Psychology
From LoveToKnow 1911
PSYCHOLOGY (i,hix,~, the mind or soul, and X&yor, theory), the science of mind, which can only be more strictly defined by an analysis of what mind means.
I. In the several natural sciences the scope and subject-matter of each are so evident that little preliminary discussion is called for. But with psychology, however much it is freed ~ from metaphysics, this is different. It is indeed ordinarily assumed that its subject-matter can be at once defined. It is what you can perceive by consciousness or reflection or the internal sense, says one, just as the subject-. matter of optics is what you can perceive by sight. Or, psychology is the science of the phenomena of mind, we are told again, and is thus marked off from the physical sciences, which treat only of the phenomena of matter. But, whereas nothing is simpler than to distinguish between seeing and hearing, or between the phenomena of heat and the phenomena of gravitation, a very little reflection may convince us that we cannot in the same fashion distinguish internal from external sense, or make clear to ourselves what we mean by phenomena of mind as distinct from phenomena of matter.
To every sense there corresponds a sense-organ; the several senses are distinct and independent, so that no one sense can add, ~t dt0 or alter the materials of another: the possession of five senses, e.g. furnishing no data as to the character of a possible sixth. Moreover, sense-impressions are passively received and occur in the first instance without regard to the feeling or volition of the recipient and without any manner of relation to the contents of consciousness at the moment. Now such a description will apply but very partially to the so-called internal sense. For we do not by means of it passively receive impressions differing from all previous presentations, as the sensations of color for one couched differ from all he has experienced before: the new facts consist rather in the recognition of certain relations among pre-existing presentations, I.e. are due to our mental activity and not to a special mode of what has been called our sensitivity. For when we taste we cannot hear that we taste, when we see we cannot smell that we see; but when we taste we may be conscious that we taste, when we hear we may be conscious that we hear. Moreover, the facts so ascertained are never independent of foeling and volition and of the contents of consciousness at the time, as true sensations are. Also if we consult the physiologist we learn that there is no evidence of any organ or centre that could be regarded as the physical basis of this inner sense; and, if self-consciousness alone is temporarily in abeyance and a man merely beside himself, such state of delirium has little analogy to the functional blindness or deafness that constitutes the temporary suspension of sight or hearing.
To the concept of an internal perception or observation the preceding objections do not necessarily applythat is to say, this concept may be so defined that they need not. But then in proportion as we escape the change of assuming a special sense which furnishes the material for such perception or observation, in that same proportion are we compelled to seek for some other mode of distinguishing its subject-matter. For, so far as the mere mental activity of perceiving or observing is concerned, it is not easy to see any essential difference in the process whether what is observed be psychical or physical. It is quite true that the so-called psychological observation is more difficult, because the facts observed are often less definite and less persistent, and admit less of actual isolation than physical facts do; but the process of recognizing similarities or differences, the dangers of mal-observation or nonobservation, are not materially altered on that account. It may be further allowed that there is one difficulty peculiarly felt in psychological observation, the one most inaccurately expressed by saying that here the observer and the observed are one. But this difficulty is surely in the first instance due to the very obvious fact that our powers of attention are limited, so that we cannot alter the distribution of attention at any moment without altering the contents of consciousness at that moment. Accordingly, where there are no other ways of surmounting this difficulty, the psychological observer must either trust to representations at a later time, or he must acquire the power of taking momentary glances at the psychological aspects of the phase of consciousness in question. And this one with any aptitude for such studies can do with so slight a diversion of attention as not to disturb very seriously either the given state or that which immediately succeeds it. But very similar difficulties have to be similarly met by physical observers in certain special cases, as, e.g. in observing and registering the phenomena of solar eclipse; and similar aptitudes in the distribution of attention have to be acquired, say, by extempore orators or skilful surgeons. Just as little, then, as there is anything that we can with propriety call an inner sense, just so little can we find in the process of inner perception any satisfactory characteristic of the subjectmatter of psychology. The question still is: What is it that is perceived or observed ? and the readiest answer of course is: Internal experience as distinguished from external, what, takes place in the mind as distinct from what takes place without.
This answer, it must be at once allowed, is adequate for most purposes, and a great deal of excellent psychological work has been done without ever calling it in question. But the distinction between internal and external experience is not one that can be drawn from the standpoint of psychology, at least not at the outset. From this standpoint it appears to be either (I) inaccurate or (2) not extra-psychological. As to (I), the boundary between the internal and the external was, no doubt, originally the surface of the body, with~which the subject or self was identified; and in this sense the terms are of course correctly used. For a thing may, in the same sense of the word, be in one space and therefore not ini.e. out of another; but we express no intelligible relation if we speak of two things as being one in a given room and the other in last week. Any one is at liberty to say if he choose that a certain thing is in his mind; but if in this way he distinguishes it from something else not in his mind, then to be intelligible this must imply one of two statementseither that the something else is actually or possibly in some other mind, or, his own mind being alone considered, that at the time the something else does not exist at all. Yet, evident as it seems that the correlatives in and not-in must apply to the same category, whether space, time, presentation (or non-presentation) to a given subject, and so forth, we still find psychologists more or less consciously confused between internal, meaning presented in the psychological sense, and external, meaning not not-presented but corporeal or oftener extra-corporeal. But (2), when used to distinguish between presentations (some of which, or some relations of which with respect to others, are called internal, and others or other relations, external), these terms are at all events accurate; only then they cease to mark off the psychological from the extra-psychological, inasmuch as psychology has to analyse this distinction and to exhibit the steps by which it has come about. But we have still to examine whether the distinction of phenomena of Matter and phenomena of Mind furnishes a better dividing line than the distinction of internal and external.
A phenomenon, as commonly understood, is what is manifest, sensible, evident, the implication being that there are eyes to see, ears to hear, and so forthin other words, that there is ~r t I a presentation to a subject; and wherever there is presenta- Me~~ tion to a subject it will be allowed that we are in the domain of psychology. But in talking of physical phenomena we, in a way, abstract from this fact of presentation. Though consciousness should cease, the physicist would consider the sum total of objects to remain the same: the orange would still be round, yellow and fragrant as before. For the physicist whether aware of it or nothas taken up a position which for the present may be described by saying that phenomenon with him means appearance or manifestation, oras we had better say-object, not for a concrete individual, but rather for what Kant called Bewussisein nberhaupt, or, as some render it, the objective consciousness, i.e. for an imaginary subject freed from all the limitations of actual subjects save that of depending on sensibility for the material of experience. However, this is not all, for, as we shall see presently, the psychologist also occupies this position; at least if he does not his is not a true science. But, further, the physicist leaves out of sight altogether the facts of attention, feeling, and so forth, all of which actual presentation entails. From the psychological point of view, on the other hand, the removal of the subject removes not only all such facts as attention and feeling, but all presentation or possibility of presentation whatever. Surely, then, to call a certain object, when we abstract from its presentation, a material phenomenon, and to call the actual presentation of this object a mental phenomenon, is a clumsy and confusing way of representing the difference between the two points of view. For the terms material and mental seem to imply that the two so-called phenomena have nothing in common, whereas the same object is involved in both, while the term phenomenon implies that the point of view is in each case the same, when in truth what is emphasized by the one the other ignores.
2. Paradoxical though it may be, we must then conclude that psychology cannot be defined by reference to a special subjectStandpoint matter as such concrete sciences, for example, as of Psycho- mineralogy and botany can be; and, since it deals in kiT, some sort with the whole of experience, it is obviously not an abstract science in any ordinary sense of that term. To be characterized at all, therefore, apart from metaphysical assumptions, it must be characterized by the standpoint from which this experience is viewed. It is by way of expressing this that widely different schools of psychology define it as subjective, all other positive sciences being distinguished as objective. But this seems scarcely more than a first approximation to the truth, and, as we have seen incidentally, is apt to be misleading. The distinction rather is that the standpoint of psychology is what is sometimes termed individualistic, that of the so-called object-sciences beiAg universalistic, both alike being objective in the sense of being true for all, consisting of what Kant would call judgments of experience. For psychology is not a biography in any sense, still less a biography dealing with idiosyncrasies, and in an idiom having an interest and a meaning for one subject only, and incommunicable to any other. Locke, Berkeley and Hume have been severely handled because they regarded the critical investigation of knowledge as a psychological problem, and set to work to study the individual mind simply for the sake of this problem. But none the less their standpoint was the proper one for the science of psychology itself; and, however surely their philosophy was foredoomed to a collapse, there is no denying a steady psychological advance as we pass from Locke to Hume and his modern representatives. By idea Locke tells us he means Whatsoever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks (ie. is conscious), and having, as it were, shut himself within such a circle of ideas he finds himself powerless to explain his knowledge of a world that is assumed to be independent of it; but he is able to give a very good account of some of these ideas themselves. He cannot justify his belief in the world of things whence certain of his simple ideas were conveyed any more than Robinson. Crusoe could have explored the continents whose products were drifted to his desert island, though he might perhaps survey the island itself well enough. Berkeley accordingly, as Professor Fraser happily puts it, abolished Lockes hypothetical outer circle. Thereby he made the psychological standpoint clearer than everhence the truth of Humes remark, that Berkeleys arguments admit of no answer; at the same time the epistemological problem was as hopeless as beforehence again the truth of Humes remark that those arguments produced no conviction. Of all the facts with which he deals, the psychologist may truly say that their esse is jercipi, inasmuch as all his facts are facts of presentation, are ideas in Lockes sense, or objects which imply a subject. Before we became conscious there was no ~rorlr-l for i~~ ,,ho,ild o,,r enri,~np~e rpsc.p th~ world for us ceases too; had we been born blind, the world would for us have had no color; if deaf, itwould have had no sounds; if idiotic, it would have had no meaning. Psychology, then, never transcends the limits of the individual. But now, though this Berkeleyan standpoint is the standpoint of psychology, psychology is not pledged to the method employed by Berkeley and by Locke. Psychology may be individualistic without being confined exclusively to the introspective method. There is nothing to hinder the psychologist from employing materials furnished by his observations of other men, of infants, of the lower animals, or of the insane; nothing to hinder him taking counsel with the philologist or even the physiologist, provided always he can show the psychological bearings of those facts which are not directly psychological. The standpoint of psychology is individualistic; by whatever methods, from whatever sources its facts are ascertained, they mustto have a psychological importbe regarded as having place in, or as being part of, some ones consciousness or experience. In this sense, i.e. as presented to an individual, the whole choir of heaven and furniture of earth may belong to psychology, but otherwise they are psychological nonentities. In defining psychology, hwever, the propriety of avoiding the terms mind or soul, which it implies, is widely acknowledged; mind because of the disastrous dualism of mind and matter, soul because of its metaphysical associations. Hence F. A. Langes famous mot: modern psychology is Psychologie ohue Seele. But consciousness, which is the most frequent substitute, is continually confused with selfconsciousness, and so is apt to involve undue stress on the subjective as opposed to the objective, as well as to emphasize the cognitive as against the conative factors. Experience, it is maintained, is a more fundamental and less ambiguous term. Psychology then is the science of individual experience. The problem of psychology, in dealing with this complex subjectmatter, is in generalfirst, to ascertain its ultimate constituents, and, secondly, to determine and explain the laws of their interaction.
