XXI. [287]
THE PERCEPTION OF REALITY.
BELIEF.
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 of consent 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 (Grübelsucht by 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 difference to our minds between 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 his Psychologie, expresses this by saying that conception and belief (which he names judgment) 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 predicate to 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 answer Yes to this question 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 the object of 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 consciousness sui 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.
THE VARIOUS ORDERS OF REALITY.
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? When we, the onlooking psychologists, say the candle is unreal, we mean something quite definite, viz., that there is a world known to us which is real, and to which we perceive that the candle does not belong; it belongs exclusively to that individual mind, has no status anywhere 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 of other facts; and since those other facts are the realities par excellence for us, and the only things we believe in, the candle is simply outside of our reality and belief altogether.
By the hypothesis, however, the mind which sees the candle can 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. It is, it is that; it is there; 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 other thing 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 in the 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 the world 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, and what is 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 and attributive 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 that all 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, or extra 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 erroneous attributes, 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, the reductives of the things judged unreal.
THE MANY WORLDS.
Habitually and practically we do not count these disregarded things as existents at all. For them Væ victis is 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. As objects of fancy, as errors, as occupants 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 realities plus the 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 which is.
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's visa 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 the Iliad, that of King Lear, of the Pickwick 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 world whilst it is attended to is real after its own fashion; only the reality lapses with the attention.
THE WORLD OF 'PRACTICAL REALITIES.'
Each thinker, however, has dominant habits of attention; and these practically 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. Whatever positively 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--that horse 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 as some sort 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 consider so." 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 both interesting and important. The worlds whose objects are neither interesting nor important we treat simply negatively, we brand them as _un_real.
In the relative sense, then, the sense in which we contrast reality with simple _un_reality, and in which one thing is said to have more reality 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 the manner of their conception and in their feeling to the mind. I confess that it is impossible perfectly to explain this feeling or manner of conception.... Its true and proper name... is belief, 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 to us.
"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, are ipso facto real relations, and confer reality upon their objective term. The fons et origo of all reality, whether from the 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 to WITH A WILL. These are our living realities; 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 immediately stinging term. 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 that our 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 the cogito go bail for the reality of all that the cogito involved, 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 painted hook 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 this blasé condition, 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]
THE PARAMOUNT REALITY OF SENSATIONS.
But now we are met by questions of detail. What does this stirring, this exciting power, this interest, consist in, which some objects have? which are those '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 that discrepancies 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 stimulates eo ipso the 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 the diverse 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 the world 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, must terminate in 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 its term. Compare what was said on pages 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 we pin, 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 his existence. 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 its dramatis personæ with 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-Indian girl; 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'--and yet 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 'primary qualities,' more real than those 'secondary' qualities which eye and ear and nose reveal. Why do we thus so markedly select the tangible to 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, the most belief-compelling are those productive of pleasure or of pain. Locke expressly makes the pleasure- or pain-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 INFLUENCE OF EMOTION AND ACTIVE IMPULSE ON BELIEF.
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. In Chapter XXIV I 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 object excites us, 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 is sui compos is 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]
The reason of the belief is undoubtedly the bodily commotion which the exciting idea sets up. 'Nothing which I can feel like that can 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 and desired. "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 of mental 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 will cause that action to explode is 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]
Human credulity in the way of therapeutics has similar psychological roots. If there is anything intolerable (especially to the heart of a woman), it is to do nothing when a loved one is sick or in pain. To do anything is a relief. Accordingly, whatever remedy may be suggested is a spark on inflammable soil. The mind makes its spring towards action on that cue, sends for that remedy, and for a day at least believes the danger past. Blame, dread, and hope are thus the great belief-inspiring passions, and cover among them the future, the present, and the past.
These remarks illustrate the earlier heads of the list on page 292. Whichever represented objects give us sensations, especially interesting ones, or incite our motor impulses, or arouse our hate, desire, or fear, are real enough for us. Our requirements in the way of reality terminate in our own acts and emotions, our own pleasures and pains. These are the ultimate fixities from which, as we formerly observed, the whole chain of our beliefs depends, object hanging to object, as the bees, in swarming, hang to each other until, de proche en proche, the supporting branch, the Self, is reached and held.
BELIEF IN OBJECTS OF THEORY.
