Fig. 55.Fig. 56.
Fig. 55.Fig. 56.
Fig. 55.Fig. 56.
It is for this reason that men have no eyes but for those aspects of things which they have already been taught to discern. Any one of us can notice a phenomenon after it has once been pointed out, which not one in ten thousand could ever have discovered for himself. Even in poetry and the arts, some one has to come and tell us whataspects to single out, and what effects to admire, before our æsthetic nature can 'dilate' to its full extent and never 'with the wrong emotion.' In kindergarten-instruction one of the exercises is to make the children see how many features they can point out in such an object as a flower or a stuffed bird. They readily name the features they know already, such as leaves, tail, bill, feet. But they may look for hours without distinguishing nostrils, claws, scales, etc., until their attention is called to these details; thereafter, however, they see them every time. In short,the only things which we commonly see are those which we preperceive, and the only things which we preperceive are those which have been labelled for us, and the labels stamped into our mind. If we lost our stock of labels we should be intellectually lost in the midst of the world.
Educational Corollaries.—First, tostrengthen attention in childrenwho care nothing for the subject they are studying and let their wits go wool-gathering. The interest here must be 'derived' from something that the teacher associates with the task, a reward or a punishment if nothing less internal comes to mind. If a topic awakens no spontaneous attention it must borrow an interest from elsewhere. But the best interest is internal, and we must always try, in teaching a class, to knit our novelties by rational links on to things of which they already have preperceptions. The old and familiar is readily attended to by the mind and helps to hold in turn the new, forming, in Herbartian phraseology, an 'Apperceptionsmasse' for it. Of course the teacher's talent is best shown by knowing what 'Apperceptionsmasse' to use. Psychology can only lay down the general rule.
Second, take that mind-wandering which at a later age may trouble uswhilst reading or listening to a discourse. If attention be the reproduction of the sensation from within, the habit of reading not merely with the eye, and of listening not merely with the ear, but of articulating to one's self the words seen or heard, ought to deepen one'sattention to the latter. Experience shows that this is the case. I can keep my wandering mind a great deal more closely upon a conversation or a lecture if I actively re-echo to myself the words than if I simply hear them; and I find a number of my students who report benefit from voluntarily adopting a similar course.
Attention and Free Will.—I have spoken as if our attention were wholly determined by neural conditions. I believe that the array ofthingswe can attend to is so determined. No object cancatchour attention except by the neural machinery. But theamountof the attention which an object receives after it has caught our mental eye is another question. It often takes effort to keep the mind upon it. We feel that we can make more or less of the effort as we choose. If this feeling be not deceptive, if our effort be a spiritual force, and an indeterminate one, then of course it contributes coequally with the cerebral conditions to the result. Though itintroduceno new idea, it will deepen and prolong the stay in consciousness of innumerable ideas which else would fade more quickly away. The delay thus gained might not be more than a second in duration—but that second may becritical; for in the constant rising and falling of considerations in the mind, where two associated systems of them are nearly in equilibrium it is often a matter of but a second more or less of attention at the outset, whether one system shall gain force to occupy the field and develop itself, and exclude the other, or be excluded itself by the other. When developed, it may make us act; and that act may seal our doom. When we come to the chapter on the Will, we shall see that the whole drama of the voluntary life hinges on the amount of attention, slightly more or slightly less, which rival motor ideas may receive. But the whole feeling of reality, the whole sting and excitement of our voluntary life, depends on our sense that in it things arereally being decidedfrom one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling off of a chain that wasforged innumerable ages ago. This appearance, which makes life and history tingle with such a tragic zest,maynot be an illusion. Effort may be an original force and not a mere effect, and it may be indeterminate in amount. The last word of sober insight here is ignorance, for the forces engaged are too delicate ever to be measured in detail. Psychology, however, as a would-be 'Science,' must, like every other Science,postulatecomplete determinism in its facts, and abstract consequently from the effects of free will, even if such a force exist. I shall do so in this book like other psychologists; well knowing, however, that such a procedure, although a methodical device justified by the subjective need of arranging the facts in a simple and 'scientific' form, does not settle the ultimate truth of the free-will question one way or the other.
Different states of mind can mean the same.The function by which we mark off, discriminate, draw a line round, and identify a numerically distinct subject of discourse is calledconception. It is plain that whenever one and the same mental state thinks of many things, it must be the vehicle of many conceptions. If it has such a multiple conceptual function, it may be called a state of compound conception.
