Chapter 14

[254]Hering would partly solve in this way the mystery of Figs. 60, 61, and 67. No doubt the explanation partly applies; but the strange cessation of the illusion when we fix the gaze fails to be accounted for thereby.

[255]Helmholtz has sought (Physiol. Optik, p. 715) to explain the divergence of the apparent vertical meridians of the two retinæ, by the manner in which an identical line drawn on the ground before us in the median plane will throw its images on the two eyes respectively. The matter is too technical for description here; the unlearned reader may be referred for it to J. Le Conte's Sight in the Internat. Scient. Series, p. 198 ff. But, for the benefit of those to whomverbum sat, I cannot help saying that it seems to me that theexactnessof the relation of the two meridians—whether divergent or not, for their divergence differs in individuals and often in one individual at diverse times—precludes its being due to the mere habitual falling-off of the image of one objective line on both. Le Conte, e.g., measures their position down to a sixth of a degree, others to tenths. This indicates an organic identity in the sensations of the two retinæ, which the experience of median perspective horizontals may roughly have agreed with, but hardly can have engendered. Wundt explains the divergence as usual, by theInnervationsgefühl(op. cit.. ii. 99 ff.).

[256]Physiol. Optik, p. 547.

[257]"We can with a short ruler draw a line as long as we please on a plane surface by first drawing one as long as the ruler permits, and then sliding the ruler somewhat along the drawn line and drawing again, etc. If the ruler is exactly straight, we get in this way a straight line. If it is somewhat curved we get a circle. Now, instead of the sliding ruler we use in the field of sight the central spot of distinctest vision impressed with a linear sensation of sight, which at times may be intensified till it becomes an after-image. We follow, in looking, the direction of this line, and in so doing we slide the line along itself and get a prolongation of its length. On a plane surface we can carry on this procedure on any sort of a straight or curved ruler, but in the field of vision there is for each direction and movement of the eye only one sort of line which it is possible for us to slide along in its own direction continually." These are what Helmholtz calls the 'circles of direction' of the visual field—lines which he has studied with his usual care. Cf. Physiol. Optik, p. 548 ff.

[258]Cf. Hering in Hermann's Handb. der Physiol., iii. 1, pp. 558-4.

[259]This shrinkage and expansion of the absolute space-value of the total optical sensation remains to my mind the most obscure part of the whole subject. It is a real optical sensation, seeming introspectively to have nothing to do with locomotor or other suggestions. It is easy to say that 'the Intellect produces it,' but what does that mean? The investigator who will throw light on this one point will probably clear up other difficulties as well.

[260]Examination of Hamilton, 3d ed. p. 283.

[261]Senses and Intellect, 3d ed. p. 183.

[262]Exam. of Hamilton, 3d ed. p. 283.

[263]Senses and Intellect, p. 372.

[264]Vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde, pp. 52-7.

[265]Psychol. als Wissenschaft, § 111.

[266]Psychol. als Wissenschaft, § 113.

[267]Lehrbuch d. Psychol., 2te Auflage, Bd. ii. p. 66. Volkmann's fifth chapter contains a really precious collection of historical notices concerning space-perception theories.

[268]Why talk of 'genetic theories'? when we have in the next breath to write as Wundt does: "If then we must regard the intuition of space as a product that simply emerges from the conditions of our mental and physical organization, nothing need stand in the way of our designating it as one of thea priorifunctions with which consciousness is endowed." (Logik, ii. 460.)

[269]P. 430.

[270]Pp. 430, 449.

[271]P. 428.

[272]P. 442.

[273]Pp. 442, 818.

[274]P. 798. Cf. also Popular Scientific Lectures, pp. 301-3.

[275]P. 456; see also 428, 441.

[276]P. 797.

[277]P. 812.

[278]Bottom of page 797.

[279]In fact, to borrow a simile from Prof. G. E. Müller (Theorie der sinnl. Aufmerksamkeit, p. 38), the various senses bear in the Helmholtzian philosophy of perception the same relation to the 'object' perceived by their means that a troop of jolly drinkers bear to the landlord's bill, when no one has any money, but each hopes that one of the rest will pay.

[280]Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens (1883), pp. 480, 591-2. Psychologische Studien (1885), p. 14.

[281]Psychology, ii. p. 174.

[282]Ibid.p. 168.

[283]Senses and Intellect, 3d ed. pp. 366-75.

[284]Cf. Hall and Donaldson in Mind, x. 559.

[285]As other examples of the confusion, take Mr. Sully: "Thefallacious assumptionthat there can be an idea of distance in general, apart from particular distances" (Mind, iii. p. 177); and Wundt: "An indefinite localization, which waits for experience to give it its reference to real space, stands in contradiction with the very idea of localization, which means the reference to a determinate point of space" (Physiol. Psych., 1te Aufl. p. 480).

[286]G. Berkeley: Essay towards a new Theory of Vision; Samuel Bailey: A Review of Berkeley's Theory of Vision (1842); J. S. Mill's Review of Bailey, in his Dissertations and Disquisitions, vol. ii; Jas. Ferrier: Review of Bailey, in 'Philosophical Remains,' vol. ii; A. Bain: Senses and Intellect, 'Intellect,' chap. i; H. Spencer: Principles of Psychology, pt. vi. chaps. xiv, xvi; J. S. Mill: Examination of Hamilton, chap. xiii (the best statement of the so-called English empiricist position); T. K. Abbott: Sight and Touch, 1861 (the first English book to go at all minutely intofacts; Mr. Abbott maintaining retinal sensations to be originally of space in three dimensions); A. C. Fraser: Review of Abbott, in North British Review for Aug. 1864; another review in Macmillan's Magazine, Aug. 1866; J. Sully: Outlines of Psychology, chap. vi; J. Ward: Encyclop. Britannica, 9th Ed., article 'Psychology,' pp. 53-5; J. E. Walter: The Perception of Space and Matter (1879)—I may also refer to a discussion between Prof. G. Groom Robertson, Mr. J. Ward, and the present writer, in Mind, vol. xiii.—The present chapter is only the filling out with detail of an article entitled 'The Spatial Quale,' which appeared in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy for January 1879 (xiii. 64).

