  heed,  as  a  rule,  of  the  different  way  in  which 
the  same  things  look  and  sound  arid  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  probably  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  oi 
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.f  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.     Foi 
an  identical  sensation  to  recur  it  would  have  to  occur  the 
/second  time  in  an  unmodified  brain.     But  as  this,  strictly 

*  Populare  Wissenschaftliche  Vortrage,  Drittes  Heft  (1876).  p.  72. 
t  Fick,  in  L.  Hermann's  Handb.  d.  Pbysiol. ,  Bd.  in.  Th.  i.  D.  225. 


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  about  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

zestful  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  brain-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  of  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  it  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 
aesthetic  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  codetenninant 
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  TIO  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- 

I  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  ? 

I  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/ 1. 
and   hollows    reoccupying  identical  places.     For  such   a  total  combina-' 
tionasthis  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  eitlier  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 
i  appearance  before  the  footlights  of  consciousness  at  periodical 
'  intervals,  is  as  mythological  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 
sion  s.  If  the  thing  is  simple,  its  thought  is  simple.  If  it 
is  multitudinous,  it  must  require  a  multitude  of  thoughts 
to  think  it.  If  a  succession,  only  a  succession  of  thoughts 
can  know  it.  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  permanent  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. 

I  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  greats 
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  anaesthetics,  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  psyche  logist,  is  for  itself  unbroken»  It  feds 
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  other  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  \ona- '  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  will  have  to  be 
matter  for  future  consideration.  But  whatever  past  feel- 
ino-s  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 
cannot  break  in  twain,  and  is  why  a  present  thought,  al 
though  not  ignorant  of  the  time-gap,  can  still  regard  itself 
as  continuous  with  certain  chosen  portions  of  the  past. 

Consciousness,  then,  does  not  appear  to  itself  chopped 
up  in  bits.  Such  words  as  *  chain '  or  c  train  '  do  not  de 
scribe  it  fitly  ar;  it  presents  itself  in  the  first  instance.  It 
is  nothing  jointed;  it  flows.  A  'river'  or  a  'stream'  are 
the  metaphors  by  which  it  is  most  naturally  described.  In 
talking  of  it  hereafter,  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  of  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  moet 
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 

*  Of.  Brentano;  Psychologic,  vol.  i.  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  i\\s  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 
Rev.  Jas.  Wills,  on  'Accidental  Association/  in  the  Transactions  of  the 
Royal  Irish  Academy,  vol  xxr.  part  i  (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  iu  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  slate.  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 
we  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  iu  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

think ;  and  as  we  think  we  feel  our  bodily  selves  as  the  seat 
of  the  thinking.  If  the  thinking  be  our  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  aesthetics  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  luhither 
that  always  accompanies  its  flows.  If  recently  the  brain- 
tract  a  was  vividly  excited,  and  then  b,  and  now  vividly  c, 
the  total  present  consciousness  is  not  produced  simply  by 
c'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  :  ^c — 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.), 
i.  83-4. 


THE  STREAM  OF  THOUGHT.  24B 

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  discontinuous,  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  stveam  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  l  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  le  reached,  it  so  exceeds  them 


244  PSYCHOLOGY 

In  vigor  and  stability  fihat  it  quite  eclipses  and  swallows 
them  up  in  its  glare.  Leo  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.  Or  if  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  tho  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  anyone 
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  out  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  Intellectual 
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  lies  on  an  entirely 
different  plane,  by  an  actus  purus  of  Thought,  Intellect,  or 
Reason,  all  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  rerum 
naturd,  so  surely,  and  more  surely,  do  feelings  exist  to  which 
these  relations  are  known.  There  is  not  a  conjunction  or  a 
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  if,  a  feeling 
of  but,  and  a  feeling  of  by,  quite  as  readily  as  we  say  a  feel- 

*E.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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

ing  of  Uue  or  a  feeling  of  cold.  Yet  we  do  not :  so  invetei\ 
ate  lias  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  VII,  (see  p.  195),  of  supposing  that  where  there  is  no  name 
no  entity  can  exist.  All  dumb  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.  As  in  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, 
ivhilst  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.  vn.  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  sensatiouists  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  sensatiouists.  Dcstutt 
de  Tracy,  Laromiguiere,  Cardaillac,  Brown,  and  finally  Spencer,  have  ex 
plicitly  contended  for  feelings  of  relation,  COD  substantial  with  our  feelings 
or  thoughts  of  the  terms  '  between  '  which  they  obtain.  Thus  Destutt  de 
Tracy  says  (Elements  dTdeologie,  T.  ler,  chap,  iv);  "  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."  Laromiguiere 
writes  (Le9ons  de  Philosophic,  lime  Partie,  3me  Le9ou): 

"  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.  .  .  .  Ideas  of  relation  origi 
nate  in  feelings  of  relation.  They  are  the  effect  of  our  comparing  them  and 
reasoning  about  them." 

Similarly,  de  Cardaillac  (Etudes  Eleineutaires  de  Philosophic,  Section  I. 
chap,  vn ): 

"  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  it  is  easy  to  seize  a  relation,  we  saj; 


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  sensible,  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  productions  r 
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  object  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,  XLV.  init.):  "  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  this  relation  ...  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  trans 
formed  sensations,  I  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  is  an  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  to  a 
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  ini- 

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  unlikeuesses,  many  of  which  are 
extremely  strong;  but  such  unliken esses  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.  It  is  true  that,  under  an  ultimate  analysis, 
what  we  call  a  relation  proves  to  be  itself  a  kind  of  feeling— the  momen 
tary  feeling  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 


tiuction  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,  so  a  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- 
ul  incidents  erewhile  experienced  and  now  perhaps  forgotten.  The  sign 
emains,  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  leav 
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.  It  is  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  1 
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  coelo 
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  b,  but,'  'although  it  is,  neverthe 
less,'  '  it  is  an  excluded  middle,  there  is  no  tertium  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  acutelj  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 
peculiar  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  well  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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 
1  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  in  a  certain 
mood  and  number,  in  another  position  it  expects  a  relative 
pronoun.  Adjectives  call  for  nouns,  verbs  for  adverbs, 
etc.,  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  XVIII,  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,  still  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  flows  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  V 
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.  ]( 
is  a  rare  feast !  All  the  inventing  and  making  goes  on  in  me  as  in  a  beau 
tiful  strong  dream.  But  the  best  of  all  is  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  a 
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 : 


FIG  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  ivere  more  in 
tense  a  moment  ago  ;  those  after  it  iviU  be  more  intense  a 
moment  hence.  If  I  recite  a,  b,  c,  d,  e,f,  g,  at  the  moment 
of  uttering  c?,  neither  a,  b,  c,  nor  e,  /,  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  harmonics  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. f 

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. 

f  Cf.  also  S.  Strieker  :  Vorlesungen  tlber  allg.  u.  exp.  Pathologic  (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 
-»f  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 
Dualities  and  things  appearing  to  the  mind  in  &  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.  MK 
guire  supposes,  and  supposes  ip,e  to  suppose,  to  be  their 


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-a&ow£ '  (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  phrases  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.  Each 
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  be  as  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  ?  "  Qu'importe  le  flacon,  pourvu  qu'on 
ait  I'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  qua  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,  qua  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  requires  a  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  n.  chap.  vii. 


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,  it  is  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  hear  is  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 
Tationality  in  these  cases  seems  rather  a  negative  than  a 


THE  STREAM   QF  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  I  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). 

fM.  G.  Tarde,  quoting  (in  Delbnmf,  Le  Sommeil  et  les  Revcs  (1885),  p. 
<J26)  some  nonsense-verses  from  a  dream,  says  they  show  how  prosodic 
forms  may  subsist  in  a  mind  from  which  logical  rules  are  effaced.  .  .  . 
I  was  able,  in  dreaming,  to  preserve  the  faculty  of  rinding  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,  it  is  harder  to  be  a  thinker  than  to  be  a  rhetorician,  and  on  the 
whole  nothing  is  commoner  thon  trains  of  -words  not  understood." 


264  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  ol 
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 '  that  it  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,'  *  muffins,' 
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  here  and  there.  All  the  rest,  '  substantive  '  and  separately  intelligible, 
as  it  may  potentially  be,  actually  serves  only  as  so  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  arc 
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. 

"  I  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  cirele  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 
he  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.  .  .  . 

' '  I  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  ?  When  this  question  occurred  to  my  mind,  I  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. 

"  I  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, 
'  Is  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.  .  .  . 

"  I  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,  arid 
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. 

"It  is  impossible  to  state  the  exact  order  in  which  these  different 
questions  arose,  i.e.,  about  men,  animals,  plants,  the  earth,  sun,  moon, 
etc.  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  I  am  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  annihilation.  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. 

"  I  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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.  I  also  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  in  a  vain  struggle  to  grasp  it,  or  rather  to 
fight  the  way  up  to  attain  to  a  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,  glad  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. 

"  I  remember  that  my  mother  once  told  me  about  a  being  up  above, 
pointing  her  finger  towards  the  sky  and  with  a  solemn  look  on  her  coun 
tenance.  I  do  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.  I  imagined  there  was  a  great  man  somewhere  in  the  blue 
vault,  who  made  a  loud  noise  with  his  voice  out  of  it ;  and  each  time  I 


THE  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."  t 

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-  FIG.  28. 
tating  and  broken  into  many  steps.     But  when  the  penul 
timate  terms   of  all  the  trains,  however  differing  inter  sc, 
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 

*  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. 

t  Quoted  by  Samuel  Porter  :  'Is  Thought  possible  without  Language?' 
in  Princeton  Review,  57th  year,  pp.  108-12  (Jan.  1881  ?).  Of.  also  W.  W. 
Ireland  :  The  Blot  upon  the  Brain  (1886),  Paper  X,  part  IT  ;  G.  J.  Romanes  : 
Mental  Evolution  in  Man,  pp.  81-83,  and  references  therein  made.  Prof. 
Max  Miiller  gives  a  very  complete  history  of  this  controversy  in  pp.  30  -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    ato  his  neighbor's  mind  and  to  find  now 
different  the  scene  y  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  is  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  maii  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  of  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  ix,  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  iv,  chapter  5.    Com 
pare  also  Victor  Eggur  :  Lu  Parole  luterieure  (Paris,  1881),  chap.  vi. 


272  PSYCHOLOGY. 

we  cannot  help  supposing.  The  judgment  that  my  thought 
has  the  same  object  as  his  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  qiiality  of  feeling,  or  an  objective  quality 
felt  ?  You  do  not  even  ask  the  question  at  this  point.  It 
is  simply  that  taste.  But  if  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.  27? 

knows  them.     This  stage  of  reflective  condition  is,  more  01 
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  anaesthetics  or 
during  a  faint.  Many  persons  testify  that  at  a  certain  stage 
of  the  anaesthetic  process  objects  are  still  cognized  whilst 
the  thought  of  self  is  lost.  Professor  Herzeu  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  moment  a  vague,  limitless,  infinite  feeling— a  sense  of  exist 
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  .  .  .  on  a  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."  t 

Similarly  a  friend  of  Mr.  Herbert  Spencer,  quoted  by 
him  in  'Mind'  (vol  in.  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.J 

*  Revue  Philosophique,  vol.  xxi.  p.  671. 

f  Quoted  from  the  Therapeutic  Gazette,  by  the  N.  Y.  Semi-weekly 
Evening  Post  for  Nov.  2,  1886. 

Jin  lialf-stunned  states  self -consciousness  may  lapse.  A  frieud  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.  1 
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  me  is.  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  i :  "  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  nisi  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.  275 

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  knoiving,  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.  It  is  at  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 
co  vered-Ainerica-in-1492.'  And  if  we  wish  to  speak  of  it 
substantively,  we  must  make  a  substantive  of  it  by  writing 
it  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  nud  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  wa}r  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,  hoiuever  complex  the 
object  may  be,  the,  thought  of  it  is  one  undivided  state  of  con 
sciousness.  As  Thomas  Brown  says  :  * 

"  I  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. f  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.J  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,  lie  should  have  said,  to  the  object 
only. 

f  "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.  i.  p.  264.) 

t  For  their  arguments,  see  above,  pp. 


278  PSYCHOLOGY. 

ciationists  think  that  a  'manifold  '  can  form  a  single  knowl 
edge,  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  tk<j 
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  *ubjec- 
tivity,  a  single  psychosis,  feeling,  or  state  of  mind. 

The  reason  why  this  fact  is  so  strangely  garbled  ^n  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  o\ie  of 
our  thoughts,  of  dropping  the  thought  as  it  is  in  itseK  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't  it  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  is,  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. 


3 

The  pack  of  cards  is  on  the  table 

FIG.  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. 

*  I  know  there  are  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  bead  can 
live  off  of  my  particular  shoulders.  In  a  sense  a  soap-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 
Bach  bubble,  each  thought,  is  a  fresh  organic  unity,  sui  generis 


280  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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.  Eggef 
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  occu 
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  luterieure  (Paris,  1881),  especially  chapters 
vi  and  vii. 


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. f  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.  :f  It  is  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  a  mere  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  30l7~~ 

f  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  of  a  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  Held  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. 

\  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  thai 
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  tell  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 
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 
of  sections  1-1',  taken  at  the  moments 
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 
thought.  At  the  moment  symbol 
ized  by  the  first  figure  pack  is  the 
prominent  part ;  in  the  third  figure  it  is  table,  etc. 

*  The  nearest  approach  (with  which  I  am  acquainted)  tolhe  doctrine 
set  forth  here  is  in  O.  Liebmann'a  Zur  Analysis  der  Wirklichkeit  PD 
427-438. 


The  pack  of  cards  is  on  the  tab! 
FIG.  80. 


The  pack  of  cards  is  on  the  table. 
FIG.  31. 


The  pack  of  cards  is  on  the  table, 
FIG.  32. 


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. 


FIG.  33. 

Let  it  be  the  thought, '  I  am  the  same  I  that  I  was  yesterday.1 
If  at  the  fourth  moment  of  time  we  annihilate  the  thinker  and 
examine  how  the  last  pulsation  of  his  consciousness  was 
n.  ade,  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  ivhile 
it  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,  noio  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  in  itself  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  Optics  is  little  more  than  a  study  of  those 
visual  sensations  of  which  common  men  never  become 
aware — blind  spots,  muscce  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  e}res  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  aesthetically  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  aesthetic  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  a  tour  in  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  a  few  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  lieasoning  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  Eeasoning  is  but  another  form  of  the 
selective  activity  of  the  mind. 

If  now  we  pass  to  its  aesthetic  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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 
I  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  ice  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 
great  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  togethei 
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. 

LET  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  he  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  agaiL 
as  if  I  had  nothing  to  do  with  it  at  all.  In  its  ividesi 
possible  sense,  however,  a  man's  Self  is  the  sum  fatal  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,  h# 
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 
5  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; 

(b)  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 
insulted,  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.  i.  p.  592  ff. 


THE  CONSCIOUSNESS  OF  SELF.  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.  We  are  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  ot 
earth  who  lord  it  over  land  and  sea  and  men  in  the  full 
blown  lustihood  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- 
1  tion,  open  or  sneaking,  of  respect  and  dread. 

(b)  A  mans  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  ivho  recognize  him  and  carry  an  image 
of  him  in  their  mind.  To  wound  any  one  of  these  his 
images  is  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 

I  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 

j  by  every  other  standard  than  that  of  the  organic  feeling  of 

j  the  individual.  To  his  own  consciousness  he  is  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 

demns  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  110  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 

* "  He  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  tc  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  himself  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. " 
(Jjocke's  Essay,  book  n.  ch.  xxvin.  §  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 
1  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  y 
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  us  in  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,  ivhat  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 


298  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. 

I  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  life,  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- 

I  cessantly  there  than  any  other  single  element  of  the  mental 
life,  the  other  elements  end  by  seeming  to  accrete  round  it 

1  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  Self  is  felt.    It  may  be  all  that 


THE  CONSCIOUSNESS  OF  SELF.  299 

Transcendentalists  say  it  is,  and  all  tliat  Empiricists  say  it 
is  into  the  bargain,  but  it  is  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.  It  is  some- 
tiling  with  which  we  also  have  direct  sensible  acquaintance, 
and  which  is  as  fully  present  at  any  moment  of  conscious 
ness  in  which  it  is  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  in  a  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  wliat  the  feeling  of 
this  central  active  self  consists, — not  necessarily  as  yet  what 
the  active  self  is,  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-j 
mend  itself  as  true,  and  confessing  my  inability  to  meet  the 
demands  of  others,  if  others  there  be. 

First  of  all,  I  am  aware  of  a  constant  play  of  furtherances 
and  Inndrances  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  grai? 


800  PSYCHOLOGY. 

pie  with  particulars,  coming  to  the  closest  possible  quarters 
with  the  facts,  it  is  difficult  for  me  to  detect  in  the  activity  any 
purely  spiritual  dement  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 
J  jj  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  it  is  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  as  if  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  clue  to  an  actual  rolling  outwards 
and  upwards  of  the  eyeballs,  such  as  I  believe  occurs  in 
,  j  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,'  ivhen  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  for  a  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.  If  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  P8TCHOLOG  Y. 

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  oiitside.  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.  SOB 

parison  with  the  foreign  matters,  apropos  to  which  they 
occur,  and  hold  a  sort  of  arbitrating,  decisive  position,  qnite 
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  orgaui 
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  oj 
ourself.  This  self-consciousness  is,  at  the  outset,  thoroughly  sensational, 
.  .  .  only  gradually  the  second-named  of  its  characters,  its  subjection  to 
«>ur  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  Psychologic,  2te  Autl.  Bd.  n.  pp.  217-19.) 


304  PSYCHOLOGY. 

If  they  really  were  the  innermost  sanctuary,  the 
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 
knoivn.  It  is  only  known  in  subsequent  reflection.  Instead, 
then,  of  the  stream  of  thought  being  one  of  ccw-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 
1  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  wlio  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  indulge  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 
I,  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-FEELINO. 

These  are  primarily  self-complacency  and  self-aissatis- 
f action.  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.  xxn.  p.  449.  M.  Souriau's  con 
clusion  is '  que  la  conscience  u'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  is  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  discontent. 
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  put  in 
his  thumb  and  pulled  out  a  plum,  and  said  what  a  good  boy 
am  I."  A  Eian  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 
a  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  AKD  SELP-PBESEBVATION. 

These  words  cover  a  large  number  of  our  fundamental 
instinctive  impulses.  We  have  those  of  bodily  self-seeldng, 
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 


J08  PSYCHOLOGY, 

with  the  hunting,  the  acquisitive,  the  home-constructing 
and  the  tool-constructing  instincts,  as  impulses  to  self- 
seeking  of  the  bodily  kind.  Keally,  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.  Guiteau, 
Garfield's  assassin,  is  an  example  of  the  extremity  to  which 
this  sort  of  craving  for  the  notoriety  of  print  may  go  in  a 
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  1  know 
enlarge  my  Self  in  a  sort  of  metaphoric  social  way.  *£7a 


THE  CONSCIOUSNESS  OF  SELF.  309 

me  connait,'  as  the  French  workman  says  of  tlie  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  as 
spiritual  self-seeking  pure  and  undefiled. 

But  this  broad  external  review  of  the  facts  of  the  life  01 
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  to  the  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  to  a  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  if.). 
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. 

II,  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  to  death  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, 

rSTi  ("» /"»  O  G  Q 

Self-esteem — p^ensions  '  SucJl  a  fracti°n  ma7  be  increased 


THE  CONSCIOUSNESS  OF  SELF.  311 

as  well  by  diminishing  the  denominator  as  by  increasing  the 
numerator.*  To  give  up  pretensions  is  as  blessed  a  relief  a^ 
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 
call  a  symphony  a  nuisance.  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  j 
thou  the  world  under  thy  feet.     Well  did  the  wisest  of  our 
time  write,  it  is  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  of  diplomatists  and  mouarchs  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.  Carlyle:  Sartor  Resartus,  'The  Everlasting  Yea.'  "Itelltbee, 
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  thou  shouldst  be  happy  ?  A  little 
while  ajro  thou  hadst  no  right  to  be&t  all."  etc..  etc. 


312  PSYCHOLOGY. 

fulcrum  of  all  appeals.  But  if  a  man  lias  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  it  invulnerable  :  "  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  in  a 
voyage  ?  We  choose  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  I  to  do  ?  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  Q866),  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,  /  shall  not  negate  them  so  long  as  |w 
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,  etc., 
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  Yanderbilts  and  the  Hohenzollerns  themselves. 
Thus  either  by  negating  or  by  embracing,  the  Ego  may  j  V  ' 
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  negativeuess 
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 
hierarchical  scale,  with  the,  bodily  Self  at  the  bottom,  the 
spiritual  Self  at  top,  and  the  extracorporeal  material  selves 
and  the  various  social  selves  betiveen.  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-    i 
teem  is  to  contract,  if  possible,  a  low  estimate  of  the  persons  that  inllict  it.    ' 
Thr's  is  our  remedy  for  the  unjust  censures  of  party  spirit,  as  well  as  of 
personal  malignity."    (Bain  :  Emotion  and  Will,  p.  209.) 