Now the merely conceived or imagined objects which our mind represents as hanging to the sensations (causing them, etc.), filling the gaps between them, and weaving their interrupted chaos into order are innumerable. Whole systems of them conflict with other systems, and our choice of which system shall carry our belief is governed by principles which are simple enough, however subtle and difficult may be their application to details. The conceived system, to pass for true, must at least include the reality of the sensible objects in it, by explaining them as effects on us, if nothing more. The system which includes the most of them, and definitely explains or pretends to explain the most of them, will, ceteris paribus, prevail. It is needless to say how far mankind still is from having excogitated such a system. But the various materialisms, idealisms, and hylozoisms show with what industry the attempt is forever made. It is conceivable that several rival theories should equally well include the actual order of our sensations in their scheme, much as the one-fluid and two-fluid theories of electricity formulated all the common electrical phenomena equally well. The sciences are full of these alternatives. Which theory is then to be believed? That theory will be most generally believed which, besides offering us objects able to account satisfactorily for our sensible experience, also offers those which are most interesting, those which appeal most urgently to our æsthetic, emotional, and active needs. So here, in the higher intellectual life, the same selection among general conceptions goes on which went on among the sensations themselves. First, a word of their relation to our emotional and active needs--and here I can do no better than quote from an article published some years ago:[313]
"A philosophy may be unimpeachable in other respects, but either of two defects will be fatal to its universal acceptance. First, its ultimate principle must not be one that essentially baffles and disappoints our dearest desires and most cherished powers. A pessimistic principle like Schopenhauer's incurably vicious Will-substance, or Hartmann's wicked jack-at-all-trades, the Unconscious, will perpetually call forth essays at other philosophies. Incompatibility of the future with their desires and active tendencies is, in fact, to most men a source of more fixed disquietude than uncertainty itself. Witness the attempts to overcome the 'problem of evil,' the 'mystery of pain.' There is no problem of 'good.'
"But a second and worse defect in a philosophy than that of contradicting our active propensities is to give them no Object whatever to press against. A philosophy whose principle is so incommensurate with our most intimate powers as to deny them all relevancy in universal affairs, as to annihilate their motives at one blow, will be even more unpopular than pessimism. Better face the enemy than the eternal Void! This is why materialism will always fail of universal adoption, however well it may fuse things into an atomistic unity, however clearly it may prophesy the future eternity. For materialism denies reality to the objects of almost all the impulses which we most cherish. The real meaning of the impulses, it says, is something which has no emotional interest for us whatever. But what is called extradition is quite as characteristic of our emotions as of our sense. Both point to an Object as the cause of the present feeling. What an intensely objective reference lies in fear! In like manner an enraptured man, a dreary-feeling man, are not simply aware of their subjective states; if they were, the force of their feelings would evaporate. Both believe there is outward cause why they should feel as they do: either 'It is a glad world! how good is life!' or 'What a loathsome tedium is existence!' Any philosophy which annihilates the validity of the reference by explaining away its objects or translating them into terms of no emotional pertinency leaves the mind with little to care or act for. This is the opposite condition from that of nightmare, but when acutely brought home to consciousness it produces a kindred horror. In nightmare we have motives to act, but no power; here we have powers, but no motives. A nameless Unheimlichkeit comes over us at the thought of there being nothing eternal in our final purposes, in the objects of those loves and aspirations which are our deepest energies. The monstrously lopsided equation of the universe and its knower, which we postulate as the ideal of cognition, is perfectly paralleled by the no less lopsided equation of the universe and the doer. We demand in it a character for which our emotions and active propensities shall be a match. Small as we are, minute as is the point by which the Cosmos impinges upon each one of us, each one desires to feel that his reaction at that point is congruous with the demands of the vast whole, that he balances the latter, so to speak, and is able to do what it expects of him. But as his abilities to 'do' lie wholly in the line of his natural propensities; as he enjoys reaction with such emotions as fortitude, hope, rapture, admiration, earnestness, and the like; and as he very unwillingly reacts with fear, disgust, despair, or doubt,--a philosophy which should legitimate only emotions of the latter sort would be sure to leave the mind a prey to discontent and craving.