We may conceive realities supposed to be extra-mental, as steam-engine; fictions, as mermaid; or mereentia rationis, like difference or nonentity. But whatever we do conceive, our conception is of that and nothing else—nothing else, that is,insteadof that, though it may be of much elsein additionto that. Each act of conception results from our attention's having singled out some one part of the mass of matter-for-thought which the world presents, and from our holding fast to it, without confusion. Confusion occurs when we do not know whether a certain object proposed to us isthe samewith one of our meanings or not; so that the conceptual function requires, to be complete, that the thought should not only say 'I mean this,' but also say 'I don't mean that.'
Each conception thus eternally remains what it is, and never can become another. The mind may change its states, and its meanings, at different times; may drop one conception and take up another: but the dropped conception itself can in no intelligible sense be said tochange intoits successor. The paper, a moment ago white, I may now see to be scorched black. But myconception'white'does not change into myconception'black.' On the contrary, it stays alongside of the objective blackness, as a different meaning in my mind, and by so doing lets me judge the blackness as the paper's change. Unless it stayed, I should simply say 'blackness' and know no more. Thus, amid the flux of opinions and of physical things, the world of conceptions, or things intended to be thought about, stands stiff and immutable, like Plato's Realm of Ideas.
Some conceptions are of things, some of events, some of qualities. Any fact, be it thing, event, or quality, may be conceived sufficiently for purposes of identification, if only it be singled out and marked so as to separate it from other things. Simply calling it 'this' or 'that' will suffice. To speak in technical language, a subject may be conceived by itsdenotation, with noconnotation, or a very minimum of connotation, attached. The essential point is that it should be re-identified by us as that which the talk is about; and no full representation of it is necessary for this, even when it is a fully representable thing.
In this sense, creatures extremely low in the intellectual scale may have conception. All that is required is that they should recognize the same experience again. A polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of 'Hollo! thingumbob again!' ever flitted through its mind. This sense of sameness is the very keel and backbone of our consciousness. The same matters can be thought of in different states of mind, and some of these states can know that they mean the same matters which the other states meant. In other words,the mind can always intend, and know when it intends, to think the Same.
Conceptions of Abstract, of Universal, and of Problematic Objects.—The sense of our meaning is an entirely peculiar element of the thought. It is one of those evanescent and 'transitive' facts of mind which introspection cannot turn round upon, and isolate and hold up for examination, as an entomologist passes round an insect on a pin. In the(somewhat clumsy) terminology I have used, it has to do with the 'fringe' of the object, and is a 'feeling of tendency,' whose neural counterpart is undoubtedly a lot of dawning and dying processes too faint and complex to be traced. (Seep. 169.) The geometer, with his one definite figure before him, knows perfectly that his thoughts apply to countless other figures as well, and that although heseeslines of a certain special bigness, direction, color, etc., hemeansnot one of these details. When I use the wordmanin two different sentences, I may have both times exactly the same sound upon my lips and the same picture in my mental eye, but I may mean, and at the very moment of uttering the word and imagining the picture know that I mean, two entirely different things. Thus when I say: "What a wonderful man Jones is!" I am perfectly aware that I mean by man to exclude Napoleon Bonaparte or Smith. But when I say: "What a wonderful thing Man is!" I am equally well aware that I mean no such exclusion. This added consciousness is an absolutely positive sort of feeling, transforming what would otherwise be mere noise or vision into somethingunderstood; and determining the sequel of my thinking, the later words and images, in a perfectly definite way.
No matter how definite and concrete the habitual imagery of a given mind may be, the things represented appear always surrounded by their fringe of relations, and this is as integral a part of the mind's object as the things themselves are. We come, by steps with which everyone is sufficiently familiar, to think of whole classes of things as well as of single specimens; and to think of the special qualities or attributes of things as well as of the complete things—in other words, we come to haveuniversalsandabstracts, as the logicians call them, for our objects. We also come to think of objects which are onlyproblematic, or not yet definitely representable, as well as of objects imagined in all their details. An object which is problematic is defined by its relations only. We think of a thingaboutwhich certain facts must obtain. But we do not yet know how the thing will look when realized—that is, although conceiving it we cannotimagineit. We have in the relations, however, enough to individualize our topic and distinguish it from all the other meanings of our mind. Thus, for example, we may conceive of a perpetual-motion machine. Such a machine is aquæsitumof a perfectly definite kind,—we can always tell whether the actual machines offered us do or do not agree with what we mean by it. The natural possibility or impossibility of the thing never touches the question of its conceivability in this problematic way. 'Round-square,' again, or 'black-white-thing,' are absolutely definite conceptions; it is a mere accident, as far as conception goes, that they happen to stand for things which nature never shows us, and of which we consequently can make no picture.