Everyone knows the difference between imagining a thing and believing in its existence, between supposing a proposition and acquiescing in its truth. In the case of acquiescence or belief, the object is not only apprehended by the mind, but is held to have reality. Belief is thus the mental state or function of cognizing reality. As used in the following pages, 'Belief' will mean every degree of assurance, including the highest possible certainty and conviction.

There are, as we know, two ways of studying every psychic state. First, the way of analysis: What does it consist in? What is its inner nature? Of what sort of mind-stuff is it composed? Second, the way of history: What are its conditions of production, and its connection with other facts?

Into the first way we cannot go very far.In its inner nature, belief, or the sense of reality, is a sort of feeling more allied to the emotions than to anything else.Mr. Bagehot distinctly calls it the 'emotion' of conviction. I just now spoke of it as acquiescence. It resembles more than anything what in the psychology of volition we know as consent. Consent is recognized by all to be a manifestation of our active nature. It would naturally be described by such terms as 'willingness' or the 'turning of our disposition.' What characterizes both consent and belief is the cessation of theoretic agitation, through the advent of an idea which is inwardly stable, and fills the mind solidly to the exclusion of contradictory ideas. When this is the case, motor effects are apt to follow. Hence the states ofconsent and belief, characterized by repose on the purely intellectual side, are both intimately connected with subsequent practical activity. This inward stability of the mind's content is as characteristic of disbelief as of belief. But we shall presently see that we never disbelieve anything except for the reason that we believe something else which contradicts the first thing.[288]Disbelief is thus an incidental complication to belief, and need not be considered by itself.

The true opposites of belief,psychologically considered,are doubt and inquiry, not disbelief.In both these states the content of our mind is in unrest, and the emotion engendered thereby is, like the emotion of belief itself, perfectly distinct, but perfectly indescribable in words. Both sorts of emotion may be pathologically exalted. One of the charms of drunkenness unquestionably lies in the deepening of the sense of reality and truth which is gained therein. In whatever light things may then appear to us, they seem more utterly what they are, more 'utterly utter' than when we are sober. This goes to a fully unutterable extreme in the nitrous oxide intoxication, in which a man's very soul will sweat with conviction, and he be all the while unable to tell what he is convinced of at all.[289]The pathological state opposed to this solidity and deepening has been called the questioning mania (Grübelsuchtby the Germans). It is sometimes found as a substantive affection, paroxysmal or chronic, and consists in the inability to rest in any conception, and the need of having it confirmed and explained. 'Why do I stand here where I stand?' 'Why is a glass a glass, a chair a chair?' 'How is it that men are only of the size they are? Why not as big as houses,' etc., etc.[290]There is, it is true, another pathological state which is as far removed from doubt as from belief, and which some may prefer to consider the proper contrary of the latter state of mind. I refer to the feeling that everything is hollow, unreal, dead. I shall speak of this state again upon a later page. The point I wish to notice here is simply that belief and disbelief are but two aspects of one psychic state.

John Mill, reviewing various opinions about belief, comes to the conclusion that no account of it can be given:

"What," he says, "is the differenceto our mindsbetween thinking of a reality and representing to ourselves an imaginary picture? I confess I can see no escape from the opinion that the distinction is ultimate and primordial. There is no more difficulty in holding it to be so than in holding the difference between a sensation and an idea to be primordial. It seems almost another aspect of the same difference.... I cannot help thinking, therefore, that there is in the remembrance of a real fact, as distinguished from that of a thought, an element which does not consist... in a difference between the mere ideas which are present to the mind in the two cases. This element, howsoever we define it, constitutes belief, and is the difference between Memory and Imagination. From whatever direction we approach, this difference seems to close our path. When we arrive at it, we seem to have reached, as it were, the central point of our intellectual nature, presupposed and built upon in every attempt we make to explain the more recondite phenomena of our mental being."[291]

If the words of Mill be taken to apply to the mere subjective analysis of belief—to the question, What does it feel like when we have it?—they must be held, on the whole, to be correct. Belief, the sense of reality, feels like itself—that is about as much as we can say.

Prof. Brentano, in an admirable chapter of hisPsychologie, expresses this by saying that conception and belief (which he namesjudgment) are two different fundamental psychic phenomena. What I myself have called (Vol. I, p. 275) the 'object' of thought may be comparatively simple, like "Ha! what a pain," or "It-thunders"; or it may be complex, like "Columbus-discovered-America-in-1492," or "There-exists-an-all-wise-Creator-of-the-world." In either case, however, the mere thought of the object may exist as something quite distinct from the belief in its reality. The belief, as Brentano says, presupposes the mere thought:

"Every object comes into consciousness in a twofold way, as simply thought of [vorgestellt] and as admitted [anerkannt] or denied. The relation is analogous to that which is assumed by most philosophers (by Kant no less than by Aristotle) to obtain between mere thought and desire. Nothing is ever desired without being thought of; but the desiring is nevertheless a second quite new and peculiar form of relation to the object, a second quite new way of receiving it into consciousness. No more is anything judged [i.e., believed or disbelieved] which is not thought of too. But we must insist that, so soon as the object of a thought becomes the object of an assenting or rejecting judgment, our consciousness steps into an entirely new relation towards it. It is then twice present in consciousness, as thought of, and as held for real or denied; just as when desire awakens for it, it is both thought and simultaneously desired." (P. 266.)

The commonplace doctrine of 'judgment' is that it consists in the combination of 'ideas' by a 'copula' into a 'proposition,' which may be of various sorts, as affirmative, negative, hypothetical, etc. But who does not see that in a disbelieved or doubted or interrogative or conditional proposition, the ideas are combined in the same identical way in which they are in a proposition which is solidly believed?The way in which the ideas are combined is a part of the inner constitution of the thought's object or content.That object is sometimes an articulated whole with relations between its parts, amongst which relations, that of predicateto subject may be one. But when we have got our object with its inner constitution thus defined in a proposition, then the question comes up regarding the object as a whole: 'Is it a real object? is this proposition a true proposition or not?' And in the answerYestothisquestion lies that new psychic act which Brentano calls 'judgment,' but which I prefer to call 'belief.'