314  PSYCHOLOGY. 

find  we  caimot  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 
I  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 
i  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  materiallself 


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  ;  one  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,'  homoeopath,  or  what  not,  I  am  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. 
jYet  still  the  emotion  that  beckons  me  on  is  indubitably 
j  the  pursuit  of  an  ideal  social  self,  of  a  self  that  is  at  least 
/  I  ivorthy  of  approving  recognition  by  the  highest  possible 
judging  companion,  if  such  companion  there  be.*  This 

*  It  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- 
1  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.  The  impulse 

ito  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  Socius  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- 
itor.     It  is  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 
once  was  admired  in  me  as  courage  has  now  become  in  the  eyes  of  men 
'impertinence';  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  ;  and  the  Eoman 
emperor  felt  sure  the  Absolute  Eeason  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';j 
glory  of  God?"  was  probably  never  answered  in  the  affir-  ' 
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 /ear,  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  'P 

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  his  own.  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,  /must  not  be 
a  failure,  is  the  very  loudest  of  the  voices  that  clamor  in 
each  of  our  breasts :  let  fail  who  may,  I  at  least  must  suc 
ceed.  Now  the  first  conclusion  which  these  facts  suggest 
is  that  each  of  us  is  animated  by  a  direct  feeling  of  regard 
for  his  oivn  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  be 
called. 


THE  CONSCIOUSNESS  OF  SELF.  319 

this  '  Nnmber  One '  within  me,  for  which,  according  to  pro 
verbial  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  pronoun  I  ?  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 
n6thing  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

not  love  it  because  lie  finds  it  to  be  identified  with  himselt 
Keverting  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  xly  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  uberhaupt, — 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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  ol 
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  cf  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 
'  greedy,'  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 
cases  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 ' 
is  primarily,  or  secondarily,  or  ever,  love  for  one's  mere  princi 
ple  of  consents  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  ne.rt,  and 
finally  if s  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 


824  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  deter  mined,  of  my  egoistic  interests. 
Other  objects  may  become  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  tJie  tvord 
'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 
uo  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  Avere  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.  n.  chap.  v.  §§  3,  4 


326  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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 
Denevolence  !  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  as  if  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  to  us.  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,"1  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  aAvaken  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,  ivhich  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,'  Imt  neither  in  the  self 
nor  the  selfishness  does  the  pure  Thinker  play  the  'title-role.' 

Only  one  more  point  connected  with  our  self-regard  need 
be  mentioned.  We  have  spoken  of  it  so  far  as  active  in~ 
stinct  or  emotion.  It  remains  to  speak  of  it  as  cold  intel 
lectual  self-estimation.  We  may  weigh  our  own  Me  in  the» 

*  Psychologische  Analysen  auf  Physiologischer  Grundlage.  Theil  n. 
lite  Hillfte,  §  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  ono  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  to  wards  ourselves 
the  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  value  upon  one  man  than  upon  another,  by  com 
paring  the  two;  to  pity  ono  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 
*>y  any  of  our  fellows.  All  these  exercises  are  intrinsically  social,  like 
Love  and  Resentment;  an  isolated  individual  could  never  attain  to  them, 
nor  exercise  then.  By  what  means,  then,  through  what  fiction  [!]  can  we 
turn  round  r.nd  play  them  off  upon  self?  Or  how  comes  it  that  we  obtain 
any  satisfaction  Ly  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  and  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. 

SOCIAL. 

SPIRITUAL. 

SELF- 
SEEKING. 

Bodily       Appetites 
and  Instincts 
Love      of      Adorn 
ment,      Foppery, 
Acquisitiveness, 
Constructiveness, 
Love  of  Home,  etc. 

Desire  to  please,  be 
noticed,  admired, 
etc. 
Sociability,   Emula 
tion,  Envy,  Love, 
Pursuit  of  Honor, 
Ambition,  etc. 

Intellectual,  Moral 
and  Religious 
Aspiration,  Con 
scientiousness 

SELF- 
ESTIMATION. 

Personal       Vanity, 
Modesty,  etc. 
Pride    of    Wealth, 
Fear  of  Poverty 

Social  and  Family 
Pride,  Vainglory, 
Snobbery,  Humil 
ity,  Shame,  etc. 

Sense  of    Moral   or 
Mental    Superior 
ity,  Purity,  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  hap  pier  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  uf  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- 
iOrming  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  or  love."  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 
sleared  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  it  is  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  Prof essor  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  Prof  essor  Bain  first  wrote,  has  made  us  see,  on 
the  contrary,  that  many  emotions  must  be  primitively  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. 

As  a  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  tldngs  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  siich  (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  em  Maunigfaltiges  gegebeuer  Vorstel- 
lungeu  iu  einem  Bewusstsein  verbinden  kann,  ist  es  moglich  dass  ich  die 
Identittit  des  Bewusstseins  in  diesen  Vorstellungen  selbst  vorstelle,  d.  h.  die 
analytische  Einheit  der  Apperception  ist  nur  unter  der  Voraussetzung  irgend 
eiuer  synthetischen  m5glich."  In  this  passage  (Kritik  der  reineu  Ver- 
uunft,  2te  Anil.  §  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,  /  am  the  same  self  that  I  was 
yesterday. 

We  may  immediately  call  it  right  and  intelligible  so  fai 
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  a  sort  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  self  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.  Them  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  by  a  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  when  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 
came  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  in  a  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  aiid  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 
uubrokeuness  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 
W3  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  felt  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. 
ft  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 


336  PSYCHOLOGY. 

so  different  from  those  we  now  enjoy,  that  no  judgment  of 
identity  can  be  decisively  cast. 

Resemblance  among  tike  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 '  ivhich  ice  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 ;  lie  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  whatevei 
farther  things  may  be  true ;  and  it  is  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.  33T 

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  seZ/'-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  oi 
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.  Eolation 
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. 


388  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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. 
A.11  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.  339 

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,  find 
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."  Each  later  Thought,  knowing  and  in 
cluding  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  its  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  Arch-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 
tion  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  is  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  r>ast  selves  dangles,  planted  firmlv 


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  I  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  rentier  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  Itself;  and  that  it  cannot  knit  it  on  to  Itself  without  knowing 
Itself  ; — so  that  our  supposition  (above,  p.  304)  that  the  Thought  may  con- 
ceivably  have  no  immediate  knowledge  of  Itself  is  thus  overthrown.  To 
which  the  reply  is  that  we  must  take  care  not  to  be  duped  by  words.  The 
words  /and  me  signify  nothing  mysterious  and  unexampled— they  are  at 
bottom  only  names  of  empJiasis ;  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  it,  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  Hint  lam.  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  without  sup« 
posiiig  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 


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  le  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  UNITS , 

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  ; 

H)  The  Transcendentalist  theory. 

The  Theory  of  the  Soul. 

In  Chapter  YI  we  were  led  ourselves  to  the  spiritualist 
theory  of  the  '  Soul,'  as  a  means  of  escape  from  the  unin- 
telligibilities  of  inind-stutf '  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  jdt  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  Soul.  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 
itsdf — 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  '  appropriate ' 
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  row. 
The  unity,  the  identity,  the  individuality,  and  the  immateri 
ality  that  appear  in  the  psychic  life  are  thus  accounted  tol 
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 


TEE  CONSCIOUSNESS  OF  SELF.  848 

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  ia 
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  together,  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  ivhen  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  ?  And  what  is  this 
after  all  but  giving  a  sort  of  concreted  form  to  one's  belief 
that  the  corning  of  the  thought,  when  the  brain-processes 


846  PSYCHOLOGY. 

occur,  has  some  sort  of  ground  in  the  nature  of  things  ?  U 
the  world  Soul  be  understood  merely  to  express  that  claim, 
it  is  a  good  word  to  use.  But  if  it  be  held  to  do  more, 
to  gratify  the  claim, — for  instance,  to  connect  rationally  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,  immate rials,  or  its  '  Self,'  still  the  '  Thought '  which 
we  have  relied  upon  in  our  account  is  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  !  behold  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  affirm 
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  knoAvledge  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  scecula  sceculorum 
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  n\  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  'stream7  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  other  soul.  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- 
ziuisohe  Psychologic,  was  (to  my  reading)  a  strong  defender  of  the  Soul- 
Substance  theory,  has  written  in  §§  243-5  of  Ins  Metaphysik  the  most  beau- 
tifnl  criticism  of  this  theory  which  exists. 


350  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  frem^-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  bo 
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  Lotzfi-  Metaphysic,  §  244. 


THE  CONSCIOUSNESS  OP  SELF.  351 

Bciousnesses,  or  of  tlie  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  long  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 
experience  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  givea 
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  moat  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  rever  can  observe  anything  but  the 
perception.  When  my  perceptions  are  removed  for  any  time,  as  by 
sound  sleep,  so  long  am  I  insensible  of  myself,  and  may  truly  be  said 
not  to  exist.  And  were  all  my  perceptions  removed  by  death,  and  could 
I  neither  think,  nor  feel,  nor  see,  nor  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  perfect  non-entity.  If  anyone,  upon 
serious  and  unprejudiced  reflection,  thinks  he  has  a  different  notion  of 
himself,  I  must  confess  I  can  reason  no  longer  with  him.  All  I  cap 
allow  him  is,  that  he  may  be  in  the  right  as  well  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.  There  is  properly  no  simplicity 
in  it  atone  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. 

1 1  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 
sceptic  and.  confess  that  this  difficulty  is  too  hard  for  my  understanding. 
\  pretend  not,  however,  to  pronounce  it  insuperable.  Others,  perhaps, 
.  .  may  discover  some  hypothesis  that  will  reconcile  these  con 
tradictions."  * 

*  Appendix  to  hook  i  of  Hume's  Treatise  on  Human  Nature. 


TUB  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  /  came  to 
be  joined.  In  the  same  way,  substantially,  Herbavt,*  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  I  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  different  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  isv 
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  OP  SELF.  355 

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  f  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  [this  is  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  /  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  I  or  me.  The  character 
does  not  abstract  itself.  Taine  means  by  'each  of  us1 
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.  T.  p.  114. 

f  '  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  (in  ! 


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.  ...  But  it  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,  v/e  must  come  to  something  ultimate  ;  and  we  seem 
to  have  reached  two  elements  which  have  a  good  prim  a  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,  wrhen  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  I  had  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  is  their  '  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."  f 


*  Analysis,  etc.,  J.  S.  Mill's  Edition,  vol.  i.  p.  331.      The  '  as  it  were 
is  delightfully  characteristic  of  the  school. 
f  J.  Mill's  Analysis,  vol.  n.  p.  175. 


THE  CONSCIOUSNESS  OF  SELF.  857 

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  fall  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 
ory  :  and  the  inexplicable  tie  .  .  .  which  connects  tha  present  con 
sciousness  with  the  past  one  of  which  it  reminds  me,  is  as  near  as  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  i'ac:  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.  As  such  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  is  a  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. f  In  this  place  the 


*  Examination  of  Hamilton,  4th  ed.  p.  263. 

f  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  difficul- 


358  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  phenomenal 
life  consist  not  only  of  present  sensations,  but  likewise,  iu  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  all,  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 
a  remembrance  of  sensation,  even  it'  not  referred  to  any  particular  date,  in 
volves  the  suggestion  and  belief  that  a  sensation,  of  which  it  is  a  copy  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  self-same  series  of  states,  or  thread  of  con 
sciousness,  of  which  the  remembrance  or  expectation  of  those  sensations  is 
the  part  now  present.  If,  therefore,  we  speak  of  the  mind  as  a  series  of 
feelings  we  are  obliged  to  complete  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  tho  mind,  or  Ego,  is  something  different 
from  any  series  of  feelings,  or  possibilities  of  them,  or  of  accepting  the 
paradox  that  something  which  ex  hy pothesi  is  but  a  series  of  feelings,  can 
be  aware  of  itself  as  a  series. 

"  The  truth  is.  that  we  are  here  face  to  face  with  that  final  inexplicw- 


THE  CONSCIOUSNESS  OF  SELF.  359 

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  muse  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  incomprehensibly  perhaps  is,  that  something  which  has 
ceased,  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  belief  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  class  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.  The  class  of  phenomena  the  Ego  presents  are 
feelings  of  which  the  later  ones  are  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  oi 
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  ft,  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  VernuDft,  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  is,  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  /  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  I  think  is  therefore  implied  in  all  ex 
perience.  No  connected  consciousness  of  anything  without 
that  of  Self&H  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, 

*  It  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  it 
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 


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,  short  enough.  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:  /;  of 
which  we  cannot  even  say  we  have  a  notion,  but  only  a  con 
sciousness  which  accompanies  all  notions.  In  this  /,  or  he 
or  it  (the  thing)  which  thinks,  nothing  more  u  represented 
than  the  bare  transcendental  Subject  of  the  knowledge  —x, 
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  that 
'  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  anything  else,  earned  for 
him  the  title  of  the  'all-destroyer.'  The  only  self  we  know 
anything  positive  about,  he  thinks,  is  the  empirical  me,  not 
the  pure  /;  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  help  us  just  as  much  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  betiueen  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  ol 
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.  It  is  just  as  much  a  puzzle  how  the  *  Ego  '  can 
amploy  the  productive  Imagination  to  make  the  Understand 
ing  uss  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  knoiv.  The  best  grammatical 
subject  for  the  verb  knoiv  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  prod  need 
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.  865 

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.f  In  this  uncertainty  we  need  again  do  no  more 
than  decide  what  to  think  of  his  transcendental  Ego  if  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 :  to  the  *  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  not 'king :  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  if:  of  next  to  no  im 
portance  at  all.  It  was  reserved  for  his  Eiclitean  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.  B.  Morris, 
Kant's  Critique,  etc.  (Chicago,  1882),  p.  224.) 

f  "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  (beeteM)."  (Kant's  Theorie 
d.  Erfahrung  (1871),  p.  138.) 


§66  PSYCHOLOGY. 

by  the  musty  academicism  of  his  Konigsberg  existence, 
With  Hegel  it  was  a  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,  Kosenkranz,  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  Eeality 
coalesces  with  the  connected  Manifold,  the  Psychologist 
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,  arid 
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. 

Transcendental  Ego  World 


<*~~                                               "^                                         ••"                                 •"•  ~» 

Psychologist 

Thought 

Thought's  Object 

Psychologist's 
Reality 

Psychologist's  Object. 

These  reductions  account  for  the  ubiquitousness  of  the  '  psychologist's 
fallacy '  (bk.  ir.  ch.  i.  D.  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.  It  is  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  (eithet 
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,  ££  07,  61,  64. 


368  PSYCHOLOGY. 

it  an  entity  copied  from  thought  in  all  essential  respects,  t>ut 
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 
bining  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 

*  Loc.  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,  tc 
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  !  "f 

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  '- 

*  E.  Caird:  Hegel  (1883),  p.  149. 

f  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.  Iii  the  pantomime  all  common  things  are  represented  to 
happen  in  impossible  ways,  people  jump  down  each  other's  tnroats,  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 
formulation  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  arn  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  grounds  for 
their  belief.  Did  they  consistently  propose  it  as  a  substitute  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  separatcness  and  unite  the 
naturally  disunited,  '  synthetizing ,'  '  connecting,'  or  '  relating '  th,e  ideas 
together  being  used  as  synonyms,  by  transcendeutalist  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  1 — 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  tlie  three  schools  we  have  named,  substantialismv 
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  ivilling  to  allow  that  '  perishing '  pulses  oj 
thought  might  recollect  and  know. 

We  m&/y  sum  up  by  saying  that  personality  implies  the 
incessant  presence  of  tAvo  elements,  an  objective  person, 
known  by  a  passing  subjective  Thought  and  recognized  as 
continuing  in  time.  Hereafter  let  us  use  the  ivords  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  the  infant,  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  1  ...  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  /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  call  it  their  own. 

Thus  the  identity  found  by  the  /  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 
miml  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,  etc.  .  .  .  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  lie  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 
tiuus  Scriblerus.  quoted  by  Brown,  ibid.} 


THE  CONSCIOUSNESS  OF  SELF.  373 

assemblage  of  facts.  We  often  say  of  a  man  '  lie  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.  As  a 
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  ni  Nmories  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  thoy  did  so.  The 
content  of  a  dream  will  oftentimes  insert  itself  into  the 
stream  of  real  life  in  a  most  perplexing  way.  The  most 
frequent  source  of  false  memory  is  the  accounts  we  give  to 
9thers  of  our  experiences.  Such  accounts  we  almost  ai 


374  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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 : 

"  It  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. f  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 !  J 

*  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.  i.  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. 

\  See  Josiah  Royce  (Mind,  vol.  13,  p.  244,  and  Proceedings  of  Am.  Soc. 
of  Psych.  Research,  vol.  i.  p.  366),  for  evidence  that  a  certain  sort  of  hal 
lucination  of  memory  which  he  calls  '  pseudo-presentiment '  is  no  uncom 
mon  phenomenon. 


THE  CONSCIOUSNESS  OF  SELF.  375 

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  of  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 ; 

(3)  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.  Bibot  says,  is  that 
feeling  of  our  vitality  which,  because  it  is  so  perpetually 
present,  remains  in  the  background  of  our  consciousness. 

"It  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  Memoire,  p.  85.  The  little  that  would  be  left  of  per 
sonal  consciousness  if  all  our  senses  stopped  their  work  is  ingenuously 
shown  in  the  remark  of  the  extraordinary  anaesthetic  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,  etc.  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  latter  becomes  con 
firmed.  It  may  gradually  contract  associations  with  the  trains  ot  ideas 
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."  f 

Professor  Strttmpell  reports  (in  the  Deulsches  Archiv  f.  klin.  Med.,  xxn. 
847,  1878).  This  boy,  whom  we  shall  later  find  instructive  in  many  con 
nections,  was  totally  anaesthetic  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  nicM  sehen  kann,  da  BIN  ich  gar 
niclit—\  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;  tbfl 
second,  somewhat  later,  which  consists  in  his  saying,  Tarn  another  person.* 
(H.  Taine:  de  1'Intelligence,  3me  edition  (1878),  p.  462. 

f  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  contradictious  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  daemons  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,  etc.  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 
tning  of  which  I  retain  a  clear  remembrance.  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.  052. 


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. 
...  I  had  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 
as  if  my  legs  did  not  belong  to  me.  It  was  almost  as  bad  with  my  arms. 
As  for  my  head,  it  seemed  no  longer  to  exist.  ...  I  appeared  to  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  functions."  * 

In  cases  similar  to  tliis,  it  is  as  certain  that  the  /  is  un 
altered  as  that  the  me  is  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  ?  What  is  this  new  one  ?  Are  they  the  same  ?  Or  have 
I  two  ?  Such  questions,  answered  by  whatever  theory  the 
patient  is  able  to  conjure  up  as  plausible,  form  the  begin 
ning  of  his  insane  life.f 

*  De  riutelligence,  3me  edition  (1878),  vol.  n,  note,  p.  461.  Kris- 
haber's  book  (La  Nevropathie  Cerebro-cardiaque,  1873)  is  full  of  similar 
observations. 

f  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  becomes  a  pauper,  or  a  loving  husband  and  fathet 
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., 

1 '  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,  etc. ,  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  Felida  X.> 


between  all  past  habits,  whether  of  an  active  or  a  passive  kind,  and  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  derangement 
is  no  uu frequent  result. 

*  The  number  of  subjects  who  can  do  this  with  any  fertility  and  exu 
berance  is  relatively  quite  small. 


380  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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. 

u  I  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  Nurnberg,  he  knew  nothing  of  it,  and  saw  himself  before  the 


*  First  in  the  Revue  Scientifique  for  May  26,  1876,  then  in  his  hook, 
Hypnotisme,  Double  Conscience,  et  Alterations  de  la  Persoimalite  (Paris, 
1887). 
f    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  Keynolds. 
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  into  the  world.  'All 
of  the  past  that  remained  to  her  was  the  faculty  of  pronouncing  a  few 
words,  and  this  seems  to  have  been  as  purely  instinctive  as  the  wailings 
of  an  infant ;  for  at  first  the  words  which  she  uttered  were  connected 
with  no  ideas  in  her  mind.'  Until  she  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  sesn  them  before,— never  known  them, — was 
not  r.waro  tha1*:  cacii  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  hills,  the  vales,  the  streams, — all  were  novelties. 
The  beauties  o*  fee  landscape  were  ail  unexplored. 