"It is far too little recognized how entirely the intellect is built up of practical interests. The theory of Evolution is beginning to do very good service by its reduction of all mentality to the type of reflex action. Cognition, in this view, is but a fleeting moment, a cross-section at a certain point of what in its totality is a motor phenomenon. In the lower forms of life no one will pretend that cognition is anything more than a guide to appropriate action. The germinal question concerning things brought for the first time before consciousness is not the theoretic 'What is that?' but the practical 'Who goes there?' or rather, as Horwicz has admirably put it, 'What is to be done?'--'Was fang' ich an?' In all our discussions about the intelligence of lower animals the only test we use is that of their acting as if for a purpose. Cognition, in short, is incomplete until discharged in act. And although it is true that the later mental development, which attains its maximum through the hypertrophied cerebrum of man, gives birth to a vast amount of theoretic activity over and above that which is immediately ministerial to practice, yet the earlier claim is only postponed, not effaced, and the active nature asserts its rights to the end.
"If there be any truth at all in this view, it follows that however vaguely a philosopher may define the ultimate universal datum, he cannot be said to leave it unknown to us so long as he in the slightest degree pretends that our emotional or active attitude towards it should be of one sort rather than another. He who says, 'Life is real, life is earnest,' however much he may speak of the fundamental mysteriousness of things, gives a distinct definition to that mysteriousness by ascribing to it the right to claim from us the particular mood called seriousness, which means the willingness to live with energy, though energy bring pain. The same is true of him who says that all is vanity. Indefinable as the predicate vanity may be in se, it is clearly enough something which permits anæsthesia, mere escape from suffering, to be our rule of life. There is no more ludicrous incongruity than for agnostics to proclaim with one breath that the substance of things is unknowable, and with the next that the thought of it should inspire us with admiration of its glory, reverence, and a willingness to add our co-operative push in the direction towards which its manifestations seem to be drifting. The unknowable may be unfathomed, but if it make such distinct demands upon our activity, we surely are not ignorant of its essential quality.
"If we survey the field of history and ask what feature all great periods of revival, of expansion of the human mind, display in common, we shall find, I think, simply this: that each and all of them have said to the human being, 'The inmost nature of the reality is congenial to powers which you possess.' In what did the emancipating message of primitive Christianity consist, but in the announcement that God recognizes those weak and tender impulses which paganism had so rudely overlooked? Take repentance: the man who can do nothing rightly can at least repent of his failures. But for paganism this faculty of repentance was a pure supernumerary, a straggler too late for the fair. Christianity took it and made it the one power within us which appealed straight to the heart of God. And after the night of the Middle Ages had so long branded with obloquy even the generous impulses of the flesh, and defined the Reality to be such that only slavish natures could commune with it, in what did the Sursum corda! of the Renaissance lie but in the proclamation that the archetype of verity in things laid claim on the widest activity of our whole æsthetic being? What were Luther's mission and Wesley's but appeals to powers which even the meanest of men might carry with them, faith and self-despair, but which were personal, requiring no priestly intermediation, and which brought their owner face to face with God? What caused the wild-fire influence of Rousseau but the assurance he gave that man's nature was in harmony with the nature of things, if only the paralyzing corruptions of custom would stand from between? How did Kant and Fichte, Goethe and Schiller, inspire their time with cheer, except by saying, 'Use all your powers; that is the only obedience which the universe exacts'? And Carlyle with his gospel of Work, of Fact, of Veracity, how does he move us except by saying that the universe imposes no tasks upon us but such as the most humble can perform? Emerson's creed that everything that ever was or will be is here in the enveloping Now; that man has but to obey himself--'He who will rest in what he is, is a part of Destiny'--is in like manner nothing but an exorcism of all scepticism as to the pertinency of one's natural faculties.
"In a word, 'Son of Man, stand upon thy feet and I will speak unto thee!' is the only revelation of truth to which the solving epochs have helped the disciple. But that has been enough to satisfy the greater part of his rational need. In se and per se the universal essence has hardly been more defined by any of these formulæ than by the agnostic x; but the mere assurance that my powers, such as they are, are not irrelevant to it, but pertinent, that it speaks to them and will in some way recognize their reply, that I can be a match for it if I will, and not a footless waif, suffices to make it rational to my feeling in the sense given above. Nothing could be more absurd than to hope for the definitive triumph of any philosophy which should refuse to legitimate, and to legitimate in an emphatic manner, the more powerful of our emotional and practical tendencies. Fatalism, whose solving word in all crises of behavior is 'All striving is vain,' will never reign supreme, for the impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race. Moral creeds which speak to that impulse will be widely successful in spite of inconsistency, vagueness, and shadowy determination of expectancy. Man needs a rule for his will, and will invent one if one be not given him."