In every proposition, then, so far as it is believed, questioned, or disbelieved, four elements are to be distinguished, the subject, the predicate, and their relation (of whatever sort it be)—these form theobjectof belief—and finally the psychic attitude in which our mind stands towards the proposition taken as a whole—and this is the belief itself.[292]

Admitting, then, that this attitude is a state of consciousnesssui generis, about which nothing more can be said in the way of internal analysis, let us proceed to the second way of studying the subject of belief:Under what circumstances do we think things real?We shall soon see how much matter this gives us to discuss.

Suppose a new-born mind, entirely blank and waiting for experience to begin. Suppose that it begins in the form of a visual impression (whether faint or vivid is immaterial) of a lighted candle against a dark background, and nothing else, so that whilst this image lasts it constitutes the entire universe known to the mind in question. Suppose, moreover (to simplify the hypothesis), that the candle is only imaginary, and that no 'original' of it is recognized by us psychologists outside. Will this hallucinatory candle be believed in, will it have a real existence for the mind?

What possible sense (for that mind) would a suspicion have that the candle was not real? What would doubt or disbelief of it imply? Whenwe, the onlooking psychologists, say the candle is unreal, we mean something quite definite, viz., that there is a world known touswhichisreal, and to which we perceive that the candle does not belong; it belongs exclusively to that individual mind, has nostatusanywhere else, etc. It exists, to be sure, in a fashion, for it forms the content of that mind's hallucination; but the hallucination itself, though unquestionably it is a sort of existing fact, has no knowledge ofotherfacts; and since thoseotherfacts are the realities parexcellencefor us, and the only things we believe in, the candle is simply outside of our reality and belief altogether.

By the hypothesis, however, themind which sees the candlecan spin no such considerations as these about it, for of other facts, actual or possible, it has no inkling whatever. That candle is its all, its absolute. Its entire faculty of attention is absorbed by it. Itis, it isthat; it isthere; no other possible candle, or quality of this candle, no other possible place, or possible object in the place, no alternative, in short, suggests itself as even conceivable; so how can the mind help believing the candle real? The supposition that it might possibly not do so is, under the supposed conditions, unintelligible.[293]

This is what Spinoza long ago announced:

"Let us conceive a boy," he said, "imagining to himself a horse, and taking note of nothing else. As this imagination involves the existence of the horse,and the boy has no perception which annuls its existence,he will necessarily contemplate the horse as present, nor will he be able to doubt of its existence, however little certain of it he may be. I deny that a man in so far as he imagines [percipit] affirms nothing. For what is it to imagine a winged horse but to affirm that, the horse [that horse, namely] has wings? For if the mind had nothing before it but the winged horse it would contemplate the same as present, would have no cause to doubt of its existence, nor any power of dissenting from its existence, unless the imagination of the winged horse were joined to an idea which contradicted [tollit] its existence." (Ethics, ii. 49, Scholium.)

The sense that anything we think of is unreal can only come, then, when that thing is contradicted by some otherthing of which we think.Any object which remains uncontradicted is ipso facto believed and posited as absolute reality.

Now, how comes it that one thing thought of can be contradicted by another? It cannot unless it begins the quarrel by saying something inadmissible about that other. Take the mind with the candle, or the boy with the horse. If either of them say, 'That candle or that horse, even when I don't see it, exists inthe outer world,' he pushes into 'the outer world' an object which may be incompatible with everything which he otherwise knows of that world. If so, he must take his choice of which to hold by, the present perceptions or the other knowledge of the world. If he holds to the other knowledge, the present perceptions are contradicted,so far as their relation to that world goes.Candle and horse, whatever they may be, are not existents in outward space. They are existents, of course; they are mental objects; mental objects have existence as mental objects. But they are situated in their own spaces, the space in which they severally appear, and neither of those spaces is the space in which the realities called 'the outer world' exist.

Take again the horse with wings. If I merely dream of a horse with wings, my horse interferes with nothing else and has not to be contradicted. That horse, its wings, and its place, are all equally real. That horse exists no otherwise than as winged, and is moreover really there, for that place exists no otherwise than as the place of that horse, and claims as yet no connection with the other places of the world. But if with this horse I make an inroad into theworld otherwise known, and say, for example, 'That is my old mare Maggie, having grown a pair of wings where she stands in her stall,' the whole case is altered; for now the horse and place are identified with a horse and place otherwise known, andwhatis known of the latter objects is incompatible with what is perceived with the former. 'Maggie in her stall with wings! Never!' The wings are unreal, then, visionary. I have dreamed a lie about Maggie in her stall.

The reader will recognize in these two cases the two sorts of judgment called in the logic-books existential andattributive respectively. The candle exists as an outer reality' is an existential, 'My Maggie has got a pair of wings' is an attributive, proposition;[294]and it follows from what was first said thatall propositions, whether attributive or existential, are believed through the very fact of being conceived, unless they clash with other propositions believed, at the same time, by affirming that their terms are the same with the terms of these other propositions.A dream-candle has existence, true enough; but not the same existence (existence for itself, namely, orextra mentem meam) which the candles of waking perception have. A dream-horse has wings; but then neither horse nor wings are the same with any horses or wings known to memory. That we can at any moment think of the same thing which at any former moment we thought of is the ultimate law of our intellectual constitution. But when we now think of it incompatibly with our other ways of thinking it, then we must choose which way to stand by, for we cannot continue to think in two contradictory ways at once.The whole distinction of real and unreal, the whole psychology of belief, disbelief, and doubt, is thus grounded on two mental facts—first, that we are liable to think differently of the same; and second, that when we have done so, we can choose which way of thinking to adhere to and which to disregard.

The subjects adhered to become real subjects, the attributes adhered to real attributes, the existence adhered to real existence; whilst the subjects disregarded become imaginary subjects, the attributes disregarded erroneousattributes, and the existence disregarded an existence in no man's land, in the limbo 'where footless fancies dwell.' The real things are, in M. Taine's terminology, thereductivesof the things judged unreal.