"  She  had  no1;  the  slightest  consciousness  that  she  had  ever  existed 
previous  to  tl:e  moment  in  which  she  awoke  from  that  mysterious 
slumber.  '  1'n  a  word,  she  was  an  infant,  jus*;  born,  yet  born  in  a  state  of 
maturity,  with  a  capacity  for  relishing  the  rich,  sublime,  luxuriant 
wonders  of  created  nature/ 

"Tho  first  lesson  in  Iier  education  was  to  teach  her  by  what  ties  she 
was  bound  to  those  by  v/hom  she  was  surrounded,  and  the  duties  de 
volving  upon  her  accordingly.  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  oi:  friendship.  She  considered 
those  she  hud  once  known  as  for  tho  most  part  strangers  and  enemies, 
among  wLcm  she  wa^,  by  some  remarkable  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  a 

*  Transactions  of  the  College  of  Physicians  of  Philadelphia,  April  4, 
1888.  Also,  less  complete,  in  Harper's  Magazine,  May  1860. 


382  PSYCHOLOGY. 

few  weeks  she  had  readily  re-learned  to  read  and  write.  In  copying  hei 
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.  I  could  not  make  the  horse 
go  on.  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  did  not  mind  me.  "Well,"  said  I, 
"  if  you  won't  for  words,  I'll  try  blows  ; ''  so  I  got  off  and  took  a  stick, 
arid  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  new  acquisitions  she  had  made,  and  any  new  ideas  she  had  obtained, 
were  lost  to  her  now — yet  not  lost,  but  laid  up  out  of  sight  in  safe-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  antieipations  were  not  to  be  realized.  After  the  lapse  of  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. 

"  In  this  state  she  came  to  understand  perfectly  the  facts  of  her  case, 
not  from  memory,  but  from  information.  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  Eeynolds  : 

"The  change  from  a  gay,  hysterical,  mischievous  woman,  fond  of 
jests  and  subject  to  absurd  beliefs  or  delusive  convictions,  to  one  retain, 
hig  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

time  keeping  house  for  him,  showing  a  sound  judgment  and  a  thorough 
acquaintance  with  the  duties  of  her  position. 

"  Dr.  Keynolds,  who  is  still  living  in  Meadville,"  says  l>r.  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.  Felida  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  anaesthetic  thereto)  and  also  on  the  memory  of  such 
sensations,  are  the  basis  of  changes  of  personality.  The 
anaesthetic  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 

*  Of.  Ribot's  Diseases  of  Memory  for  cases.  See  also  a  large  number  of 
them  in  Forbes  Winslow's  Obscure  Diseases  of  the  Braiu  and  Mind, 
chapters  XIII-XYII. 


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  anaesthetic 
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  anaesthetic  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  anaesthesias  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. 
Charcot'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  it  in  Rose,  in  Marie, 
and  in  Leonie  ;  and  his  brother,  Dr.  Jules  Janet,  who  was 
interne  at  the  Salpetriere  Hospital,  found  it  in  the  celebrated 
subject  Wit ....  whose  trances  had  been  studied  for  years 


386  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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 
it  aU  recollection  of  past  sensations  of  that  kind.  If,  for  ex 
ample,  hearing  be  the  anaesthetic  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  anaesthetic, 
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- 
toro-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.  381 

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  hysteric  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  Leonie  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  doe? 
not  even  suspect  when  awake,  for  her  amnesia  is  then  complete.  .  .  . 
She  refuses  the  name  of  Leonie  and  takes  that  of  Leontine  (Leonie  21 
to  which  her  first  magnetizers  had  accustomed  her.  '  That  good  woman 
is  not  myself,' she  says,  'she  is  too  stupid!'  To  herself,  Leontine  or 
Leonie  2,  she  attributes  all  the  sensations  and  all  the  actions,  in  a  wor<J 
all  the  conscious  experiences  which  she  has  undergone  in  somnambulism, 


388  PSYCHOLOGY. 

and  knits  them  together  to  make  the  history  of  her  already  long  life. 
To  Leonie  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  Leonie  has  a  husband  and  chil 
dren  ;  but  Leonie  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  J 
learned  that  her  magnetizers  in  early  days,  as  audacious  as  certain  hyp- 
notizers  of  recent  date,  had  somnambulized  her  for  her  first  accouche- 
me?its,  and  that  she  had  lapsed  into  that  state  spontaneously  in  the 
later  ones.  Leonie  2  was  thus  quite  right  in  ascribing  to  herself  the 
children— 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 
called  Leonie  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  Leonie  1.  'A  good  but  rather 
stupid  woman,'  she  says,  '  and  not  me.'  And  she  aiso  separates  herself 
from  Leonie  2  :  4  How  can  you  see  anything  of  me  in  that  crazy  crea 
ture  ? '  she  says.  *  Fortunately  I  am  nothing  for  her.'  " 

Leonie  1  knows  only  of  herself ;  Leonie  2,  of  herself  and 
of  Leonie  1 ;  Leonie  3  knows  of  herself  and  of  both  the 
others.  Leonie  1  has  a  visual  consciousness  ;  Leonie  2  has 
one  both  visual  and  auditory  ;  in  Leonie  3  it  is  at  once 
visual,  auditory,  and  tactile.  Prof.  Janet  thought  at  first 
that  he  was  Leonie  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 
Leonie  2. 

"This  resurrection  of  a  somnambulic  personage  who  had  been 
extinct  for  twenty  years  is  curious  enough  ;  and  in  speaking  to  Leonie 
8,  I  naturally  now  adopt  the  name  of  Leonore  which  was  given  her  by  her 
first  master." 

The  most  carefully  studied  case  of  multiple  personality 
is  that  of  the  hysteric  youth  Louis  V.  aboiit  whom  MM. 
Bourru  and  Burot  have  written  a  book.*  The  symptoms 
are  too  intricate  to  be  reproduced  here  with  detail.  Suffice 
it  that  Louis  V.  had  led  an  irregular  life,  in  the  army,  in 

*  Variations  de  la  Personnalite  (Paris,  1888^. 


THE  CONSCIOUSNESS  OF  SELF.  389 

hospitals,  and  in  houses  of  correction,  and  had  had  numer 
ous  hysteric  anaesthesias,  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  Bicetre  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  Personnalite  (1885),  the 


390  PSYCHOLOGY. 

The  case  of  this  proteiform  individual  would  seem,  then, 
nicely  to  corroborate  M.  P.  Janet's  law  that  anaesthesias  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  anaesthesia  does 
not  sufficiently  explain  the  changes  of  disposition,  which  are 
probably  due  to  modifications  in  the  perviousuess  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  1  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  anaesthetic  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 
anaesthetic  as  when  awake.  (Loc.  cit.  p.  619.)— It  does  not  appear  that 
there  was  any  important  difference  in  the  sensibility  of  Felida  X.  between 
her  two  states— as  far  as  one  can  judge  from  M.  Azam's  account  she  was  to 
some  degree  anaesthetic  in  both  (op.  cit.  pp.  71,  96).— In  the  case  of  double 
personality  reported  by  M.  Dufay  (Revue  Scientifique,  vol.  xvin.  p.  69), 
the  memory  seems  to  have  been  best  in  the  more  anaesthetic  condition. — 
Hypnotic  subjects  made  blind  do  not  necessarily  lose  their  visua1  ideas.  It 
appears,  then,  both  that  amnesias  may  occur  without  anaesthesias,  and  anaes 
thesias  without  amnesias,  though  they  may  also  occur  in  combination 
Hypnotic  subjects  made  blind  by  suggestion  will  tell  you  that  they  clearlj 
imagine  the  things  which  they  can  v  longer  see 


THE  CONSCIOUSNESS  OF  SELF.  391 

latory  '  sort,  who  has  given  me  permission  to  name  him  in 
these  pages.* 

The  Rev.  Ansel  Bourne,  of  Greene,  R.  I.,  was  brought  up  to  th« 
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  tht, 
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 
rery  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 
Proceeding  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,  orderly  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  l  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  kno\\ 
what  set  me  down  in  that  Pawtucket  horse-car,  and  I  don't  know  how 
I  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,  etc., 
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  Jafl"w  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  iz  so  now  in  communities  which  favor  that  be 
lief.  With  us  In  gives  himself  out  at  the  worst  for  an 
Indian  or  other  grotesquely  speaking  but  harmless  person 
age.  Usually  li:  purports  to  be  the  spirit  of  a  dead  per 
son  known  or  unknown  to  tnose  present,  and  the  subject  is 
then  wiiat  we  call  c,  c  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  ~'us^  beginning  to  be  studied 
in  a  proper  scientific  way.  The  lowest  phase  of  medium- 
ship  is  automatic  writing,  and  the  lowest  gro.de  of  that  is 
where  the  Subject  knows  what  words  are  coming,  but  feels 
impelled  to  write  them  as  if  from  without.  Then  comes 
writing  unconsciously,  even  whilst  engaged  ii.  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  Hiusdale,  and  Mr.  R. 
Hodgson)  practically  doubts  his  ingrained  honesty,  nor,  so  far  as  I  can 
discover,  do  any  of  his  personal  acquaintances  indulge  in  a  sceptical 


394  PSYCHOLOGY. 

everything  are  changed,  and  there  is  no  after-memory 
whatever  until  the  next  trance  comes.  One  curious  thing 
about  trance-utterances  is  their  generic  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  abounds  in  a 
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 
guishable  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,  B.  I.,  member  of  Con 
gress  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,"  be  writes  us,  "  is  in  hieroglyph,  or  strange  compound 
ed  arbitrary  characters,  each  series  possessing  a  seeming  unitv  in  general 


CONSCIOUSNESS  OF  SELF.  895 

design  or  cnaraeter,  followed  by  what  purports  to  be  a  translation  or 
rendering  into  molhei  English.  I  never  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  impressional,  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  owTn  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  I  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  a  sentence.  Sentences  are  commenced  without  knowledge  of  mine  as 
to  their  subject  or  ending.  In  fact,  I  have  never  known  in  advance  the 
subject  of  disquisition. 

"There  is  in  progress  now,  at  uncertain  times,  not  subject  to  my 
v.'ill,  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,  etc. 
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.  ...  I  am  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. 

"It  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  far  as  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  mv 


396  PSYCHOLOGY. 

intellectual  powers,  and  writes  chapters  upon  the  philosophy  of  life,  o* 
opens  a  post-office  for  spirits  to  drop  their  effusions,  and  have  them 
put  into  English  script.  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.  .  . 

"  It  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  c^n  style.1' 

I  am  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  living  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  Yennum  is  perhaus  as  extreme  a  case  of  '  pos- 


THE  CONSCIOUSNESS  OF  SELF.  397 

session  '  of  the  modern  sort  as  one  can  find.*  Lurancy  was 
a  young  girl  of  fourteen,  living  with  her  parents  at  Watseka, 
111.,  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. 
BofFs  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.  Roffs  she  had  no  knowledge  of,  and  did 
not  recognize,  any  of  Mr.  Vennum's  family,  their  friends  or  neighbors, 
yet  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Venn  urn  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  KofiV  would  sometimes 
*  go  back  to  heaven,'  and  leave  the  body  in  a  '  quiet  trance,' 
i.e.,  without  the  original  personality  of  Luraucy  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  Publishing  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  Mi. 
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.  I  saw  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  anaesthetic  during  the  act. 

*  My  friend  Mr.  R.  Hodgson  informs  me  that  he  visited  Watseka  iv 
April  1890,  and  cross-examined  the  principal  witnesses  of  this  case.  Hi? 
confidence  in  the  original  narrative  was  strengthened  by  what  he  learned ; 
and  various  unpublished  facts  were  ascertained,  which  increased  the  plau 
sibility  of  the  spiritualistic  interpretation  of  the  phenomenon. 


THE  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  ono 
system  give  rise  to  one  consciousness,  and  those  of  another 
system  to  another  simidtaneously  existing  consciousness. 
Thus  only  can  we  understand  the  facts  of  automatic  writing, 
etc.,  whilst  the  patient  is  out  of  trance,  and  the  false  anaes 
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 
ideas  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  which  as  *  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  samo  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  the  person  receives  or  may  re 
ceive.  This  me  is  an  empirical  aggregate  of  things  object 
ively  known.  The  /  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.  xiv.  p.  161,  and  Luys's  essay,  '  Sur  le  Dedoublement,'  etc..  IB 
1'Encephale  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 
haman  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.  If  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 
knoioer  correlative  to  all  this  known  ;  and  the  problem  ivho 
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 
psychological  or  naturalistic  point  of  view. 


CHAPTER  XL 
ATTENTION. 

E  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 
axperience.  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.  370-374  of  the  Emotions  of  the  Will.  .1 
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  what  attention  is.  It  is  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.  localization,  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  pensee  de  derriere  la 
tete  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    ONCEP 

The  question  of  the  '  span1  of  consciousness  has  often  been 
asked  and  answered — sometimes  a  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  tha^ 
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  wr 
I'Education  des  Animaux,  Lille,  1842) ,  that  is  to  say,  we  must  seek  to  make 
them  gradually  perceive  separately  things  M'hich,  if  left  to  themselves, 
would  not  be  attended  to,  because  they  would,  fuse  with  a  great  sum  of 
other  sensorial  stimuli  to  a  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  the 
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  singida  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."  f 

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.  J 

*  Elements,  part  i.  chap,  n,  Jin. 

f  Lectures  on  Metaphysics,  lecture  xiv. 

t  Nature,  vol.  in.  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,  f 

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- 

*  If  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. 

f  Mr.  Cattell  made  Jevons's  experiment  in  a  much  more  precise  way 
(Philosophische  Studien,  nr  121  if.).  Cards  were  ruled  with  short  lines, 
varying  in  number  from  four  to  fifteen,  and  exposed  to  the  eye  for  a  hun 
dredth  of  a  second.  When  the  number  was  but  four  or  five,  no  mistakes 
as  a  rule  were  made.  For  higher  numbers  the  tendency  was  to  uuder- 
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.,  ir.  215).  Dietze  found  that  by  mentally 
subdividing  the  groups  into  sub-groups  as  one  listened,  as  many  as  forty 
strokes  could  be  identified  as  a  whole.  They  were  then  grasped  as  eight 
sub-groups  of  five,  or  as  five  of  eight  strokes  each.  (Philosophische  Studien, 
II.  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 -f- 1,  apparently.  (Neurologiscb.es  Centralblatt,  1889,  272.) 


408  PSYCHOLOGY. 

fore  us  breaks  into  parts  disconnected  with  each  other,  and 
forming  each  as  it  were  a  separate  object  or  system,  not 
conceivable  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  : 

"I  write  the  first  four  verses  of  Athalie,  whilst  reciting  eleven  of 
Musset.  The  whole  performance  occupies  40  seconds.  But  reciting 
alpne  takes  22  and  writing  alone  31,  or  53  altogether,  so  that  there  is  a 
difference  in  favor  of  the  simultaneous  operations." 

Or  again  : 

"I  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  Caesar  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 

*  Of.  Chr.  Wolff:  Psychologia  Empirica,  §  245.     Wolff's  account  of  the 
phenomena  of  attention  is  iu  general  excellent. 


410  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  distinc 
tion  of  which  came  first),  it  is  obvious  that  each  signal  must 
combine  stably  in  our  perception  with  a  different  instant  of 
time.  It  is  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- 

*  Pfluger's  Archiv,  xi.  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, — aii  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  drop- 
ping  on  the  board."  f 

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.,  3d  ed.  n.  pp.  238-40. 
f  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  oDject)  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  bell-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  call  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  simultaneous  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  J  of  a  second  of  time.  Eesults,  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  othei 
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.f 


*  Physio!  .  Psych.,  2d  ed.  n.  264-6. 

f  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- 


& 


a 


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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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,  i.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  21st  the  star  seemed  removed  by  ac  from 
the  meridian-thread  c,  whilst  at  the  22d  it  was  at  the  distance  be  ;  then,  if 
ac  :  be  ::  1  :  2,  the  star  would  have  passed  at  21£  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  made  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,  n.  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  v. 
Tschisch  give.* 

*  Physiol.  Psych.,  2d  ed.  n.  273-4;  3d  ed.  n.  339;  Philosophische 
Studieu,  n.  621  fit'. — I  know  that  I  am  stupid,  but  1  confess  I  find  these 
theoretical  statements,  especially  Wuiidt's,  a  little  ha/y.  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  simulta 
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  fix  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 
get  a  third.  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,  and  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  later  on.  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  a 
regularly  recurring  series,  the  stimulus  is  once  in  a  while  omitted,  the  ob 
server  sometimes  reacts  as  if  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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 
f)  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  bis  earlier  work  (Vorlesungen 
lib.  Menschen  und  Thierseele,  i.  37-42,  865-371)  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,  etc.,  etc.,  etc. 

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  wrhen  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  draAvs 
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  is  a 
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  tbe 
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.1'  * 

Passive  intellectual  attention  is  immediate  when  we  follow 
ip  thought  a  train  of  images  exciting  or  interesting  per  se; 
derived,  when  the  images  are  interesting  only  as  means  to  a 
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;  Psychologic  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,  wras  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  drculos  nieos!  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 
journey.  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  Budaeus  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  nem-algic  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."  f 

Dr.  Carpenter  speaks  of  launching  himself  by  a  deter 
mined  effort.  This  effort  characterizes  what  we  called  ac- 


*  Sir  W.  Hamilton.  Metaphysics,  lecture  xiv. 

f  Mental  Physiol.,  §  124.     The  oft-cited  case  of  soldiers  not  perceiving 
that  they  are  wounded  is  of  an  analogous  sort. 


PSYCHOLOGY. 

live  or  voluntary  attention.  It  is  a  feeling  which  every  one 
knows,  but  which  most  people  would  call  quite  indei- crib- 
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  discrimi 
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  a  time.  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,  that  is,  the 
centres  kept  in  a  state  of  unstable  equilibrium,  for  one  second"  (Mind,  XL 
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  ivill  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  arid  lets  its  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  noonday  lesson  in  formal  logic 
which  he  detests.  Anything  but  that ! 

Once  more,  the  object  must  change.  When  it  is  one  of 
sight,  it  will  actually  become  invisible  ;  when  of  hearing, 
inaudible, — if  we  attend  to  it  too  unmoviugly.  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,  §  32. 


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, 


FIG.  36. 

or  parts  of  both,  will  come  to  consciousness,  but  hardly 
ever  both  combined.     Helmholtz  now  says  : 

"  I  find  that  I  am  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,  to  something  else.  If  we  wish  to  keep  it  upon  one  and  the  same 
object,  we  must  seek  constantly  to  find  out  something  new  about  the 
latter,  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.  N»  w 


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  Helmlioltz  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  it  in  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  a  new  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  suime}.'  '  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  xiv.) 


424  PSYCHOLOGY. 

each  other  mutually  by  some  rational  law.  Therefore  we 
call  the  attention  '  sustained '  and  the  topic  of  meditation 
for  hours  '  the  same.'  In  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  of  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  it  is  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 
XIY  and  XV  some  of  these  consequences  will  come  to  light. 
Suffice  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 
(e)  shortens  'reaction- time.' 

a  and  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,  etc.,  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 
iancy  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,  n.  28;  Lotze:  Metaphysik,  §  273; 
Feclmer.  Revision  d.  Psychophysik,  xix  ;  G.  E.  Muller :  Zur  Theorie  d. 
sinnl.  Aufmerksamkeit,  §  1;  Stuinpf :  Tonpsycbologie  I.  71. 


426  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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,f  become  stronger  by  the  very  fact  of  being 
observed. 

"  I  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, 
involving  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. 
f  Tonpsychologie,  i.  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  ivill  re 
main  in  the  memory,  whilst  one  inattentively  allowed  to  pass 
will  leave  no  traces  behind.  Already  in  Chapter  YI  (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 : f  "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  : 

u  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  wroi>g 
stimulus.  Sometimes  even,  though  not  so  often,  the  latter  may  be  an- 


*  Compare,  en  clearness  as  the  essential  fruit  of  attention,  Lotze's  Meta- 
physic,  §  273. 

f  Elements,  part  i.  chap.  n. 


428  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  inteivals, — 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. 

(  No  warning 0.253  0.051  13 

^5  cm.       -j  Warning o.076  0.060  17 

K  (  No  warning 0.206  0.036  14 

5  cm>       ]  Warning 0.175  0.035  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. f 
....  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.  n.  226. 

f  By  a  negative  value  of  the  reaction-time  Wundt  means  the  case  of  tke 
reactive  movement  occurring  before  the  stimulus. 


ATTENTION.  429 

its  climax,  the  movement  we  stand  ready  to  execute  escapes  from  the 
control  of  om  will,  and  we  register  a  wrong  signal.  In  these  other  ex 
periments,  in  wriicn  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 
apperceived)  and  with  ihn  apperception  the  motor  discharge  coin 
cides."* 

Usually,  when  the  impression  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 
pl^siological  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  shoiving  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. 