The nominalists and conceptualists carry on a great quarrel over the question whether "the mind can frame abstract or universal ideas." Ideas, it should be said, of abstract or universal objects. But truly in comparison with the wonderful fact that our thoughts, however different otherwise, can still be ofthe same, the question whether that same be a single thing, a whole class of things, an abstract quality or something unimaginable, is an insignificant matter of detail. Our meanings are of singulars, particulars, indefinites, problematics, and universals, mixed together in every way. A singular individual is as muchconceivedwhen he is isolated and identified away from the rest of the world in my mind, as is the most rarefied and universally applicable quality he may possess—being, for example, when treated in the same way. From every point of view, the overwhelming and portentous character ascribed to universal conceptions is surprising. Why, from Socrates downwards, philosophers should have vied with each other in scorn of the knowledge of the particular, and in adoration of that of the general, is hard to understand, seeing that the more adorable knowledge ought to bethat of the more adorable things, and that thethingsof worth are all concretes and singulars. The only value of universal characters is that they help us, by reasoning, to know new truths about individual things. The restriction of one's meaning, moreover, to an individual thing, probably requires even more complicated brain-processes than its extension to all the instances of a kind; and the mere mystery, as such, of the knowledge, is equally great, whether generals or singulars be the things known. In sum, therefore, the traditional Universal-worship can only be called a bit of perverse sentimentalism, a philosophic 'idol of the cave.'
Nothing can be conceived as the same without being conceived in a novel state of mind.It seems hardly necessary to add this, after what was said onp. 156. Thus, my arm-chair is one of the things of which I have a conception; I knew it yesterday and recognized it when I looked at it. But if I think of it to-day as the same arm-chair which I looked at yesterday, it is obvious that the very conception of itasthe same is an additional complication to the thought, whose inward constitution must alter in consequence. In short, it is logically impossible that the same thing should beknown as the sameby two successive copies of the same thought. As a matter of fact, the thoughts by which we know that we mean the same thing are apt to be very different indeed from each other. We think the thing now substantively, now transitively; now in a direct image, now in one symbol, and now in another symbol; but nevertheless we somehow alwaysdoknow which of all possible subjects we have in mind. Introspective psychology must here throw up the sponge; the fluctuations of subjective life are too exquisite to be described by its coarse terms. It must confine itself to bearing witness to the fact that all sorts of different subjective states do form the vehicle by which the same is known; and it must contradict the opposite view.
Discrimination versus Association.—Onp. 15I spoke of the baby's first object being the germ out of which his whole later universe develops by the addition of new parts from without and the discrimination of others within. Experience, in other words, is trainedbothby association and dissociation, and psychology must be writbothin synthetic and in analytic terms. Our original sensible totals are, on the one hand, subdivided by discriminative attention, and, on the other, united with other totals,—either through the agency of our own movements, carrying our senses from one part of space to another, or because new objects come successively and replace those by which we were at first impressed. The 'simple impression' of Hume, the 'simple idea' of Locke are abstractions, never realized in experience. Life, from the very first, presents us with concreted objects, vaguely continuous with the rest of the world which envelops them in space and time, and potentially divisible into inward elements and parts. These objects we break asunder and reunite. We must do both for our knowledge of them to grow; and it is hard to say, on the whole, which we do most. But since the elements with which the traditional associationism performs its constructions—'simple sensations,' namely—are all products of discrimination carried to a high pitch, it seems as if we ought to discuss the subject of analytic attention and discrimination first.
Discrimination defined.—The noticing of anypartwhatever of our object is an act of discrimination. Already onp. 218I have described the manner in which we often spontaneouslylapse into the undiscriminating state, even with regard to objects which we have already learned to distinguish. Such anæsthetics as chloroform, nitrous oxide, etc., sometimes bring about transient lapses even more total, in which numerical discrimination especially seems gone; for one sees light and hears sound, but whether one or many lights and sounds is quite impossible to tell. Where the parts of an object have already been discerned, and each made the object of a special discriminative act, we can with difficulty feel the object again in its pristine unity; and so prominent may our consciousness of its composition be, that we may hardly believe that it ever could have appeared undivided. But this is an erroneous view, the undeniable fact being thatany number of impressions, from any number of sensory sources, falling simultaneously on a mindWHICH HAS NOT YET EXPERIENCED THEM SEPARATELY,will yield a single undivided object to that mind. The law is that all things fuse thatcanfuse, and that nothing separates except what must. What makes impressions separate is what we have to study in this chapter.