General Analysis.
3. In seeking to make a first general analysis of experience, we must start from individual human experience, for this alone is what we immediately know. From this standpoint we must endeavour to determine the irreducible minimum involved, so that our concept may apply to all lower forms of experience as well. Etymologically experience connotes practical acquaintance, efficiency and skill as the result of trialusually repeated trialand effort. Many recent writers on comparative psychology propose to make evidence of experience in this sense the criterion of psychical life. The ox knoweth his owner and the ass his masters crib, and so would pass muster; but the ant and the bee, who are said to learn nothing, would, in spite of their marvellous instinctive skill, be regarded as mere automata in Descartess sense. That this criterion is decisive on the positive side will hardly be denied; the question how far it is available negatively we must examine later on. But it will be well first briefly to note some of the implications of this positive criterion: Experience is the process of becoming expert by experiinent. The chief implication, no doubt, is that which in psychological language we express as the duality of subject and object. Looking at this relation as the comparative psychologist has to do, we find that it tallies in the main with the biological relation of organism and environment. The individuality of the organism corresponds to, though it is not necessarily identical with, the psychological subject, while to the environment and its changes corresponds the objective continuum or totum objectivum as we shall call it. This correspondence further helps us to see still more clearly the error of regarding individual experience as wholly subjective, and at the same time helps us to find some measure of truth in the nave realism of Common Sense. As these points have an important bearing on the connection of psychology and epistemology, we may attempt to elucidate them more fully.
Though it would be unwarrantable to resolve a thing, as some have done, into a mere meeting-point of relations, yet it is perhaps as great a mistake to assume that it can be anything determinate in itself apart from all relations to other things. By the physicist this mistake can hardly be made: for him action and reaction are strictly correlative: a material system can do no work on itself. For the biologist, again, organism and environment are invariably complementary. But in psychology, when presentations are regarded as subjective modifications, we have this mistaken isolation in a glaring form, and all the hopeless difficulties of what is called subjective idealism are the result. Subjective modifications no doubt are always one constituent of individual experience, but always as correlative to objective modifications or change in the objective continuum. If experience were throughout subjective, not merely would the term subjective itself be meaningless, not merely would the conception of the objective never arise, but the entirely impersonal and intransitive process that remained, though it might be described as absolute becoming, could not be called even solipsism, least of all real experience. Common Sense, then, is right in positing, wherever experience is inferred, (1) a factor answering to what we know as self, and (2) another factor answering to what each of us knows as the world. It is further right in regarding the world which each one immediately knows as a colored, sounding, tangible world, more exactly as a world of sensible qualities. The assumption of nave realism, that the world as each one knows it exists as such independently of him, is questionable. But this assumption goes beyond individual experience, and does not, indeed could not, arise at this standpoint.
Answering to the individuality and unity of the subjective factor, there is a corresponding unity and individuality of the objective. Every Ego has its correlative Non-Ego, whence in the end such familiar saying as quot liomines tot sentenliac and the like. The doctrine of Leibnitz, that each monad is a living mirror... representative of the universe according to its point of view, will, with obvious reservations, occur to many as illustrative here. In particular, Leibnitz emphasized one point on which psychology will do well to insist. Since the world is a plenum, he begins, all things are connected together and everybody acts upon every other, more or less, according to their distance, and is affected by their reaction; hence each monad is a living mirror,f &c. Subject and Object, or (as it will be clearer in this connection to say) Ego and Non-Ego, are then not merely logically a universe, but actually tile universe, so that, as Leibnitz put it, He who sees all could read in each what is happening everywhere (Monadology, 61). Though every individual experience is unique, yet the more Egoi is similar to Egoi the more their complementaries Non-Ego1, NonEgo2 are likewise similar; much as two perspective projections are more similar the more adjacent their points of sight, and more similar as regards a given position the greater its distance from both points. No doubt we must also make a very extensive use of the hypothesis of subconsciousness, just as Leibnitz did, before we can say that the universe is the objective factor in each and every individuals experience. But we shall have in any case to allow that, besides the strictly limited content rising above the threshold of consciousness, there is an indefinite extension of the presentational continuum beyond it. And the Leibnitzian i\ionadology helps us also to clear up a certain confusion that besets terms such as content of consciousness, or finite centre of experience a barbarous but intelligible phrase that has recently appearedthe confusion, that is, with a mosaic of mutually exclusive areas, or with a scheme of mutually exclusive logical compartments. Consciousnesses, though in one respect mutually exclusive, do not limit each other in this fashion. For there is a sense in which all individual experiences are absolutely the same, though relatively different as to their point of view, i.e. as to the manner in which for each the same absolute whole is sundered into subjective and 9bjective factors.
This way of looking at the facts of mind helps, again, to dispel the obscurity investing such terms as subjective, ml ersubj relive, transsubjective and objective, as these occur in psychological or epistemological discussions. For the psychologist must maintain that no experience is merely subjective: it is only epistemologists (notably Kant) who so describe individual experience, because objects experienced in their concrete particularity pertain, like so many idiosyncrasies, to the individual alone. In contrast with this, epistemologists then describe universal experiencethe objects in which are the same for every experient as objective experience par excellence. And so has arisen the time-honored opposition of Sense-knowledge and Thoughtknowledge: so too has arisen the dualism of Empiricism and Rationalism, which Kant sought to surmount by logical analysis. It is in the endeavour to supplement this analysis by a psychological genesis that the terms intersubjective and transsubjective prove useful. The problem for psychology is to ascertain the successive stages in the advance from the one form of experience or knowledge to the other. When ten men look at the sun or the moon, said Reid, they all see the same individual object. But according to Hamilton this statement is not philosophically correct. .. the truth is that each of these persons sees a different object.. .. It is not by perception but by a process of reasoning that we connect the objects of sense with existences beyond the sphere of immediate f Now it is to this beyond that the term transsubjective is applied, and the question before us is: How do individual subjects thus get beyond the immanence or immediacy with which all experiene begins? By a process of reasoning) it is said. But it is at least true in fact, whether necessarily true or not, that such reasoning is the result of social intercourse. Further, it will be generally allowed that Kants Anal ytik, before referred to, has made plain the insufficiency of merely formal reasoning to yield the categories of Substance, Cause and End, by which we pass from mere perceptual experience to that wider experience which transcends it. And psychology, again, may claim to have shown that in fact these categories are the result of that reflective self-consciousness to which social intercourse first gives rise.
But such intercourse, it has been urged, presupposes the common ground between subject and subject which it is meant to explain. How, it is asked, if every subject is confined to his own unique experience, does this intersubjective intercourse ever arise ? If no progress towards intellective synthesis were possible before intersubjective intercourse began, such intercourse, as presupposing something more than immediate sense-knowledge, obviously never could begin.3 Let us illustrate by an analogy which Leibnitzs association of experience with a point of view at once suggests. If it were possible for the terrestrial astronomer to obtain observations of the heavens from astronomers in the neighboring stars, he would be able to map in three dimensions constellations which now he can only represent in two. But unless he had ascertained unaided the heliocentric parallax of these neighboring stars, he would have no means of distinguishing them as near from the distant myriads besides, or of understanding the data he might receive; and unless he had first of all determined the still humbler geocentric parallax of our sun, those heliocentric parallaxes would have been unattainable. So in like manner we may say intersubjective parallax presupposes what we may call subjective parallax, and even this the psychological duality of object and subject. But such subjective parallax or acquaintance with other like selves is the direct outcome of the extended range in time which memory proper secures; and when in this way self has become an object, resembling objects become other selves or ejects, to adopt with slight modification a term originated by the late W. K. Clifford. We may be quite sure that his faithful dog is as little of a solipsist as the noble savage whom he accompanies. Indeed, the rudiments of the social factor are, if we may judge by biological evidence, to be found very early. Sexual union in the physiological sense occurs in all but the lowest Metazoa, pairing and courtship are frequent among insects, while among the cold-blooded fishes the battle of the stickleback with his rivals, his captivating manceuvres to lead the female to the nest which he has built, his mad dance of passion around her, and his subsequent jealous guarding of the nest, have often been observed and admired. Among birds and mammals And it is precisely for want of this mediation that Kants two stems of human knowledge, which perhaps may spring from a common but to us unknown root, leave epistemology still more or less hampered with the old dualism of sense and understanding.
Evolution of Sex, by Geddes and Thomson, 1st ed. p. 265.
we find not merely that these psychological aspects of sexual life are greatly extended, but we find also prolonged education of offspring by parents and imitation of the parents by offspring. Even language, or, at any rate the linguistic impulse, is not wholly absent among brutes.f Thus as the sensori-motor adjustments of the organism to its environment generally advance in complexity and range, there is a concomitant advance in the variety and intimacy of its relations specially with individuals of its kind. It is therefore reasonable to assume no discontinuity between phases of experience that for the individual are merely objective and phases that are also ejective as well; and once the ejective level is attained, some interchange of experience is possible. So disappears the great gulf fixed betwixt subjective or individual and intersubjective or universal experience by rival systems in philosophy.
4. From this preliminary epistemological discussion we may pass on to the psychological analysis of experience itself. As to this, there is in the main substantial agreement; the elementary facts of mind cannot be expressed in less than three propositions I feel somehow, I know something, I do something. But here at once there arises an important question, viz. What after all are we to understand by the subject of these propositions? The proposition I feel somehow is not equivalent to I know that I feel somehow. To identify the two would be to confound consciousness with self-consciousness. We are no more confined to our own immediate observations here than elsewhere; but the point is that, whether seeking to analyse ones own consciousness or to infer that of a lobster, whether discussing the association of ideas or the expression of emotions, there is always an individual self or subject in question. It is not enough to talk of feelings or volitions:
what we mean is that some individualman or wormfeels, strives, acts, thus or thus. Obvious as this may seem, it has been frequently either forgotten or gainsaid. It has been forgotten among details or through the assumption of a medley of faculties, each treated as an individual in turn, and among which the real individual was lost. Or it has been gainsaid, because to admit that all psychological facts pertain to an experiencing subject or experient seemed to imply that they pertained to a particular spiritual substance, which was simple, indestructible, and so forth; and it was manifestly desirable to exclude such assumptions from psychology as a science aiming only at a systematic exposition of what can be known and verified by observation. But, however, -much assailed or disowned, the concept of a mind or conscious Subject or. ... .