After the emotional and active needs come the intellectual and æsthetic ones. The two great æsthetic principles, of richness and of ease, dominate our intellectual as well as our sensuous life. And, ceteris paribus, no system which should not be rich, simple, and harmonious would have a chance of being chosen for belief, if rich, simple, and harmonious systems were also there. Into the latter we should unhesitatingly settle, with that welcoming attitude of the will in which belief consists. To quote from a remarkable book:
"This law that our consciousness constantly tends to the minimum of complexity and to the maximum of definiteness, is of great importance for all our knowledge.... Our own activity of attention will thus determine what we are to know and what we are to believe. If things have more than a certain complexity, not only will our limited powers of attention forbid us to unravel this complexity, but we shall strongly desire to believe the things much simpler than they are. For our thoughts about them will have a constant tendency to become as simple and definite as possible. Put a man into a perfect chaos of phenomena--sounds, sights, feelings--and if the man continued to exist, and to be rational at all, his attention would doubtless soon find for him away to make up some kind of rhythmic regularity, which he would impute to the things about him, so as to imagine that he had discovered some laws of sequence in this mad new world. And thus, in every case where we fancy ourselves sure of a simple law of Nature, we must remember that a great deal of the fancied simplicity may be due, in the given case, not to Nature, but to the ineradicable prejudice of our own minds in favor of regularity and simplicity. All our thoughts are determined, in great measure, by this law of least effort, as it is found exemplified in our activity of attention.... The aim of the whole process seems to be to reach as complete and united a conception of reality as possible, a conception wherein the greatest fulness of data shall be combined with the greatest simplicity of conception. The effort of consciousness seems to be to combine the greatest richness of content with the greatest definiteness of organization."[314]
The richness is got by including all the facts of sense in the scheme; the simplicity, by deducing them out of the smallest possible number of permanent and independent primordial entities: the definite organization, by assimilating these latter to ideal objects between which relations of an inwardly rational sort obtain. What these ideal objects and rational relations are will require a separate chapter to show.[315] Meanwhile, enough has surely been said to justify the assertion made above that no general off-hand answer can be given as to which objects mankind shall choose as its realities. The fight is still under way. Our minds are yet chaotic; and at best we make a mixture and a compromise, as we yield to the claim of this interest or that, and follow first one and then another principle in turn. It is undeniably true that materialistic, or so-called 'scientific,' conceptions of the universe have so far gratified the purely intellectual interests more than the mere sentimental conceptions have. But, on the other hand, as already remarked, they leave the emotional and active interests cold. The perfect object of belief would be a God or 'Soul of the World,' represented both optimistically and moralistically (if such a combination could be), and withal so definitely conceived as to show us why our phenomenal experiences should be sent to us by Him in just the very way in which they come. All Science and all History would thus be accounted for in the deepest and simplest fashion. The very room in which I sit, its sensible walls and floor, and the feeling the air and fire within it give me, no less than the 'scientific' conceptions which I am urged to frame concerning the mode of existence of all these phenomena when my back is turned, would then all be corroborated, not de-realized, by the ultimate principle of my belief. The World-soul sends me just those phenomena in order that I may react upon them; and among the reactions is the intellectual one of spinning these conceptions. What is beyond the crude experiences is not an alternative to them, but something that means them for me here and now. It is safe to say that, if ever such a system is satisfactorily excogitated, mankind will drop all other systems and cling to that one alone as real. Meanwhile the other systems coexist with the attempts at that one, and, all being alike fragmentary, each has its little audience and day.
* * * * *
I have now, I trust, shown sufficiently what the psychologic sources of the sense of reality are. Certain postulates are given in our nature; and whatever satisfies those postulates is treated as if real.[316] I might therefore finish the chapter here, were it not that a few additional words will set the truth in a still clearer light.
DOUBT.
There is hardly a common man who (if consulted) would not say that things come to us in the first instance as ideas; and that if we take them for realities, it is because we add something to them, namely, the predicate of having also 'real existence outside of our thought.' This notion that a higher faculty than the mere having of a conscious content is needed to make us know anything real by its means has pervaded psychology from the earliest times, and is the tradition of Scholasticism, Kantism, and Common-sense. Just as sensations must come as inward affections and then be 'extradited;' as objects of memory must appear at first as presently unrealities, and subsequently be 'projected' backwards as past realities; so conceptions must be entia rationis till a higher faculty uses them as windows to look beyond the ego, into the real extra-mental world;--so runs the orthodox and popular account.