Conditions which favor Discrimination.—I will treat successively of differences:
(1) So far as they are directlyfelt;
(2) So far as they areinferred;
(3) So far as they aresingled out in compounds.
Differences directly felt.—The first condition is thatthe things to be discriminated mustBEdifferent, either in time, place, or quality. In other words, and physiologically speaking, they must awaken neural processes which aredistinct. But this, as we have just seen, though an indispensable condition, is not a sufficient condition. To begin with, the several neural processes must be distinctenough. No one can help singling out a black stripe on a white ground, or feeling the contrast between a bass note and a high one sounded immediately after it. Discrimination is hereinvoluntary. But where the objective difference isless, discrimination may require considerable effort of attention to be performed at all.
Secondly,the sensations excited by the differing objects must not fall simultaneously, but must fall in immediateSUCCESSIONupon the same organ. It is easier to compare successive than simultaneous sounds, easier to compare two weights or two temperatures by testing one after the other with the same hand, than by using both hands and comparing both at once. Similarly it is easier to discriminate shades of light or color by moving the eye from one to the other, so that they successively stimulate the same retinal tract. In testing the local discrimination of the skin, by applying compass-points, it is found that they are felt to touch different spots much more readily when set down one after the other than when both are applied at once. In the latter case they may be two or three inches apart on the back, thighs, etc., and still feel as if they were set down in one spot. Finally, in the case of smell and taste it is well-nigh impossible to compare simultaneous impressions at all. The reason why successive impression so much favors the result seems to be that there is a realsensation of difference, aroused by the shock of transition from one perception to another which is unlike the first. This sensation of difference has its own peculiar quality, no matter what the terms may be, between which it obtains. It is, in short, one of those transitive feelings, or feelings of relation, of which I treated in a former place (p. 161); and, when once aroused, its object lingers in the memory along with the substantive terms which precede and follow, and enables ourjudgments of comparisonto be made.
Where the difference between the successive sensations is but slight, the transition between them must be made as immediate as possible, and both must be comparedin memory, in order to get the best results. One cannot judge accurately of the difference between two similar wines whilst the second is still in one's mouth. So of sounds, warmths, etc.—we must get the dying phases of both sensationsof the pair we are comparing. Where, however, the difference is strong, this condition is immaterial, and we can then compare a sensation actually felt with another carried in memory only. The longer the interval of time between the sensations, the more uncertain is their discrimination.
The difference, thus immediately felt between two terms, is independent of our ability to say anythingabouteither of the terms by itself. I can feel two distinct spots to be touched on my skin, yet not know which is above and which below. I can observe two neighboring musical tones to differ, and still not know which of the two is the higher in pitch. Similarly I may discriminate two neighboring tints, whilst remaining uncertain which is the bluer or the yellower, orhoweither differs from its mate.
I said that in the immediate succession ofmuponnthe shock of their difference isfelt. It is feltrepeatedlywhen we go back and forth frommton; and we make a point of getting it thus repeatedly (by alternating our attention at least) whenever the shock is so slight as to be with difficulty perceived. But in addition to being felt at the brief instant of transition, the difference also feels as if incorporated and taken up into the second term, which feels 'different-from-the-first' even while it lasts. It is obvious that the 'second term' of the mind in this case is not baldn, but a very complex object; and that the sequence is not simply first 'm,' then 'difference,' then 'n'; but first 'm,' then 'difference,' then 'n-different-from-m.' The first and third states of mind are substantive, the second transitive. As our brains and minds are actually made, it is impossible to get certainm's andn's in immediate sequence and to keep thempure. If kept pure, it would mean that they remained uncompared. With us, inevitably, by a mechanism which we as yet fail to understand, the shock of difference is felt between them, and the second object is notnpure, butn-as-different-from-m. The pure idea ofnisnever in the mind at allwhenmhas gone before.
Differences inferred.—With such direct perceptions of difference as this, we must not confound those entirely unlike cases in which weinferthat two things must differ because we know enoughabouteach of them taken by itself to warrant our classing them under distinct heads. It often happens, when the interval is long between two experiences, that our judgments are guided, not so much by a positive image or copy of the earlier one, as by our recollection of certain facts about it. Thus I know that the sunshine to-day is less bright than on a certain day last week, because I then said it was quite dazzling, a remark I should not now care to make. Or I know myself to feel livelier now than I did last summer, because I can now psychologize, and then I could not. We are constantly comparing feelings with whose quality our imagination has no sort ofacquaintanceat the time—pleasures, or pains, for example. It is notoriously hard to conjure up in imagination a lively image of either of these classes of feeling. The associationists may prate of an idea of pleasure being a pleasant idea, of an idea of pain being a painful one, but the unsophisticated sense of mankind is against them, agreeing with Homer that the memory of griefs when past may be a joy, and with Dante that there is no greater sorrow than, in misery, to recollect one's happier time.
