Questions of the day in philosophy and psychology

Front matter

BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME PROM THE

SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND

THE GIFT OF

Preface

These essays are in the main an expansion of a course of public lectures which I delivered in this University during the winter of 1910-11 under the general title : " Some Eecent Philosophical Movements." In the case of Nos. V. and IX, I have availed myself freely of material which I had already published in another form in the Hibbert Journal and the International Journal of Ethics : for permission to do so I am indebted to the courtesy of the Editors of these magazines.

A considerable proportion of the audience to which the lectures were addressed consisted of persons possessing little previous knowledge of the subject, and the essays as now published are intended to be intelligible to the general educated reader. To those versed in the technicalities of philosophical discussion this must be my apology for the popular style in which these papers are written.

I am well aware that the book is lacking in unity. But while the subjects treated are miscellaneous I have endeavoured to keep a single purpose in view. It is now admitted that, for good or for evil, psychology has come to occupy a position very different from that which it held a generation ago. The change is generally ascribed to a transformation of method which, although it has been effected viii PREFACE

gradually, is profound and far-reaching. I liave tried to estimate in the first essay what this transformation means and how far it is to be welcomed. In the remainder of the book an attempt has been made to illustrate the argument of the opening paper by showing how new light is now being cast by psychologists on some very old and previously obscure problems in the theory of knowledge and in the social sciences. If I have included discussions which are not prima facie germane to psychology it is because I am convinced that the sphere of application of that science is still indefinitely wide.

I acknowledge with gratitude my obligation to several friends who have helped me in the preparation of these essays for the press. Dr. Hastings Eashdall has read through in MS. Nos. V., VII., VIIL, and IX. ; and Dr. William McDougall has rendered me a similar service in respect of the remainder. While the responsibility for the opinions expressed is of course exclusively my own, I am deeply sensible of how much I owe to the suggestions and criticisms which they have ofiered ; and the reader will at once recognize how much I have been influenced by the psychological and ethical teaching of their published books. To Professor John Park, my senior colleague in the University of Belfast, I owe a general debt which can be appreciated only by those who have been brought into contact with his immense stores of philosophical learning.

My former pupil Miss A. J. Kennedy, M.A., has devoted unsparing pains to the preparation of the index and the verification of references ; and I have to thank my colleague, the Rev. Canon O'Connell,

PREFACE ix

M.A., Lecturer in Celtic Languages, and the Rev. F. E. Harts, M.A., for their kindness in reading the proofs.

HEEBEET L. STEWAET.

The Queen's University OF Belfast, October, 1912.

Contents

PAGE

I. The Eefokm in Psychology 1

II. The Present Position of the Hypothesis of Subconsciousness 65

II

As the character and purpose of psychology thus became transformed it was obviously expedient and even necessary that it should alter its methods. If it is to be one of the natural sciences clearly it ought to avail itself of those instruments of investigation which the natural sciences have so thoroughly perfected. That it has done and is doing so with ever-increasing success is a striking confirmation both of the reality and of the advantage of that change which we have been tracing.

Little advance could be made in such a study as physics if we were forced to wait until those phenomena, whose causal connexions we wish to detect, present themselves spontaneously. For even when our patience is rewarded by their appearance we find them so intermingled with and so disguised by other facts and processes that we cannot easily separate the elements either of the complex antecedent or of the complex consequent. Our success depends upon our being able to produce physical phenomena artificially, under conditions arranged to facilitate the investigation we have in view. We understand thoroughly those circumstances which we have ourselves created ; thus we can introduce a definite, quantitatively determined, factor into a pre-existing situation and observe the change in the effect.

Psychology long lingered in that more primitive stage where one simply watches what happens without attempting to control or regulate it. It relied solely on introspection ; and it is scarcely to be wondered at that so little progress was made until this method was improved upon.

For the ancients were quite as competent to employ it as we are, and long ago they had reaped the entire harvest of psychological theory which tUlage of this kind could produce. Since we have learned, however, that psychology is one thing and metaphysics another, we have begun to adapt our methods to our material. There never has been and there never can be such a thing as experimental metaphysics. It has even been suggested — and with much plausibility — that metaphysics might be negatively defined as being " such knowledge of matter, mind, and their relations as is not based upon or justifiable by particular empirical cognitions." For it is of the essence of experiment to vary the circumstances : obviously, therefore, experiment is of no avail where the circumstances are fixed and unalterable. If changes are taking place we may note the laws in accordance with which they come and go : this is observation. If the changes are to any extent modifiable at will we can introduce definite variations and note definite results : this is experiment. But both methods must be futile if you have to do with that which ex hypothesi does not change, with the permanent amid the flux, with the unity amid the differences.