And there is no question that this is a true account of the way in which many of our later beliefs come to pass. The logical distinction between the bare thought of an object and belief in the object's reality is often a chronological distinction as well. The having and the crediting of an idea do not always coalesce; for often we first suppose and then believe; first play with the notion, frame the hypothesis, and then affirm the existence, of an object of thought. And we are quite conscious of the succession of the two mental acts. But these cases are none of them primitive cases. They only occur in minds long schooled to doubt by the contradictions of experience. The primitive impulse is to affirm immediately the reality of all that is conceived.[317] When we do doubt, however, in what does the subsequent resolution of the doubt consist? It either consists in a purely verbal performance, the coupling of the adjectives 'real' or 'outwardly existing' (as predicates) to the thing originally conceived (as subject); or it consists in the perception in the given case of that for which these adjectives, abstracted from other similar concrete cases, stand. But what these adjectives stand for, we now know well. They stand for certain relations (immediate, or through intermediaries) to ourselves. Whatever concrete objects have hitherto stood in those relations have been for us 'real,' 'outwardly existing.' So that when we now abstractly admit a thing to be 'real' (without perhaps going through any definite perception of its relations), it is as if we said "it belongs in the same world with those other objects." Naturally enough, we have hourly opportunities for this summary process of belief. All remote objects in space or time are believed in this way. When I believe that some prehistoric savage chipped this flint, for example, the reality of the savage and of his act makes no direct appeal either to my sensation, emotion, or volition. What I mean by my belief in it is simply my dim sense of a continuity between the long dead savage and his doings and the present world of which the flint forms part. It is pre-eminently a case for applying our doctrine of the 'fringe' (see Vol I. p. 258). When I think the savage with one fringe of relationship, I believe in him; when I think him without that fringe, or with another one (as, e.g., if I should class him with 'scientific vagaries' in general), I disbelieve him. The word 'real' itself is, in short, a fringe.
RELATIONS OF BELIEF AND WILL.
We shall see in Chapter XXV that will consists in nothing but a manner of attending to certain objects, or consenting to their stable presence before the mind. The objects, in the case of will, are those whose existence depends on our thought, movements of our own body for example, or facts which such movements executed in future may make real. Objects of belief, on the contrary, are those which do not change according as we think regarding them. I will to get up early to-morrow morning; I believe that I got up late yesterday morning; I will that my foreign bookseller in Boston shall procure me a German book and write to him to that effect. I believe that he will make me pay three dollars for it when it comes, etc. Now the important thing to notice is that this difference between the objects of will and belief is entirely immaterial, as far as the relation of the mind to them goes. All that the mind does is in both cases the same; it looks at the object and consents to its existence, espouses it, says 'it shall be my reality.' It turns to it, in short, in the interested active emotional way. The rest is done by nature, which in some cases makes the objects real which we think of in this manner, and in other cases does not. Nature cannot change the past to suit our thinking. She cannot change the stars or the winds; but she does change our bodies to suit our thinking, and through their instrumentality changes much besides; so the great practical distinction between objects which we may will or unwill, and objects which we can merely believe or disbelieve, grows up, and is of course one of the most important distinctions in the world. Its roots, however, do not lie in psychology, but in physiology; as the chapter on Volition will abundantly make plain. Will and Belief, in short, meaning a certain relation between objects and the Self, are two names for one and the same PSYCHOLOGICAL phenomenon. All the questions which arise concerning one are questions which arise concerning the other. The causes and conditions of the peculiar relation must be the same in both. The free-will question arises as regards belief. If our wills are indeterminate, so must our beliefs be, etc. The first act of free-will, in short, would naturally be to believe in free-will, etc. In Chapter XXVI, I shall mention this again.
* * * * *
A practical observation may end this chapter. If belief consists in an emotional reaction of the entire man on an object, how can we believe at will? We cannot control our emotions. Truly enough, a man cannot believe at will abruptly. Nature sometimes, and indeed not very infrequently, produces instantaneous conversions for us. She suddenly puts us in an active connection with objects of which she had till then left us cold. "I realize for the first time," we then say, "what that means!" This happens often with moral propositions. We have often heard them; but now they shoot into our lives; they move us; we feel their living force. Such instantaneous beliefs are truly enough not to be achieved by will. But gradually our will can lead us to the same results by a very simple method: we need only in cold blood ACT as if the thing in question were real, and keep acting as if it were real, and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real. It will become so knit with habit and emotion that our interests in it will be those which characterize belief. Those to whom 'God' and 'Duty' are now mere names can make them much more than that, if they make a little sacrifice to them every day. But all this is so well known in moral and religious education that I need say no more.[318]
* * * * *
[287] Reprinted, with additions, from 'Mind' for July 1889.