The 'Singling out' of Elements in a Compound.—It is safe to lay it down as a fundamental principle thatany total impression made on the mind must be unanalyzable so long as its elements have never been experienced apart or in other combinations elsewhere. The components of an absolutely changeless group of not-elsewhere-occurring attributes could never be discriminated. If all cold things were wet, and all wet things cold; if all hard things pricked our skin, and no other things did so: is it likely that we should discriminate between coldness and wetness, and hardness and pungency, respectively? If all liquids were transparent and no non-liquid weretransparent, it would be long before we had separate names for liquidity and transparency. If heat were a function of position above the earth's surface, so that the higher a thing was the hotter it became, one word would serve for hot and high. We have, in fact, a number of sensations whose concomitants are invariably the same, and we find it, accordingly, impossible to analyze them out from the totals in which they are found. The contraction of the diaphragm and the expansion of the lungs, the shortening of certain muscles and the rotation of certain joints, are examples. We learn that thecausesof such groups of feelings are multiple, and therefore we frame theories about the composition of the feelings themselves, by 'fusion,' 'integration,' 'synthesis,' or what not. But by direct introspection no analysis of the feelings is ever made. A conspicuous case will come to view when we treat of the emotions. Every emotion has its 'expression,' of quick breathing, palpitating heart, flushed face, or the like. The expression gives rise to bodily feelings; and the emotion is thus necessarily and invariably accompanied by these bodily feelings. The consequence is that it is impossible to apprehend it as a spiritual state by itself, or to analyze it away from the lower feelings in question. It is in fact impossible to prove that it exists as a distinct psychic fact. The present writer strongly doubts that it does so exist.
In general, then, if an object affects us simultaneously in a number of ways,abcd, we get a peculiar integral impression, which thereafter characterizes to our mind the individuality of that object, and becomes the sign of its presence; and which is only resolved intoa,b,c, andd, respectively, by the aid of farther experiences. These we now may turn to consider.
If any single quality or constituent, a, of such an object have previously been known by us isolatedly, or have in any other manner already become an object of separate acquaintance on our part, so that we have an image of it,distinct or vague, in our mind, disconnected withbcd, then that constituent a may be analyzed out from the total impression. Analysis of a thing means separate attention to each of its parts. InChapter XIIIwe saw that one condition of attending to a thing was the formation from within of a separate image of that thing, which should, as it were, go out to meet the impression received. Attention being the condition of analysis, and separate imagination being the condition of attention, it follows also that separate imagination is the condition of analysis.Only such elements as we are acquainted with, and can imagine separately, can be discriminated within a total sense-impression.The image seems to welcome its own mate from out of the compound, and to separate it from the other constituents; and thus the compound becomes broken for our consciousness into parts.
All the facts cited inChapter XIIIto prove that attention involves inward reproduction prove that discrimination involves it as well. In looking for any object in a room, for a book in a library, for example, we detect it the more readily if, in addition to merely knowing its name, etc., we carry in our mind a distinct image of its appearance. The assafœdita in 'Worcestershire sauce' is not obvious to anyone who has not tasted assafœtidaper se. In a 'cold' color an artist would never be able to analyze out the pervasive presence ofblue, unless he had previously made acquaintance with the color blue by itself. All the colors we actually experience are mixtures. Even the purest primaries always come to us with some white. Absolutely pure red or green or violet is never experienced, and so can never be discerned in the so-called primaries with which we have to deal: the latter consequently pass for pure.—The reader will remember how an overtone can only be attended to in the midst of its consorts in the voice of a musical instrument, by sounding it previously alone. The imagination, being then full of it, hears the like of it in the compound tone.
Non-isolable elements may be discriminated, providedtheir concomitants change.Very few elements of reality are experienced by us in absolute isolation. The most that usually happens to a constituentaof a compound phenomenonabcdis that itsstrengthrelatively tobcdvaries from a maximum to a minimum; or that it appears linked withotherqualities, in other compounds, asaefgorahik. Either of these vicissitudes in the mode of our experiencingamay, under favorable circumstances, lead us to feel the difference between it and its concomitants, and to single it out—not absolutely, it is true, but approximately—and so to analyze the compound of which it is a part. The act of singling out is then calledabstraction, and the element disengaged is anabstract.