Psychology, on the other hand, is now attempting to reinforce introspection both by experiment and by comparison. The first laboratory for this purpose was established by Wundt at Leipzig about forty years ago. To-day, in the United States alone, there are fifty similar institutions, similar, I mean, in aim, but, as one might anticipate, far more elaborate and far more effective in machinery. There is an obvious reason why this way of studying mental process could not have been undertaken much earlier than the latter part of the nineteenth century. Physiology had not until then supplied the necessary data. We cannot experiment upon mind itself, only upon embodied mind ; hence we were obliged to wait until our knowledge of the brain and nervous system ceased to be of that vague and useless kind which preceded the great discoveries of Johannes Miiller and Gall. " We have," writes Dr. McDougall, " three great principles, the principle of the specific energies of sensory nerves, the principle of strict localization of cerebral functions, and the principle of association, each of them arrived at independently of the others, and each founded on a great mass of empirical evidence. Together they constitute the indispensable basis of physiological psychology."

In the absence of such definite knowledge experimentation must have led to hopeless blundering. For we have to deal with a compound process, involving both neural change and psychic change : we have to discover what precisely is the part played by each, what are its laws, and especially, how it is related to the other. Now it is plain that little progress can be made in determining the relation between two things if you know nothing of either of them taken by itself, but are forced to examine it in a situation where it is bewilderingly intertwined with the other. In this case we should have been exposed to two kinds of error : we should either have invented complicated psychic laws to account for events which are quite simply explained by nerveprocess, or, in speechless admiration of a machinery which we did not understand, we should have accepted all sorts of marvels as wrought by the nervous system alone. The physiologists and the anatomists have done much to help us out of an otherwise insuperable difficulty. They have given us some fundamental facts of a purely physical nature — facts which are indeed all too sparse, but which constitute, at least, a basis.

The science of psycho-physics has sprung from the attempt to look at the results of introspective psychology in connexion with these and similar principles of nerve-action. The two bodies of knowledge could not long be kept in water-tight compartments : for they both related to one sentient experience. And the moment they were brought into touch with each other a host of new questions suggested themselves. On the one side we have nerve-stimulus and on the other we have sensation. Speaking roughly and within limits the stronger the stimulus the keener the sensation. But are they connected by a precise ratio ? If we replace a weight of four pounds on the back of the hand by a weight of eight pounds, will the intensity of the feeling be doubled ?

This raises the crucial difficulty of psycho-physics. Can we speak of psychic experiences as mathematically related ? Plainly one feeling is not twice as intense as another in the sense that it is identical with two experiences of the other. One severe headache certainly cannot be called equal to two less severe headaches added together in the same sense in which seven is equal to four plus three. If this objection is final it makes an end of all quantitative methods in psychology. If it is impossible to get a genuine psychic unit we need not attempt calculation. And the objection has recently been urged with characteristic clearness and vigour by M. Henri Bergson. With all the respect that is due to so great a name I must urge that M. Bergson has not fully met the reply that the psycho-physicists have been offering to this very objection for the last twenty years.

The unit they adopt is not any particular sensation, but the difference between two sensations. I cannot intelligently say that a sound X is half as loud as a sound Z : but it is not meaningless to say that the sound Y is as much louder than the sound X as the sound Z is louder than the sound Y. One light cannot be called half as bright as another, yet I may fairly speak of one as exactly intermediate in brightness between the other two. Now when the weight of one pound rests on the back of the hand I can quite easily appreciate an additional six ounces laid on the top of it. But if the original weight were a quarter of a stone I could distinguish no difference at all if six ounces were added. Suppose, then, we try as our unit the just distinguishable difference of sensation. Beginning with a pressure of one pound let us gradually increase the stimulus until the addition begins to be felt, until in technical phrase the difference-threshold is passed. Note the increase of stimulus. Repeat the process beginning where you left off, again noting the intensity of stimulus, and so on as far as you choose to carry it.

Proceeding thus, Fechner reached a striking result. The points where intensities of stimulus were noted were separated from each other by equal differences of sensation : they were separated by the unit of measurement which we adopted, viz. the margin of just distinguishable difference. But the differences of stimulus at those points were not found to be equal. No matter what the original stimulus was, the least perceptible addition was found to be a certain fixed fraction of that stimulus : e.g. for pressure Jg, for light y^, for muscular sensation yV ^^'^ ^^ ^^- '^^® formulation given to the law by Fechner was that the sensations form an arithmetical, while the corresponding stimuli form a geometrical progression.