"If,  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.  ii.  239. 

f  The  reader  must  not  suppose  this  phenomenon  to  be  of  frequent 
occurrence.  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 
vance.  In  II  they  came  irregularly. 

I.  Regular  Alternation. 

Average  Time.  Average  Error.   No.  of  Expta. 

Strong  sound 0.116"  0.010"  18 

Weaksound 0.127"  0.012"  9 

II.  Irregular  Alternation. 

Strong  sound 0.189"  0.038"  9 

Weaksound 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  versa. 
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 
0  25".  It  is  also  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  unexpected  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  difficult.  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.  Experiments. 

A          (  Without  noise 0.189       0.244         0.156  21 

(Bell-stroke -s  W}th  no}ge _  ,.0.313       0.499         0.183  16 

moderate)  ( 

B  (  Without  noise 0.158       0.206         0.133  20 

(Bell-stroke  ]WithD0.se Q  3Q3       Q  295         Q  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. 

Without  noise 0.222  0.284  0.158  20 

With  noise 0.300  0.390  0.250  18 

"  When  one  reflects  that  in  the  experiments  with  one  and  the  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  ivhen  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  has  a  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 ,   0.073 

b)  Unexpectedly  weak  sound 0.171 

2.  Interference  by  like  stimulus  (sound  by  sound)  0.045  t 

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,  f 

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. 

f  It  should  be  added  that  Mr.  J.  M.  Cattell  (Mind,  XT.  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,  i.  439.  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  ilber  die  Ableukung  d.  Auf- 
merksamkeit,  Dorpat,  1889)  found  that  a  stimulus  to  one  eye  sometimes 
prevented,  sometimes  improved,  the  perception  of  a  quickly  ensuing  very 
faint  stimulus  to  the  other. 

|  Of.  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.  In  a  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  ?"  etc.  ;  or  "  which  is  Goethe's  finest  drama  ?"  etc. ; 
or  "  which  letter  comes  the  later  in  the  alphabet,  the  letter 
L  or  the  first  letter  of  the  most  beautiful  tree  ?"  etc. ;  or 
"which  is  less,  15  or  20  minus  8  ?"  *  etc.  etc.  etc.  Even  in 
this  series  of  reactions  the  time  was  much  quicker  when  the 
reacter  turned  his  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  inind  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  lohich  his  possible 
answer  lay.f  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 

*Beitrilge  zur  Experiraentellcn  Psychologic,  Heft  i.  pp.  73-106  (1889). 

f  To  say  the  very  least,  he  always  brought  his  articulatory  iunervation 
close  to  the  discharging  point.  Herr  M.  describes  a  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  loithin  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  a  sense  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  already  seen, 
(p.  300),  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  feel  a  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  is  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 
cately  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  I 
seek  to  apprehend  a  thini?  keenly  by  eye  or  ear;  and  this  analogous  feel 


436  PSYCHOLOGY. 

ing  is  very  differently  localized.  While  in  sharpest  possible  attention  to 
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.  f 

*  Psychophysik,  Bd.  n.  pp.  475-6. 

f  I  must  say  that  I  am  wholly  unconscious  of  the  peculiar  feelings  in 
the  scalp  which  Feclmer  ^oes  on  to  describe.  "  The  feeling  of  strained 
attention  in  the  different  sense-organs  seems  to  be  only  a  muscular  one  pro 
duced  in  using  these  various  organs  by  setting  in  motion,  by  a  sort  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- 
sammenneJimen,  etc.,  etc.  In  a  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." 
(Ibid,  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  v ''o  their  elements,  this  investigator  continues:  "It  is  more  than  a 
figure  c  f  qjeech  when  one  says  that  we  'search  '  among  the  sounds.  This 
hearkening  search  is  very  observably  a  bodily  activity,  just  like  attentive 
looking  i  \  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.,  XLVIII.  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  not 
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  full.  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  from 
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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

"  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  as  lie  in  this  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  for  a 
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.  But  if  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  5  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. 

f  Hermann's  Handbuch,  in.  i.  548. 


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  is  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  imagination.  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-centres,  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

"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  c,  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  the  c.  ...  If  you 
place  the  resonator  which  corresponds  to  a  certain  overtone,  for  ex 
ample  g'  of  the  sound  c,  against  your  ear,  and  then  make  the  note  c 
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.  "f 

In  another  place  J  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- 
schauungsbild)  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.,  n.  209. 

f  Physiol.  Optik,  741.  \  P.  728. 

§  Popular  Scieutin'e  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 


Fio.  37. 


FIG.  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  lieu  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,  f 

*  Similarly  in  the  verses  which  some  one  tried  to  puzzle  me  with  the 
other  day:  "  Oui  n'a  beau  dit,  gm  sabot  dit,  nid  a  beau  dit  elle  f  " 

f  I  cannot  refrain  from  referring  in  a  note  to  an  additional  set  of  facts 
instanced  by  Lotze  in  his  Medizinische  Psychologic,  §  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  aesthetic  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  lie 
gives.  "  Iii  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  lineal- 
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  FlG-  39> 

from  indefinite  distances;  but  at  the  next  moment  it  startles  us  by 
its  threatening  loud  ness  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. 


444  PSYCHOLOGY. 

a  stuffed  bird.  They  readily  name  the  features  they 
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  Eibot,t  and  still  more  ably  advocated  by  Mr.  N. 
Lange,  :|:  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  [of  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. 
f  Psychologie  de  1'Attentiou  (1889),  p.  32  if. 
t  Philosophische  Studien,  iv.  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  present  is  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  vistializer,  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  Mecanisme  de  1'At- 
tention,  in  Revue  Philosophique,  vol.  xxvn.  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. 

f  Drs.  Ferrier  (Functions of  the  Brain,  §§  102-3)  and  Obersteiner  (Brain, 
i,  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. 
Muller,  whose  little  work  Zur  Theorie  der  siunlichen  Aufrnerksamkeit, 
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.  Kibot 
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  is  made." 

I  take  another  example,  from  M.  B.  Perez :  * 

"A  child  of  six  years,  habitually  prone  to  mind^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.,  309 
ft.;  C.  Stumpf:  Tonpsychologie,  i.  67-75;  W.  B.  Carpenter:  Mental  Physi 
ology,  chap.  3  ;  Cappie  in  '  Brain/  July  1886  (hyperaemia- theory) ;  J,  Sully 
in  'Brain,'  Oct.  1890. 

*  L'Enfant  de  trois  a  sept  Anss  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  wlio  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  mys 
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  feeder  a  rumpat, 
Ex  infinite  ne  causam  causa  sequatur — 

*  Psychologic  de  1'Attention,  p.  53. 

f  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  I  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  are  the  attention.  We  don't 
bestow  it,  the  object  draws  it  from  us.  The  object  has  the 
initiative,  not  the  mind. 

Derived  attention,  ivhere  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  such  a  state  of  heightened  iirita- 
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  aud  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  Handbtich,  p.  534.)  I  do  not  here  insist  on  this,  because 
it  is  hard  to  tell  whether  the  attention  or  the  movement  comes  lirst  (Ber 
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  mer  2  effect  of 
stimulus  and  association.  Mach's  theory  that  the  will  to  look  is  the  space- 
feeling  itself  may  be  compared  with  Bering's  in  this  place.  See  JMach's 
Beitrilge  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  to  a  com 
panion's  voice  in  the  midst  of  noises  which  pass  unnoticd 
though  objectively  much  louder  than  the  words  we  hear. 
Each  word  is  doMy  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 
hot  an  agent,  The  things  we  attend  to  come  to  us  by  their 
own  laws.  Attention  creates  no  idea  ;  an  idea  must  already 
bo  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.  451 

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  cart 
make  more  of  it  ifiue  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  effect 
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  iDtrinsically  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.  Biit  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  Avould  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  verbal  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. 

I  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,  wrhere  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,  "  Is  there  a  Special  Activity  of  Attention  ?"  in  '  Mind,' 
xi.  305,  and  Lipps,  Gruudtatsachen,  chaps,  iv  and  xxix,  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  ivere  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,  it  may  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.  The  consciousness  doesn't  count> 
these  reasoners  say ;  it  doesn't  exist  for  science,  it  is  nil ; 
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  unlike  them ;  and  we  assume  that  a  compli 
cation  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,  f 

*  More  will  be  said  of  the  matter  when  we  come  to  the  chapter  on  the 
Will. 

f  See.  for  a  defence  of  the  notion  of  inward  activity,  Mr.  J times  Ward's 
searching  articles  in  '  Mind,'  xn.  45  ami  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  few  days  we  ignore  them 
altogether.  Various  entoptic  images,  muscce  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  muscce,  volitantes  the  double  retinal  images,  etc. 
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.  As  a  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 
criminate  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  more  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.  Miiller  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. 

*  Zur  Theorie  d.  sinul.  Aufuaerksamkeit,  p.  128  foil. 


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  able  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  miller  who  does  the  same  when 
his  wheel  stands  still,  are  stock  examples.  ISow  (since 
every  impression  falling  on  the  nervous  system  must  propa 
gate  itself  somewhither),  Miiller  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)  tlie  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 

*  I  have  begun  to  inquire  experimentally  whether  any  of  the  measurable 
functions  of  the  workmen  change  after  the  din  of  machinery  stops  at  a 
workshop.  So  fur  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  it  is  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,  tlie  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  ivhen  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  it  is.  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  a  is  a,  and  b, 
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  '  coucept '  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  priori 
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.  'The 
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  Encyclopaedia  Britaunica  (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  all  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  repeaiable  active  experiences. 
And  when  we  have  got  our  objects  together  and  compared  them,  we  do 
not  make,  but  find,  their  relations. 

*  Cf.  Hodgson,  Time  and  Space,  §  46.     Lotze,  Logic,  §  11. 

f  "  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.  n.  chap.  xi.  §  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  in  a  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.  It  is  a  quwsitum  of  a  perfectly 
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.  '  Eound  square,'  '  black-white-thiug,'  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,  in  our  mind.  As  u  mutter  of  fact,  she  may 
realize  a  warm  cold  thing  whenever  two  points  of  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   ABE    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,  etc.  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 
ivay  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,  anyone 
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,  §§  42fi-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  iliem  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  ©f  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  it  is,  it  brings 
new  conceptions  into  consciousness,  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  so  on.  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.  But  if  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  aesthetic  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  =  13  expresses 
the  relation  of  equality  between  two  ideal  objects,  13  on  the 
one  hand  and  6  -J-  7  on  the  other,  sucessively  conceived 
and  compared.  The  judgments  6  -f  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  -f-  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  difficultv  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 
experimenting  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  is 
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  polygon  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  psychol 
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 
They  form  an  essentially  discontinuous  system,  and  trans 
late  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  cur  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  mediaeval  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  as  a  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. 

"  It  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  employed  in 
surmounting  that  difficulty,  and  furnishing  themselves  with  those  nee- 
essary  helps  for  discourse.     It  cannot  be  when  they  are  grown  up,  fop 
then  it  seems  they  are  not  conscious  of  any  such  painstaking;  it  re- 
mains  therefore  to  be  the  business  of  their  childhood.     And  surely  tha 
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  nomiualistic  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  it  is  sufficiently  intense,  we  may 
be  temporarily  unconscious  of  any  of  the  other  attributes,  and  may 
really,  for  a  brief  interval,  have  nothing  present  to  our  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  concrete  idea  :  and  by  that  exclusive  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  tram  of  meditation  or  reasoning  relating  to  those  parts  only,  ex 
actly  as  if  we  were  able  to  conceive  them  separately  from  the  rest."  f 

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  houteux,'  Rabier,  Psychologic,  310. 
f  Exam,  of  Hamilton,  p.  393.     Cf.  also  Logic,  bk.  u.  chap.  v.  §  1,  and 
bk   iv.  chap  n.  §  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  cognitiojit  per  assimilationem  cognoscen- 
tis  el  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  ultimateuess 
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,  sooner  or  later,  in  a  sensation  which  re 
sembles  the  latter. 

But  Mill  and  the  rest  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.  55:?.) 


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  even  if  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  !  "  I  am  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  mclude  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, 
{^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 
tlie  conceptualists,  and  affirm  that  the  power  to  think  things, 
qualities,  relations,  or  whatever  other  elements  there  maj 


CONCEPTION.  473 

be,  isolated  and  abstracted  from  the  total  experience  in 
which  they  appear,  is  the  most  indisputable  function  of  our 
thought. 

UNIVEBSALS. 

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- 
lev  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,  f 
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." 

|C.  F.  Reid's  Intellectual  Powers,  Essay  v.  chap.  m.—  Whiteneu  ia 
one  thing,  the  whiteness  of  Utis  sheet  of  paper  another  thing. 


474  PSYCHOLOGY. 

ness  than  lias  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  like,"  etc. 
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  intellect  us,  or  an  Ego,  whose  func 
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 
lowrer  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.  Bradley  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  tnink  without  judging, 
and  where  we  deny,  that  description  would  not  be  applicable/'  This 
seems  to  be  the  same  doctrine  as  ours;  the  application  to  one  or  to  all  sub- 
jectsof  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). 


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  be  awakened  by  the  hearing  of  a  name. 

If  we  open  the  pages  of  either  school,  wre  find  it  im 
possible  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 
lie  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  gwcm-universal, 
something  which  we  think  as  if  it  were  universal,  though  it 

*  Lectures  on  Greek  Philosophy,  op.  33-8». 


476  PSYCHOLOGY. 

is  not ;  and  in  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 
or  a  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  wrord  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  :  f 

"  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  knoiv  ;  '  becomes  general,'  not  becomes 
aware  of  something  general ;  '  particular  ideas,'  not  par 
ticular  things — everywhere  the  same  timidity  about  beg 
ging  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.  vin. 

f  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  rnind,  the  being  of  each  several  one  of 
them  there  will  be  an  equivalent  for  the  knoiving,  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  a  class.  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.  If  each  '  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  en  p.  224. 

"  Why  may  we  not  side  with  the  conceptualists  in  saying  that  the  uni 
versal  sense  of  a  word  does  corresoond  to  a  mental  fact  of  some  kind,  but 


478  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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.  Gallon'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  IX]. 

"  If  the  image  come  unfringed,  it  reveals  but  a  simple  quality,  thing, 
or  event ;  if  it  come  fringed,  it  may  reveal  something  expressly  taken  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 
certain  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. 
Thistingeing  is  its  sensitive  body,  the  wie  Him  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  imlocalized  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 
oassiiig  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 ,  arc  thoughts  sui  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  things 
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,  qua  subjective,  are  singular  and  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  Unite.  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  I'  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,  ix.  pp.  18-19.) 

*  Hodgson,  Time  and  Space,  p.  404. 


480  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  the  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  clef  eat' 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  aAvare  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  bur  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.  310. 


482  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  ;  it  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  saic? 
about  conception,  but  for  the  present  this  will  suffice. 

*  Philosophy  of  Keflection,  i.  273-308. 


CHAPTER  XIII. 
DISCRIMINATION  AND   COMPARISON. 

IT  is  matter  of  popular  observation  that  some  men  have 
sharper  senses  than  others,  and  that  sonic  have  acuter 
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 
us  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  i*S 
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,  whereby  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 
\n  one  man  above  another.  4iu!  lieuce,  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 
carefully  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  sc'hool.  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,  as  a  single  *idea  of  sensation.'  His  modern  disciples, 

*  ¥uman  Understanding,  n.  xi.  1,  3. 


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  : 

"  '  It  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  a  man.  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  be  a 
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.  i.  p.  71. 

Senses  and  the  Intellect,  page  411. 


486  PSYCHOLOGY. 

stance,  the  separate  notice  of  any  uniform  hum  in  the  car,  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  red  object,  and  then  a  red  round  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  tlting.  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  Dissoci 
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  anaesthetics 
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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  ofe- 
jectfor  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, 
when  once  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 
h#ve  been  operative  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  this  is  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.   Of.  also  Lipps:  Grundtatsachen  des 
Seeleulebens,  p,  579  if. ;  and  see  below.  Chapter  XIX. 


DISCRIMINATION  AND  COMPARISON.  489 

about  the  &ame  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  a  sum  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 
wntinuum,  &  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  is  there ;  or  we  may  also 
take  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  colof 
scale,  are  examples.  Every  department  of  our  experience 


490  PSYCHOLOGY. 

may  have  its  data  written  down  in  an  evenly  gradated  order, 
from  a  lowest  to  a  highest  member.  And  any  one  datum 
may  be  a  term  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, 
MOKE,  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- 
cifile  of  mediate  comparison  ivhich  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. 

ABE  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  tbe  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  adtlecl  ;  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 
sh;  ,pe  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.  1  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  woight,  and  then  another,  new  feelings  may  start  out 
in  m.'y  elbow-joint,  wrist,  and  elsewhere,  and  make  me  call 
the  second  weight  the  heavier  of  the  twain.  In  all  these 
cases  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,  etc.,  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  + 
C  =  X+3d; 
D  = 


If  X  itself  were  ultimately  composed  of  cf  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  P8YCEOLOOT. 

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  tilings  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. 
If  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  unlikeuess,  but  a  fact  of  com 
position,  one  of  them  being  the  same  as  the  other  plus  an 
increment  of  still  higher  order,  S  for  example,  added.  But 
when  we  recollect  that  even- thing  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-compoundiugs  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  ?f  So 
long  as  we  stick  to  verifiable  psychology,  ice  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,  I.  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  Wahle  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. 

f  The  belief  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  ivhich  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  sufficiently  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  wrhite  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  we  call  such,  the  sensations,  are  but  sums  of  differences, 
loci  or  starting  points  whence  many  directions  of  difference  proceed. 
'  TJjiterscJiiedsempfindungs-Complexe  '  are  what  he  calls  them.  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,  i.  121,  and  James  Ward,  Mind,  i.  464. 


DISCRIMINATION  AND   COMPARISON.  496 

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  applied  at  once.     In  the  latter  case  they 
may  be  two  or  three  inches  apart  on  the  back,  thighs,  etc., 
and  still  feel  as  if  they  were  set  down  in  one  spot.     Finally, 
in  the  case  of  smell  and  taste  it  is  well-nigh  impossible  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  if.);    and,   when   once    aroused,  its   object 
lingers  in  the  memory   along  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  them  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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,  etc. — 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.  I 
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  hoio  either  differs  from  its  mate.f 

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. 

f  "  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 Unterscheid ting,  pp.  9-10.) 


DISCRIMINATION  AND  COMPARISON.  497 

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  imperfect  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  denning  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.  If  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,  someivhere.  The  last 


498  PSYCHOLOGY. 

ground  for  inferring  that  A  and  B  differ  must  be  that, 
whilst  A  is  an  w,  B  is  an  n,  and  that  m  and  n  are  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 
w's,  when  these  are  seemingly  simple  terms. 

I  said  that  in  their  immediate  succession  the  shock  of 
their  difference  was  felt.  It  is  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  addition  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  '  difterent- 
from-the-first '  even  while  it  lasts.  It  is  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- differ  ent-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  w'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  TI'S  simple  quality  should 
occur.  But  as  it  has  been  treated  as  a  paradox,  and  as  a 
spiritual  agent,  not  itself  a  portion  of  the  stream,  has  been 

*  In  cases  where  the  difference  is  slight,  we  may  need,  as  previously 
remarked,  to  get  the  dying  phase  of  n  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.  49& 

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  factor  in  determining  what 
manner  of  experiences  the  following  ones  shall  be  (cf. 
pp.  232-236).  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  l>y  ivhat, 
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.,  n.  17.     Cf.  also  pp.  12,  14. 


600  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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 
*  7i '  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,  us 
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  tootli  now 
aching,  I  perceive  the  pain  to  be  less  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' weigh 
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  it  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  pcus  or  minus,  might  sometimes  enable  us  to  establish  a  relation  whicl 
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  (us  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,  }ret 
knows  and  compares  both,  why  not  allow  your  pulse  of  thought,  which  u 


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  thought  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  n,  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  (Bowue'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  7 
The  spiritualist  says,  the  soul  remembers  ;  it  abides  across  the  years  acd 
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  "i  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  tlie  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  transparenc}r.  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- 
ppssible  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 

1  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  is  in  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  yetunfound  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  anaesthesia  will  have  made 
the  latter  unfelt. 

In  general,  then,  if  an  object  affects  us  simultaneously 
in  a  number  of  ways,  abed,  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. 

If  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  o* 
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  assafcetida 
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.  Even  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  wre  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.  We  are  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  crmpound  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  abed,  is  that 
its  strength  relatively  to  bed  varies  from  a  maximum  to  a 
minimum  ;  or  that  it  appears  linked  with  oilier  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,  abed,  and  abcD.  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  Abed  is  on  the  a  side  ;  that  to  abcD  is  on  the  d  side. 
And  these  two  differences  of  direction  are  differently 
felt.  I  do  not  say  that  this  discernment  of  the  a-direction 
from  the  cZ-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  oi  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  groiv  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  : 

"  If  the  property  A  occurs  here  along  with  the  properties  B,  C,  D, 
there  along  with  C,  F,  H,  and  again  with  E,  G,  B,  .  .  .  it  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.1'  * 

And  still  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.  345. 