~ subject is to be found implicitly or explicitly in all psychological writers whatevernot more in Berke ley, who accepts it as a fact, than in Hume, who treats it as a fiction. This being so, we are far more likely to reach the truth eventually if we openly acknowledge this inexpugnable assumption, if such it prove, instead of resorting to all sorts of devious periphrases to hide it. Now wherever the word Subject, or its derivatives, occurs in psychology we might substitute the word Ego and analogous derivatives, did such exist. But Subject is almost always the preferable term; its impersonal form is an advantage, and it readily recalls its modern correlative Object. Moreover, Ego has two senses, distinguished by Kant as pure and empirical, the latter of which was, of course, an 6bject, the Me known, while the former was subject always, the I knowing. By pure Ego or Subject it is proposed to denote here the simple fact that everything experienced is referred to a Self experiencing. This psychological concept of a self or subject, then, is after all by no means identical with the metaphysical concepts of a soul or mind-atom, or of mind-stuff not atomic; it may be kept as free from metaphysical implications as the concept of the biological individual or organism with which it is so intimately connected.
The attempt, indeed, has frequently been made to resolve the former into the latter, and so to find in mind only such an mdi~ as has an obvious counterpart in this individuextrude the ality of the organism, i.e. what we may call an objective individuality. But such procedure owes all its plausibility to the fact that it leaves out of sight the difference between the biological and the psychological standpoints. All that the biologist means by a dog is the sum of the phenomena which make up its corporeal existence. 2 And, inasmuch as its presentation to any one in particular is a point of no importance, the fact of presentation at all may be very well dropped out of account. Let us now turn to psychology: Why should we not here follow Huxley and take the word soul simply as a name for the series of mental phenomena which make up an individual mind ? i Surely the moment we try distinctly to understand this question we realize that the cases are different. Series of mental phenomena for whom ? For any passer-by such as might take stock of our biological dog? No, obviously only for that individual mind itself; yet that is supposed to be made up of, to be nothing different from, the series of phenomena. Are we, then, (I) quoting J. S. Mills words, to accept the paradox that something which ex hypothesi is but a series of feelings, can be aware of itself as a series ? Or (2) shall we say that the several parts of the series are mutually phenomenal, much as A may look at B, who was just now looking at A ? Or (3) finally, shall we say that a large part of the so-called series, in fact every term but one, is phenomenal for the restfor that one?
As to the first, paradox is too mild a word for it; even contradiction will hardly suffice. It is as impossible to express beingaware of by one term as it is to express an equation or any other relation by one term: what knows can no more be identical with what is known than a weight with wjiat it weighs. If a series of feelings is what is known or presented, then what knows, what it is presented to, cannot be that series of feelings, and this without regard to the point Mill mentions, viz, that the infinitely greater part of the, series is either past or future. The question is not in the first instance one of time or substance at all, but simply turns upon the fact that knowledge or consciousness is unmeaning except as it implies something knowing or conscious of something~ But it may be replied:
Granted that the formula for consciousness is something doing something, to put it generally; still, if the two somethings are the same when I touch myself or when I see myself, why may not agent and patient be the same when the action is knowing or being aware of; why may I not know myselfin fact, do I not know myself? Certainly not; agent and patient never are the same in the same act; such terms as self-caused, self-moved, self-known, et -Id genus omne, either connote the incomprehensible or are abbreviated expressions as, e.g. touching oneself when ones right hand touches ones left. And so we come to the alternative: As one hand washes the other, may not different members of the series of feelings be subject and object in turn ? Compare, for example, the state of mind of a man succumbing to temptation (as he pictures himself enjoying the coveted good and impatiently repudiates scruples of conscience or dictates of prudence) with his state when, filled with remorse, he sides with conscience and condemns this former self the better self having meanwhile become supreme. Here the cluster of presentations and their associated sentiments and motives, which together played the role of self in the first situation, haveonly momentarily it may be true, but still havefor the time the place of not-self; and under abnormal circumstances this partial alternation may become complete alienation, as in what is called double consciousness. Or again, the development of self-consciousness might be loosely described as taking the subject or self of one stage as an object in the nextself being, e.g. first identified with the body and afterwards distinguished from it. But all this, however true, is beside the mark; and it is really a very serious misnomer to speak, as e.g. Herbert Spencer does, of the development of selfconsciousness as a differentiation of subject and object. It is, if anything, a differentiation of object and object, i.e. in plainer words, it is a differentiation among presentationsa differentiation every step of which implies just that relation to a subject which it is supposed to supersede.
There still remains the alternative, expressed in the words of J. S. Mill, viz. the alternative of believing that the Mind or Ego is something different from any series of feelings or possibilities of them. To admit this, of course, is to admit the necessity of distinguishing between Mind or Ego, meaning the unity or continuity of consciousness as a complex of presentations, and Mind or Ego as the subject to which this complex is presented. In dealing with the body from the ordinary biological standpoint no such necessity arises. But, whereas there the individual organism is spoken of unequivocally, in psychology, on the other hand, the individual mind ma1 mean either (1.) the series of feelings or mental phenomena above referred to; or (ii.) the subject of these feelings for whom they are phenomena; or (iii.) the subject of these feelings or phenomena plus the series of feelings or phenomena themselves, the two being in that relation to each other in which alone the one is subject and the other a series of feelings, phenomena or objects. It is in this last sense that Mind is used in empirical psychology.5 Its exclusive use in the first sense is favored only by those who shrink from the speculative associations connected with its exclusive use in the p. 17!.
Huxley, Os.. cit. p. 172.
ExaininatIon of Sir W. Hamiltons Philosophy, ch. xii. fin.
A meaning better expressed, as said above, by experience.
second. But psychology is notcalled upon to transcend the relation of subject to object or, as we may call it, the fact of presentation. On the other hand, as has been said, the attempt to ignore one term of the relation is hopeless; and equally hopeless, even futile, is the attempt, by means of phrases such as consciousness or the unity of consciousness, to dispense with the recognition of a conscious subject.
5. We might now proceed to inquire more closely into the character and relations of the three invariable constituents of Feeling psychical life which are broadly distinguished as cognitions, feelings and conations. But we should be at once confronted by a doctrine which, strictly taken, amounts almost to a denial of this tripartite classification of the facts of mindthe doctrine, viz, that feeling alone is primordial and invariably present wherever there is consciousness at all. Every living creature, it is said, feels, though it may never do any more; only the higher animals, and these only after a time, learn to discriminate and identify and to act with a purpose. This doctrine, as might be expected, derives its plausibility partly from the vagueness of psychological terminology, and partly from the intimate connection that undoubtedly exists between feeling and cognition on the one hand and feeling and volition on the other. As to the meaning of the term, it is plain that further definition is requisite for a word that may mean (a) a touch, as feeling of roughness; (b) an organic sensation, as feeling of hunger; (c) an emotion, as feeling of anger; (d) feeling proper, as pleasure or pain. But, even taking feeling in the last, its stricter sense, it has been maintained that all the more complex forms of consciousness are resolvable into, or at least have been developed from, feelings of pleasure and pain. The only proof of such position. since we cannot directly observe the beginnings of conscious life, must consist of considerations such as the following. So far as we can judge, we find feeling everywhere; but, as we work downwards from higher to lower forms of life, the possible variety and the definiteness of sense-impressions both steadily diminish. Moreover, we can directly observe in our own organic sensations, which seem to come nearest to the whole content of primitive or infantile experience, an almost entire absence of any assignable quale. Finally, in our senseexperience generally, we find the element of feeling at a maximum in the lower senses and the cognitive element at a maximum in the higher. But the so-called intellectual senses are the most used, and use (we know) blunts feeling and favors intellection, as we see in chemists, who sort the most filthy mixtures by smell and taste without discomfort. If, then, feeling predominates more and more as we approach the beginning of conscious life, may we not conclude that it is its only essential constituent? On the contrary, such a conclusion would be rash in the extreme. Two lines, e.g. may get nearer and nearer and yet will never meet, if the rate of approach is simply proportional to the distance. A triangle may be diminished indefinitely, and yet we cannot infer that it becomes eventually all angles, though the angles get no less and the sides do. Before, then, we decide whether pleasure or pain alone can ever constitute a complete experience, it may be well to inquire into the connection between feeling and cognition, on the one hand, and between feeling and conation on the other, so far as we can now observe. And this is an inquiry which will help us towards an answer to our main question, namely, that concerning the nature and connections of what are commonly regarded as the three ultimate facts of mind. -
Broadly speaking, in any state of mind that we can directly observe, what we find is (I) that we are aware of a certain change RelatIon of in our sensations, thoughts or circumstances, (2) Feeling tO that we are pleased or pained with the change, and a~~o- (3) that we act accordingly. We never find that tion. feeling directly altersi.e. without the intervention of the action of which it promptseither our sensations or situation, but that regularly these latter with remarkable promptness and certainty alter it. We have riot first a change of feeling, and then a change in our sensations, perceptions and ideas; but, these changing, change of feeling follows. In short, feeling a~t~ears to be an effect, which therefore cannot exist without its cause, though in different circumstances the same immediate cause may produce a different amount or even a different state of feeling. Turning from what we may call the receptive phase of an experience to the active or appetitive phase, we find in like manner that feeling is certainly notin such cases as we can clearly observethe whole of what we experience at any moment. True, in common speech we talk of liking pleasure and disliking pain; but this is either tautology, equivalent to saying we are pleased when we are pleased and pained when we are pained; or else it is an allowable abbreviation, and means that we like pleasurable objects and dislike painful objects, as when we say we like feeling warm and dislike feeling hungry. But feeling warm or feeling hungry, we must remember, is n.ot pure feeling in the stricter sense of the word. Within the limits of our observation, then, we find that feeling accompanies some more or less definite presentation which for the sake of it becomes the object of appetite or aversion; in other words, feeling implies a relation to a pleasurable or painful presentation or situation, that, as cause of feeling or as end of the action to which feelin& prompts, is doubly distinguished from it. Thus the very facts that lead us to distinguish feeling from cognition and conation make against the hypothesis that consciousness can ever be all feeling. -
But, as already said, the plausibility of this hypothesis is in good part due to a laxity in the use of terms. Most psycholo~ gists before Kant, and some even to the present day, peeling and speak of pleasure and pain as sensations. But it is Sensation plain that pleasure and pain are not simple ideas, distinct.
as Locke called them, in the sense in which touches and tastes arethat is to say, they are never like these localized or projected, nor are they elaborated in conjunction with other sensations and movements into percepts or intuitions of the external. This confusion of feeling with sensations is largely consequent on the use of one word pain both for certain organic sensations and for the purely subjective state of being pained. But such pains not only are always more or less definitely localizedwhich of itself is so far cognition, they are also distinguished as shooting, burning, gnawing, &c., all which symptoms indicate a certain objective quality. Accordingly psychologists have been driven by one means or another to recognize two aspects (Bain), or properties (Wundt), in what they call a sensation, the one a sensible or intellectual or qualitative, the other an affective or emotive, aspect or property. The term aspect is figurative and obviously inaccurate; even to describe pleasure and pain as properties of Sensation is a matter open to much question. But the point which at present concerns us is simply that when feeling is said to be the primordial element in consciousness more is usually included under feeling than pure pleasure and pain, viz, some characteristic or quality by which one pleasurable or painful sensation is distinguishable from another. No doubt, as we go downwards in the chain of life the qualitative or objective elements in the so-called sensations become less and less definite; and at the same time organisms with well-developed sense-organs give place to others without any clearly differentiated organs at all. But there is no ground for supposing even the amoeba itself to be affected in all respects the same whether by changes of temperature or of pressure or by changes in its internal fluids, albeit all of these changes will further or hinder its life and so presumably be in some sort pleasurable or painful. On the whole, then, there are grounds for saying that the endeavour to represent all the various facts of consciousness as evolved out of feeling is due to a hasty striving after simplicity, and has been favored by the ambiguity of the term feeling itself. If by feeling we mean a certain subjective state varying continuously in intensity and passing from time to time from its positive phase (pleasure) to its negative phase (pain), then this purely pathic state implies an agreeing or disagreeing something which psychologically determines it. If, on the other hand, we let feeling stand for both this state and the cause of it, then, perhaps, a succession of such feelings may make up a consciousness; but then we are including two of our elementary facts under the na1n of one of them. The simplest form of psychical life, therefore, involves not only a subject feeling but a subject having qualitatively distinguishable presentations which are the occasion of its feeling.