Habitually and practically we do notcountthese disregarded things as existents at all. For themVæ victisis the law in the popular philosophy; they are not even treated as appearances; they are treated as if they were mere waste, equivalent to nothing at all. To the genuinely philosophic mind, however, they still have existence, though not the same existence, as the real things.Asobjects of fancy,aserrors,asoccupants of dreamland, etc., they are in their way as indefeasible parts of life, as undeniable features of the Universe, as the realities are in their way. The total world of which the philosophers must take account is thus composed of the realitiesplusthe fancies and illusions.

Two sub-universes, at least, connected by relations which philosophy tries to ascertain! Really there are more than two sub-universes of which we take account, some of us of this one, and others of that. For there are various categories both of illusion and of reality, and alongside of the world of absolute error (i.e., error confined to single individuals) but still within the world of absolute reality (i.e., reality believed by the complete philosopher) there is the world of collective error, there are the worlds of abstract reality, of relative or practical reality, of ideal relations, and there is the supernatural world. The popular mind conceives of all these sub-worlds more or less disconnectedly; and when dealing with one of them, forgets for the time being its relations to the rest. The complete philosopher is he who seeks not only to assign to every given object of his thought its right place in one or other of these sub-worlds, but he also seeks to determine the relation of each sub-world to the others in the total world whichis.

The most important sub-universes commonly discriminated from each other and recognized by most of us as existing, each with its own special and separate style of existence, are the following:

(1) The world of sense, or of physical 'things' as we instinctively apprehend them, with such qualities as heat, color, and sound, and such 'forces' as life, chemical affinity, gravity, electricity, all existing as such within or on the surface of the things.

(2) The world of science, or of physical things as the learned conceive them, with secondary qualities and 'forces' (in the popular sense) excluded, and nothing real but solids and fluids and their 'laws' (i.e., customs) of motion.[295]

(3) The world of ideal relations, or abstract truths believed or believable by all, and expressed in logical, mathematical, metaphysical, ethical, or æsthetic propositions.

(4) The world of 'idols of the tribe,' illusions or prejudices common to the race. All educated people recognize these as forming one sub-universe. The motion of the sky round the earth, for example, belongs to this world. That motion is not a recognized item of any of the other worlds; but as an 'idol of the tribe' it really exists. For certain philosophers 'matter' exists only as an idol of the tribe. For science, the 'secondary qualities' of matter are but 'idols of the tribe.'

(5) The various supernatural worlds, the Christian heaven and hell, the world of the Hindoo mythology, the world of Swedenborg'svisa et audita, etc. Each of these is a consistent system, with definite relations among its own parts. Neptune's trident, e.g., has no status of reality whatever in the Christian heaven; but within the classic Olympus certain definite things are true of it, whether one believe in the reality of the classic mythology as a whole or not. The various worlds of deliberate fable may be ranked with these worlds of faith—the world of theIliad, that ofKing Lear, of thePickwick Papers, etc.[296]

(6) The various worlds of individual opinion, as numerous as men are.

(7) The worlds of sheer madness and vagary, also indefinitely numerous.

Every object we think of gets at last referred to one world or another of this or of some similar list.It settles into our belief as a common-sense object, a scientific object, an abstract object, a mythological object, an object of some one's mistaken conception, or a madman's object; and it reaches this state sometimes immediately, but often only after being hustled and bandied about amongst other objects until it finds some which will tolerate its presence and stand in relations to it which nothing contradicts. The molecules and ether-waves of the scientific world, for example, simply kick the object's warmth and color out, they refuse to have any relations with them. But the world of 'idols of the tribe' stands ready to take them in. Just so the world of classic myth takes up the winged horse; the world of individual hallucination, the vision of the candle; the world of abstract truth, the proposition that justice is kingly, though no actual king be just. The various worlds themselves, however, appear (as aforesaid) to most men's minds in no very definitely conceived relation to each other, and our attention, when it turns to one, is apt to drop the others for the time being out of its account. Propositions concerning the different worlds are made from 'different points of view'; and in this more or less chaotic state the consciousness of most thinkers remains to the end. Each worldwhilst it is attended tois real after its own fashion; only the reality lapses with the attention.

Each thinker, however, has dominant habits of attention; and thesepractically elect from among the various worlds some one to be for him the world of ultimate realities. From this world's objects he does not appeal. Whateverpositively contradicts them must get into another world or die. The horse, e.g., may have wings to its heart's content, so long as it does not pretend to be the real world's horse—thathorse is absolutely wingless. For most men, as we shall immediately see, the 'things of sense' hold this prerogative position, and are the absolutely real world's nucleus. Other things, to be sure, may be real for this man or for that—things of science, abstract moral relations, things of the Christian theology, or what not. But even for the special man, these things are usually real with a less real reality than that of the things of sense. They are taken less seriously; and the very utmost that can be said for anyone's belief in them is that it is as strong as his 'belief in his own senses.'[297]

In all this the everlasting partiality of our nature shows itself, our inveterate propensity to choice. For, in the strict and ultimate sense of the word existence, everything which can be thought of at all exists assomesort of object, whether mythical object, individual thinker's object, or object in outer space and for intelligence at large. Errors, fictions, tribal beliefs, are parts of the whole great Universe which God has made, and He must have meant all these things to be in it, each in its respective place. But for us finite creatures, "'tis to consider too curiously to considerso." The mere fact of appearing as an object at all is not enough to constitute reality. That may be metaphysical reality, reality for God; but what we need is practical reality, reality for ourselves; and, to have that, an object must not only appear, but it must appear bothinterestingandimportant. The worlds whose objects are neither interesting nor important we treat simply negatively, we brand them asunreal.