Fluctuation in a quality's intensity is a less efficient aid to our abstracting of it than variety in the combinations in which it appears.What is associated now with one thing and now with another tends to become dissociated from either, and to grow into an object of abstract contemplation by the mind.One might call this thelaw of dissociation by varying concomitants. The practical result of this law is that a mind which has once dissociated and abstracted a character by its means can analyze it out of a total whenever it meets with it again.
Dr. Martineau gives a good example of the law: "When a red ivory ball, seen for the first time, has been withdrawn, it will leave a mental representation of itself, in which all that it simultaneously gave us will indistinguishably coexist. Let a white ball succeed to it; now, and not before, will an attribute detach itself, and thecolor, by force of contrast, be shaken out into the foreground. Let the white ball be replaced by an egg, and this new difference will bring theforminto notice from its previous slumber, and thus that which began by being simply an object cut out from the surrounding scene becomes for us first aredobject, then ared roundobject, and so on."
Whythe repetition of the character in combination with different wholes will cause it thus to break up its adhesion with any one of them, and roll out, as it were, alone uponthe table of consciousness, is a little of a mystery, but one which need not be considered here.
Practice improves Discrimination.—Any personal or practical interest in the results to be obtained by distinguishing, makes one's wits amazingly sharp to detect differences. And long training and practice in distinguishing has the same effect as personal interest. Both of these agencies give to small amounts of objective difference the same effectiveness upon the mind that, under other circumstances, only large ones would have.
That 'practice makes perfect' is notorious in the field of motor accomplishments. But motor accomplishments depend in part on sensory discrimination. Billiard-playing, rifle-shooting, tight-rope-dancing demand the most delicate appreciation of minute disparities of sensation, as well as the power to make accurately graduated muscular response thereto. In the purely sensorial field we have the well-known virtuosity displayed by the professional buyers and testers of various kinds of goods. One man will distinguish by taste between the upper and the lower half of a bottle of old Madeira. Another will recognize, by feeling the flour in a barrel, whether the wheat was grown in Iowa or Tennessee. The blind deaf-mute, Laura Bridgman, so improved her touch as to recognize, after a year's interval, the hand of a person who once had shaken hers; and her sister in misfortune, Julia Brace, is said to have been employed in the Hartford Asylum to sort the linen of its multitudinous inmates, after it came from the wash, by her wonderfully educated sense of smell.
The fact is so familiar that few, if any, psychologists have even recognized it as needing explanation. They have seemed to think that practice must, in the nature of things, improve the delicacy of discernment, and have let the matter rest. At most they have said, "Attention accounts for it; we attend more to habitual things, and what we attend to we perceive more minutely." This answer, though true, is too general; but we can say nothing more about the matter here.
The Order of our Ideas.—After discrimination, association! It is obvious that all advance in knowledge must consist of both operations; for in the course of our education, objects at first appearing as wholes are analyzed into parts, and objects appearing separately are brought together and appear as new compound wholes to the mind. Analysis and synthesis are thus the incessantly alternating mental activities, a stroke of the one preparing the way for a stroke of the other, much as, in walking, a man's two legs are alternately brought into use, both being indispensable for any orderly advance.
The manner in which trains of imagery and consideration follow each other through our thinking, the restless flight of one idea before the next, the transitions our minds make between things wide as the poles asunder, transitions which at first sight startle us by their abruptness, but which, when scrutinized closely, often reveal intermediating links of perfect naturalness and propriety—all this magical, imponderable streaming has from time immemorial excited the admiration of all whose attention happened to be caught by its omnipresent mystery. And it has furthermore challenged the race of philosophers to banish something of the mystery by formulating the process in simpler terms. The problem which the philosophers have set themselves is that of ascertaining, between the thoughts which thus appear to sprout one out of the other,principles of connectionwhereby their peculiar succession or coexistence may be explained.
But immediately an ambiguity arises: which sort ofconnection is meant? connectionthought-of, or connectionbetween thoughts? These are two entirely different things, and only in the case of one of them is there any hope of finding 'principles.' The jungle of connectionsthought ofcan never be formulated simply. Every conceivable connection may be thought of—of coexistence, succession, resemblance, contrast, contradiction, cause and effect, means and end, genus and species, part and whole, substance and property, early and late, large and small, landlord and tenant, master and servant,—Heaven knows what, for the list is literally inexhaustible. The only simplification which could possibly be aimed at would be the reduction of the relations to a small number oftypes, like those which some authors call the 'categories' of the understanding. According as we followed one category or another we should sweep, from any object with our thought, in this way or in that, to others. Werethisthe sort of connection sought between one moment of our thinking and another, our chapter might end here. For the only summary description of these categories is that they are all thinkable relations, and that the mind proceeds from one object to another by some intelligible path.