6. We may now try to ascertain what is meant by cognition as an essential element in this life, or, more exactly, what we are to understand by the term presentation. It was an Presenta- important step onwards for psychology when Locke introduced that new way of ideas which Stillingfleet found alternately so amusing and so dangerous. By ideas Locke told him he meant nothing but the immediate objects of our minds in thinking; and it was so far a retrograde step when Hume restricted the term to certain only of these objects, or rather to these objects in a certain state, viz, as reproduced ideas or images. And, indeed, the history of psychology seems to show that its most important advances have been made by those who have kept closely to this way of ideas; the establishment of the laws of association with their many fruitful applications and the whole Herbartian psychology may suffice as instances (see HERBART). The truth is that the use of such a term is itself a mark of an important generalization, one which helps to free us from the mythology and verbiage of the faculty-psychologists. All the various mental facts spoken of as sensations, movements, percepts, images, intuitions, concepts, notions, have two characteristics in cornmon: (1) they admit of being more or less attended to, and (2) they can be variously combined together and reproduced. It is here proposed to use the term presentation to denote them all, as being the best English equivalent for what Locke meant by idea and what Kant and Herbart called a lorstellung.
A presentation has then a twofold relationfirst, directly to the subject, and, secondly, to other presentations. The former relation answers to the fact that a presentation is attended to, that the subject is more or less conscious of it: it is in his mind or presented. As presented to a subject a presentation might with advantage be called an object, or perhaps a psychical object, to distinguish it from what are called objects apart from presentation, i.e. conceived as independent of any particular subject. Locke, as we have seen, did so call it; still, to avoid possible confusion, it may turn out best to dispense with the frequent use of object in this sense. But on one account, at least, it is desirable not to lose sight altogether of this, which is after all the stricter as well as the older signification of object, namely, because it enables us to express definitely, without implicating any ontological theory, what we have so far seen reason to think is the fundamental fact in experience. Instead of depending mainly on that vague and treacherous word consciousness, or committing ourselves to the position that ideas are modifications of a certain mental substance or identical with the subject to whom they are presented, we may leave all this on one side, and say that ideas are objects, and the relation of objects to subjectsthat whereby the one is object and the other subjectis presentation; and it is because only objects sustain this relation that they may be spoken of simply as presentations. On the side of the subject this relation implies what, for want of a better word, may be called attention, extending the denotaAttention tion of this term so as to include even what we ordinarily call inattention. Attention so used will thus cover part of what is meant by consciousnessso much of it, that is, as answers to being mentally active, active enough at least to receive impressions. Attention on the side of the subject implies intensity on the side of the object: we might indeed almost call intensity the matter of a presentation, without which it is a nonentity.i The inter-9bjective relations of presentations, on which continuity their second characteristic, that of revivability and of Con- associability depends, though of the first, importsclousness. ance in themselves, hardly call for examination in a general analysis like the present. But there is one point i Cf. Kants Principle of the Anticipations of Perception: In all phenomena the real, which is the object of sensation, has intensive magnitude.
still more fundamental that we cannot wholly pass by: it isin part at any ratewhat is commonly termed the unity or continuity of consciousness. From the physical standpoint and in ordinary life we can talk of objects that are isolated and independent and in all respects distinct individuals. The screech of the owl, for example, has physically nothing to do with the brightness of the moon: either may come or go without changing the order of things to which the other belongs. But psychologically, for the individual percipient, they are parts of one whole; the more his attention is given to the one the more it is taken from the other. Also the actual recurrence of the one will afterwards entail the re-presentation of the other also. Not only are they still parts of one whole, but such distinctness as they have at present is the result of a gradual differentiation.
It is quite impossible for us now to imagine the effects of years of experience removed, or to picture the character of our infantile presentations before our interests had led us habitually to concentrate attention on some and to ignore others. In place of the many things which we can now see and hear, not merely would there then be a confused presentation of the whole field of vision and of a mass of undistinguished sounds, but even the difference between sights and sounds themselves would be without its present distinctness. Thus the further we go back the nearer we approach to a total presentation having the character of one general continuum in which differences are latent. There is, then, in psychology, as in biology, what may be called a principle of progressive differentiation or specialization; 2 and this, as well as the facts of reproduction and association, forcibly suggests the conception of a certain objective continuum forming the background or basis to the several relatively distinct presentations that are elaborated out of itthe equivalent, in fact, of that unity and continuity of consciousness which has been supposed to supersede the need for a conscious subject.
There is one class of objects of special interest even in a general survey, viz, movements or motor presentations. These, like sensory presentations, admit of association and reproduction, and seem to attain to such distinctness as they possess in adult human experience by, a gradual differentiation out of an original diffused mobility which is little besides emotional expression. Of this, however, more presently. It is primarily to such dependence upon feeling that movements owe their distinctive character, the possession, that is, under normal circumstances, of definite and assignable psychical antecedents, in contrast to sensory presentations, which are devoid of them. We cannot psychologically explain the order in which particular sights and sounds occur; but the movements that follow them, on the other hand, can be adequately explained only by psychology. The twilight that sends the hens to roost sets the fox to prowl, and the lions roar which gathers the jackals scatters the sheep. Such diversity in the niovements, although the sensory presentations are similar, is due, in fact, to what we might call the principle of subjective or hedonic selection that, out of all the manifold changes of sensory presentation which a given individual experiences, only a few are the occasion of such decided feeling as to become objects of possible appetite or aversion. It is thus by means of movements that we are more than the creatures of circumstances and that we can with propriety talk of subjective selection., The representation of what interests us comes then to be associated with the representation of such movements as will secure its realization, so thatalthough no concentration of attention will secure the requisite intensity to a pleasurable object present only in ideawe can by what is strangely like a concentration of attention convert the idea of a movement into the fact, and by means of the movement attain the coveted reality.
2 The biological principle referred to is that known as von Baers law, viz. that the progress of development is from the general to the special.
7. And this has brought us round naturally to the third of the commonly accepted constituents of experience. What is conation, or rather conative action? For there are two quesConatlon tions often more or less confused, the question of motive or spring of action, as it is sometimes called why is there action at all? and the question of meanshow do definite actions come about? The former question relates primarily to the connection of conation and feeling. It is only the latter question that we now raise. In ordinary voluntary movement we have first of all an idea or re-presentation of the movement, and last of all the actual movement itselfa new presentation which may for the present be described as the filling out of the re-presentation, which thereby attains that intensity, distinctness and embodiment we call reality. How does this change come about? The attempt has often been made to explain it by a reference to the more uniform, and apparently simpler, case of reflex action, including under this term what are called sensori-motor and ideo-motor actions. In all these the movement seems to be the result of a mere transference of intensity from the associated sensation or idea that sets on the movement. But when by some chance or mischance the same sensory presentation excites two or more nascent motor changes that conflict, a temporary block is said to occur; and, when at length one of these nascent motor changes finally prevails, then, it is said, there is constituted a state of consciousness which displays what we term volition.i But this assumption that sensory and motor ideas are associated before volition, and that volition begins where automatic or reflex action ends, is due to that inveterate habit of confounding the psychical and the physical which is the bane of modern psychology. How did these particular sensory and motor presentations ever come to be associated? The only psychological evidence we have of any very intimate connection between sensory and motor representations is that furnished by our acquired dexterities, i.e. by such movement as Hartley1 styled secondarily automatic. But then all these ha~e been preceded by volition: as Herbert Spencer says, the child learning to walk wills each movement before making it. Surely, then, a psychologist should take this as his typical case and prefer to assume that all automatic actions that come within his ken at all are in this sense secondarily automatic, i.e. to say that either in the experience of the individual or of his ancestors, volition or something analogous to it, preceded habit.
But, if we are thus compelled by a sound method to regard sensori-motor actions as degraded or mechanical forms of voluntary actions, instead of regarding voluntary actions as gradually differentiated out of something physical, we have not to ask: What happens when one of two alternative movements is executed? but the more general question: What happens when any movement is made in consequence of feeling? It is obvious that on this view the simplest definitely purposive movement must have been preceded by some movement simpler still. For any distinct movement purposely made presupposes the ideal presentation, before the actual realization, of the movement. But such ideal presentation, being a re-presentation, equally presupposes a previous actual movement of which it is the so-called mental residuum. There is then, it would seem, but one way left, viz. to regard those movements which are immediately expressive of pleasure or pain as primordial, and to regard the so-called voluntary movements as elaborated out of these. The vague and diffusive character of these primitive emotional manifestations is really a point in favor of this position. For such diffusion is evidence of an underlying continuity of motor presentations parallel to that already discussed in connection with sensory presentations, a continuity which, in each case, becomes differentiated in the course of experience into comparatively distinct and discrete movements and sensations respectively.3
I Compar& Spencers Principles of Psychology, I. ~ 217, 8.
D. Hartley, Observations on Man (6th ed., 1834), pp. 66 sqq.
It may be well to call to mind here that Alexander ham alic regarded emotional expression as a possible commencement of action But whereas we can only infer, and that in a very roundabout fashion, that our sensations are not absolutely distinct but are parts of one massive sensation, as it were, we are still liable under the influence of strong emotion directly to experience the corresponding continuity in the case of movement. Such motorcontinuum we may suppose is the psychical counterpart of that permanent readiness to act, or rather that continual nascent acting, which among the older physiologists was spoken of as tonic action. This skeletal tone, as it is now called, is found to disappear 1nore or less completely from a limb when its sensory nerves are divided. In the absence of the usual stream of afferent impulses passing into it, the spinal cord ceases to send forth the influences which maintain the tone.4 And a like intimate dependence, we have every reason to believe, obtains throughout between sensation and movement. We cannot imagine the beginning of life but only life begun. The simplest picture, then, which we can form of a concrete state of mind is not one in which there are movements before there are any sensations or sensations before there are any movements, but one in which change of sensation is followed by change of movement, the link between the two being a change of feeling.