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  red  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  wall  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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,  or 
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  never  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,  etc.  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  and  a 
sheep."  * 

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  Avhose  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  in  a  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.  511 

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 
lohich  they  severally  affect.  Let  B  and  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  stil] 
be  uncertain — "  which,"  we  ask  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  betiveen  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  distinctly  into 
consciousness ;  but  pari  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  uerms.  It  is 
merely  fixing,  identifying,  and  so  to  speak  substantializing, 


512  PSYCHOLOGY. 

the  terms.  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  Avhich  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  first* 


*  The  explanation  I  offer  presupposes  that  a  difference  too  faint  to  have 
any  direct  effect  in  the  way  of  makiug  the  miud  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  differentiae.  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  b,  but  make  their  distances  such  that  the  a's  are  equidistant 
on  both  slides,  whilst  the  b's  are  nearer  together  on  slide  1  than  on  slide  2. 
Make  moreover  the  distance  ab  =  db'"  and  the  distance  ab'  =  ab"  Then 

a,        b  a      b' 

Slide  1.  •         •  6      * 

a      b"  a         b'" 

Slide  2.  9     •  •        c 

look  successively  at  the  two  slides  stereoscopically.  so  that  the  a's  in  both 
are  directly  fixated  (that  fc  fall  on  the  two  foveae,  or  centres  of  distinct- 


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  abed  e/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  c  and  d ;  for  the  point  e  would  be  so  near/,  and 
so  like  it,  as  not  to  be  aroused  without/also  coming  to  mind. 
Similarly  d  would  recall  e  and,  more  remotely,/.  In  such 
wise  c — d  would  no  longer  be  bare  c — d,  but  something  more 
like  abc — 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  «'s  will  then  appear  single,  and  so  probably  will  the  b's. 
But  the  now  single-seeming  &  on  slide  1  will  look  nearer,  whilst  that  on 
slide  2  will  look  farther  than  the  a.  But,  if  the  diagrams  are  rightly  drawn, 
ft  and  V"  imv4  affect  'identical'  spots,  spots  equally  far  to  the  right  of 
the  fovea,  ft  in  the  left  eye  and  ft'"  in  the  right  eye.  The  same  is  true 
of  ft'  and  ft".  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 
a  to  ft,  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  (1807).  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  aft,  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.f 

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  Uetmng,  etc.,  Leipzig  Be 
richte,  Math.-phys.  Classe,  x,  1858,  p.  67. 
\lbid.,  Tabellel,  p.  43. 


DISCRIMINATION  AND  COMPARISON.  515 

an  '  overtone  '  helps  us  to  detect  the  latter  in  a  compound 
sound  (supra,  pp.  439-40).  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  rnind 
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  tilling  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.  AVe  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  w'th  them,  the  tenden 
cy  to  fuse  being  proportional  to  the  similarity  of  the  ideas  Cf.  Grmidtiit 
sachen,  etc.,  pp.  233-3 ;  also  pp.  118,  492,  52G-7. 


516  PSTCHOLOGT. 

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  investi 
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  two  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  ia 
our  perceptions.  In  this  case  we  will  say  that  the  impression  of  ttw 
sensation  in  question  is  perceived  synthetically.  The  second  higher 
grade  is  when  we  immediately  distinguish  the  sensation  in  question  a?. 


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. f  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  car 
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  oui 
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  the  sense-organs  has,  in  n 
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. 

f  Compare  as  to  this,  however,  what  1  said  above,  Chapter  V,  pp 
173-176. 


518  PSYCHOLOGY. 

tive  phenomena  are  extraordinarily  hard  to  find  ;  and  when  they  are 
once  found,  special  aids  for  the  attention  are  almost  ahrays  required  to 
observe  them.  It  is  usually  hard  to  notice  the  phenomenon  again  even 
when  one  knows  already  the  description  of  the  first  observer.  Th< 
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  muscce,  volttantes,  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  muscce 
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  fashioaable  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 
is  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.  As  a  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,  for  a 
brief  account  of  the  matter,  O.  F.  Wadsworth  in  Boston  Med.  and  Surg. 
Journ.,  cxvi.  49  (Jan.  20,  '87),  and  the  replies  by  Derby  and  others  a  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  is  indistinguishable  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/acte,  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

After  all  we  have  said,  no  comment  seems  called  for 
upon  these  interesting  and  important  facts  and  reflections 
of  Helrnholtz. 

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  Sttimpf  respectively,  which  I  quote  because  they  are  the  ablest 
expressions  of  the  view  opposed  to  my  own.  Both  authors,  it  seems  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  aJ 


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  ft'.— 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  sec.; 

0.047   " 

0.079   " 


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  1o  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,  unmiinable  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  be  their  sum.  So,  for  example, 
when  we  clearly  perceive  that  the  content  of  our  sensation  of  oil  of  pepper- 
meiit  is  partly  a  sensation  of  taste  and  partly  one  of  temperature."  (Ton- 
pay  chologie,  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. 


524 


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. 


6 

10 

16.7 
25.6 


8  5 
14.4 
20.8 
31 


10.75 

19.9 

29 


10.7 
22.7 
29.1 
40.1 


33 

58.5 

75 

95.5 


53 

57.8 
84 
138  f 


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. if 
Mr.  J.  M.  Cattell  found  lie  could  get  no  results  by  this 
method,§  and  reverted  to  one  used  by  observers  previous 

*  Physiol.  Psych.,  n.  248. 

f  Wundt's  Philos.  Studien,  i.  527. 

t  Ibid.  p.  530. 

§  Mind,  xi.  377  if.  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  sec.         and         0.050  sec.; 

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         0.117 ; 

that  for  distinguishing  the  letter  A  in  ordinary  print  from 
the  letter  Z  : 

0.142  and         0.137; 


Miud,  xi.  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  sec.          to          0.158  sec. 

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  someivliere  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.  Physiologic,  Bd.  i.  p.  297  ff.  (these  au 
thors  get  much  smaller  figures);  Fricdrich,  Psychologische  Studien,  i.  39. 
Chapter  ix  of  Buccola's  book,  Le  Legge  del  tempo,  etc.,  gives  a  full  ac 
count  of  the  subject. 


DISCRIMINATION  AND   COMPARISON.  527 

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  iii- 
nace.  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. f  But  what  all  investigators  have 
aimed  to  determine  in  these  experiments  is  the  minimum 
time.  I  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. 

f  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  Studieu,  i.  527.) 


528  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  rind  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  I 
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  a  rule  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 
1  difference,'  if  one  likes — but  a  practical  and  linguistic  re 
mark. 

The  same  things,  th  en,  which  arouse  the  perception  of  difference 
usually  arouse  that  of  resemblance  also.  And  the  analysis  of 
them,  so  as  to  define  Avherein  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  bis 
Grundtatsaclien  des  Seelenlebens,  pp.  390-393. — I  leave  my  text  just  as  it 
was  written  before  tbe  publication  of  Lange's  and  Mtinsterberg's  results 
cited  on  pp.  92  and  432.  Tbeir  '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, 
aud  all  that  I  say  in  the  text  falls  beautifully  into  line  with  their  results. 


DISCRIMINATION  AND   COMPARISON.  629 

treat  them  as  merely  different,  we  are  apt  to  discover  how 
much  they  are  alike.  Difference,  commonly  so  called,  is 
thus  betivecn  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.  There  is  a  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  differentiae,  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:  ibid.  xi.  83  ;  Bosauquet :  ibid.  xr. 
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  scientific 
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  fact  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  rny  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.  I  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- 


DISCRIMINATIVE  AND   COMPARISON.  531 

ferences,  in  other  words,  between  diverse  pairs  of  terms, 
a  and  6,  for  example,  on  the  one  hand,  and  c  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  light  or  color,  which  we  have  little  difficulty  in 
arranging  by  steps  of  difference  of  sensibly  equal  value. 
Messrs.  Plateau  and  Delbceuf  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,  f 

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  V  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  (Toupsychologie,  i.  131),  is  probably  because  the  introduction 
of  the  fourth  term  brings  involuntary  cross- comparisons  with  it,  a  and  b 
with  d,  b  with  c,  etc.,  which  confuses  us  by  withdrawing  our  attention 
from  the  relations  we  ought  alone  to  be  estimating. 

f  J.  Delbceuf  :  Elements  de  Psych ophysique  (Paris,  1883),  p.  64.  Pla 
teau  in  Stumpf,  Tonpsych.,  i.  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-coulimious  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.  I  am  inclined  to  suspect,  from  certain  data,  that  the  ulti 
mate  philosophy  of  difference  and  likeness  will  have  to  be  built  upon 
experiences  of  intoxication,  especially  by  nitrous  oxide  gas,  which  lets  MS 
into  intuitions  the  subtlety  whereof  is  denied  to  the  waking  state.  Cf.  B. 
P.  Blood  :  The  Anaesthetic  Revelation,  and  the  Gist  of  Philosophy  (Am 
sterdam,  N.  Y.,  1874).  Cf.  also  Mind,  vn.  200. 

i  Oo.  cit.  v   126  ft. 


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  difference  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.  493).  So  here  any  theory 
which  would  base  likeness  011  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  a  high  note,  e.g.  (7, /sharp, 
a'",  we  remark  immediately  that  the  first  is  less  like  the  third  than  the 
second  is.  The  same  would  be  true  of  c  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  plus  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  MEASUBE  OF  DISCRIMINATIVE  SENSIBILITY. 

In  1860,  Professor  G.  T.  Feclmer  of  Leipzig,  a  man  of 
great  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.  1 16-7.  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,  c  d  efg,  have  something  in  common, — no  matter  what 
it  is,  call  it  X;  then  I  say  that  the  differing  parts  of  eacli  of  these  terms 
must  not  only  be  differently  constituted  in  each,  but  must  themselves  form 
a  series,  whose  existence  is  the  ground  for  our  apprehending  the  original 
terms  in  serial  form.  We  thus  get  instead  of  the  original  series  a  b  c  d  ef 
.  .  .  the  equivalent  series  X(r,  Xft,  Xy,  .  .  .  etc.  What  is  gained  ?  The 
question  immediately  arises  :  How  is  a  ft  y  known  as  a  series?  According 
to  the  theory,  these  elements  must  themselves  be  made  up  of  -i  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.  Feclmer'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  Yorlesungen  iiber  Menschen 
and  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  s;»y  :  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  two,  or  three,  or  four,  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  mas 

mtudes  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,  and  a 
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  luid  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  stimuli  to  our  senses,  and  stimuli  whoso  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. 

u  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,  but  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  two,  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  to  a 
hundred- weight.  .  .  .  We  can  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  s\,e  how  much  we  can  increase  the  stim 
ulus  without  making  the  sensation  seem  to  change.  If  we  carry  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.  ..." 

Observations  according  to  this  method  are  particularly 


DISCRIMINATION  AND  COMPARISON.  537 

easy  to  make  in  the  spheres  of  light-,  sound-,  and  pressure- 
sensation.  .  .  .  Beginning  with  the  latter  case, 

"We  find  a  surprisingly  simple  result.  The  barely  sensible  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 
£  ;  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, yj-g. 

Muscular  sensation,  .     , 1if- 

Feeling  of  pressure, 
"        "  warmth 
"        "  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  Hcinrich  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  view7,  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 
unit  of  any  kind  of  sensation  will  be  that  increment  which, 


538  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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 
cal  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  ; 

1  =        «         A  (1  +  r) ; 

"          2—         "         A(l  +  r)a; 

3  __        ,<         A  (1  +  r)8 ; 


n  =        "        A  (1  +  r)n. 

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 
wre  call  the  stimulus  R,  and  the  constant  factor  C,  we  get 
the  formula 

S  =  C  log  R, 

which  is  what  For-hnor  calls  the  psychophysischer  Maas- 
forniel.  This,  in  brief,  is  Fechner's  reasoning,  as  1  under 
stand  it. 

The  Maasformd  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  disceruibility,  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  Feehner's  formula  are  Delbceuf  s 
In  his  Recherches  sur  la  Mesure  des  Sensations  (1873),  p.  85,  and  Elsus's  in 
his  pamphlet  Uber  die  Psychophysik  (1886)  p.  10. 


040  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.  Feclmer  discussed  three  methods,  as  follows  : 

(1)  The  Method  of  just-discernible  Differences.     Take   a 
standard  sensation  S,  and  add  to  it  until  you  distinctly  feel  the 
addition  d  ;  then  subtract  from  S  -j-  d  until  you  distinctly 
feel  the  effect  of  the  subtraction ;  *  call  the  difference  here 

d'.     The  least  discernible  difference  sought  is  — ~ —  ;  and 

2 

the  ratio  of  this  quantity  to  the  original  8  (or  rather  to 
J3  +  d  —  d')  is  what  Fechner  calls  the  difference-threshold. 
This  difference-threshold  should  be  a  constant  fraction  (no 
matter  what  is  the  size  of  8)  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.f 

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 
oilier. 

(2)  The  Method  of  True  and  False  Cases.     A  sensation 
which  is  barely  greater  than  another  will,  on  account  of 
accidental  errors  in  a  long  series  of  experiments,  sometimes 
be  judged  equal,  and  sometimes  smaller ;  i.e.,  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. 

f  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  is  a  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.  Feclmer  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 
Feclmer  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,  Elements  de  Psychophysique  (1883),  p.  9. 


542  PSYCHOLOGY. 

ences  oy  means  of  what  Wundt  calls  the  Methode  tier  mitt- 
leren  Abstufungen,  and  what  we  may  call 

(4)  The  Method  of  Equal- appear  ing  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  big.     But  what  we  can  but 
just  notice  as  an  increment  need  not  appear  always  of  the 
same  bigness  after  it  is  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,  Yolkmann,  Aubert,  Masson,  Helm- 
holtz,  and  Krapelin  find  figures  varying  from  J  or  J  to  y^-y 
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)  betAveen  96  and  4096,  beyond  which  in 
tensity  no  experiments  were  made.*  Konig  and  Brodhun 


*  Philos.  Studien,  iv.  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  Wuudt's  laboratory,  found  that 
effects  of  contrast  played  so  large  a  part  in  experiments 
performed  in  this  way  that  Delboeuf'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  AcfidTSitz"iuigsberichte,  1888,  p.  917.     Other  observers  (Dobro. 
wolsky,  Lamausky)  found  great  differences  in  different  colors. 

f  See  Merkel's  tables,  loc.  cit.  p.  568. 

f  American  Journal  of  Psychology,  i.  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 
•£$  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  ^j-  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  weights, 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  g*T  for  250  grams 
to  ^  for  2500.  For  2750  it  rose  to  ^  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  T^  was 
felt  when  there  was  no  movement  of  the  finger,  and  of  about 
fa  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.J 

Wo.rmih  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.  I.  370-2. 

*  PhilosophischeStudien,  v.  514-5. 

f  Cf.  G.  E.  Miiller:  Zur  Grandlegung  der  Psychophysik,  §§  68-70. 

i  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  n,  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 
it  is  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,  As  —  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  lies  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,  in.  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  increased  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  YI) 
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  arc  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  wras 
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.  It  is  these  KELATIONS,  these  DIS 
TANCED,  ivhich  ice  are  measuring  and  not  the  composition  of  the 
qualities  themselves,  as  Feclmer  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  Fechner's  formula  disregards.* 

But  apart  from  these  a  priori  difficulties,  and  even  sup 
posing  that  sensations  did  consist  of  added  units,  Feclmer'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  giew  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  J  stand  for  the  smallest  difference  which  we  perceive, 
then  we  should  have,  instead  of  the  formula  As  =  const., 

which   is    Feclmer's,    the   formula  -     =  const,,  a   formula 

rS 

which  interprets  all  the  facts  of  Weber's  law,  in  an  entirely 
different  theoretic  way  from  that  adopted  by  Fechner.J 
The  entire  superstructure  which  Feclmer  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- 
iahrschrift  fur  wiss.  Philosophic,  vi.  257  ff.,  shows  very  clearly  the  a 
surdity  of  supposing  that  our  stronger  sensations  contain  our  weaker  ones 
as  parts  They  differ  as  qualitative  units.  Compare  also  J.  farmery  in 
-  -  -  -  •  ««oo%  -  1-j.i  4jt.  j.  Ward  in  Mind, 


i   464-  Lotze,  Metaphysik,  $  258. 

'  +  F  Brentano  Psychologic,  i.  9,  88  ff.-Uerkel  thinks  that  his  results 
with  the  method  of  equal-appearing  intervals  show  that  we  «>|»Par«  ;;«n; 
siderable  intervals  with  each  other  by  a  different  law  from  that  by  whicl 
we  notice  barely  perceptible  intervals.  The  stimuli  lorn,  an  arithmetic  al 
series  (a  pretty  wild  one  according  to  his  tigurcs)  in  the  foiuici 

geometrical  oife  in  the  latter-*  least  so  1  understand  this  valiant  expert- 

meiiter  but  somewhat  obscure  if  acute  writer. 

t  This  is  the  formula  which  Merkel  thinks  he  has  verihed  (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 
Feclmer'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  latv  of 
friction  in  the  neural  machine.*  Just  how  these  inner 
resistances  and  frictions  are  to  be  conceived  is  a  specu 
lative  question.  Delboeuf  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  are  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  AND   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  o!"  the  mole 
cules,  but  affect  fewer  and  fewer  in  proportion  as  they  have 
already  diminished  their  number.  The  latest  additions  tc 
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.  (Pfliiger'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  Feclmerian  Maas- 
formel  and  the  conception  of  it  as  an  ultimate  *  psychophysic 
law'  will  remain  an  'idol  of  the  den,'  if  ever  there  was  one. 
Feclmer  himself  indeed  was  a  German  Gelehrterol  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.  The  only  amusing  part  of  it  is  that  Feclmer'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  light  did  win.' 
'  But  what  good  came  of  it  at  last? ' 
Quoth  little  Peterkiu. 
Why,  that  I  cannot  tell,'  said  he, 
1  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 
terniSo  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 


ASSOCIATION.  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  Eenouvier  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  i 
would  fuse  the  items  into  a  continuum.  Were  this  the  sort  v 
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  generate,  Logique,  n.  p.  493  foil. 


552  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  no  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  oloser,  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 
suggestions  into  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.  553 


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  ?  I 

There  are,  then,  mechanical  conditions  on  which  thought 
depends,  and  ivhich,  to  say  the  least,  determine  the  order  in 
ivhich  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  account  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  I 
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 


564  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  iucumbrance  that  the 

t  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. 

I  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  produced.  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.  Kooms,  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  oi 
the  others  to  arise.  Let  a  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  on  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 
I  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 
I  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- 

Ibet  without  the  name  which  he  first  heard  in  conjunction 
with  each  clinging  to  it  in  his  mind  ;  and  inversely  he  will 


ASSOCIATION.  557 

never  hear  the  name  without  the  faint  arousal  of  the  image 
of  the  object.* 

THE  RAPIDITY  OF  ASSOCIATION. 

Beading  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  f  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. 

fTn  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  cquiv- 
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  'carnage, 
because  there  are  so  many  different  kinds-two-wheeled,  four-wheeled 
open  and  closed,  and  in  so  many  different  possible  positions,  that  the  n 
possibly  hesitates  amidst  an  obscure  sense  of  many  alternations  that  cannot 
blend  together.  But  limit  the  idea  to  say  a  landau,  and  the  mental  assc 
elation  declares  itself  more  quickly."  (Inquiries,  etc. ,  p.  190.) 


558  PSYCHOLOGY. 

in  which  the  '  cue '  was  given  by  single-syllabled  Avoids 
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.  S.  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  in  a  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.,  n.  280  fol. 

f  For  interesting  remarks  ou  the  sorts  of  things  associated,  in  these  ex 
periments,  with  the  prompting  word,  see  Galton,  op.  ctt.  pp.  185-203.  and 
Trautscholdt  in  Wundt's  Psychologische  Studien.  i.  213. 


ASSOCIATION.  559 

three,  or  four  additional  ideas  may  be  in  the  background  of  consciou 
ness      The  second  letter  in  view  shortens  the  time  about  -4V,  the  third 
sV  the  fourth  ^  the  fifth  ^  sec. 

"  I  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  makin« 
sentences  (a  passage  from  Swift)  at  the  rate  of  i  sec.,  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  188,  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  -J  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.  04-5. 