[288] Compare this psychological fact with the corresponding logical truth that all negation rests on covert assertion of something else than the thing denied. (See Bradley's Principles of Logic, bk. i. ch. 3.)
[289] See that very remarkable little work, 'The Anæsthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy,' by Benj. P. Blood (Amsterdam, N. Y., 1874). Compare also Mind, vii. 206.
[290] "To one whose mind is healthy thoughts come and go unnoticed; with me they have to be faced, thought about in a peculiar fashion, and then disposed of as finished, and this often when I am utterly wearied and would be at peace; but the call is imperative. This goes on to the hindrance of all natural action. If I were told that the staircase was on fire and I had only a minute to escape, and the thought arose--'Have they sent for fire-engines? Is it probable that the man who has the key is on hand? Is the man a careful sort of person? Will the key be hanging on a peg? Am I thinking rightly? Perhaps they don't lock the depot'--my foot would be lifted to go down; I should be conscious to excitement that I was losing my chance; but I should be unable to stir until all these absurdities were entertained and disposed of. In the most critical moments of my life, when I ought to have been so engrossed as to leave no room for any secondary thoughts, I have been oppressed by the inability to be at peace. And in the most ordinary circumstances it is all the same. Let me instance the other morning I went to walk. The day was biting cold, but I was unable to proceed except by jerks. Once I got arrested, my feet in a muddy pool. One foot was lifted to go, knowing that it was not good to be standing in water, but there I was fast, the cause of detention being the discussing with myself the reasons why I should not stand in that pool." (T. S. Clouston, Clinical Lectures on Mental Diseases, 1883, p. 43. See also Berger, in Archiv f. Psychiatrie, vi. 217.)
[291] Note to Jas. Mill's Analysis, i. 412-428.
[292] For an excellent account of the history of opinion on this subject see A. Marty, in Vierteljahrsch. f. wiss. Phil., viii. 181 ff. (1884).
[293] We saw near the end of Chapter XIX that a candle-image taking exclusive possession of the mind in this way would probably acquire the sensational vividness. But this physiological accident is logically immaterial to the argument in the text, which ought to apply as well to the dimmest sort of mental image as to the brightest sensation.
[294] In both existential and attributive judgments a synthesis is represented. The syllable ex in the word Existence, da in the word Dasein, express it. 'The candle exists' is equivalent to 'The candle is over there.' And the 'over there' means real space, space related to other reals. The proposition amounts to saying: 'The candle is in the same space with other reals.' It affirms of the candle a very concrete predicate--namely, this relation to other particular concrete things. Their real existence, as we shall later see, resolves itself into their peculiar relation to ourselves. Existence is thus no substantive quality when we predicate it of any object; it is a relation, ultimately terminating in ourselves, and at the moment when it terminates, becoming a practical relation. But of this more anon. I only wish now to indicate the superficial nature of the distinction between the existential and the attributive proposition.
[295] I define the scientific universe here in the radical mechanical way. Practically, it is oftener thought of in a mongrel way and resembles in more points the popular physical world.
[296] It thus comes about that we can say such things as that Ivanhoe did not really marry Rebecca, as Thackeray falsely makes him do. The real Ivanhoe-world is the one which Scott wrote down for us. In that world Ivanhoe does not marry Rebecca. The objects within that world are knit together by perfectly definite relations, which can be affirmed or denied. Whilst absorbed in the novel, we turn our backs on all other worlds, and, for the time, the Ivanhoe-world remains our absolute reality. When we wake from the spell, however, we find a still more real world, which reduces Ivanhoe, and all things connected with him, to the Active status, and relegates them to one of the sub-universes grouped under No. 5.