Having thus simplified the question, we may now ask again:
How is this change of movement through feeling brought about? The answer, as already hinted, appears to be: Dependence By a change of attention. We learn from such of Action of observations as psychologists describe under the Feelwg, head of fascination, imitation, hypnotism, &c., that the mere concentration of attention upon a movement is often enough to bring the movement to pass. But, of course, in such cases neither emotion nor volition is necessarily implied; but none the less they show the close connection that exists between attention and movement. Everybody, too, must often have observed how the execution of any but mechanical movements arrests attention to thoughts or sensations, and how, vice versa, a striking impression or thought interrupts him in the performance of skilled movements. Let us suppose, then, that we have at any given moment a certain distribution of attention between sensory and motor presentations; a change in that distribution then will mean a change in the intensity of some of all of these. But, in the case of motor presentations, change of intensity means change of movement. Such changes are, however, quite minimal in amount so long as the given presentations are not conspicuously agreeable or disagreeable. So soon as they are, however, there is evidence of a most intimate connection between feeling and attention; but it. is hardly possible adequately to exhibit this evidence without first attempting to ascertain the characteristics of the piesentations, or groups of presentations, that are respectively pleasurable and painful, and this must ocCupy us later on.
8. We are now at the end of our analysis, and the results may perhaps be most conveniently summarized by first throwing them into a tabular form and then appending a primordial few remarks by way of indicating the main purport Facts of of the table. Taking no account of the specific Mind.
difference between one concrete state of mind and another, and supposing that we are dealing with presentations but only to reject it in favor of his own peculiar doctrine of spontaneity, which, however, is open to the objection that it makes movement precede feeling instead of following itan objection that would be serious even if the arguments advanced to support his hypothesis were as cogent as only Bain supposed them to be. Against the position maintained above he objects that the emotional wave almost invariably affects a whole group of movements, and therefore does not furnish the isolated promptings that are desiderated in the case of the will (Mental and Moral Science, p. 323). But to make this objection is to let heredity count for nothing. In fact, wherever a variety of isolated movements is physically possible there also we always find corresponding instincts, that untaught ability to perform actions, to use Bains own language, which a minimum of practice stiffices to perfect. But then these suggest gradual ancestral acquisition.
Foster, Text-Book of Physiology, 597.
in their simplest form, i.e. as sensations and movements, we have:
(I) non-voluntarily attend-) _
ing to changes in the ~ Presentation sensory~continuum;i j of sensory (2) being, in consequence, either pleased or A sUBJEcT pained; oBJEcTS.
~Feeling]
and (3) by voluntary atten-~
tion or innervation L=Presentation producing changes in of motor the motor-continuum.J
L ~Conationl Of the three phases or functions, thus analytically distinguishable, but not really separable, the first and the third correspond in the main with the receptive and active states or powers of the older psychologists. The second, being more difficult to isolate, was long overlooked; or, at all events, its essential characteristics were not distinctly marked, so that it was confounded either with (I) which is its cause, or with (3), its effect. But perhaps the most important of all psychological distinctions is that which traverses both the old bipartite and the prevailing tripartite analysis, viz, that between the subject on the one hand, as acting and feeling, and the objects of this activity on the other. With this distinction clearly before us, instead of crediting the subject with an indefinite number of faculties or capacities, we must seek to explain not only reproduction, association, &c., but all varieties of thinking and acting, by the laws pertaining to ideas or presentations, leaving to the subject only the one power of variously distributing that attention upon which the intensity of a presentation in part depends. What we call acthity in the narrower sense (as eg. purposive movement and intellection) is but a special form of this single subjective activity, although a very important one.
According to this view, then, presentations, attention, feeling, are not to be regarded as three co-ordinate genera, each of which is a complete state of mind or consciousness, i.e. as being all alike included under this one supreme category. There is, as Berkeley long ago urged, no resemblance between activity and an idea; nor is it easy to see anything common to pure feeling and an idea, unless it be that both possess intensity. Classification seems, in fact, to be here out of place. Instead, therefore, of the one summum genus, state of mind or consciousness, with its three co-ordinate subdivisionscognition, emotion, conation our analysis seems to lead us to recognize three distinct and irreducible componentsattention, feeling, and objects or presentationsas together, in a certain connection, constituting one concrete state of mind or psychosis. Of such concrete states of mind or psychoses we may then sayso far agreeing with the older, bipartite psychologythat there are two forms, corresponding to the two ways in which attention. may be determined and the two classes of objects attended to in each, viz. (I) the sensory or receptive attitude, when attention is non-voluntarily determined, i.e. where feeling follows the act of attention; and (2) the motor or active attitude, where feeling precedes the act of attention, which is thus determined voluntarily.
Attention.
9, Instead of a congeries of faculties we have assumed a single subjective activity and have proposed to call this attention. Some further explication of this position seems to be desirable. We start with the duality of subject and object as fundamental. We say of man, mouse, or monkey that it feels, perceives, remembers, infers, strives, and so forth. Leaving aside the first term, it is obvious that all the rest imply both an activity and an object. Is it possible to resolve these instances into a form in which the assumed diversity of the act will appear as a diversity of the object? At first sight it looks rather as if the kind of activity might vary while the object remained the same; that e.g. we perceived an object and later on remembered or desired it. It would then be most natural to refer these several activities to corresponding faculties of perception, memory and desire. This, indeed, is the view embodied in common speech, and for practical purposes it is doubtless the simplest and the best. Nevertheless, a more thorough analysis shows that when the supposed faculty is different the object is never entirely and in all respects the same. Thus in perception, e.g. we deal with impressions or primary presentations, and inmemory and imagination with ideas (in the later sense) or secondary presentations. In desire the want of the object gives it an entirely different setting, adding a new characteristic, that of value or worth, so that its acquisition. becomes the end of a series of efforts or movements. The older psychology, by its acceptance of the Cartesian doctrine that all the facts of immediate experience are to be interpreted as subjective modifications, failed to distinguish adequately between the subject as active and the objects of its activity. Hence the tendency to rest content with the popular distinction of various faculties in spite of the underlying sameness implied in the common application of conscious to them all. In fact, Lockes definition of idea (in the older and wider sense) as the immediate object of consciousness or thinking was censured by Reid as the greatest blemish in the Essay on Human Understanding. But, accepting this definition as implied in the duality of subject and object, and accepting too the underlying sameness which the active form conscious undeniably implies, we have simply to ask; Which is the better term to denote this common element consciousness or attention?
Consciousness, as the vaguest, most protean and most treacherous of psychological terms, will hardly serve our purpose. Attention, on the other hand, has an invariable active sense, and there is an appropriate verb, to attend. But many things5 it may be said, are presented while few are attended to; if attention is to be made coextensive with the activity implied in consciousness, will not the vital distinction between attention and inattention be lost? In fact, however, this distinction implies a covert comparison, not an absolute contrast. In everyday life we recognize many degrees of attention, ranging from an extreme of intense concentration to one of complete remission, as Locke long ago pointed out.2 Between these extremes there is perfect continuity, and not a difference of kind; to apply the one term attention to the whole range is very like applying the one term magnitude to large and small quantities alike.
But it is not enough to show that when we commonly talk of different faculties we also find psychological differences of object, and to assert that if there is one common factor in all psychical activity this factor is attention. To make our position secure it is needful to show directly that all the various faculties with which a subject can be credited are resolvable into attention and various classes or relations or states of presentations that are attended to. How far this is possible remains to be seen as we proceed. In the case of the so-called intellectual powers the position is generally conceded, but so far as the voluntary or active powers are concerned it is as generally denied. Now, in so far as volition implies not merely action, overt or intended, but also motives, in so far also it must be acknowledged it contains a factor not resolvable into attention to motor presentations. This further factor, which has been called the volitional character of feeling, we here leave aside. Apart from this direct spring of action, then, the question is whether the active process itself differs from the cognitive or receptive process save in being attention to a special class of objects. First of all, it is noteworthy that both have the same characteristics. Thus, what Hamilton called the law of limitation holds of each alike and of either with respect to the other; and it holds too not only of the number of presentations but also of the intensity. We can be absorbed in action just as much as in. perception or thought; also, as already said, movements, unless they are mechanical, inhibit ideas; and vice versa, ideas, other than associated trains, arrest movements. Intoxication, hypnotism or insanity, rest or exhaustion, tell on apperception as well as on innervation.. The control of thoughts, equally with the control of movements, requires effort; and as there is a strain peculiar to intently listening or gazing, which is known to have a muscular concomitant, so too there is a strain characteristic of recollection and visualization, which may quite well turn out to be muscular too. When movements have to be associated, the same continuous attention is called for as is found requisite in associating sensory impressions; and, when such associationS have become very intimate, dissociation is about equally difficult in both cases.
There is one striking fact that brings to light the essential sameness of apperception and innervation, cited by Wundt for this very purpose. In so-called reaction-time experiments it is found, when the impression to be registered follows on a premonitory signal after a certain brief interval, that then the reaction (registering the impression.) is often instantaneous; the reaction-time, in other words, is nil. In such a case the subject is aware not of three separate events, (1) the perception of the impression; (2) the reaction; (3) the perception of this; but the fact of the impression is realized and the registering movement is actualized at once and together the subject is conscious of one act of attention and one only.
Theory of Presentations.
10. We come now to the exposition of the objects of attention or consciousness, i.e. to what we may call the objective or presentational factor of psychical life. The treatment of this will fall naturally into two divisions. In the first we shall have to deal with its general characteristics and with the fundamental processes which all presentation involves. In view of its general and more or less hypothetical character we may call it the theory of presentation. We can then pass on to the special forms of presentations, known as sensations, percepts, images, &c., and to the special processes to which these forms lead up.
This exposition will be simplified if we start with a supposition that will enable us to leave aside, at least for the present, the Assumption difficult question of heredity. We know that in of a Psycho- the course of each individuals life there is more logical or less of progressive differentiation or development.