Is it determined by any laws?But as a matter of fact, What determines the particular path? Why do we at a given time and place proceed to think ofbif we have just thought ofa, and at another time and place why do we think, not ofb, but ofc? Why do we spend years straining after a certain scientific or practical problem, but all in vain—our thought unable to evoke the solution we desire? And why, some day, walking in the street with our attention miles away from that quest, does the answer saunter into our minds as carelessly as if it had never been called for—suggested, possibly, by the flowers on the bonnet of the lady in front of us, or possibly by nothing that we can discover?
The truth must be admitted that thought works under strange conditions. Pure 'reason' is only one out of athousand possibilities in the thinking of each of us. Who can count all the silly fancies, the grotesque suppositions, the utterly irrelevant reflections he makes in the course of a day? Who can swear that his prejudices and irrational opinions constitute a less bulky part of his mental furniture than his clarified beliefs? And yet, themode of genesisof the worthy and the worthless in our thinking seems the same.
The laws are cerebral laws.There seem to be mechanical conditions on which thought depends, and which, to say the least,determine the order in which, the objects for her comparisons and selections are presented. It is a suggestive fact that Locke, and many more recent Continental psychologists, have found themselves obliged to invoke a mechanical process to account for theaberrationsof thought, the obstructive prepossessions, the frustrations of reason. This they found in the law of habit, or what we now call association by contiguity. But it never occurred to these writers that a process which could go the length of actually producing some ideas and sequences in the mind might safely be trusted to produce others too; and that those habitual associations which further thought may also come from the same mechanical source as those which hinder it. Hartley accordingly suggested habit as a sufficient explanation of the sequence of our thoughts, and in so doing planted himself squarely upon the properlycausalaspect of the problem, and sought to treat both rational and irrational associations from a single point of view. How does a man come, after having the thought of A, to have the thought of B the next moment? or how does he come to think A and B always together? These were the phenomena which Hartley undertook to explain by cerebral physiology. I believe that he was, in essential respects, on the right track, and I propose simply to revise his conclusions by the aid of distinctions which he did not make.
Objects are associated, not ideas.We shall avoid confusionif we consistently speak as ifassociation, so far as the word stands for aneffect, were betweenTHINGS THOUGHT OF—as if it wereTHINGS,not ideas, which are associated in the mind. We shall talk of the association ofobjects, not of the association ofideas. And so far as association stands for acause, it is betweenprocesses in the brain—it is these which, by being associated in certain ways, determine what successive objects shall be thought.
The Elementary Principle.—I shall now try to show that there is no otherelementarycausal law of association than the law of neural habit. All thematerialsof our thought are due to the way in which one elementary process of the cerebral hemispheres tends to excite whatever other elementary process it may have excited at any former time. The number of elementary processes at work, however, and the nature of those which at any time are fully effective in rousing the others, determine the character of the total brain-action, and, as a consequence of this, they determine the object thought of at the time. According as this resultant object is one thing or another, we call it a product of association by contiguity or of association by similarity, or contrast, or whatever other sorts we may have recognized as ultimate. Itsproduction, however, is, in each one of these cases, to be explained by a merely quantitative variation in the elementary brain-processes momentarily at work under the law of habit.
My thesis, stated thus briefly, will soon become more clear; and at the same time certain disturbing factors, which coöperate with the law of neural habit, will come to view.
Let us then assume as the basis of all our subsequent reasoning this law:When two elementary brain-processes have been active together or in immediate succession, one of them, on re-occurring, tends to propagate its excitement into the other.
But, as a matter of fact, every elementary process has unavoidably found itself at different times excited in conjunctionwithmanyother processes. Which of these others it shall awaken now becomes a problem. Shallborcbe aroused next by the presenta? To answer this, we must make a further postulate, based on the fact oftensionin nerve-tissue, and on the fact of summation of excitements, each incomplete or latent in itself, into an open resultant (seep. 128). The processb, rather thanc, will awake, if in addition to the vibrating tractasome other tractdis in a state of sub-excitement, and formerly was excited withbalone and not witha. In short, we may say:
The amount of activity at any given point in the brain-cortex is the sum of the tendencies of all other points to discharge into it, such tendencies being proportionate (1) to the number of times the excitement of each other point may have accompanied that of the point in question; (2) to the intensity of such excitements; and (3) to the absence of any rival point functionally disconnected with the first point, into which the discharges might be diverted.