In the relative sense,then, the sense in which we contrast reality with simpleunreality, and in which one thing is said to havemorereality than another, and to be more believed,reality means simply relation to our emotional and active life.This is the only sense which the word ever has in the mouths of practical men.In this sense, whatever excites and stimulates our interest is real;whenever an object so appeals to us that we turn to it, accept it, fill our mind with it, or practically take account of it, so far it is real for us, and we believe it. Whenever, on the contrary, we ignore it, fail to consider it or act upon it, despise it, reject it, forget it, so far it is unreal for us and disbelieved. Hume's account of the matter was then essentially correct, when he said that belief in anything was simply the having the idea of it in a lively and active manner:

"I say, then, that belief is nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object than the imagination alone is ever able to attain.... It consists not in the peculiar nature or order of the ideas, but in themannerof their conception and in theirfeelingto the mind. I confess that it is impossible perfectly to explain this feeling or manner of conception.... Its true and proper name... isbelief, which is a term that everyone sufficiently understands in common life. And in philosophy we can go no farther than assert that belief is something felt by the mind, which distinguishes the idea of the judgment from the fictions of the imagination.[298]It gives them more weight and influence; makes them appear of greater importance; enforces them in the mind; gives them a superior influence on the passions, and renders them the governing principle in our actions."[299]

Or as Prof. Bain puts it: "In its essential character, belief is a phase of our active nature—otherwise called the Will."[300]

The object of belief, then, reality or real existence, is something quite different from all the other predicates which a subject may possess. Those are properties intellectually or sensibly intuited. When we add any one of them to the subject, we increase the intrinsic content of the latter, we enrich its picture in our mind. But adding reality does not enrich the picture in any such inward way; it leaves it inwardly as it finds it, and only fixes it and stamps it in tous.

"The real," as Kant says, "contains no more than the possible. A hundred real dollars do not contain a penny more than a hundred possible dollars.... By whatever, and by however many, predicates I may think a thing, nothing is added to it if I add that the thing exists.... Whatever, therefore, our concept of an object may contain, we must always step outside of it in order to attribute to it existence."[301]

The 'stepping outside' of it is the establishment either of immediate practical relations between it and ourselves, or of relations between it and other objects with which we have immediate practical relations. Relations of this sort, which are as yet not transcended or superseded by others, areipso factoreal relations, and confer reality upon their objective term.The fons et origo of all reality, whether fromthe absolute or the practical point of view, is thus subjective, is ourselves.As bare logical thinkers, without emotional reaction, we give reality to whatever objects we think of, for they are really phenomena, or objects of our passing thought, if nothing more. But,as thinkers with emotional reaction, we give what seems to us a still higher degree of reality to whatever things we select and emphasize and turn towith a will. These are ourlivingrealities; and not only these, but all the other things which are intimately connected with these. Reality, starting from our Ego, thus sheds itself from point to point—first, upon all objects which have an immediate sting of interest for our Ego in them, and next, upon the objects most continuously related with these. It only fails when the connecting thread is lost. A whole system may be real, if it only hang to our Ego by one immediatelystingingterm. But what contradicts any such stinging term, even though it be another stinging term itself, is either not believed, or only believed after settlement of the dispute.

We reach thus the important conclusion thatour own reality, that sense of our own life which we at every moment possess, is the ultimate of ultimates for our belief.'As sure as I exist!'—this is our uttermost warrant for the being of all other things. As Descartes made the indubitable reality of thecogitogo bail for the reality of all that thecogitoinvolved, so we all of us, feeling our own present reality with absolutely coercive force, ascribe an all but equal degree of reality, first to whatever things we lay hold on with a sense of personal need, and second, to whatever farther things continuously belong with these. "Mein Jetzt und Hier," as Prof. Lipps says, "ist der letzte Angelpunkt für alle Wirklichkeit, also alle Erkenntniss."

The world of living realities as contrasted with unrealities is thus anchored in the Ego, considered as an active and emotional term.[302]That is the hook from which the rest dangles, the absolute support. And as from a paintedhook it has been said that one can only hang a painted chain, so conversely, from a real hook only a real chain can properly be hung.Whatever things have intimate and continuous connection with my life are things of whose reality I cannot doubt.Whatever things fail to establish this connection are things which are practically no better for me than if they existed not at all.

In certain forms of melancholic perversion of the sensibilities and reactive powers, nothing touches us intimately, rouses us, or wakens natural feeling. The consequence is the complaint so often heard from melancholic patients, that nothing is believed in by them as it used to be, and that all sense of reality is fled from life. They are sheathed in india-rubber; nothing penetrates to the quick or draws blood, as it were. According to Griesinger, "I see, I hear!" such patients say, "but the objects do not reach me, it is as if there were a wall between me and the outer world!"

"In such patients there often is an alteration of the cutaneous sensibility, such that things feel indistinct or sometimes rough and woolly. But even were this change always present, it would not completely explain the psychic phenomenon... which reminds us more of the alteration in our psychic relations to the outer world which advancing age on the one hand, and on the other emotions and passions, may bring about. In childhood we feel ourselves to be closer to the world of sensible phenomena, we live immediately with them and in them; an intimately vital tie binds us and them together. But with the ripening of reflection this tie is loosened, the warmth of our interest cools, things look differently to us, and we act more as foreigners to the outer world, even though we know it a great deal better. Joy and expansive emotions in general draw it nearer to us again. Everything makes a more lively impression, and with the quick immediate return of this warm receptivity for sense impressions, joy makes us feel young again. In depressing emotions it is the other way. Outer things, whether living or inorganic, suddenly grow cold and foreign to us, and even our favorite objects of interest feel as if they belonged to us no more. Under these circumstances, receiving no longer from anything a lively impression, we cease to turn towards outer things, and the sense of inward loneliness grows upon us.... Where there is no strong intelligence to control thisblasécondition, this psychic coldness and lack of interest, the issue of these states in which all seems so cold and hollow, the heart dried up, the world grown dead and empty, is often suicide or the deeper forms of insanity."[303]

But now we are met by questions of detail. What does this stirring, this exciting power, this interest, consist in, which some objects have? whicharethose 'intimate relations' with our life which give reality? And what things stand in these relations immediately, and what others are so closely connected with the former that (in Hume's language) we 'carry our disposition' also on to them?