Individual. Further, it is believed that there has existed a series of sentient individuals beginning with the lowest form of life and advancing continuously up to man. Some traces of the advance already made may be reproduced in the growth of each human being now, but for the most part such traces have been obliterated. What was experience in the past has become instinct in the present. The descendant has no consciousness of his ancestors failures when performing by an untaught ability what they slowly and perhaps painfully acquired. But, if we are to attempt to follow the genesis of mind from its earliest dawn, it is the primary experience rather than the eventual instinct that we have first of all to keep in view. To this end, then, it is proposed to assume that we are dealing with one individual who has continuously advanced from the beginning of psychical life, and not with a series of individuals of whom all save the first inherited certain capacities from their progenitors. The life-history of such an imaginary individual, that is to say, would correspond with all that was new in the experience of a certain typical series of individuals each of whom advanced a certain stage in mental differentiation. On the other hand, from this history would be omitted that inherited reproduction of the net results, so to say, of ancestral experience, that innate tradition by which alone, under the actual conditions of existence, progress s possible. The process of thus reproducing the old might differ as widely from that of producing the new as electrotyping does from engraving. However, the point is that as psychologists we know nothing directly about it; neither can we distinguish precisely at any link in the chain of life what is old and inheritedoriginal in the sense of Locke and Leibnitz from what is new or acquiredoriginal in the modern sense. But we are bound as a matter of method to suppose all complexity and differentiation among presentations to have been originated, i.e. experimentally acquired, at some time or other. So long, then, as we are concerned primarily with the progress of this dif(eren.tiation we may disregard the fact that it has not actually been, as it were, the product of one hand dealing with one tabula rasa to use Lockeeoriginally Aristotlesfigure, but of many hands, each of which, starting with a reproduction of what had been wrought on the preceding tabulae, put in more or fewer new touches before devising the whole to a successor who would proceed in like manner.
II. What is implied in this process of differentiation and what is it that becomes differentiated ?these are the questions to which we must now attend. Psychologists have, The Pro.
usually represented mental advance as consisting sentationfundamentally in the combination and recombina- Continuum. tion of various elementary units, the so-called sensations and primitive movements: in other words, as consisting in a species of mental chemistry. If we are to resort to physical analogies at alla matter of very doubtful proprietywe shall find in. the growth of a seed or an embryo far better illustrations of the unfolding of the contents of consciousness than in the building up of molecules: the process seems much more a segmentation of what is originally continuous than an aggregation of elements at first independent and distinct. Comparing higher minds or stages of mental development with lowerby what means such comparison is possible we need not now considerwe find in the higher conspicuous differences between presentations which in the lower are indistinguishable or absent altogether. The worm is aware only of the difference between light and dark. The steel-worker sees half a dozen tints where others see only a uniform glow. To the child, it is said, all faces are alike; and throughout life we are apt to note the general, the points of resemblance, before the special, the points of difference. But even when most definite, what we call a presentation is still part of a larger whole. It is not separated from other presentations, whether simultaneous or successive, by something which is not of the nature of presentation, as one island is separated from another by the intervening sea, or one note in a melody from the next by an interval of silence. In our search for a theory of presentations, then, it is from this continuity of consciousness that we must take our start. Working backwards from this as we find it now, we are led alike by particular facts and general considerations to the conception of a totum objectivum or objective continuum which is gradually differentiated, thereby giving rise to what we call distinct presentations, just as some particular presentation, clear as a whole, as Leibnitz would say, becomes with mental growth a complex of distinguishable parts. Of the very beginning of this continuum we can say nothing; absolute beginnings are beyond the pale of science. Experience advances as this continuum is differentiated, every differentiation being a change of presentation. Hence the commonplace of psychologists We are only conscious as we are conscious of change.
But change of consciousness is too loose an expression to take the place of the unwieldy phrase differentiation of a presentation-continuum, to which we have been Gradual Di!driven. For not only does the term consciousness ferentlation confuse what exactness requires us to keep distinct, an of Presenactivity and its object, but also the term change tatlonContinuum.
fails to express the characteristics which distinguish new presentations from other changes. Differentiation implies that the simple becomes complex or the complex more complex; it implies also that this increased complexity is due to the persistence of former changes; we may even say such persistence is essential to the very idea of development or growth. In trying, then, to conceive our psychological individual in the earliest stages of development we must not picture him as experiencing a succession of absolutely new sensations, which, coming out of nothingness, admit of being strung upon the thread of consciousness like beads picked up at random, or cemented into a mass like the bits of stick and sand with which the young caddis covers its nakedness. The notion, which Kant has done much to encourage, that psychical life begins with a confused manifold of sensationsdevoid not only of logical but even of psychological unityis one that becomes more inconceivable the more closely we consider it. An absolutely new presentation, having no sort of connection with former presentations till the subject has synthesized it with them, is a conception for which it would be hard to find a warrant either by direct observation, by inference from biology, or in considerations of an a priori kind. At any given moment we have a certain whole of presentations, a field of consciousness, psychologically one and continuous; at the next we have not an entirely new field but a paitial change within this field. Many who would allow this in the case of representations, i.e. where idea succeeds idea by the workings of association, would demur to it in the case of primary presentations or sensations. For, they would say, may not silence be broken by a clap of thunder, and have not the blind been made to see? To urge such objections is to miss the drift of our discussion, and to answer them may serve to make it clearer. Where silence can be broken there are representations of preceding sounds and in all probability even subjective presentations of sound as well; silence as experienced by one who has heard is very different from the silence of Condillacs statue before it had ever heard. The question is rather whether such a conception as that of Condillacs is possible; supposing a sound to he, qualitatively, entirely distinct from a smell, could a field of consciousness consisting of smells be followed at once by one in which sounds had part? And, as regards the blind coming to see, we must remember not only that the blind have eyes but that they are descended from ancestors who could see. What nascent presentations of sight are thus involved it would be hard to say; and the problem of heredity is one that we have for the present left aside.
The view here taken is (1) that at its first appearance in psychical life a new sensation or so-called elementary presentation is really a partial modification of some pre-existing presentation which thereby becomes as a whole more complex than it was before; and (2) that this complexity and differentiation of parts never become a plurality of discontinuous presentations, having a distinctness and individuality such as the atoms or elementary particles of the physical world are supposed to have. Beginners in psychology, and some who are not beginners, are apt to be led astray by expositions which set out from the sensations of the special senses, as if these furnished us with the type of an elementary presentation. The fact is we never experience a mere sensation of color, sound, touch, and the like; and what the young student mistakes for such is really a perception, a sensory presentation combined with various sensory and motor presentations and with representationsand having thus a definiteness and completeness only possible to complex presentations. ~iIoreover, if we could attend to a pure sensation of sound or color by itself, there is much to justify the suspicion that even this is complex and not simple, and owes to such complexity its clearly marked specific quality. In certain of OUI vaguest and most diffused organic sensations there is probably a much nearer approach to the character of the really primitive presentations.
In such sensations we can distinguish three variations, viz, variations of quality, of intensity, and of what Bain called Diffusion massiveness, or, as we shall say, extensity. Thif and last characteristic, which everybody knows whc Res*tlon. knows the difference between the ache of a hf bruise and the ache of a little one, between total anc partial immersion in a bath, is, as we shall see later on, ar essential element in our perception of space. But it is certainl)
not the whole of it, for in this experience of massive sensation alone it is impossible to find other elements which an analysis of spatial intuition unmistakably yields. Extensity and extension, then, are not to be confounded. Now, we find, even at our level of mental evolution, that an increase in the intensity of a sensation is apt to entail an increase in its extensity too. In like manner we observe a greater extent of movement in emotional expression when the intensity of the emotion increases. Even the higher region of imagination is no exception, as is shown by the whirl and confusion of ideas incident to delirium, and, indeed, to all strong excitement. But this diffusion or radiation, as it has been called, diminishes as we pass from the class of organic sensations to the sensations of the five senses, from movements expressive of feeling to movements definitely purposive, and from the tumult of ideas excited by passion to the steadier sequences determined by efforts to think. Increased differentiation seems, then, to be intimately connected with increased restriction. Probably there may be found certain initial differentiations which for psychology are ultimate facts that it cannot explain. As already said, the very beginning of experience is beyond us, though it is our businessworking from withinto push back our analysis as far as we can. But some differentiations being given, then it may be safely said that, in accordance with what we have called the principle of subjective selection (see 6), attention would be voluntarily concentrated upon certain of these and upon the voluntary movements specially connected with them. To such subjectively initiated modifications of the presentation-continuum, moreover, we may reasonably suppose restriction to be in large measure due. But increased restriction would render further differentiation of the given whole of presentation possible, and so the two processes might supplement each other. These processes have now proceeded so far that at the level of human consciousness we find it hard to form any tolerably clear conception of a field of consciousness in which an intense sensation, no matter what, mightso to saydiffuse over the whole. Colors, e.g. are with us so distinct from sounds thatexcept as regards the excitement of attention or the drain upon itthere is nothing in the intensest color to affect the simultaneous presentation of a sound. But at the beginning whatever we regard as the earliest differentiation of sound might have been incopresentable with the earliest differentiation of color, if sufficiently diffused, much as a field of sight all blue is now incopresentable with one all red. Or, if the stimuli appropriate to both were active together, the resulting sensation might have been not a blending of two qualities, as purple is said to be a blending of red and violet, but rather a neutral sensation without the specific qualities of either. Now, on the other hand, colors and sounds are necessarily so far localized that we are directly aware that the eye is concerned with the one and the ear with the other. This brings to our notice a fact so ridiculously obvious Incothat it has never been deemed worthy of mention, presentalthough it has undeniably important bearings ability.
the fact, viz, that certain sensations or movements are an absolute bar to the simultaneous presentation of other sensations or movements. We cannot see an orange as at once yellow and green, though we can feel it at once as both smooth and cool; we cannot open and close the same hand at the same moment, but we can open one hand while closing the other. Such incopresentability or contrariety is thus more than mere difference, and occurs only between presentations belonging to the same sense or to the same group of movements. Strictly speaking, it does not always occur even then; for red and yellow, hot and cold, are presentable together provided they have certain other differences which we shall meet again presently as differences of local sign.
12. In the preceding paragraphs we have had occasion tc distinguish between the presentation-continuum or whole field of consciousness, as we may for the present call it, I? t ~ and those several differentiations within this field ~ e which are ordinarily spoken of as presentations, and to whichnow that their true character as parts is clear we too may confine the term. But it will be well in the next place, before inquiring more closely into their characteristics, to consider for a moment that persistence of preceding modifications which the principle of progressive differentiation implies. This persistence is best spoken of as retentiveness. It is often confused with memory, though this is something much more complex and special; for in memory there is necessarily some contrast of past and present, whereas here there is simply the persistence of the old. But what is it that persists? On our theory we must answer, the continuum as differentiated, not the particular differentiation as an isolated unit. If psychologists have erred in regarding the presentations of one moment as merely a plurality of units, they have erred in like manner concerning the so-called residua of such presentations. As we see a certain color or a certain object again and again, we do not go on accumulating images or representations of it, which are somewhere crowded together like shades on the banks of the Styx; nor is such color, or whatever it be, the same at the hundredth time of presentation as at the first, as the hundredth impression of a seal on wax would be. There is no such lifeless fixitv in mind. The explanations of perception most in vogue are far too mechanical arid, so to say, atomistic; but we must fall back upon the unity and continuity of our presentationcontinuum if we are to get a better. Suppose that in the course of a few minutes we take half a dozen glances at a strange and curious flower. We have not as many complex presentations which we might symbolize as F,, F1 Fs. But rather, at first only the general outline is noted, next the disposition of petals, stamens, &c., then the attachment of the anthers, position of the ovary, arid so on; that is to say, symbolizing the whole flower as as being akin to feeling and so distinct from special presentations, should in any way confound the two. The mistake is perhaps accounted for by the fact that Bain, in common with the rest of his school, nowhere distinguishes between attention and the presentations that are attended to. If change of impression and being conscious or mentally alive are the same thing, it is then manifestly tautologous to say that one is the indispensable condition of the other. If they are not the same thing, then the succession of shocks or surprises cannot wholly determine the impressions which successively determine them.