Expressing the fundamental law in this most complicated way leads to the greatest ultimate simplification. Let us, for the present, only treat of spontaneous trains of thought and ideation, such as occur in revery or musing. The case of voluntary thinking toward a certain end shall come up later.
Spontaneous Trains of Thought.—Take, to fix our ideas, the two verses from 'Locksley Hall':
"I, the heir of allthe agesin the foremost files of time,"
"I, the heir of allthe agesin the foremost files of time,"
"I, the heir of allthe agesin the foremost files of time,"
and—
"For I doubt not throughthe agesone increasing purpose runs."
"For I doubt not throughthe agesone increasing purpose runs."
"For I doubt not throughthe agesone increasing purpose runs."
Why is it that when we recite from memory one of these lines, and get as far asthe ages, that portion of theotherline which follows and, so to speak, sprouts out ofthe agesdoes not also sprout out of our memory and confuse the sense of our words? Simply because the word that followsthe ageshas its brain-process awakened not simply bythe brain-process ofthe agesalone, but by itplusthe brain-processes of all the words precedingthe ages. The wordagesat its moment of strongest activity would,per se, indifferently discharge into either 'in' or 'one.' So would the previous words (whose tension is momentarily much less strong than that ofages) each of them indifferently discharge into either of a large number of other words with which they have been at different times combined. But when the processes of 'I, the heir of all the ages,' simultaneously vibrate in the brain, the last one of them in a maximal, the others in a fading, phase of excitement, then the strongest line of discharge will be that which theyall aliketend to take. 'In' and not 'one' or any other word will be the next to awaken, for its brain-process has previously vibrated in unison not only with that ofages, but with that of all those other words whose activity is dying away. It is a good case of the effectiveness over thought of what we called onp. 168a 'fringe.'
But if some one of these preceding words—'heir,' for example—had an intensely strong association with some brain-tracts entirely disjoined in experience from the poem of 'Locksley Hall'—if the reciter, for instance, were tremulously awaiting the opening of a will which might make him a millionaire—it is probable that the path of discharge through the words of the poem would be suddenly interrupted at the word 'heir.' Hisemotional interest in that wordwould be such that itsown special associations would prevailover the combined ones of the other words. He would, as we say, be abruptly reminded of his personal situation, and the poem would lapse altogether from his thoughts.
The writer of these pages has every year to learn the names of a large number of students who sit in alphabetical order in a lecture-room. He finally learns to call them by name, as they sit in their accustomed places. On meeting one in the street, however, early in the year, the face hardly ever recalls the name, but it may recall the place ofits owner in the lecture-room, his neighbors' faces, and consequently his general alphabetical position: and then, usually as the common associate of all these combined data, the student's name surges up in his mind.
A father wishes to show to some guests the progress of his rather dull child in kindergarten-instruction. Holding the knife upright on the table, he says, "What do you call that, my boy?" "I calls it aknife, I does," is the sturdy reply, from which the child cannot be induced to swerve by any alteration in the form of question, until the father, recollecting that in the kindergarten a pencil was used and not a knife, draws a long one from his pocket, holds it in the same way, and then gets the wished-for answer, "I calls itvertical." All the concomitants of the kindergarten experience had to recombine their effect before the word 'vertical' could be reawakened.
Total Recall.—The ideal working of the law of compound association, as Prof. Bain calls it, were it unmodified by any extraneous influence, would be such as to keep the mind in a perpetual treadmill of concrete reminiscences from which no detail could be omitted. Suppose, for example, we begin by thinking of a certain dinner-party. The only thing which all the components of the dinner-party could combine to recall would be the first concrete occurrence which ensued upon it. All the details of this occurrence could in turn only combine to awaken the next following occurrence, and so on. Ifa,b,c,d,e, for instance, be the elementary nerve-tracts excited by the last act of the dinner-party, call this actA, andl,m,n,o,pbe those of walking home through the frosty night, which we may callB, then the thought ofAmust awaken that ofB, becausea,b,c,d,ewill each and all discharge intolthrough the paths by which their original discharge took place. Similarly they will discharge intom,n,o, andp; and these latter tracts will also each reinforce the other's action because, in the experienceB, they have already vibrated in unison. The lines in Fig. 57 symbolize thesummation of discharges into each of the components ofB, and the consequent strength of the combination of influences by whichBin its totality is awakened.