I give this piece of psycho-physical research merely to illustrate a method : I fully recognize the difficulties that later discussion has revealed in the way of accepting it as final. It is certainly true that it fails both for very low and for very high degrees of stimulation.

The frantic enthusiasm with which it was hailed in Germany as the discovery of the ultimate psycho-physical fact has by this time been sorely damped. But can any one doubt that we are at least on the track of valuable truth, and that the lesson of similar research elsewhere is to be both cautious and patient ?

Or take the case of memory. Introspection testifies to it as a fact ; physiology shows it to be a fact that is physically conditioned. I am conscious of the power to recall a past experience and to recognize it as past. The recognition involves much more than simple repetition ; it involves the judging thought that my past belongs together with my present to that psychic unity which we call the self. Consequently, the phenomenon of memory is fatal to every type of psychological atomism. Considered from the purely mental side it furnishes a rich field for minute, and yet immensely important psychological distinction. But if we approach it from the physical side we are faced with facts of a different order. We notice that as the nerve tissue decays in old age one remembers with perfect clearness the events of childhood but is strangely confused about the events of last year and perhaps even of last week. We find that in exhaustion and in disease memory plays us strange tricks. And most remarkable of all we find that after an intense brain shock— -for example the shock of a railway accident — a man may emerge with an injury which has destroyed his power of recalling one particular group of facts leaving the rest unimpaired. Knowledge of Greek perhaps has been wholly lost while his other knowledge remains as before.

We are at once impelled to find out all that we can in detail about this dependence of memory on neural conditions. Our only way of finding out is the way of experiment.

It would take us much too far afield if I attempted to describe the experiments upon memory that have actually been conducted. But no one can doubt the interest that attaches to the results or can dispute that those results are in the main firmly established. Ribot has classified the various sorts of memory image on the basis of facility of revival into —

1. Those of direct and easy revivability : visual,

auditory, tactile-motor.

2. Those of indirect and comparatively easy

revivability : pleasures and pains, emotions

{indirectly revivable because the emotional

state is induced only through the medium

of the intellectual state with which it was

associated).

3. Those of difficult revivability direct or

indirect : tastes, odours, internal sensations.

And the law has been provisionally laid down

that an impression is revivable in direct ratio to its

complexity and to the motor elements contained

in it.

Moreover, we now know that it is, strictly speaking, inaccurate to deal with Memory in general; there is not Memory, there are memories. One person can recall sights vividly but not sounds, another sounds but not sights. Moreover the study of aphasia has shown us that a single memory may be largely lost without the other memories being perceptibly aflfected. And the mention of aphasia leads us to notice a still further extension of experimentation from which a great deal may fairly be expected in the years to come.

So much light is being cast upon normal psychology by the study of morbid cases that some writers now speak of a distinct pathological method. The distinction, I think, is well worth drawing. There is a region, lamentably vast, where nature herself carries out experiments for us that we could not or dare not carry out for ourselves. The hospital for nervous diseases and the asylum for the insane are, from the point of view of the psychologist, laboratories of unique importance. An instrument is here put into our hands which acts, as M. Eibot has tersely said, at once as an insulator and as a magnifier. Factors relatively obscure in the normal mind and liable on that account to be entirely overlooked by the introspective psychologist are here presented in an exaggerated form, and apprise us, perhaps for the first time, of their existence. One element, it may be, is missing, and we find that we had never appreciated its value until we experienced its absence. Other elements are modified in varying degrees, and we can study by the method of concomitant variations how these elements afiect one another. It is as though we were examining some vast machine with a bewildering network of wheels and piston-rods and cranks, and, just as we had obtained some vague general idea of the working, we were shown samples of the same machine in all stages of derangement small and great, so that we might compare the normal working with the deviation caused by the loss of this or that fragment of the mechanism. We thus discover that many a process once thought simple is exceedingly complex, that features of consciousness once thought independent of one another are but aspects of a concrete unity, and that there are obscure and silent mental activities to which we have never even given a name, which are yet great motive forces in life. How much more do we know about imagery since we have studied hallucination, about personality since we have observed double and triple consciousness, about suggestibility since we have ceased to sneer at hypnotism and have begun to understand it ?

We must carefully bear in mind, however, that the experimental method and the pathological method do not by any means stand on the same logical footing. In an experiment we introduce an artificial change whose nature and limits we understand with tolerable precision : for example, we introduce a nerve-stimulus whose effect in the nerve world we know. It is an application of the method of difi'erence.