[297] The world of dreams is our real world whilst we are sleeping, because our attention then lapses from the sensible world. Conversely, when we wake the attention usually lapses from the dream-world and that becomes unreal. But if a dream haunts us and compels our attention during the day it is very apt to remain figuring in our consciousness as a sort of sub-universe alongside of the waking world. Most people have probably had dreams which it is hard to imagine not to have been glimpses into an actually existing region of being, perhaps a corner of the 'spiritual world.' And dreams have accordingly in all ages been regarded as revelations, and have played a large part in furnishing forth mythologies and creating themes for faith to lay hold upon. The 'larger universe,' here, which helps us to believe both in the dream and in the waking reality which is its immediate reductive, is the total universe, of Nature plus the Supernatural. The dream holds true, namely, in one half of that universe; the waking perceptions in the other half. Even to-day dream-objects figure among the realities in which some 'psychic-researchers' are seeking to rouse our belief. All our theories, not only those about the supernatural, but our philosophic and scientific theories as well, are like our dreams in rousing such different degrees of belief in different minds.
[298] Distinguishes realities from unrealities, the essential from the rubbishy and neglectable.
[299] Inquiry concerning Hum. Understanding, sec. v. pt. 2 (slightly transposed in my quotation).
[300] Note to Jas. Mill's Analysis, i. 394.
[301] Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Müller, ii. 515-17. Hume also: "When, after the simple conception of anything, we would conceive it as existent, we in reality make no addition to, or alteration of, our first idea. Thus, when we affirm that God is existent, we simply form the idea of such a being as He is represented to us; nor is the existence which we attribute to Him conceived by a particular idea, which we join to His other qualities, and can again separate and distinguish from them.... The belief of the existence joins no new idea to those which compose the ideas of the object. When I think of God, when I think of Him as existent, and when I believe Him to be existent, my idea of Him neither increases nor diminishes. But as 'tis certain there is a great difference betwixt the simple conception of the existence of an object and the belief of it, and as this difference lies not in the facts or compositions of the idea which we conceive, it follows that it must lie in the manner in which we conceive it." (Treatise of Human Nature, pt. iii. sec. 7.)
[302] I use the notion of the Ego here, as common-sense uses it. Nothing is prejudged as to the results (or absence of results) of ulterior attempts to analyze the notion.
[303] Griesinger, Mental Diseases, §§ 50, 98. The neologism we so often hear, that an experience 'gives us a realising sense' of the truth of some proposition or other, illustrates the dependence of the sense of reality upon excitement. Only what stirs us is 'realized.'
[304] The way in which sensations are pitted against systematized conceptions, and in which the one or the other then prevails according as the sensations are felt by ourselves or merely known by report, is interestingly illustrated at the present day by the state of public belief about 'spiritualistic' phenomena. There exist numerous narratives of movement without contact on the part of articles of furniture and other material objects, in the presence of certain privileged individuals called mediums. Such movement violates our memories, and the whole system of accepted physical 'science.' Consequently those who have not seen it either brand the narratives immediately as lies or call the phenomena 'illusions' of sense, produced by fraud or due to hallucination. But one who has actually seen such a phenomenon, under what seems to him sufficiently 'test-conditions,' will hold to his sensible experience through thick and thin, even though the whole fabric of 'science' should be rent in twain. That man would be a weak-spirited creature indeed who should allow any fly-blown generalities about 'the liability of the senses to be deceived' to bully him out of his adhesion to what for him was an indubitable experience of sight. A man may err in this obstinacy, sure enough, in any particular case. But the spirit that animates him is that on which ultimately the very life and health of Science rest.
[305] Treatise of Human Nature, bk. i. pt. iii. sec. 7.
[306] Early Hist. of Mankind, p. 108.
[307] See Vol. I. pp. 285-6; Vol. II. pp. 237 ff.
[308] See Theory of Vision, § 59.
[309] Essay, bk. iv. chap. 2, § 14. In another place: "He that sees a candle burning and hath experimented the force of its flame by putting his finger into it, will little doubt that this is something existing without him, which does him harm and puts him to great pain.... And if our dreamer pleases to try whether the glowing heat of a glass furnace be barely a wandering imagination in a drowsy man's fancy by putting his hand into it, he may, perhaps, be awakened into a certainty greater than he could wish, that it is something more than bare imagination. So that the evidence is as great as we can desire, being as certain to us as our pleasure or pain, i.e. happiness or misery; beyond which we have no concernment, either of knowledge or being. Such an assurance of the existence of things without us is sufficient to direct us in the attaining the good and avoiding the evil which is caused by them, which is the important concernment we have of being made acquainted with them," (Ibid. bk. iv. chap. 11, § 8.)
[310] W. Bagehot, 'The Emotion of Conviction,' Literary Studies, i. 412-17.