In a simple and direct way these questions cannot be answered at all. The whole history of human thought is but an unfinished attempt to answer them. For what have men been trying to find out, since men were men, but just those things: "Where do our true interests lie—which relations shall we call the intimate and real ones—which things shall we call living realities and which not?" A few psychological points can, however, be made clear.

Any relation to our mind at all, in the absence of a stronger relation, suffices to make an object real.The barest appeal to our attention is enough for that. Revert to the beginning of the chapter, and take the candle entering the vacant mind. The mind was waiting for just some such object to make its spring upon. It makes its spring and the candle is believed. But when the candle appears at the same time with other objects, it must run the gauntlet of their rivalry, and then it becomes a question which of the various candidates for attention shall compel belief. As a rule we believe as much as we can. We would believe everything if we only could. When objects are represented by us quite unsystematically they conflict but little with each other, and the number of them which in this chaotic manner we can believe is limitless. The primitive savage's mind is a jungle in which hallucinations, dreams, superstitions, conceptions, and sensible objects all flourish alongside of each other, unregulated except by the attention turning in this way or in that. The child's mind is the same. It is only as objects become permanent and their relations fixed thatdiscrepancies and contradictions are felt and must be settled in some stable way. As a rule, the success with which a contradicted object maintains itself in our belief is proportional to several qualities which it must possess. Of these the one which would be put first by most people, because it characterizes objects of sensation, is its—

(1) Coerciveness over attention, or the mere power to possess consciousness: then follow—

(2) Liveliness, or sensible pungency, especially in the way of exciting pleasure or pain;

(3) Stimulating effect upon the will, i.e., capacity to arouse active impulses, the more instinctive the better;

(4) Emotional interest, as object of love, dread, admiration, desire, etc.;

(5) Congruity with certain favorite forms of contemplation—unity, simplicity, permanence, and the like;

(6) Independence of other causes, and its own causal importance.

These characters run into each other. Coerciveness is the result of liveliness or emotional interest. What is lively and interesting stimulateseo ipsothe will; congruity holds of active impulses as well as of contemplative forms; causal independence and importance suit a certain contemplative demand, etc. I will therefore abandon all attempt at a formal treatment, and simply proceed to make remarks in the most convenient order of exposition.

As a whole, sensations are more lively and are judged more real than conceptions; things met with every hour more real than things seen once; attributes perceived when awake, more real than attributes perceived in a dream. But, owing to thediverse relations contracted by the various objects with each other,the simple rule that the lively and permanent is the real is often enough disguised. A conceived thing may be deemed more real than a certain sensible thing, if it only be intimately related to other sensible things more vivid, permanent, or interesting than the first one. Conceived molecular vibrations, e.g., are by the physicist judged more real than felt warmth, because so intimately related to all those other facts of motion in theworld which he has made his special study. Similarly, a rare thing may be deemed more real than a permanent thing if it be more widely related to other permanent things. All the occasional crucial observations of science are examples of this. A rare experience, too, is likely to be judged more real than a permanent one, if it be more interesting and exciting. Such is the sight of Saturn through a telescope; such are the occasional insights and illuminations which upset our habitual ways of thought.

But no mere floating conception, no mere disconnected rarity, ever displaces vivid things or permanent things from our belief. A conception, to prevail, mustterminatein the world of orderly sensible experience. A rare phenomenon, to displace frequent ones, must belong with others more frequent still. The history of science is strewn with wrecks and ruins of theory—essences and principles, fluids and forces—once fondly clung to, but found to hang together with no facts of sense. And exceptional phenomena solicit our belief in vain until such time as we chance to conceive them as of kinds already admitted to exist. What science means by 'verification' is no more than this, that no object of conception shall be believed which sooner or later has not some permanent and vivid object of sensation for itsterm. Compare what was said onpages 3-7, above.

Sensible objects are thus either our realities or the tests of our realities. Conceived objects must show sensible effects or else be disbelieved.And the effects, even though reduced to relative unreality when their causes come to view (as heat, which molecular vibrations make unreal), are yet the things on which our knowledge of the causes rests. Strange mutual dependence this, in which the appearance needs the reality in order to exist, but the reality needs the appearance in order to be known!

Sensible vividness or pungency is then the vital factor in reality when once the conflict between objects, and the connecting of them together in the mind, has begun.No object which neither possesses this vividness in its own right nor is able to borrow it from anything else has a chance of making headway against vivid rivals, or of rousing in us that reaction in which belief consists. On the vivid objects wepin, as the saying is, our faith in all the rest; and out belief returns instinctively even to those of them from which reflection has led it away. Witness the obduracy with which the popular world of colors, sounds, and smells holds its own against that of molecules and vibrations. Let the physicist himself but nod, like Homer, and the world of sense becomes his absolute reality again.[304]

That things originally devoid of this stimulating power should be enabled, by association with other things which have it, to compel our belief as if they had it themselves, is a remarkable psychological fact, which since Hume's time it has been impossible to overlook.

"The vividness of the first conception," he writes, "diffuses itself along the relations and is conveyed, as by so many pipes or channels, to every idea that has any communication with the primary one.... Superstitious people are fond of the relics of saints and holy men, for the same reason that they seek after types and images, in order to enliven their devotion and give them a more intimate and strong conception of those exemplary lives.... Now, 'tis evident one of the best relics a devotee could procure would be the handiwork of a saint, and if his clothes and furniture are ever to be considered in this light, 'tis because they were once at his disposal, and were moved and affected by him; in which respect they are... connected with him by a shorter train of consequences than any of those from which we learn the reality of hisexistence. This phenomenon clearly proves that a present impression, with a relation of causation, may enliven any idea, and consequently produce belief or assent, according to the precedent definition of it.... It has been remarked among the Mahometans as well as Christians that those pilgrims who have seen Mecca or the Holy Land are ever after more faithful and zealous believers than those who have not had that advantage. A man whose memory presents him with a lively image of the Red Sea and the Desert and Jerusalem and Galilee can never doubt of any miraculous events which are related either by Moses or the Evangelists. The lively idea of the places passes by an easy transition to the facts which are supposed to have been related to them by contiguity, and increases the belief by increasing the vivacity of the conception. The remembrance of those fields and rivers has the same influence as a new argument.... The ceremonies of the Catholic religion may be considered as instances of the same nature. The devotees of that strange superstition usually plead in excuse for the mummeries with which they are upbraided that they feel the good effect of external motions and postures and actions in enlivening their devotion and quickening their fervor, which otherwise would decay, if directed entirely to distant and immaterial objects. We shadow out the objects of our faith, say they, in sensible types and images, and render them more present to us by the immediate presence of these types than it is possible for us to do merely by an intellectual view and contemplation."[305]