But no skilled neurologist would claim to know with anything like equal precision the nature and extent of a lesion in the brain. We cannot here apply the method of difference as a method of proof but only as a method of discovery. For no one can possibly be sure that the mental abnormality he is able to point out is the whole abnormality which is present. The great value of pathological study lies in its power of suggesting hypotheses. Deranged man is still man. That which is present in a state of morbid exaggeration or diminution in some persons is also present in some degree in all persons. But in very many cases either its existence or its influence has been hitherto cloaked and consequently ignored.

Take the instance of the "fixed idea." Any asylum will illustrate it. The case quoted by Eibot is that of a patient obsessed with the idea of killing his mother. The notion of such a thing was abhorrent to him. He declared that he had absolutely no motive or reason for doing so ; but try as he would to rid himself of it, the idea haunted him, and he voluntarily asked to be placed under restraint.

Two hypotheses of the first psychological importance are here suggested. The first is that the volitional aspect of mental life is capable of disturbance, while other aspects remain, so far as we can judge, normal. And once this has been suggested to us, we find no difficulty in multiplying illustrations. The knowing, the feeling, and the striving aspects of conscious life may be separately dislocated ; and we have at once a clue to the explanation of those apathias and aboulias, agoraphobias and claustrophobias, which have so long puzzled the alienist. And the case suggests in the second place the existence of such a thing as Ideo-Motor action, or action on the bare idea, particularly if the idea has a strong affective tone. For some reason or other the idea of himself as committing matricide has obtained a firm hold over the field of the patient's consciousness. In the absence of all rational motive that idea tends to work itself out in action. May it not be that in every one of us the presence of a bare idea has some tendency so to work itself out, even as in this case it has an overpowering tendency ? And is it not simply the presence of so many iahibiting ideas in the normal mind which prevents such ideo-motor action from being executed? If we carry this hypothesis with us we shall be able to understand not a few odd freaks of everyday experience. Dr. Johnson was certainly not mad in any ordinary sense of the word, yet he could not restrain himself from touching every lamppost as he passed it in the street, and he would carefully go back to touch one that he had omitted. How many persons whose sanity is unimpeachable have said that in standtag at the edge of a precipice they have invariably an impulse — inhibited as soon as it arises — to throw themselves over ! The more vivid and terrible the prospect, the greater seems to be the momentary power of the impulse. It is not the mere mechanical danger of overbalancing that makes it inadvisable for most persons to court death or glory at Carrick-a-rede. How many " extraordinary suicides," as the papers call them, take place at such spots among those to whom, if to any one, life ought to be sweet ? And what is the meaning of a suicide epidemic? How many persons feel a momentary tendency to drop a lighted lamp that they are carrying ? "I never," said a great banker, " hold in my hand a bundle of notes for an enormous amount without the idea of tearing them up flashing across my mind, and feeling a momentary impulse to do it." And why does the station-master warn us not to stand too near an incoming train? Not merely because a carriage door may be suddenly thrown open, but because we may be " drawn in " by what he describes as " the suction of the train." The theory that the train sucks deserves a place beside Nature's " abhorrence of a vacuum " ; we are not physically but psychically lured to our undoing, like the moth to the candle-flame.

Comparison, however, may be profitably instituted, not merely between the normal and the deranged, but between the mind of the child and the mind of the adult, or between human and animal intelligence. We cannot fail to learn something of a mature product by studying with care the process of its unfolding. In particular we may thus save ourselves from attributing to the highest and most recently developed mental activities phenomena that are sufficiently explained as reflex or as instinctive reactions. We think of man too much in the categories of rationality. A wholesome corrective is found when we see precisely the same types of action occurring in the animal, the savage, or the young child, to whom such complicated pieces of reasoning cannot possibly be ascribed. Hence the value of that ever-increasing literature which records careful and scientific observation of the phenomena of infancy, of instinct, and of the primitive races of mankind.