But we have still to consider whether the impressions themselves are nothing but differences or contrasts. We do not know any one thing of itself but only the difference between it and another thing, said Bain. But it is plain we cannot speak of contrast or difference between two states or things as a contrast or difference, if the states or things are not themselves presented; the so-called contrast or difference would then be itself a single presentation, and its supposed relativity but an inference. Difference is not more necessary to the presentation of two objects than two objects to the presentation of difference. And, what is more, a difference between presentation. is not at all the same thing as the presentation of that difference. The former must precede the latter; the latter, which requires active comparison, need not follow. There is an ambiguity in the words know, knowledge, which Bain seems not to have considered: to know may mean either to perceive or apprehend, or it may mean to understand or comprehend.r Knowledge in the first sense is only what we shall have presently to discuss as the recognition or assimilation of an impression (see below, i8); knowledge in the latter sense is the result of intellectual comparison and is embodied in a proposition. Thus a blind man who cannot know light in the first sense can know about light in the second if he studies a treatise on optics. Now in simple perception or recognition we cannot with any exactness say that two things are perceived: straight is a thing, i.e. a definite object presented; not so not-straight, which answers to no definite object at all. Only when we rise to intellectual knowledge is it true to say: No one could understand the meaning of a straight line without being shown a line not straight, a bent or crooked line. 2 Two distinct presentations are necessary to the comparison that is here implied; but we must first recognize our objects before we can compare them, and this further step we may never take. We need, then, to distinguish between the comparativity of intellectual knowledge, which we must admitfor it rests at bottom on a purely analytical proposition and the differential theory of presentations, which, however plausible at first sight, must be wrong somewhere, since it commits us to absurdities. Thus, if we cannot have a presentation X but only the presentation of the difference between V and Z, it would seem that in like manner we cannot have the presentation of V or Z, nor therefore of their difference X, till we have had the presentation of A and B say, which differ by F, and of C and D, which we may suppose differ by Z.
The lurking error in this doctrine, that all presentations are but differences, may perhaps emerge if we examine more closely what may be meant by difference. We may speak of (a) differences in intensity between sensations supposed to be qualitatively identical, as e.g. between the taste of strong and weak tea; or of (b) differences in quality between presentations of the same sense, as e.g. between red and green; or of (c) differences between presentations of distinct senses, as e.g. between blue and bitter. Now as regards (a) and (b), it will be found that the difference between two intensities of the same quality, or between two qualities of the same order, may be itself a distinct pre1 Other languages give more prominence to this distinction; compare -yv&wo.i and s~vaL, noscere and scire, kennen and wissen, conna~ire and savoir. On this subject there are some acute remarks in a little-known book, the Exploratio philosophica, of Professor J. Grote. Hobbes, too, was well awake to this difference, as e.g. when he says, There are two kinds of knowledge; the one, sense or knowledge original and remembrance of the same; the other, science or knowledge of the truth of propositions, derived from understanding.
Bain, Logic, i. 3.
sentation, that is to say, in passing from a load of 10 lb to one of 20 tb, for example, or from the sound of a note to that of its octave, it is possible to experience the change continuously, and to estimate it as one might the distance between two places on the same road. But nothing of this kind holds of (c) ,1 In passing from the scent of a rose to the sound of a gong or a sting from a bee we have no such means of bringing the two into relationscarcely more than we might have of measuring the length of a journey made partly on the common earth and partly through the looking-glass. In. (c), then, we have only, a diversity of presentations, but not a special presentation of difference; and we only have more than this in (a) or (b) provided the selected presentations occur together. We say that we know the difference between a sound and a taste; but what we mean is simply that we know what it is to pass from attending to the one to attending to the other. It is simply an experience of change. Change, however, implies continuity, and there is continuity here in the movement of attention and the affective state consequent on that, but not directly in the qualities themselves.
c. If red follows green we may be aware of a greater difference than we could if red followed orange; and we should ordinarily call a 10 lb load heavy after one of 5 lb and light after one of 20 lb. Facts like these it is which make the differential theory of presentations plausible. On the strength of such facts Wundt has formulated a law of relativity, free, apparently, from the objections just urged against Bains doctrine. It runs thus: Our sensations afford no absolute but only a relative measure of external impressions. The intensities of stimuli, the pitch of tones, the qualities of light, we apprehend (empfinden) in general only according to their mutual relation, not according to any unalterably fixed unit given along with or before the impression itself. ~
But if true this law would make it quite immaterial what the impressions themselves were: provided the relation continued the same, the sensation would be the same too, just as the ratio of 2 to I is the same whether our unit be miles or millimetres. In the case of intensities, e.g. there is a minimum sensibile and a maximum sensibile. The existence of such extremes is alone sufficient to turn the flank of the thoroughgoing relativists; but there are instances enough of intermediate intensities that are directly recognized. A letter-sorter, for example, who identifies an ounce or two ounces with remarkable exactness identifies each for itself and not the first as half the second; of an ounce and a half or of three ounces he may have a comparatively vague idea. And so generally within certain limits of error, indirectly ascertained, we can identify intensities, each for itself, neither referring to a common standard nor to one that varies from time to timeto any intensity, that is to say, chat chances to be simultaneously presented; just as an enlisting sergeant will recognize a man fit for the Guards without a yard measure and whether the mans comrades are tall or short. As regards the qualities of sensations the outlook of the relativists is, if anything, worse. In what is called Meyers experiment (described under VIsIoN) what appears greenish on a red ground will appear of an orange tint on a ground of blue; but this contrast is only possible within certain very narrow limits. In fact, the phenomena of color-contrast, so far from proving, distinctly disprove that we apprehend the qualities of light only according to their mutual relation. In the case of tones it is very questionable whether such contrasts exist at all. Summing up on the particular doctrine of relativity of which Wundt is the most distinguished adherent, the truth seems to be that, in some cases where two presentations whose difference is itself presentable occur in close connection, this differenceas we indirectly learnexerts a certain bias on the assimilation or identification Common language seems to recognize some connection even here or we should not speak of harsh tastes and harsh sounds, or of dull sounds and dull colors and so forth. All this is, however, superadded to the sensation, probably on the ground of similarities in the accompanying organic sensations.
Physiologische Psychologie, 1st ed., p. 421; the doctrine reappears in later editions, but no equally general statement of it is given.
of one or both of the presentations. There is no unalterably fixed unit certainly, but, on the other hand, the mutual relations of impressions are not everything.
15. The term field of consciousness has occurred sundry times in the course of this exposition: it is one of several em.Subcon. ployed in describing what have been incidentally ~ciousness. referred to as degrees or grades of consciousness a difficult and perplexing topic that we must now endeavour further to elucidate. Sailors steering by night are said to look at the pole-star, the cynosure of every eye, but this does not prevent them from seeing the rest of the starry vault. At a conversazione we may listen to some one speaker while still hearing the murmur of other voices, and while listening we may also see the speaker and thereby identify him the better. What in these instances is looked at or listened to has been called the focus of consciousness, the rest of what is heard or seen or otherwise presented being called the field within which attention is thus concentrated or brought to a point. Of these objects beyond the focus we have then only a lower degree of consciousness, and the more distant they are from the centre of interest the fainter and obscurer they are supposed to be or to become. Now, it is obvious that the continuity here implied, if strictly taken, logically commits us to a field of consciousness extending with ever diminishing intensity ad indefinitum. But we have next to notice certain new features that have led psychologists to give to the term field of consciousness a more restricted meaning. A meteor flashing across the sky would certainly divert the helmsmans attention, and for the nonce he would look at that and not at the star in the Little Bears tail; a voice at our elbow accosting us, we should turn to the new speaker and listen to him, still hearing it may be, but no longer following, the discourse thus for us interrupted. In these cases a change in the field of consciousness brings about a non-voluntary change in the focus. But it only does so provided it is sufficiently intense and abrupt, and the more attention is already concentrated the less effective a given disturbance wifi be. A whole swarm of meteors might have streaked the sky unheeded while Ulysses, life in hand, steered between Scylla and Charybdis, just as all the din of the siege failed to distract Archimedes bent over his figures in the sand. On the other hand, we can voluntarily transfer the focus of consciousness to any object within the field, provided again this is sufficiently differentiated from the rest. But, more than that, we can not only of our own motion turn to lock at or to listen to what we have only seen or heard, but not noticed before; we can also look out or listen for something not as yet distinguishable, perhaps not as yet existing at all. And here ~.gain the concentration of attention may be maximal, as when a shipwrecked crew scan the horizon for a sail, or a beleaguered troop hearken for the oncoming of rescue. Now, such anticipated presentations as soon as they are clearly discernible have already a certain finite intensity, and so they are said to have passed over the threshold to use Herbarts now classic phraseand to have entered the field of consciousness. Afterwards any further increase in their intensity is certainly gradual; are we then to suppose that before this their intensity changed instantly from zero to a finite quantity and not rather that there was an ultraliminal or subliminal phrase where too it only changed continuously? The latter alternative constitutes the hypothesis of subconsciousness.
According to this hypothesis the total field with which we began is divided into two parts by what Fechner emphatically called the fact of the threshold, and the term field of consciousness is henceforth restricted to that part within which the focus of consciousness always lies, the outlying part being the region of subconsciousness. Difficulties now begin to be apparent. The intensity or vivacity of a presentation within the field of consciousness depends partly on what we may call its inherent or absolute intensity, partly on the attention that it receives; but this does not hold of presentations in subconsciousness. These sub-presentations, as we ought perhaps to call them, cannot be severally and selectively attended to, cannot be singled out as direct objects of experience. Many psychologists have accordingly maintained not only that they cannot with propriety be called presentations, but that they have no strictly psychical existence at all. This, however, is too extreme a view. If nothing of a presentational character can exist save in the field of consciousness as thus circumscribed by a definite boundary or threshold, a breach of continuity is implied such as we nowhere else experience: even the field of sight, from which the metaphor of a field of consciousness is derived, has no such definite margin. The threshold then is not comparable to a mathematical line on opposite sides of which there is an intensive discontinuity. This has been amply proved by the psychophysical investigations of Fechner and others. We listen, say, to a certain sound as it steadily diminishes; at length we cease to hear it. Again, we listen for this same sound as it steadily increases and presently just barely hear it. In general it is found that its intensity in the former case is less than it is in the latter, and there is also in both cases a certain margin of doubt between clear presence and clear absence; the presentation seems to flicker in and out, now there and now gone. Further, in comparing differences in sensationsof weight, brightness, temperature, &c.we may fail wholly to detect the difference between a and b, b and c, and yet the difference between a and c may be clearly perceived. We have thus to recognize the existence of a difference between sensations, although there is no so-called sensation of difference. But if this much continuity must be admitted we can hardly fail to admit more. If differences of presentation exist within the field of consciousness beyond the outermost verge of the threshold of difference, we cannot consistently deny the existence of any presentations at all beyond the threshold of consciousness. Since the field of consciousness varies greatly and often suddenly with the amount and distribution of attention, we must, as already said, either recognize such subconscious presentations or suppose that clearly differentiated presentations, presentations that is to say of finite intensity, pass abruptly into or out of existence with every such variation of the field.