560  PSYCHOLOGY. 

is  the  existence  of  certain  constant  differences  between  as 
sociations  of  different  sorts.     Thus  : 

From  country    to  city,      Mr.  C.'s  time  was  0.340  sec. 
"  '    season      "  month,        "  "       "     0.399 

"      language  "  author,       "  "        "     0.523 

"      author      "  work,         "          "       "     0.596 

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.  Wuudt  calls  atten 
tion  to  the  fact  that  the  figures  found  by  him  give  an  average,  0.720",  ex 
actly  equal  to  the  time  interval  which  in  his  experiments  (mfo  infra,  chapter 
on  Time)  was  reproduced  without  error  either  way,  and  to  that  required, 
according  to  the  Webers,  for  the  legs  to  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.,  IT.  286). 
The  r approvement  is  of  that  tentative  sort  which  it  is  no  harm  for  psy 
chologists  to  make,  provided  they  recollect  how  very  fictitious  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,  xxvm.  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  iu  mania.  Choice 
time,  on  the  contrary,  is  increased  in  mania. 


ASSOCIATION.  561 

as  cues,  and  the  different  types  of  association  studied,  differ 
mucli  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  Vo  of  a  second  longer  to  call  it  to  mind  ;  B  knows  quite  as 
well  as  C  that  Dante  was  a  poet,  but  needs  ^V  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.^ 

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,  xii.  67-74. 

f  Compare  Bum's  law  of  Association  by  Contiguity  :  "  Actions,  bensa- 
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 
Ideas  a  b,  c,  etc.,  that  anyone  of  the  sensations  A,  when  impressed  alone, 
shall  be  able  to  excite  in  the  Mind  b,  c,  etc.,  the  ideas  of  the  rest."^  (Ob 
servations  on  Man.  parti,  chap.  i.  §2,  Prop,  x.)  The  statement  in  the 
text  differs  from  these  in  holding  fast  to  the  objective  point  of  view.  J 
thing*,  and  objective  properties  in  things,  which  are  associatec 

°J  Encyclopedia  Britannica,  9th  Ed.,  article  Psychology,  p.  60,  col.  2. 
§Physiol.  Psych.,  2d  ed.  n.  300 


562  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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.*  Parts  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  uberJiaupl  is  in  seeing  how  new 
paths  come  first  to  be  formed  (cf.  above,  109).  Experience  shows  that  a 
new  path  is  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.  We  can  only  make  hypotheses.  Any  hypothesis  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  Mimsterberg  thinks  (Beitriige  zur  exp.  Psychologic,  Heft  1,  p.  132) 
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  (loc.  cit.)  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  vrould  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  Will,  where  we  can  treat  it  in  a  broader  way.  It  is 
enough  here  to  have  called  attention  to  it  as  a  serious  problem. 


ASSOCIATION.  663 

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.  But  if  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  tJirts  lie  an  effect,  within  the  mind,  of  the  physical  fart 
that  nerve-currents  propayaic  themselvex  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  Lycke,  "settles  habits  of  thinking  in  the  under 
standing,  as  well  as  of  determining  in  the  will,  and  of  motions  in  tin- 
body  ;  all  which  seem  to  l>c  but  trains  of  motion  in  the  animal  sjiirftn 


564  PSYCHOLOGY. 

[by  this  Locke  meant  identically  what  we  understand  by  neural  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,  as  it  were,  natural."  * 

Hartley  was  more  thorough  in  his  grasp  of  tlie  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,  etc.,  by  being  associated  together  a  suffi 
cient  Number  of  Times,  get  such  a  Power  over  a,  b,  c,  etc. ,  the  corre 
sponding  Miniature  Vibrations,  that  any  of  the  Vibrations  A,  when 
impressed  alone,  shall  be  able  to  excite  6,  c,  etc.,  the  Miniatures  of  the 
rest."f 

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.  If  A  B  C  D  E 
be  a  sequence  of  outer  impressions  (they  may  be  events 

*  Essay,  bk.  n.  chap,  xxxin.  §  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  propel1 
traces,  and  rummage  that  cell  which  belongs  to  the  idea.  But  as  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." 

I  Op.  cit   proo.  xi. 


ASSOCIATION.  565 

or  they  may  be  successively  experienced  properties  of  an 
object)  which  once  gave  rise  to  the  successive  '  ideas,'a  bcde, 
then  no  sooner  will  A  impress  us  again  and  awaken  the 
a,  than  bode  will  arise  as  ideas  even  before  BCDE 
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  priuci- 


566  PSYCHOLOGY. 

pies,  such  as  those  of  Similarity  and  Contrast,  before 
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  oj 
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  b  or  c  be  aroused  next  by  the 
present  a  ?  We  must  make  a  further  postulate,  based,  how 
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  b,  rather  than 
c,  will  awake,  if  in  addition  to  the  vibrating  tract  a  some 
other  tract  d  is  in  a  state  of  sub-excitement,  and  formerly 
was  excited  with  b  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  ivhich  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 
Kail '  : 

"I,  the  heir  of  all  the  ages  in  the  foremost  tiles  of  time," 
and — 

"  For  I  doubt  not  through  the  ages  one  increasing  purpose  runs." 

Why  is  it  that  when  we  recite  horn  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

charge  into  either  of  a  large  number  ol  other  words  with 
which  they  have  been  at  different  times  combined.  But 
when  the  processes  of  '  /,  the  heir  of  all  the  ages,'  simul 
taneously  vibrate  in  «he  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.  '  In  '  and  not  '  one  '  or  any  other  word 
wi]l  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  ivoidd 
prevail  over  the  combined  ones  of  the  other  words.  He 
would,  as  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  ?"  "  I  calls  it  a  knife,  I  does,"  is  the  sturdy  re 
ply,  from  which  the  child  cannot  be  induced  to  swerve  by 


ASSOCIATION.  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-f or  answer,  "  I  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  01  the  dinner-party,  call  this  act  A,  and  I,  m,  n,  o,  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,  65  c,  d,  e,  will  each  and  all  discharge  into  I 
through  the  paths  by  which  their  original  discharge  took 
place.  Similarly  they  will  discharge  into  w,  n3  o,  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  y  to  desig 
nate  all  association.  Such  processes  as  we  have  just  de- 

*I  strongly  advise  the  student  to  read  his  Sense*  and  Intellect,  pp.  544- 
556. 


570 


PSYCHOLOGY. 


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 


Fio.  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 
vant  items  cluster  as  pertinaciously  as  the  essential  ones, 


ASSOCIATION.  571 

the  slaves  of  literal  fact,  the  stumblers  over  tlie  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- 
nia.'  Hear  how  she  redintegrates  : 

u  '  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  Fatty  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.  So  I  said  I  would 
go  down  and  see,  and  Jane  said  :  "  Shall  I  go  down  instead  ?  for  1  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- 
tins—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  spontaneous  flow  of  our  ideas  does  not  foHow  the 
law  of  impartial  redintegration.  In  no  revival  of  a  past  ex 
perience  are  all  the  items  of  our  thought  equally  operative  in 
determining  ivliat  the  next  thought  shall  be.  Always  some  in 
gredient  is  prepotent  over  the  rest.  Its  special  suggestions  or 


572  PSTCHOL007. 

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  alivays  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  all  interest  us  alike)  is  this  law  departed 
from.  It  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  aesthetic  nature, 
are  kept  for  ever  rotating  among  the  literal  sequences  of 
their  local  and  personal  history. 

Most  of  us,  however,  are  better  organised  than  this,  and 

*  Time  and  Space,  p.  266.  Compare  Coleridge  :  "  The  true  practical 
general  lav/  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  contemporneity  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.  673 

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.  Each  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 
guity  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  call  it 

OBDINARY,  Or  MIXED,  ASSOCIATION. 

Another  example  of  it  is  given  by  Hobbes  in  a  passage 
which  has  been  quoted  so  often  as  to  be  classical : 


674  PSYCHOLOGY. 

"  In  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 
ivhich  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 
I  itself  in  its  old  position  ;  but  scarcely  has  the  process  begun,  when  the 
I  original  law  of  interest  begins  to  operate  on  this  new  formation,  seizes 
1  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.  i.  chap,  in.,  init. 


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.  Goring' s  'System  derv 
kritischen  Philosophic '  has  most  frequently  awakened  in  \  v 
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  II.,'  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  die  away.  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 

*  I  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  his  Inquiries  into  Human  Faculty,  pp.  1 


576  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  Avhose  interest  is  most  remotely  pertinent 
to  theirs.  If  a  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, 

I  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.,  ix.  144- 

41?  (1885). 


ASSOCIATION.  677 

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,  } \f 
all  reasons  why  one  representation  rather  than  another 
should  be  awakened  by  the  interesting  portion  of  a  depart- 
kig  thought.  We  may  say  with  truth  that  in  the  majority 
of  cases  the  coming  representation  ivill  have  been  either 
habitual,  recent,  or  vivid,  and  ivill  be  congruous.  If  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  whic-h  lie 
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  PSYCHOLOGY, 


ASSOCIATION  BY  SIMILAEITY. 

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  attention,  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  ivill  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 

*I  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  throughoiit.  Impartial  redinte 
gration  connotes  neiiral  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,  1  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  wind  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  m 
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.  4H 


580 


PSYCHOLOGY. 


similar  association.     A  in  each  is  the  passing,  B  the  coming 
thought.     In  'impartial,'  all  parts  of  A  are  equally  opera- 


FIG.  41. 


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. 


FIG.  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  d  simple  difference  in 
the  amount  of  that  portion  of  the  nerve-tract  supporting  tha 
going  thought  ivhich  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  ol 
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  redintegrate,  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  Avith  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  en  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  so  subtile 
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  sev 
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,  baffies  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  fiux  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  abc  turns  up,  and  b  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, 


684  PSYCHOLOGY. 

from  lack  of  previous  connection  between  Z  and  a  or  c, 
does  not  influence  a  or  c.  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.,  etc. 

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  form  a  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  it  is  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  it  is  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  io  each  detail  forms  now  the 
main  interest  of  the  latter.  We  keep  running  over  the  de 
tails  in  our  mind,  dissatisfied,  craving  something  more. 
Prom  each  detail  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 
ciated  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

there ;  then  that  the  subject  talked  about  was  so  and  so , 
finally,  that  the  thought  came  d  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  ivhich 
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  v/hicli  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,  I,  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  c  little  by  little  irradiate  into  ly  m,  and  n, 


fia.  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  it 
keep  below  the  threshold  of  discharge,  is  probably  to  some 
degree  co-operative  with  a,  b,  c  in  determining  that  I,  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  unknoivn  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  I,  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 
a  man  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 
and  where  and  when  he  had  it;  that  is  to  say,  to  lind  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  Itemem 
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  as  a  man 
should  run  over  the  alphabet  *.o  start  a  rhyme."  (Leviathan,  165,  p.  10.) 


588  PSYCHOLOGY. 

we  seek  a  forgotten  name,  we  must  suppose  the  name's 
centre  to  be  in  a  state  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  quwsitum,  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.  T.  p.  394. 


ASSOCIATION.  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  process 
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  selec 
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."}: 

f 

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. 

f  All  association  is  called  redintegration  by  Hodgson. 

i  Ibid.  p.  400.  Compare  Bain,  Emotions  aud  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 
every  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." 


690  PSYCHOLOGY. 

possibly  have  been  connected,  trusting  that  when  the  right 
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  do  so.  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  do  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  through  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  hi 
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.f 

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  if.;  E.  Rabier,  Psychologic,  187  ff.; 
Paulhan,  Critique  Philosophique,  2me  Serie,  i.  458;  Rabier,  ibid.  460; 
Pillon,  ibid.  n.  55;  B.  P.  Bowue,  Introduction  to  Psych.  Theory,  92; 
Ward,  Encyclop.  Britt.  art.  Psychology,  p.  60;  Wahle,  Vierteljahrsch.  f. 
wiss.  Philos.  ix.  426-431. 

f  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,  ho\v 
can  this  occur  except  through  first  reviving  an  image  a  oi 
its  own  past  occurrence.  This  is  the  term  directly  con 
nected  with  b ;  so  that  the  process  instead  of  being  simply 
A — b  is  A — a — b.  Now  A  and  a  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  it  is  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  if.).  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  wow-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  B  as 
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  A  is  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. 

CONTKAST  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,  etc.,  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 
clay  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, 


*  Of.  Bain,  Senses  jiml  Intellect,  504  if.;  J.  S.  Mill,  Note  :J9  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  abnupto.  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 

inay  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  in  a  definite  way.  Hobbes  first  formulated  the  problem 
of  the  succession  of  our  thoughts.  He  writes  in  Leviathan, 
chapter  in,  as  follows  : 

*  See,  for  farther  details,  Hamilton's  Reid,  Appendices  D**  and  D***; 
and  L.  Ferri,  La  Psychologic  de  I'Associatioii  (Paris,  1883).  Also  Kohert- 
son,  art.  Association  in  Eucyclop.  Britannica. 


ASSOCIATION.  695 

"  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,  Respwefinem;  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 
an  effect  imagined  we  sock  the  causes,  or  means  that  produce  it  :  and 
this  is  common  to  man  and  beast.     The  other  is,  when  imagining  any- 
thin"  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 
onlv  •  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  bat  P*****.  <«'  the  faculty  or  invention, 


596  PSYCHOLOGY. 

which  the  Latins  called  sayacitas,  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. 

"  I  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  to 
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.  f>9? 

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- 
leyf  and  James  Mill.J  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.  Bibot,  repeats 
Hume's  comparison  of  the  law  of  association  with  that  of 
gravitation,  and  goes  on  to  say  : 

"It  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  few  scattered  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  I.  §  iv. 

f  Observations  on  Man  (London,  1749). 

f  Analysis  of  the  Phenomena  of  the  Human  Mind  (1829). 

§  Hartley's  Theory,  2d  ed.  (1790)  p.  xxvri. 

'll  [Current,  that  is,  in  France.— W.  J.] 


598  PSYCHO  LOOT. 

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  ;  it  is  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  &  flatus  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.  Expectation  the  same,  with 
future  substituted  for  past.  Fancy,  the  association  of 
images  without  temporal  order. 

Belief  in  anything  not  present  to  sense  is  the  very  lively, 

*  La  Psychologic  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  left  out.  Thus  we  feai 
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  PS  YCHOLOG  T. 

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  Mill  t 
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  : 

"  I  believe  it  will  be  found  that  we  are  accustomed  to  see  like  rnings 
together.  When  we  see  a  tree,  we  generally  see  more  trees  than  one  ; 
a  sheep,  more  sheep  than  one  ;  a  man,  more  men  than  one.  From  this 
observation,  I  think,  we  may  refer  resemblance  to  the  law  of  frequency 
fi.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,:):  and  in  a  chapter,  which  also  is  a  curiosity,  he  tries 

*  Review  of  Bain's  Psychology,  by  J.  S.  Mill,  in  Edinb.  Review,  Oct.  1, 
1859,  p.  293. 

f  Analysis  of  the  Phenomena  of  the  Human  Mind,  J.  S.  Mill's  edition, 
vol.  i.  p.  111. 

\  On  the  Associability  of  Relations  between  Feelings,  in  Principles  of 
Psychology,  vol.  I.  p.  259.  It  is  impossible  to  regard  the  "  cohering  of  each 
feeling  with  previously-experienced  feeling?  of  thfi  same  class,  order, 


ASSOCIATION.  QQI 

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 
Bam  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  use,  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  ot  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  ne\v  addition  was  made  to  the  class  cf  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  wrind,  a  rush  of  water,  or  an  exertion  of  animal  muscle  ?  The  dis 
cordance  was  too  great  to  be  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  course.  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,  f  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  J  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,  a  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  Vorstellungsmassen  and  their 
Hemmungen  and  Hemmungssummen,  and  sinken  and  erJteben 
and  schiveben,  and  Verschmehungen  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. 

f  See  his  Time  and  Space,  chapter  v,  and  his  Theory  of  Practice,  §§  53 
to  57. 

\  Psychologic  als  Wissenschaft  (1824),  2. 

§  Prof.  Ribot,  in  chapter  i  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.  T).  Morrell'p  Outlines  of 
Mental  Philosophy  (2d  ed.,  London,  1862)  largely  follows  Herbart  and 
Beneke.  I  know  of  no  other  English  book  which  does  so. 


604  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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.  Babier  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  et  passim, 
-especially  pp.  106  if.,  364 

f  The  most  burdensome  and  utterly  gratuitous  of  them  are  perhaps 
Steintlial's,  in  his  Einleitung  in  die  Psychologic,  2te  Aufl.  (1881).  Cf.  also 
G.  Glogau:  Steintlial's  Psychologische  Formelu  (1886). 

$  Le9ons  de  Philosophic,  i.     Psychologic,  chap,  xvi  (1884). 

§Mr.  F.  H.  Bradley  seems  to  me  to  have  been  guilty  of  something  very 
like  this  ignoratio  elenchi  in  the,  of  course,  subtle  and  witty  but  decidedly 
long-winded  critique  of  the  association  of  ideas,  contained  in  book  n. 
part  ii.  chap.  i.  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,  it  is  necessary  that  the  notion  of  '  past '  should 
be  one  of  our  '  ideas.'  We  shall  see  in  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- 
uess  ?  What  is  the  original  of  our  experience  of  pastuess, 
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 
sui  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  svstem.s.  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  cou*d  have  <iny  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  acquiring  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  these  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 
glow-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 
B  C  D  E  E  G  H,  and  the  one  after  that  of  C  D  E  F  G  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  to 

*  James  Mill,  Analysis,  vol.  i.  p.  319  (J.  S.  Mill's  Edition). 


THE  PERCEPTION  OF  TIME.  607 

consciousness   without   wliich   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,  is  a  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  lias 
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.  .  .  . 

"  In  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  momber 
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  and  a  latter  are  included  in  the 
minimum  of  consciousness;  and  this  is  what  is  meant  by  saying  that  all 
consciousness  is  in  the  form  of  time,  or  that  time  is  the  form  of  feeling,  the 
form  of  sensibility.  Crr.dely  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 
least  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  ciear 

that  the  minimum  of  feeling  contains  two  portions-a  sub-feehng  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  , 
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 
Londs  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  pr<™«  ™  } 
was  a  datum-**  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  01 
attend  to,  the  present  moment  of  time.  One  of  the  most 
baffling  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  oii  je  parle  est  deja  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."  (S.  H.  Hodgson:  Philosophy  of  Reflection,  vol.  i.  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  imago  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 
M  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. 


THE  PERCEPTION  OF  TIME,  609 

that  it  must  exist,  but  that  it  does  exist  caii  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 
tspecious  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  lei 
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. 

f  Locke,  in  his  dim  way,  derived  the  sense  of  duration  from  reflec 
tion  on  the  succession  of  our  ideas  (Essay,  book  n.  chap.  xiv.  £  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  in.  chap,  v.)  "  Qu'on  ne  cherche  point,"  says 
Royer  Collard  in  the  Fragments  added  to  Jouffroy's  Translation  of  Reid, 


610  PSYCHOLOGY. 

as  parts  of  this  duration-block  that  the  relation  ol  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  mentallv  imagin 
ing  remoter  and  remoter  positions,  just  as  we  now  construct 
great  durations  by  mentally  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  from  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. 

"  la  duree  dans  la  succession;  on  ne  1'y  trouvera  jamais;  la  duree  a  precede 
la  succession;  la  notion  de  la  duree  a  precede  la  notion  de  la  succession. 
Kile  en  est  done  tout-a-fait  independaute,  dira-t-ou?  Oui,  elle  en  est  tout- 
i-t'ait  iudependante." 


THE  PERCEPTION  OF  TIME.  611 


ACCURACY   OF  OUR  ESTIMATE  OF  SHORT  DURATIONS. 

We  must  now  proceed  to  an  account  of  the  facts  ot  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,  arid 
these  totals  it  can  afterward  subdivide  into  an  almost  infi 
nite  number  of  distinctly  identified  parts.  The  units  of 
duration,  011  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  is  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  V 


612  PSYCHOLOGY. 

Our  spontaneous  tendency  is  to  break  up  any  monoto* 
nously  given  series  of  sounds  into  some  sort  of  a  rhythm. 
We  involuntarily  accentuate  every  second,  or  third,  01 
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  Maw';  and 
the  recurrent  stresses  and  sinkings  make  us  feel  with  pe 
culiar  readiness  the  lack  of  a  syllable  or  the  presence  of 
one  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  ^2-  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  f  that  twelve  impressions  could  be  distin 
guished  clearly  as  a  united  cluster,  provided  they  were 
caught  in  a  certain  rhythm  \)j  the  mind,  and  succeeded  eacL 
other  at  intervals  not  smaller  than  0.3  and  not  larger  thai? 
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  0.3  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  eacli. 
When  no  grouping  of  the  strokes  beyond  making  couples  of 

*  Physiol.  Psych.,"  n.  54,  55. 

f  Ibid.  n.  218. 