It is of the first importance, if our results are to be worth having, that we should not underestimate the difiiculties and dangers of this sort of research. Handling these data has risks other than those that belong to psychology in general. Other sciences must be everywhere laid under tribute. The zoologist must inform us with a nicety of distinction, which he has so far rarely reached, regarding the behaviour of animals. The anthropologist must give such halting and uncertain guidance as he can through the mazes of prehistoric custom. The philologist must discover for us in language the traces of a social life which has passed for ever from the world, save for the monuments which it has found for itself in words. And when the data have been collected and arranged, history shows in how many ways a blundering psychology may misuse them. The commonest fallacy is that of interpreting every kind of experience under the categories of our own experience. It still vitiates to a greater or less degree most of what is written about the mental life of animals. We observe the behaviour of the dog or the monkey, and we infer that because that behaviour if seen in man would probably be the outcome of a certain sort of intellectual process, the same process must be at work in the case before us. And once we have stereotyped such a view in a metaphor, we are most reluctant to reconsider it, whatever may be the extravagances to which it leads. For example, it is the opinion of some psychologists that the attraction exercised by the so-called "queen-bee" over the other occupants of the hive results from the possession of a special odour. But once it had occurred to some poetically-minded naturalist to use the title "queen" the imagination rapidly ran riot. The bees became a highly patriotic and even an imperialistic community. They have a developed industrial system. They have an elaborate architecture. They have a forethought, a power of adapting means to ends long foreseen, by which the moral of industry can be pointed for generations of schoolboys, and which may put many a statesman to shame. In their political thinking Socialism has made strides that the most ardent reformer of us all may envy. And what is true of the bees is true also of the ants, with their careful division of labour — their agricultural caste and their warrior caste. Such is the psychological havoc that is wrought by words.

But we are working our way out of these fogs. Scientists have long been acutely alive to anthropomorphism in theology ; they are coming now to see that anthropomorphism may work downwards as well as upwards. If we tend to degrade divine attributes after the likeness of human infirmity we tend no less to idealize into human dignity the mental life of the beasts of the field. Take for example the pretty story told by G. J. Eomanes in his book on " Animal Intelligence " :

" I have noticed in one of my formicaria a subterranean cemetery where I have seen some ants burying their dead by placing earth upon them. One ant was evidently much afiected and tried to exhume the bodies ; but the united exertions of the yellow sextons were more than sufficient to neutralize the effort of the disconsolate mourner."

The annotation of this tale by Wundt will be branded as " showing no feeling for the animal world " ; but it is absolutely sound psychology :

" It is a fact that the ants carry out of the nest, deposit near by, and cover up dead bodies just as they do anything that lies in their way. They can then pass to and fro without hindrance. In the observed case they were evidently interrupted

D in this occupation by another ant and resisted its interference. The cemetery, the sextons, the feelings of the disconsolate mourner which impelled her to exhume the body of the departed — aU this is a fiction of the sympathetic imagination of the observer."

William James was surely right when he spoke of the interpretation of the psychoses of animals, savages and infants as "wild work in which the personal equation of the investigator has things very much its own way ... no rules can be laid down ia advance. Comparative observations to be definite must usually be made to test some pre-existing hypothesis, and the only thing is to use as much sagacity as you possess and to be as candid as you can."

Ill

There is a third circumstance to which, more perhaps than to any change either in purpose or in method, we owe the revived interest in psychology. It has revealed itself as a science capable of application, and that in two senses :

(a) It casts light on not a few of the strictly speculative difficulties of other sciences ; and

(6) It is making important contributions to the perfecting of several practical arts.

(a) Consider in the first place the " Science of Society." How much industry and how much perverse ingenuity have been expended in the attempt to give an account of the origin of our social life and institutions ! We have long buried the conception of a contract in which primitive mankind swore fidelity to an arrangement dictated by " intelligent foresight " and " enlightened self-interest," The historians have assured us that such a notion is unhistorical, and that the records, such as they are, indicate on the contrary a slow development of the idea of contract out of the idea of status. But if psychology had not been so one-sided we should have required no historical research to inform us of our error, and that error still persists in a subtler form even after history has cast what light it can. For at bottom the error is a psychological one, consisting in a false though plausible theory of the springs of action. It was natural to take for granted that impulse and will in man are everywhere guided by purposive reason ; it followed that wherever we aim at things really detrimental this must be because we somehow imagine them to be advantageous. How natural the assumption was we may see from the attempts made by Greek thinkers to deal with the Socratic paradox. The common experience of seeing the better and choosing the worse was a standing puzzle in the ancient world ; the solutions offered were mainly in intellectual terms alleging an error of judgment ; and the enigma was not less perplexing to Bentham and Mill, nor was their answer more satisfactory. For, confining their analysis of human nature almost exclusively to the cognitive side, they could not help regarding man as always and everywhere a being that either consciously or unconsciously plans, adapts means to ends, reasons about things before doing them, and does everywhere the thing that on the whole at the time he does it seems to him most profitable. The construction of communal life was represented to have been the most ingenious of the devices adopted by this mythical being for the maximization of his own happiness.