The hypothesis of subconsciousness, then, is in the ipain nothing more than the application to the facts of presentation of the law of continuity, its introduction into psychology being due to Leibnitz, who first formulated that law. Half the difficulties in the way of its acceptance are due to our faulty terminology. With Leibnitz consciousness was not coextensive with all psychical life, but only with certain higher phases of ~t.i Of late, however, the tendency has been to make consciousness cover all stages of mental development, and all grades of presentation, so that a presentation of which there is no consciousness resolves itself into the manifest contradiction of an unpresented presentationa contradiction not involved in Leibnitzs unapperceived perception. But such is not the meaning intended when it is said, for example, that a soldier in battle is often unconscious of his wounds or a scholar unconscious at any one time of most of the knowledge hidden in the obscure recesses of his mind. There would be no point in saying a subject is not conscious of what is not presented at all; but to say that what is presented lacks the intensity requisite in the given distribution of attention to change that distribution appreciably is pertinent enough. Subconscious presentations may tell on conscious lifeas sunshine or mist tells on a landscape, or the underlying writing on a palimpsestalthough, lacking either the intensity or the individual distinctness requisite to make them definite features. Even if there were no facts to warrant this concept of an ultra-liminal presentation of impressions it might still claim an a priori justification.
The subconscious presentation of ideas as distinct from impressions calls, however, for some special consideration. As we can turn our attention to the sensory threshold j,ieas. and await the entrance of an expected impression, so we may await the emergence of a memory- image; and again the threshold turns out to be not a mathematically exact boundary but a region of varying depth.f What we are trying to recollect seems first to waver, now at the tip of our tongue and the next moment completely gone, then perhaps a moment afterwards rising into clear consciousness. Sometimes when asked, say, for the name of a certain college contemporary we reply: I cannot tell, but I should know the name if I heard it. We are aware that we could recognize, though we cannot reproduce. At other times we are confident that even recognition is no longer possible, and still if we met the man himself in the old scenes and heard his voice his name might yet recur. Nevertheless, it may be urged, it is surely incredible that all the incidents of a long lifetime and all the items of knowledge of a well-stored mind that may possibly recur the infinitely greater part of our spiritual treasures, as Hamilton saysare severally retained and continuously presented in the form and order in which they were originally experienced or acquired. This, however, is not implied. Images in contrast to impressions have always a certain generality. The same image may figure in very various connections, as may the same letter, for example, in many words, the same word in many sentences. We cannot measure the literature of a language by its vocabulary, nor may we equate the extent of our spiritual treasures when these are successively unfolded with the psychical apparatus, so to say, in which they are subconsciously involved.2 Take the first book of the Aeneid, which, as Macaulay would say, every schoolboy knows: as subconsciously involved, when the boy is not thinking of it, his knowledge is more comparable to a concordance than to the text itself, which nevertheless can be reproduced from it. In the text Aeneas occurs many times, in the concordance as a heading but once. But give him the cue Aeneas scopulum, and the boy reels off from the 280th line; or Praecs~-pue pius A enecis, and he starts with the 2 20th. But ask him for the 580th line; he is probably helpless, while a dunce with the book in his hand can read it off at once. Say instead Et pater A eneas, and the boy can straightway complete the line while the dunce is now helpless. So though its explicit revival is successional, occurs, so to say, in single file, a whole scheme in which many ideas are involved may rise towards the threshold together. When our schoolboy, for example, turns from classics to geography, the mention of Atlas, which might then have recalled a Titan, now leads him to think only of his book of maps. And there is a like sudden shifting of the substratum of our thoughts, when, taking up the morning paper, we glance first at the foreign telegrams, then at the money market, and then at the doings of our political friends. Yet more remote than all, obscurer but more pervasive, like the clouds of cherubs or imps vaguely limned in medieval pictures, are the indefinite constituents of our emotional atmosphere, gay motes that people the sunbeams of our cheerfulness and make all couleur de rose, or horrid shapes and sights unholy that overcast the outlook when we have the blues. And as attention relaxes, these advance into the foreground and become more or less palpable hopes or fears.
Herbart and Fechner describe subconscious presentations generally as existing below the threshold. On the other hand, we have spoken of subconscious sensations as existing beyond it. In view of the important differences between the two forms of presentations primary and secondary, this distinction of ultra-liminal and subliminal seems convenient and justifiable.
2 This doctrine of the involution and evolution of ideas we owe to Leibnitz. Herbart attempted in a very arbitrary and a priori fashion to develop it into a physical statics and dynamics with the resultusual to extreme viewsthat later psychologists neglected it altogether. There are now signs of a fresh reaction, and we shall continually come across evidence of the wide range and great importance of the doctrine as we proceed.
Because of the manifold forms into which they may evolve, subconscious images, while still involved, are sometimes called psychical or more definitely presentational dispositions. The word disposition means primarily an arrangement, as when we talk of the disposition of troops in a battle or of cards in a game; the disposita, that is to say, are always something actual. Which of several potential dispositions they will actually assume will depend upon circumstances, but at least, as Leibnitz long ago maintained, les puissances vritables ne sont jamais des simples possibilits. What is requisite to the realization of a given potentiality is sometimes a condition to be added, sometimes it is one to be taken away. A locomotive with the fire out has no tendency to move, but with steam up it is only hindered from moving by the closure of the throttle-valve or the friction of the brake. Now presentational dispositions we assume to be of the latter sort. They are processes or functions more or less inhibited, and the inhibition is determined by their relation. to other psychical processes or functions. The analysis and genesis of these presentational interactions will occupy us at length by and by; it may then be possible to explain the gradual involution of what was successively unfolded in explicit consciousness into those combinations which Herbart called apperception-masses, combinations devoid of the concrete hints of date and place which are essential to memory. Meanwhile the evidence adduceddecidedly cogent though admittedly indirecttogether with the difficulties besetting the extreme view that beyond or below the threshold of consciousness there is nothing presentational, seems clearly to justify the hypothesis of subconsciousness. At the same time the principle of continuity, everywhere of fundamental importance when we are dealing with reality, forbids the attempt arbitrarily to assign any limits to the subconscious.
Many psychologists have proposed to explain subconscious retention by habit. But it is obvious that habit itself implies retention and is practically synonymous with disposition; it must therefore presuppose disposita if we are to escape the absurdities of puissances ou facults nues, with which in this very connection Leibnitz twitted Locke. Yet, obvious as all this may be, it is frequently ignored even by those who are fond of exposing the pretended explanations of the faculty-psychologists and quoting Moliere to confute them. Thus we find J. S. Mill arguing: I have the power to walk across the room though I am sitting in my chair: but we should hardly call this power a latent act of walking.1 Nor should we call it a power at all if Mill had been paralysed, or if, instead of sitting in his chair, he had been lying in his cradle. What we want is the simplest psychological description of the situation after the power has been acquired by practice and is still retained. In such a case we can be conscious of the idea of the movement without the movement actually ensuing; yet only in such wise that the idea is more apt to pass over into action the intenser it is, and often actually passes over in spite of us. Surely there must be some functional activity answering to this conscious presentation; why may not a much less amount of it be conceived possible in subconscious presentation?
Sensation, Movement and the External World.
16. On the view of experience here maintained, we are bound to challenge the description of sensations ~ as due to physical stimuliwidely current though it isas one that is psychologically inappropriate. The ~ of following definition, given by Bain, may be taken as a type: By sensations, in the strict meaning, we understand the mental impressions, feelings or states of consciousness following on the action of external things on some part of the body, called on that account sensitive. i It is true, no doubt, that what the psychologist calls sensibility has as its invariable concomitant what physiologists call sensibility, For a detailed account of the various sensations and perceptions pertaining to the several senses the reader is referred to the articles VISION; HEARING; ToucH; TASTE; SMELL, &c.
Senses and Intellect, 4th ed. (1894), p. 101.
or what the more careful of them call irritability; and, true again, that this irritability is invariably preceded by a physical process called stimulation. But it may be urged, why not recognize a connection that actually obtains, since otherwise sensation must remain unexplained ? Well, in the first place, such psychophysical connection is not a psychological explanation: it cannot be turned directly to account in psychology, either analytic or genetic. Next the psychological fact called sensation always is, and at bottom always must be, independently ascertained; for the physiological neurosis or irritation has not necessarily a concomitant psychosis or sensation and, strictly dealt with, affords no hint of such. Finally, this inexplicability of sensation is a psychological fact of the utmost moment: it answers to what we call reality in the primary sense of the term. The psychophysicist, in setting out to explain sensation, hasunawares to himselfleft this fundamental reality behind him. For it belongs essentially to individual experience, and thisin assuming the physical standpointhe has of course transcended. Nevertheless the mistake of method that here reveals itself was perhaps inevitable, for the facts of anothers sense-organs and their physical excitants must have obtruded themselves on observation long before the reflective attitude was advanced enough to make strictly psychological analysis possible. The psychophyfical standpoint, that is to say, was attained before the purely psychological; and the consequent bias is only now in process of correction. A series of physical processes, first without and then within the organismethereal or aerial vibrations, neural and cerebral excitationswas the startingpoint. What comes first, immediately, and alone, in the individuals experience, and is there simply and positively real, was then misinterpreted as subjective modification, mental impression, species sensibiles, or the like. For from the days of Democritus to our own the same crude metaphor has prevailed without essential variation. And here the saying holds:
Vestigia niella retrorsum. Into the mans head the whole world goes, including the head itself. Such thoroughgoing introjection affords no ground for subsequent projection. Thus the endeavour to explain sensation overreaches itself: the external object or thing that was supposed to cause sensations and to be therefore distinct from them, was in the end wholly resolved into these and regarded as built out of them by association (Mill) or by apperceptive synthesis (Kant). But no mental chemistry, no initial alchemy of forms, can generate objective reality from feelings or sense-impressions as psychophysically def