1  Philosopbische  Studien,  n.  362. 


THE  PERCEPTION  OF  TIME.  613 

them  by  the  attention  was  allowed — arid  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  0.8 
second,  or  12  seconds,  to  be  the  maximum  filled  duration  of 
which  \ve  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  count  a  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. 

f  Estel   in  Wundt's  Philosophische  Studien,  ir.  50.     Mehner,   ibid.  n. 
571      In  Dietze's  experiments  even  numbers  of  strokes  were  better  caught 
than  odd  ones,  by  the  ear.     The  rapidity  of  their  sequence  had  a  great  influ 
ence  on  the  '-esult.     At  more  than  4  seconds  apart  it  was  impossible  to  per 
ceive  series  of  them  as  units  in  all  (cf.  Wundt,  Physiol.  Psych     n    : 
They  were  simply  counted  as  so  many  individual  strokes.     Below  021 
0.11  second,  according  to  the  observer,  judgment  again  became  confusec 
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, 
U   18.     The  latter  could  hardly  be  clearly  grasped  at  all      Among  odd 
numbers,  3,  5,  7  were  the  series  easiest  caught  ;  next,  9, 15  ;  harde      .f  all, 
11  and  13  ;  and  17  was  impossible  to  apprehend 


614  PSYCHOLOGY. 

of  an  electric  spark,  when  their  interval  was  made  as  small 
as  about  -g-J-g-  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".f 

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  :  $ 

"In  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 r.  The  doubleness  of 
their  snap  was  usually  replaced  by  a  single-seeming  sound  when  it  fell  to 
0.00198",  the  sound  becoming  louder  \vken  the  sparks  seemed  simultaneous. 
The  difference  between  these  two  intervals  is  only  TTJTF7ff^  of  a  second;  ami, 
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 
Pfltiger's  Archiv,  Bd.  XI. 

f  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 
t).076" 

^  Hall  and  Jastrow  .  Studies  of  Rhythm,  Mind,  XT.  58. 

§  Nevertheless,  multitudinous  impressions  may  be  felt  as  discontinuous, 
though  separated  by  excessively  minute  intervals  of  time.  Grtinhageu 
says  (Pfluger's  Archiv,  vi.  175)  that  10,000  electric  shocks  a  second  art  felt 
as  interrupted,  by  the  tongue  (I).  Von  WUtich  (ibid.  IT.  329),  that  between 
1000  and  2000  strokes  a  second  are  felt  as  discrete  by  the  finger.  W. 
Preyer,  on  the  other  Land  (Die  Grenzen  des  Empfindungsvermogens,  etc., 
1868,  p.  15),  makes  contacts  appear  continuous  to  the  finger  when  86.8  o) 
them  follow  in  a,  second.  Similarly,  Mach  (Wiener  Sitzgsb.,  LI.  2,  142; 
gives  about  36.  Lalanne  (Comptes  Rendus,  LXXXII.  p.  1314)  found  summa 
tion  of  finger  contacts  after  22  repetitions  in  a  second.  Such  discrepan, 
figures  are  of  doubtful  worth.  On  the  retina  20  to  30  impressions  a  second 


THE  P3HCEPT10X  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  .  .  .  ,  ..............   0.071 

From  touch  to  sight  ..............  Q  953 

From  sight  to  hearing.  .  .  ,  .......  .  ____  Q.16 

From  hearing  to  sight  ................   0.06 

From  one  ear  to  another  ..............  0.064 

To  be  conscious  of  a  time  interval  at  all  is  one  thing  ;  to 
tett  tvhether  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 
betzveen  two  times  which  we  can  perceive. 

The  difference  is  at  its  minimum  when  the  times  them- 
selves  are  very  short.  Exner,  f  reacting  MS  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  J^TT  of  a  second  either  way  from  the  average  were 


at  the  very  utmost  can  be  felt  as  discrete  when  they  fail  on  the  same  spot. 
The  ear,  which  begins  to  fuse  stimuli  together  into  a  musical  tone  when  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). 

*  Pfluger's  Archiv,  xi.  428.  Also  in  Herrmann's  Hdbh  d  Physiol  2 
Bd.,  I.  Thl.  pp.  260-26?, 

t  Pflilger's  Archiv,  vn.  639.  Tigerstedt  (Bihang  till  Kongl.  Svenska 
Vetenskaps-Akad.  HandI.,Bd.  8,  Hitfte  2,  Stockholm,  1884)  revises  Exnei's 
figures,  and  shows  that  his  conclusions  are  exaggerated.  According  to 
Tigerstedt,  two  observers  almost  always  rightly  appreciated  0.05"  or  0.06" 
of  leactior.-time  difference.  Half  the  time  they  did  it  rightly  when  the 
difference  sank  to  0.03",  though  from  0.03"  and  O.OB"  differences  were 
often  not  noticed  at  all.  Buccola  found  (Le  Legge  del  Tempo  nei  Fenom- 
eni  del  Fensiero,  Milano.  1883,  D.  371)  that,  after  much  practice  in  making 
rapid  reactions  upon  a  signal,  he  estimated  directly,  in  figures,  his  own 
reaction  -time,  in  10  experiments,  with  an  error  of  from  0.010"  lo  0.018"; 
!n  6,  with  one  of  0.005"  to  0.009";  in  one,  with  one  of  0.002";  and  IB  3L 
with  one  of  0.008" 


616  PSYCHOLOGY. 

correctly  noticed  by  him  at  the  time.  The  average  waa 
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  -^  from  the 
extremes.  When  it  varied  TJg-,  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  Feclmer's  *  Psy chop hy sic  Law '  it 
ought  always  to  bear  the  same  ratio.  Various  observers, 
however,  have  found  this  not  to  be  the  case.f  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  f  INDIFFERENCE- 
POINT;'  that  is  to  say,  an  interval  which  we  judge  with  max 
imum  accuracy,  a  time  which  we  tend  to  estimate  as  neither 
longer  or  shorter  than  it  really  is,  and  away  from  which, 


*  Mind,  xi.  61  (1886). 

f  Mach,  Wiener  Sitzungsb.,  LI.  2,  133  (1865);  Estel,  loc.  cit.  p.  65, 
Mehner,  loc.  cit.  p.  586;  Buccola,  op.  cit  p.  378.  Fechner  labors  to  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  Wuudt's  Philosophische  Studien 
HI.  1  ) 


THE  PERCEPTIOX  OF  TIKE.  017 

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. f 

The  times,   noted  by  the  ear,   and  the  average  indiffer 
ence-points  (given  in  seconds)  were,  for — 

Wundtt 0.72 

Kollert§ 0.75 

Estel  (probably) 0.75 

Mehner 0.71 

Stevens  || 0.71 

Machl 0.35 

Buccola  (about)** 0.40 

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.  Studicn,  IV.  423),  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., 
secoad>  respectively,  and  (thought  that  his  observations  roughly  corrobo 
rated  Weber's  law.  As  'maximum'  and  'minimum' are  printed  inter 
dmnsrrably  in  Glass's  article  it  is  hard  to  follow. 

f  With  Vierordt  and  his  pupils  the  indifference  point  lay  as  higl 
from  1.5  sec  to  4.9  sec.,  according  to  the  observer  (cf.  Per  Zeitsinn,  1808, 
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  ro- 
corded.  Wundt  gives  good  reasons  (Physiol.  Psych.,  n.  289,  290)  for  re 
jecting  Vierorclt's  figures  as  erroneous.  Vierordt's  book,  it  should  be  s  nd, 
is  full  of  important  matter,  nevertheless. 

%  Physiol.  Psych.,  n.  286,  290. 

§  Philosophische  Studien,  i.  86. 

||  Mind,  xi.  400. 

*fi  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, 
observed,  however,  that  Buccola's  figure  has  little  value,  hi*  observatio 
not  being  well  fitted  to  show  this  particular  point. 


618  PSYCHOLOGY. 

as  the  interval  of  time  most  easy  to  catcli  and  reproduce, 
Odder  still,  both  Estel  and  Mehuer  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. f 

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. if  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  ivith  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  200  a 

*  Estel's  figures  led  him  to  think  that  all  the  multiples  enjoyed  this  priv 
ilege;  with  Mehner,  on  the  other  hand,  only  the  odd  multiples  showed 
diminution  of  the  average  error;  thus,  0.71,  2.15,  3.55,  5,  6.4,  7.8,  9.8,  and 
10.65  second  were  respectively  registered  with  the  least  error.  Cf.  Phil 
Studien,  n.  pp.  57,  562-565. 

t  Cf.  especially  pp.  558-561. 

j  Wundt:  Physiol.  Psych.,  n.  287.     Hall  and  Jastrow:  Mind,  XI.  62. 

§  Mehner-  loc.  cit.  p.  553. 


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  aesthetic  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). 

f  P.  19,  §  18,  p.  112. 


620  PSYCHOLOGY. 

that  the  latter  alternative  is  the  true  one,  and  that  we  can 
no  more  intuit  a  duration  than  ice  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.* 


*  I  leave  the  text  just  as  it  was  printed  in  the  Journal  of  Speculative 
Philosophy  (for  'Oct.  1886')  in  1887.  Since  then  Mtinsterberg  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 
exactlv  similar  relaxations  and  subsequent  expectant  tensions  of  these 


THE  PERCEPTION  OF  TIME.  621 

And  here  again  we  have  aii  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  all  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.  Miinsterberg  has  studied  care 
fully  in  his  own  case  the  variations  of  the  respiratory  factor.  They  are 
many ;  but  he  sums  up  his  experience  by  saying  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  as  they  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  tLe  beginning  of  the  time  given  him  and  that  of  the  time 
which  he  was  to  give  coincide  with  identical  phases  thereof.— Finally, 
Miinsterberg  with  great  plausibility  tries  to  explain  the  discrepancies  be 
tween  the  results  of  Vierordt,  Estel,  Mehner,  Glass,  etc.,  as  due  to  the  fact 
that  they  did  not  all  use  tlie  sarne  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  maxiinn  of 
facility  in  measuring  accurately 


622  PSYCHOLOGY. 

But  a  movement  is  a  change,  a  process  ;  so  we  see  that  iu 
tha  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.  No  one  has  anything  like  a  perception  of  the 
greater  length  of  the  time  between  now  and  the  first  century 
than  of  that  between  now  and  the  tenth.  To  an  historian, 


*  "  Any  one  wishing  yet  further  examples  of  this  mental  substitution 
will  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,  ne  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.) 


THE  PERCEPTION  OF  TIME.  6&i 

it  is  true,  tlie  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  the}*  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. 
I  am  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  ouly  objections  to  this  which  I  can  think  of  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; 
(8)  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 ;  and  I  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  exact  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.— Idiots  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  : 
was  punctual  almost  to  a  minute  in  her  demand  for  food  and  other  regular 
attentions  Her  dinner  was  generally  furnished  her  at  l: 
that  hour  she  would  begin  to  scream  if  it  were  not  forthcoming. 
Fast-day  or  Thanksgiving  it  were  delayed,  in  accordance  witl 
England  custom,  she  screamed  from  her  usual  dinner-hour  until 
was  carried  to  her.  On  the  next  day,  however,  she  again  made  known 
want«  nromnti"  »«  12.30.  Any  slight  attention  shown  her  on  one  day  was 


624  PSYCHOLOGY. 

From  tliis  we  pass  naturally  to  speak  of  certain  familial 
variations  in  our  estimation  of  lengths  of  time.  In  general, 
a  time  Jilled  ivitli  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  siglit-seeing 
may  subtend  an  angle  more  like  three  weeks  in  the  memory  ; 
and  a  month  of  sickness  hardly  yields  more  memories  than 
a  day.  The  length  in  retrospect  depends  obviously  on  the 
multitudinoiisness  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  Yon  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  ail 
without  becoming  dizzy — at  any  rate  not  now.  And  yet  again,  when  11 
look  at  the  village,  at  the  church -tower,  it  seems  as  if  I  could  hardlj 
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  less  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.  in.  §  1. 

*  Ideale  Fragen  (1878),  p.  219  (Essay,  'Zeit  und  Weile  '). 


THE  PERCEPTION  OF  TIME.  025 

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  J:ime  could  have  come  be 
tween." 

The  same  space  of  time  seems  shorter  as  we  grow  older — 
that  is,  the  clays,  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  is  a  law,  lie 
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  yV  of  his  whole 
life_a  man  of  50  as  ^,  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,  retentiveiiess  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   i:r.  p.  49fr 


626  PSYCHOLOGY. 

So  much  for  the  apparent  shortening  of  tracts  of  time  in 
retrospect.  They  shorten  in  passing  whenever  we  are  so 
fully  occupied  with  their  content  as  not  to  note  the  actual 
time  itself.  A  clay  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.  Tcedium,  ennui,  Langwetle,  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  i  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.f  The  sensation  of  tsedium  is  a  protest,  says 
Volkmann,  against  the  entire  present. 

*  "Empty  time  is  most  strongly  perceived  when  it  comes  as  a  pause  in 
mus'.e  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  purposety  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  \V. ,  §115.) — Compare  also  Munsterberg,  Beitraga 
Heft  2,  p.  41. 

+  A  night  of  pr.iu  will  seem  terribly  lone:  we  keep  looking  forward  t<3 


THE  PERCEPTION  OF  TIME.  627 

Exactly  parallel  variations  occur  in  our  consciousness 
of  space.  A  road  we  walk  back  over,  hoping  to  find  at  each 
step  an  object  tve  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 
ennui  some  deeper  cause  may  be  at  work.  This  cause  can 
only  be  ascertained,  if  it  exist,  by  finding  out  why  ice  per 
ceive  time  at  all  To  this  inquiry  let  us,  though  without 
much  hope,  proceed. 

THE  PEELING  OF  PAST  TIME  IS  A  PRESENT  PEELING. 

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 
only  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 
odionsness  of  time  that  seems  long  from  its  emptiness.  The  more  positive 
odiousness  of  the  pain,  rather,  is  what  tiuges  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.  m.  p.  297;  J.  Sully,  Illusions,  pp.  245-261,  302-305; 
W.  Wundt.  Fhysiol.  Psych.,  n.  287,  288;  besides  the  essays  quoted  from 
Lazarus  and  Janet.  In  German,  the  successors  of  Herbart  have  treated  of 
this  subject:  compare  Volkraann's  Lehrbucli  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  r" 
eventful  S'milar.y  the  English  Commonwealth,  etc. 


628  PYSCHOLOGY. 

"our  perceptions  can  truly  correspond  with  outer  reality,  is  that  oi 
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 
luminiferous  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-relations  of  its  own  states. 
But  as  these  are  copies  of  the  outward  time-relations,  so 
must  it  know  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 
sions  as  forces  stamping  their  image  on  the  mind,f  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  feel 
ing  of  their  own  succession  is  added,  that  must  be  treated  as  an 


*Physiol.  Optik,  p.  445. 

f  Succession,  time  per  se,  is  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  it  again.  Volkmanu 
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  in  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  nor  in  A  ;  and  no 
third  idea  has  been  supposed.  The  thinking  of  the  sequence  of  B  upon 
A  is  another  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  Encyclopaedia  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 

*  Lehrbur-Ji  d.  Psych. ,  §  87.     Compare  also  H.  Lotze.  Melaphysik,  §  1 54 


630  PSYCHOLOGY. 

as  it  is,  and  -with  the  latter  in  treating  of  our  intuition  of  time,  where, 
just  as  in  a  perspective  representation  of  distance,  \ve  are  confined  to 
lines  in  a  plane  at  right  angles  to  the  actual  line  of  depth.  In  a  succes 
sion  of  events,  say  of  sense-impressions,  ABODE.  .  .  ,  the  presence 
of  B  means  the  absence  of  A  and  0,  but  the  presentation  of  this  succes 
sion  involves  the  simultaneous  presence  in  some  mode  or  other  of  two 
or  more  of  the  presentations  A  B  C  D.  In  reality,  past,  present,  and 
future  are  differences  in  time,  but  in  presentation  all  that  corresponds 
to  these  differences  is  ;n  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  intuition  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  came  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  it  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 
observe,  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 

Jitter  would  be  limited,  in  his  case,  to  tlie  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  oi 
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,  f 
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  wliicli  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  oiir  feeling  of 
time  pe1)  se,  as  an  elementary  bit  of  duration,  is  true  of  our  feeling  of  dctte 
in  its  events. 

f  We  construct  the  miles  just  as  we  construct  the  years.  Travelling  in 
ihe  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  tneir  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  recall  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  greatly  their  unit  of  space-intuition.  Recently  I  heard  my  child 
of  four  tell  a  visitor  that  he  had  been  '  as  much  as  one  week  '  in  the  country. 
As  he  had  been  there  three  months,  the  visitor  expressed  surprise;  where 
upon  the  child  corrected  himself  by  saying  he  had  been  there  'twelve 
years.'  But  the  child  made  exactly  the  same  kind  of  mietake  when  he 
asked  if  Boston  was  not  one  hundred  miles  from  Cambridge,  the  distance 
being  three  miles. 


632  PSYCHOLOGY. 


TO  WHAT  CEBEBRAL  PROCESS  IS  THE  SENSE  OP  TIME  DUE  F 

Now,  to  wliat  dement  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  to  express  briefly  the  only  conclusion  which 

*  Most  of  these  explanations  simply  give  the  signs  which,  adhering  to 
impressions,  lead  us  to  dale  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  onr  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- 
maun'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  b,  go  through  this  process  simultaneously, 
or  as  one  precedes  or  follows  the  other,  the  phases  of  their  fading  w7ill  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  translate  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."  (Grundtatsacheu  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 
'nexplicable  (p.  591).  M.  Guyau's  account  (Revue  Philosophique,  xix.  353) 
hardly  differs  from  that  of  his  predecessors,  except  in  picturesqueuess  of 
style.  Every  change  leaves  a  series  of  trainees  lumineuses  in  the  mind  like 


THE  PERCEPTION  OF  TIME.  633 

seems  to  emerge  from  a  study  of  them  and  of  the  facts — 
uoiripe  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.  All  this  is  doubtless  true,  but  is  no  explanation. 

Mr.  Ward  gives,  in  his  Encyclopaedia  Britanniea  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,  abed,  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  oblivisceuce,  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  awaking  man.'  Now  what  is  this  '  distance  '  that  separates 
a  from  b,  bfrom  c,  and  so  on  ;  and  what  means  have  we  of  knowing  that  it 
is  tolerably  constant  in  waking  life?  It  is,  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  brun-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  '  protensily,'  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 
Tim*.  In  Time  physically  conceived  there  is  no  trace  of  intensity  ;  in  time 


634  PSYCHOZiWY. 

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  b  ;  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,  a  b  c  d  e,  may  seen* 
short  in  retrospect,  which  seemed  everlasting  in  passing,  he  says:  "  What 
tells  in  retrospect  is  the  series  abode,  etc.;  what  tells  in  the  present  is  the 
intervening  t\  ty  t<, ,  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 
thr£e  fourths  of  a  second.  This  association-time  he  regards  as  a  sort  of 
;uterual  standard  of  duration  to  which  we  in  voluntarily  assimilate  all  inter 
vals  which  we  trj  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.,  IT. 
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 
w?  try  to  subdivide  rhythmically  longer  tracts  of  time." 


THE  PERCEPTION  OF  TIME.  635 

jehind  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  ivhich  the  fainter  ones  are  the  dying  phases  of  processes 
ivhich  bict  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  a  suggestion  move  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 
long;  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  later."  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  (Beitnlge  zur  Analyse  der  Empfindungen,  p.  103  foil.).  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  to 
bean  explanation,  but  only  an  elementary  statement  of  the  'law'  whic> 
makes  us  aware  of  time.  The  Herbartian  mythology  purports  to  explain 


636  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  to 
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 :  t  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,  wlricli  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  a  near  past.  This  sense  of  recency  is  a  feeling  sui  generis,  and 
may  affect  things  that  happened  hours  ago.  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. 

f  Physiol.  Psych.,  n.  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 
lime,  of  percepts  to  tvhich  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- 

*1  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  ideatioual  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  am 
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  a1,  a2,  a3,  a4,  be  homologous  phases  in  four  successive  movements 
of  this  kind.  If  four  outer  stimuli  1,  2,  3,  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  8  by 
that  of  2,  etc.,  does  not  give  the  cJiaracteristic  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.  1  do  not 
understand  Herr  Munsterberg  to  claim  this  for  them.  He  takes  our 
seme  of  time  for  granted,  and  only  discusses  its  measurement. 


638  PSYCHOLOGY. 

cesses  of  different  phase — wherever  and  from  whatever 
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  a  few  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  ivemay  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.! 

*  Exner  in  Hermann's  Hdbch.  d.  Physiol.,  Bd.  n.  Thl.  n.  p.  281. 
Richet  in  Revue  Philosophique,  xxi.  568  (juin,  1886).  See  the  next  chap 
ter,  pp.  642-646. 

f  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.  Yon  Bser  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  beings  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  suppose  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  somewheie  in  the  animal  kingdom,  it  would  be 
rash  to  deny. 

"A  gnat's  wings,'  says  Mr  Spencor,t  "  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." 