Hume's cases are rather trivial; and the things which associated sensible objects make us believe in are supposed by him to be unreal. But all the more manifest for that is the fact of their psychological influence. Who does not 'realize' more the fact of a dead or distant friend's existence, at the moment when a portrait, letter, garment or other material reminder of him is found? The whole notion of him then grows pungent and speaks to us and shakes us, in a manner unknown at other times. In children's minds, fancies and realities live side by side. But however lively their fancies may be, they still gain help from association with reality. The imaginative child identifies itsdramatis personæwith some doll or other material object, and this evidently solidifies belief, little as it may resemble what it is held to stand for. A thing not too interesting by its own real qualities generally does the best service here. The most useful doll I ever saw was a large cucumber in the hands of a little Amazonian-Indiangirl; she nursed it and washed it and rocked it to sleep in a hammock, and talked to it all day long—there was no part in life which the cucumber did not play. Says Mr. Tylor:

"An imaginative child will make a dog do duty for a horse, or a soldier for a shepherd, till at last the objective resemblance almost disappears, and a bit of wood may be dragged about, resembling a ship on the sea or a coach on the road. Here the likeness of the bit of wood to a ship or coach is very slight indeed; but it is a thing, and can be moved about,... and is an evident assistance to the child in enabling it to arrange and develop its ideas.... Of how much use... may be seen by taking it away, and leaving the child nothing to play with.... In later years and among highly educated people the mental process which goes on in a child's playing with wooden soldiers and horses, though it never disappears, must be sought for in more complex phenomena. Perhaps nothing in after-life more closely resembles the effect of a doll upon a child than the effect of the illustrations of a tale upon a grown reader. Here the objective resemblance is very indefinite... yet what reality is given to the scene by a good picture.... Mr. Backhouse one day noticed in Van Diemen's Land a woman arranging several stones that were flat, oval, and about two inches wide, and marked in various directions with black and red lines. These, he learned, represented absent friends, and one larger than the rest stood for a fat native woman on Flinder's Island, known by the name of Mother Brown. Similar practices are found among far higher races than the ill-fated Tasmanians. Among some North American tribes a mother who has lost a child keeps its memory ever present to her by filling its cradle with black feathers and quills, and carrying it about with her for a year or more. When she stops anywhere, she sets up the cradle and talks to it as she goes about her work, just as she would have done if the dead body had been still alive within it. Here we have an image; but in Africa we find a rude doll representing the child, kept as a memorial.... Bastian saw Indian women in Peru who had lost an infant carrying about on their backs a wooden doll to represent it."[306]

To many persons among us, photographs of lost ones seem to be fetishes. They, it is true, resemble; but the fact that the mere materiality of the reminder is almost as important as its resemblance is shown by the popularity a hundred years ago of the black taffeta 'silhouettes' which are still found among family relics, and of one of which Fichte could write to his affianced: 'Die Farbe fehlt, das Auge fehlt, es fehlt der himmlische Ausdruck deiner lieblichen Züge'—andyet go on worshipping it all the same. The opinion so stoutly professed by many, that language is essential to thought, seems to have this much of truth in it, that all our inward images tend invincibly to attach themselves to something sensible, so as to gain in corporeity and life. Words serve this purpose, gestures serve it, stones, straws, chalk-marks, anything will do. As soon as anyone of these things stands for the idea, the latter seems to be more real. Some persons, the present writer among the number, can hardly lecture without a blackboard: the abstract conceptions must be symbolized by letters, squares or circles, and the relations between them by lines. All this symbolism, linguistic, graphic, and dramatic, has other uses too, for it abridges thought and fixes terms. But one of its uses is surely to rouse the believing reaction and give to the ideas a more living reality. As, when we are told a story, and shown the very knife that did the murder, the very ring whose hiding-place the clairvoyant revealed, the whole thing passes from fairy-land to mother-earth, so here we believe all the more, if only we see that 'the bricks are alive to tell the tale.'

So much for the prerogative position of sensations in regard to our belief. But among the sensations themselves all are not deemed equally real. The more practically important ones, the more permanent ones, and the more æsthetically apprehensible ones are selected from the mass, to be believed in most of all; the others are degraded to the position of mere signs and suggestions of these. This fact has already been adverted to in former chapters.[307]The real color of a thing is that one color-sensation which it gives us when most favorably lighted for vision. So of its real size, its real shape, etc.—these are but optical sensations selected out of thousands of others, because they have æsthetic characteristics which appeal to our convenience or delight. But I will not repeat what I have already written about this matter, but pass on to our treatment of tactile and muscular sensations, as 'primaryqualities,' more real than those 'secondary' qualities which eye and ear and nose reveal. Why do we thus so markedly select thetangibleto be the real? Our motives are not far to seek. The tangible qualities are the least fluctuating. When we get them at all we get them the same. The other qualities fluctuate enormously as our relative position to the object changes. Then, more decisive still, the tactile properties are those most intimately connected with our weal or woe. A dagger hurts us only when in contact with our skin, a poison only when we take it into our mouths, and we can only use an object for our advantage when we have it in our muscular control. It is as tangibles, then, that things concern us most; and the other senses, so far as their practical use goes, do but warn us of what tangible things to expect. They are but organs of anticipatory touch, as Berkeley has with perfect clearness explained.[308]

Among all sensations, themostbelief-compelling are those productive of pleasure or of pain. Locke expressly makes thepleasure- orpain-giving quality to be the ultimate human criterion of anything's reality. Discussing (with a supposed Berkeleyan before Berkeley) the notion that all our perceptions may be but a dream, he says:

"He may please to dream that I make him this answer... that I believe he will allow a very manifest difference between dreaming of being in the fire and being actually in it. But yet if he be resolved to appear so sceptical as to maintain that what I call being actually in the fire is nothing but a dream, and that we cannot thereby certainly know that any such thing as fire actually exists without us, I answer that we, certainly finding that pleasure or pain [or emotion of any sort] follows upon the application of certain objects to us, whose existence we perceive, or dream that we perceive by our senses,this certainly is as great as our happiness or misery,beyond which we have no concernment to know or to be."[309]

The quality of arousing emotion, of shaking, moving us or inciting us to action, has as much to do with our belief in an object's reality as the quality of giving pleasure or pain. InChapter XXIVI shall seek to show that our emotions probably owe their pungent quality to the bodily sensations which they involve. Our tendency to believe in emotionally exciting objects (objects of fear, desire, etc.) is thus explained without resorting to any fundamentally new principle of choice. Speaking generally, the more a conceived objectexcitesus, the more reality it has. The same object excites us differently at different times. Moral and religious truths come 'home' to us far more on some occasions than on others. As Emerson says, "There is a difference between one and another hour of life in their authority and subsequent effect. Our faith comes in moments,... yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences." The 'depth' is partly, no doubt, the insight into wider systems of unified relation, but far more often than that it is the emotional thrill. Thus, to descend to more trivial examples, a man who has no belief in ghosts by daylight will temporarily believe in them when, alone at midnight, he feels his blood curdle at a mysterious sound or vision, his heart thumping, and his legs impelled to flee. The thought of falling when we walk along a curbstone awakens no emotion of dread; so no sense of reality attaches to it, and we are sure we shall not fall. On a precipice's edge, however, the sickening emotion which the notion of a possible fall engenders makes us believe in the latter's imminent reality, and quite unfits us to proceed.

The greatest proof that a man issui composis his ability to suspend belief in presence of an emotionally exciting idea. To give this power is the highest result of education. In untutored minds the power does not exist.Every exciting thought in the natural man carries credence with it. To conceive with passion is eo ipso to affirm.As Bagehot says:

"The Caliph Omar burnt the Alexandrian Library, saying: 'All books which contain what is not in the Koran are dangerous. All which contain what is in it are useless!' Probably no one ever had an intenser belief in anything than Omar had in this. Yet it is impossible to imagine it preceded by an argument. His belief in Mahomet, in the Koran, and in the sufficiency of the Koran, probably came to him in spontaneous rushes of emotion; there may have been little vestiges of argument floating here and there, but they did not justify the strength of the emotion, still less did they create it, and they hardly even excused it.... Probably, when the subject is thoroughly examined, conviction will be found to be one of the intensest of human emotions, and one most closely connected with the bodily state,... accompanied or preceded by the sensation that Scott makes his seer describe as the prelude of a prophecy:'At length the fatal answer came,In characters of living flame—Not spoke in words, nor blazed in scroll,But borne and branded on my soul.'A hot flash seems to burn across the brain. Men in these intense states of mind have altered all history, changed for better or worse the creed of myriads, and desolated or redeemed provinces or ages. Nor is this intensity a sign of truth, for it is precisely strongest in those points in which men differ most from each other. John Knox felt it in his anti-Catholicism; Ignatius Loyola in his anti-Protestantism; and both, I suppose, felt it as much as it is possible to feel it."[310]

'At length the fatal answer came,In characters of living flame—Not spoke in words, nor blazed in scroll,But borne and branded on my soul.'

A hot flash seems to burn across the brain. Men in these intense states of mind have altered all history, changed for better or worse the creed of myriads, and desolated or redeemed provinces or ages. Nor is this intensity a sign of truth, for it is precisely strongest in those points in which men differ most from each other. John Knox felt it in his anti-Catholicism; Ignatius Loyola in his anti-Protestantism; and both, I suppose, felt it as much as it is possible to feel it."[310]

The reason of the belief is undoubtedly the bodily commotion which the exciting idea sets up. 'Nothing which I can feel likethatcan be false.' All our religious and supernatural beliefs are of this order. The surest warrant for immortality is the yearning of our bowels for our dear ones; for God, the sinking sense it gives us to imagine no such Providence or help. So of our political or pecuniary hopes and fears, and things and persons dreaded anddesired. "A grocer has a full creed as to foreign policy, a young lady a complete theory of the sacraments, as to which neither has any doubt.... A girl in a country parsonage will be sure that Paris never can be taken, or that Bismarck is a wretch"—all because they have either conceived these things at some moment with passion, or associated them with other things which they have conceived with passion.

M. Renouvier calls this belief of a thing for no other reason than that we conceive it with passion, by the name ofmental vertigo.[311]Other objects whisper doubt or disbelief; but the object of passion makes us deaf to all but itself, and we affirm it unhesitatingly. Such objects are the delusions of insanity, which the insane person can at odd moments steady himself against, but which again return to sweep him off his feet. Such are the revelations of mysticism. Such, particularly, are the sudden beliefs which animate mobs of men when frenzied impulse to action is involved. Whatever be the action in point—whether the stoning of a prophet, the hailing of a conqueror, the burning of a witch, the baiting of a heretic or Jew, the starting of a forlorn hope, or the flying from a foe—the fact that to believe a certain object willcause that action to explodeis a sufficient reason for that belief to come. The motor impulse sweeps it unresisting in its train.

The whole history of witchcraft and early medicine is a commentary on the facility with which anything which chances to be conceived is believed the moment the belief chimes in with an emotional mood. 'The cause of sickness?' When a savage asks the cause of anything he means to ask exclusively 'What is to blame?' The theoretic curiosity starts from the practical life's demands. Let some one then accuse a necromancer, suggest a charm or spell which has been cast, and no more 'evidence' is asked for. What evidence is required beyond this intimate sense of the culprit's responsibility, to which our very viscera and limbs reply?[312]

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