Iii  hashish-intoxication  there  is  a  curious  increase  in  the 
apparent  time-perspective.  We  utter  a  sentence,  and  ere 

*  Reden  (St.  Petersburg,  1804),  vol   i  pp.  ~!55-2G8. 
|  Psychology,  §  91. 


640  PSYCHOLOGY. 

fclie  end  is  reached  the  beginning  seems  already  to  date  from 
indefinitely  long  ago.  We  enter  a  short  street,  and  it  is  aa 
if  we  should  never  get  to  the  end  of  it.  This  alteration 
might  conceivably  result  from  an  approach  to  the  condition 
of  Von  Brer'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  explori'igly  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  immediately -past  * 
events  have  filled  be  of  something  long  or  of  something  short,  ii 
is  not  ivhat  it  is  because  tliose  events  are  past,  but  because  they 
have  left  behind  them  processes  which  are  present.  To  those  pro 
cesses,  however  caused,  the  mind  ivould  still  respond  by  feeling  a 
specious  present,  with  one  part  of  it  just  vanishing  or  vanished 
into  the  past.  As  the  Creator  is  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  liaviiito 
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  Psychiatric,  Bd.  xvi. 
pp.  672-673.)  It  is  hard  to  believe  that  in  such  a  patient  the  time  intuited 
was  not  clipped  oil'  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  subsequent  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  as  if,  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  b  respectively : 
Were  1  awake,  a  would  leave  a  fading  process  in  my  sensorium  which 
would  overlap  the  process  of  b  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  b  then  comes  and  wakes  me,  a  comes  back,  it  is 
true,  but  not  as  belonging  to  the  specious  present.  It  lias  to  be  specialty 
revoked  in  memory.  This  mode  of  revocation  usually  characterizes  long- 
past  things — whence  the  illusion. 

*  Again  1  omit  the  future,  merely  for  siK'.ulicity 


642  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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,  chorter  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  direcV 
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  each  a  date.  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? 

PBIMARY  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

just  how  we  felt  when  we  said  'how*  or  'notwithstanding.' 
Our  consciousness  of  these  transitive  states  is  shut  up  to 
1 1  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  Bichet  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.!  But  the  idea  of  it  could  not 

*  L'Homme  et  llntelligence,  p.  32. 

f  Professor  Richet  has  therefore  no  right  to  say,  as  he  does  in  another 
place  (Revue  Philosophique,  xxi.  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  gives  a  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 

toftenuards  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  every  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  into  the  past.  Hcei'et  lateri  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  brilliant  and  the  fixation  long)  last  for  many  minutes.  Fechner  gives 
the  name  of  memory-after-images  (Psychophysik,  n  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 
strain  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 
ordinary  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 
j  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- 
1  mary  memory  is  called  by  Eichet  '  elementary  memory.'  f  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  Kichet  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.,  u.  2.  282. 
t  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  Sinnesgedachtniss  by  the  Germans)  have  some 
thing  periodical  in  their  nature,  f    They  show  that  profound  - 
rearrangements  and  slow  settlings  into  a  new  equilibrium   /  )i  ?» 
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  [retentissement,  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  [1  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. 

f  Cf.  Fechner,  Psychophysik.  n.  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.* 
iA  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  it 
is  the  knowledge  of  an  event,  or  fact,  of  which  meantime  we 
have  not  been  thinking,  with  the  additional  conscious  ;iess  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,  in.  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  0.0433 
sec.,  five  letters  ;  and  at  0.0528  sec.  all  the  letters  could  be  read."  (Pfluger'a 
Archiv,  iv.  325  ff  J 


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  writers  f  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  to  resemble  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  swcula  sceculorum.  But  does  the 
present  clock-stroke  become  aware  of  the  past  ones,  or  the 
present  stream  recollect  the  past  stream,  because  they  repeat 
and  resemble  them  ?  Assuredly  not.  And  let  it  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.  In  no  sort  of  conceptual  knowledge 
is  it  requisite  that  definitely  resembling  images  be  there  (cf.  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. 

f  E.g.  Spencer,  Psychology,  i.  p.  448.  How  do  the  believers  in  the 
sufficiency  of  the  'image'  formulate  the  cases  where  we  remember  that 
something  did  not  happen — that  we  did  not  wind  our  watch,  did  not  lock 
the  door,  etc.  ?  It  is  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. 


660  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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.  Hemoter 
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  a  name 
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 
lof  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  Mevius  in  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.  Iu 
this  recollection  there  is,  first  of  all,  the  ideas,  or  simple  conceptions  ot 
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 
ftiere)  to  which  the  emotion  of  belief  adheres. 

*  Analysis,  i.  330-1.  Mill  believed  that  the  various  things  remembered, 
the  self  included,  enter  consciousness  in  the  form  of  separate  ideas,  but  so 
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.  i.  p.  123).  This  mythol 
ogy  does  not  imp»ir  the  accuracy  of  his  description  of  memory's  object 


MEMORY. 


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  law 

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  I  am  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  to  remember.  In  this  state  it  is  certain  we  have  not  in  the 
mind  the  idea  which  we  are  trying  to  have  in  it.*  How  is  it,  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  over  a 
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  knew  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,  f  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. 

f  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  :  a  man  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  the  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.  y. 


MEMORY.  655 

the  occasion  arises ;  when  it  is  slow,  resuscitation  conies 
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  ;  ivhen  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  o, 

FIG  45 

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  n  in  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  hot  a 
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 


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  phis  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  H ;  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  least  help  in  this  matter")  puts  us  on  the  track  of 
an  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  of  memory,  and  simply  dream  that  we  were  un 
dergoing  the  experience  as  if  for  the  first  time.*  Wheiever, 

*  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  close  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 
of  its  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.  For  example, 
I  enter  a  friend's  room  and  see  on  the  wall  a  painting.  At 
first  I  have  the  strange,  wondering  consciousness,  '  surely 
I  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  Era  Angelicos  in  the  Floren 
tine  Academy — I  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  thai 
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;,  namely,  that  1  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  : 

"I  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 

fcome  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 
BO-and-so,  of  such-and-such  a  street.  But  when  was  it  ?  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  the  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 
ill-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, 
nnd  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  MEMOBY. 

The  remembered   fact  being  n,  then,  the  path  N — O  is 
what  arouses  for  n  its  setting  when  it  is  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-  ] 
pathi,  its  excellence  in  a  given  individual  will  depend  partly  on  \ v 
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,  f 
and  from  one  persorTto  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 
I  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.* 

*!Sot  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.  "But if  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,'  vide  supra,  p.  643].  But  he  adds  that  the  youth  '  remembered 
his  pages  a  long  time.'  In  the  Journal  of  Speculative  Philosophy  for  Jan. 
1871  (vr.  6)  is  an  account  by  Mr.  W.  D.  Ileukle  (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  extreme  old  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  n  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  iifteen  thousand  days.  Pity  that 
such  a  magnificent  faculty  as  this  could  not  have  found  more  worthy  appli 
cation  I 

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  at  a  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  of  all.  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  ivho  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 


MEMORY.  668 

almost  as  encyclopaedic  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  savant* 
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. 
Thrigs  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,  Jorm  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  ELABOKATING  THE  ASSOCIATES  of 
each  of  the  several  things  to  be  remembered.  No  amount 
of  culture  would  seem  capable  of  modify ina  a  man's  GENERAL 


664  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  to  the  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.  W^hat  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  is  a  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 

*  Of.  Ebbinghaus:  Ueber  das  Gedachtniss  (1885),  pp.  67,  45.  One  may 
hear  a  person  say:  ' '  I  have  a  very  poor  memory,  because  1  was  never  sys 
tematically  made  to  learn  poetry  at  schooi.' 


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. 

"  I  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."  t 

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.,  etc. 
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  mj 
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), 
t  Page  39. 


666  PSYCHOLOGY. 

told  me  I  must  train  my  memory.  So  when  I  came  home  that  night,  1 
sat  down  alone  and  spent  fifteen  minutes  trying  silently  to  recall  with 
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. 
4  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.  I  mentioned  all  the  letters  I  had  sent  and  received,  and  the  very 
language  used,  as  nearly  as  possible;  when  I  had  walked  or  ridden — I 
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 
lof  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,  f 

*  Op.  cit.  p.  100. 

f  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  one's  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  131£ — it  should 
be  said  that  I  had  learned  nothing  by  heart  for  many  years.  I  then,  work- 
kig  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  151 1  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  I 
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  14f.  He  then  trained  himself  on  Schiller's 
translation  of  the  second  book  of  the  JEneid  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 
14ff  „  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.  Tne  result  was  .  minimum  time  8  minutes  ;  maximum 
19^  ;  average  14^. 

Mr.  E.  S.  Drown  tested  himself  on  Virgil  for  16  days,  then  again  for 
16  days,  after  training  himself  on  Scott.  Average  time  before  training, 
13  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  a  la  Ebbinghaus  on  series  of  nonsense- 
syllables,  having  no  analogy  whatever  with  any  system  of  expressive  verses, 
I  induced  two  of  my  students  to  perform  that  experiment  also.  The  record 
is  unfortunately  lost ;  but  the  result  was  a  very  considerable  shortening  of 
the  average  time  of  the  second  series  of  nonsense-syllables,  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  oi  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  tilings  are  nothing  but 
logical  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.  To  remember  numbers,  e.g.,  a  figure-alphabet 
is  first  formed,  in  which  each  numerical  digit  is  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 
is  a  great  difference  of  facility  in  method.  I  used  to  commit  sentence  by 
sentence.  Now  I  take  the  idea  of  the  whole,  then  its  leading  divisions, 
then  its  subdivisions,  then  its  sentences. " 


MEMORY. 

The    word    will    then    be    remembered    when    the    numbers 
alone  might  be  forgotten. 

"The  most  common  figure-alphabet  is  this: 

1,  2/3,  4,  5,  6,  7,  8,  9,  0, 

t,  n,  m,  r,    1,  sh,  g,  f,  b,   s, 

d,  j,   k,  v,  p,  c, 

ch,  c,  z, 

g,  qu. 

"To  briefly  show  its  use,  suppose  it  is  desired  to  fix  1142  feet  in  a 
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;  etc.  etc."  (Pick.)f 

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 

*  E.  Pick  :  Memory  and  its  Doctors  (1888),  p.  7. 

\  This  system  is  carried  out  in  great  detail  in  a  book  called  '  Memory 
Training,'  by  Win.  L.  Evans  (1889). 


670  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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 
net  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,  etc.  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.  Yery  likely  we  were  re 
minded  of  them  again  soon  after  they  occurred  ;  that  be 
came  a  reason  why  we  should  again  recollect  them,  etc., 
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.  An  impres 
sion  may  be  so  exciting  emotionally  as  almost  to  leave  a 
scar  upon  the  cerebral  tissues  ;  and  thus  originates  a  path 
ological  delusion.  "  A  woman  attacked  by  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  of  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.,  etc." ' 

On  the  general  effectiveness  of  both  attention  and  repe 
tition  I  cannot  do  better  than  copy  what  M.  Taine  has 
written : 

"  If  we  compare  different  sensations,  images,  or  ideas,  we  find  that 
their  antitudes  for  revival  are  not  equal.  A  large  number  of  them  are 


*  Paulhan,  L'Activite  mental,  et  les  Elements  de  1'Esprit  (1888),  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  skull-cap.'1 — For  my  own  part, 
after  thirty  years,  i  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  extraordinarg  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  ;  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

Is  being  sung  in  the  adjoining  room,  we  do  not  retain  it  \  we 
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  mind 
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 
theon,  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  hours,  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 

images  is  also  derived  from  the  first.  As  every  sensation  tends  to  re- 
rive  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.'1* 

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  coiv 
nections  among  our  experiences  cease  to  be  classed  as  memories  when 
they  have  become  thoroughly  familiar.  Though,  on  hearing  the  voice 
cf  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."  f 

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,  i.  77-82. 
f  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  HSffding  considers  that  the  absence  of  contiguous  associates 
distinctly  though t-of  is  a  proof  that  associative  processes  are  not  concerned 
in  these  cases  of  instantaneous  recognition  where  we  get  a  strong  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  -f  a  in  the  brain 
(Psychologic,  p.  188 ;  Vierteljsch.  f.  wiss.  Phil.,  xm.  432  [1889]).  This 
explanation  is  a  very  tempting  one  where  the  phenomenon  of  recognition  is 
reduced  to  its  simplest  terms.  Experiments  have  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  tl-us,  whenever  we 
meet  a  familiar  objec.t,  that  sense  of  expectation  gratified  which  is  so  large 
a,  factor  in  our  aesthetic  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  charaUer  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  immediate^ 


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  jusf 
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  all  the  details,  in  a  word,  forthwith  re-establish  themselves  as 
familiar  occupants  of  my  mind  ;  the  extraneous  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  face  again,  just  as  I  now  experience  them,  with  no  different  past  ingre- 
iient.  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.  Hoffding,  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  foi 
reinstating  the  general  notion  which  we  have  already  rejected  (supra,  p. 
592)  that  a  '  sensation  '  is  ever  received  into  the  mind  by  an  'image'  oi 
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  Hoffding  that  Dr. 
Lehman n'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 
<x  (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 
»wn  proposed  explanation,  in  'Knowledge'  for  Nov.  8,  1884.  See  also 
Ribot,  Maladies  de  la  Memoire,  p-  149  ff. 


676  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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 
gestion  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  and  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.J  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- 


*  Zeitscbr.  f.  Volkerpsycbologie  u.  s.  w.,  Bd.  v.  p.  146. 

f  Ueber  das  Gedachtniss,  experimentelle  Untersuchungen  (1885),  p.  64 

i  Ibid.  §  23. 


MEMORY.  677 

quired  to  relearn  the  list  after  it  had  been  once  learned 
Eoughly  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 
B  days  a  fourth,  and  after  a  whole  month  a  good  fifth  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 
called  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 
ceived  ;  and  Dr.  Ebbinghaus' s  attempt  is  as  successful  as 
it  is  original,  in  bringing  two  views,  which  seem  at  first 
eight  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  e  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  PSYCHOLOGY. 

syllables  by  numbers,  if  the  first  list  were  1,  2,  3,  4,  ...  1$ 
14,  15,  16,  the  second  would  be  1,  3,  5,  ...  15,  2,  4,  6, ... 

16,  and  so  forth,  with  many  variations. 

Now,  if  1  and  3  in  the  first  list  were  learned  in  that  order 
merely  by  1  calling  up  2,  and  by  2  calling  up  3,  leaving  out 
the  2  ought  to  leave  1  and  3  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.  Ebbinghaua 
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,'  to  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 
ous  observations  of  M.  Biuet  on  certain  hysterical  subjects,  with  anaesthetic 
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,  etc. 
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'^ 
primary  consciousness,  iwaken,  nevertheless,  their  usual  visual  associate* 
therein. 


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  subject  to  considerable  variations,  one  of  which 
seems  to  be  constant  and  is  peculiar ;  namely,  there  seems  to  be  a 
rhythm  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, 

*  I  copy  from  the  abstract  of  Wolfe's  paper  in  '  Science '  for  Nov.  19, 
1886.  The  original  is  in  Psychologisclie  Studien,  m.  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,  of  ten  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.1'  * 

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.  Eibot  calls  foreshortening ;  and  this  foreshortening  is 
due  to  the  omission  of  an  enormous  number  of  the  facts 
which  filled  them. 

1  '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  th« 
entire  series  of  terms  which  separate  it  from  our  present  selves,  memor) 
would  become  impossible  on  account  of  the  length  of  the  operation.  W« 

*  Essay  cone.  Human  Understanding,  n.  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 
Dn  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 
could  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  Bab- 
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  sev 
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."  f 

*  Th.  Ribot,  Les  Maladies  de  la  Memoire,  p.  46. 

f  Biographia  Literaria,  ed.  1847,  I.  117  (quoted  in  Carpenter's  Mental 
Physiology,  chapter  x.  which  see  for  a  number  of  other  cases,  all  unt'or- 


682  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  anaesthesias  carry  amnesias  with  them  (see 
above,  pp.  385  if.).  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  antesthetic  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 
anaesthesia  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. 

All  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  wh'.ch 
'  psychical  research  '  demands).  Compare  also  Th.  Ribot,  Diseases  of  Mem 
ory,  chap.  iv.  The  knowledge  of  foreign  words,  etc.,  reported  in  trance 
mediums,  etc.,  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  several 
cantos,  which  her  parents  say  she  '  had  never  read.'  Of  course  she  must 
have  read  or  heard  it,  but  perhaps  never  learned  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.,  etc.,  p  553*- 


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  ho\7 
it  ever  vanishes."  * 

Those  whom  such  an  argument  persuades  may  be  left 
happy  with  tlreir  belief.  Other  positive  argument  there  is 
none,  none  certainly  of  a  physiological  sort.f 

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 
call.  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.,  n.  212. 

f  Of.  on  this  point  J.  Delboeuf,  Le  Sommeil  et  les  Reves  (1885),  p.  119 
ff.  ;  R.  Verdon,  Forgetfulness,  in  Mind,  n.  437. 
I  Cf.  A.  Maury,  Le  Sommeil  et  les  Reves,  p.  442. 


684  PSYCHOLOGY. 

very  last  to  decay.     Kussmaul*  makes  the  following  acute 
remark  on  this  subject : 

"The  concreter  a  conception  is,  the  sooner  is  its  name  forgotten. 
This  is  because  our  ideas  of  persons  and  things  are  less  strongly  bound 
up  with  their  names  than  with  such  abstractions  as  their  business,  their 
circumstances,  their  qualities.  We  easily  can  imagine  persons  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  in  as  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,  f  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,  or  a  purblind  per 
son  to  remember  visual  appearances  well.  In  a  later  chap 
ter  we  shall  see  illustrations  of  the  differences  in  men's 
imagining  power.  ;f  It  is  obvious  that  the  machinery  of 
memory  must  be  largely  determined  thereby. 

*  StOrungen  der  Sprache,  quoted  by  Ribot,  Les  Maladies  de  laM. ,  p.  133. 
f  Op.  cit.  chap.  in. 

\  "  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  familia/ 


MEMORY.  685 

Mr.  Gallon,  in  his  work  on  English  Men  of  Science,*^  has 
given  a  very  interesling  collalion  of  cases  showing  individ 
ual  varialions  in  Ihe  lype  of  memory,  where  il  is  slrong. 
Some  have  il  verbal.  Others  have  it  good  for  facls  and 
figures,  others  for  form.  Mosl  say  that  what  is  to  be^  re 
membered  must  first  be  rationally  conceived  and  assimi- 
laled.f 

There  is  an  interesling  facl  connected  wilh  remember 
ing,  which,  so  far  as  I  know,  Mr.  R.  Verdon  was  Ihe  first 
writer  expressly  to  call  atlenlion  lo.  We  can  set  our  mem 
ory  as  il  were  lo  relain  things  for  a  certain  time,  and  Ihen 
lei  Ihem  depart. 

"  Individuals  often  remember  clearly  and  well  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, 
but  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.  If  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  Revcs,  p.  443.) 

*  Pp.  107-121. 

f  For  other  examples  see  Hamilton's  Lectures,  n.  219,  and  A.  Huber 
Das  Gedachtniss,  p.  36  ff. 

t  Mind,  n.  449. 


686  PSYCHOLOGY. 

"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  explanation. 
S'etting  the  mind  to  remember  a  thing  involves  a  continual 
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  i§  that  things  are 
impressed  better  by  active  than  by  passive  repetition.  I 
mean  that  in  learning  by  heart  (for  example),  when  we  al 
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 
cover  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 
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  is,  moreover,  a  greater  amount 
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 


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  bet 
ter  than  exactly  similar  things  which  are  communicated  to 
us  from  without. 

A  word,  in  closing,  about  the  metaphysics  involved 
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  yet  in  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  consciousness  and  of  what  sort  the  knowledge  may  be. 
Sensations,  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.  Relating  consciousness  is  quite  the  reverse,  and  the 
mystery  of  it  is  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 
investigate  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  rela 
tions  in  time  of  the  stimulations.  But  for  that  spiritual  activity 
which  actually  puts  together  in  consciousness  the  sensations,  it  can 
not  even  suggest  the  beginning  of  a  physical  explanation.  More 
over,  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  emphat 
ically,  must  we  insist  upon  the  complete  inability  of  physiology  to 
*  Physiological  Psychology,  pt.  n.  chap.  x.  §  23. 


688  PSYCHOLOGY. 

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  not  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  nerv 
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  bring  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.  I  and  n.  Useful 
books  are :  D.  Kay's  Memory,  What  It  Is,  and  How  to 
Improve  It  (1888) ;  and  F.  Fauth's  Das  Gedachtniss,  Studie 
zu  einer  Padagogik,  etc.,  1888. 


END  OF  VOL.  I. 


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