[311] Psychologie Rationnelle, ch. 12.
[312] Two examples out of a thousand:
Reid, Inquiry, ch. ii. § 9: "I remember, many years ago, a white ox was brought into the country, of so enormous size that people came many miles to see him. There happened, some months after, an uncommon fatality among women in child-hearing. Two such uncommon events, following one another, gave a suspicion of their connection, and occasioned a common opinion among the country people that the white ox was the cause of this fatality."
H. M. Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, ii. 388: "On the third day of our stay at Mowa, feeling quite comfortable amongst the people, on account of their friendly bearing, I began to write in my note-book the terms for articles, in order to improve my already copious vocabulary of native words. I had proceeded only a few minutes when I observed a strange commotion amongst the people who had been flocking about me, and presently they ran away. In a short time we heard war-cries ringing loudly and shrilly over the table-land. Two hours afterwards a long line of warriors were seen descending the table-land and advancing towards our camp. There may have been between five and six hundred of them. We, on the other hand, had made but few preparations except such as would justify us replying to them in the event of the actual commencement of hostilities. But I had made many firm friends among them, and I firmly believed that I should be able to avert an open rupture. When they had assembled at about a hundred yards in front of our camp, Safeni and I walked up towards them and sat down midway. Some half-dozen of the Mowa people came near, and the shauri began.
"'What is the matter, my friends?' I asked. 'Why do you come with guns in your hands, in such numbers, as though you were coming to fight? Fight? fight us, your friends! Tut! this is some great mistake, surely.'
"'Mundele,' replied one of them,... 'our people saw you yesterday make marks on some tara-tara [paper]. This is very bad. Our country will waste, our goats will die, our bananas will rot, and our women will dry up. What have we done to you that you should wish to kill us? We have sold you food and we have brought you wine each day. Your people are allowed to wander where they please without trouble. Why is the Mundele so wicked? We have gathered together to fight you if you do not burn that tara-tara now before our eyes. If you burn it we go away, and shall be your friends as heretofore.'
"'I told them to rest there, and left Safeni in their hands as a pledge that I should return. My tent was not fifty yards from the spot, but while going towards it my brain was busy in devising some plan to foil this superstitious madness. My note-book contained a vast number of valuable notes.... I could not sacrifice it to the childish caprice of savages. As I was rummaging my book-box, I came across a volume of Shakespeare [Chandos edition] much worn, and well thumbed, and which was of the same size as my field-book; its cover was similar also, and it might be passed for the field-book, provided that no one remembered its appearance too well. I took it to them. 'Is this the tara-tara, friends, that you wish burned?'
"'Yes, yes, that is it.'
"'Well, take it, and burn it, or keep it.'
"'M--m. No, no, no. We will not touch it. It is fetish. You must burn it.'
"'I! Well, let it be so. I will do anything to please my good friends of Mowa.'
"'We walked to the nearest fire. I breathed a regretful farewell to my genial companion, which, during my many weary hours of night, had assisted to relieve my mind when oppressed by almost intolerable woes, and then gravely consigned the innocent Shakespeare to the flames, heaping the brush fuel over it with ceremonious care.
"'A-h-h,' breathed the poor deluded natives sighing their relief.... 'There is no trouble now.'... And something approaching to a cheer was shouted among them, which terminated the episode of the burning of Shakespeare."
[313] 'Rationality, Activity, and Faith' (Princeton Review, July 1882, pp. 64-9).
[314] J. Royce, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (Boston, 1885). pp. 317-57.
[315] Chapter XXVII.
[316] Prof. Royce puts this well in discussing idealism and the reality of an 'external' world. "If the history of popular speculation on these topics could be written, how much of cowardice and shuffling would be found in the behavior of the natural mind before the question, 'How dost thou know of an external reality?' Instead of simply and plainly answering: 'I mean by the external world in the first place something that I accept or demand, that I posit, postulate, actively construct on the basis of sense-data,' the natural man gives us all kinds of vague compromise answers.... Where shall these endless turnings and twistings have an end?... All these lesser motives are appealed to, and the one ultimate motive is neglected. The ultimate motive with the man of every-day life is the will to have an external world. Whatever consciousness contains, reason will persist in spontaneously adding the thought: 'But there shall be something beyond this.'... The popular assurance of an external world is the fixed determination to make one, now and henceforth." (Religious Aspect of Philosophy, p. 304--the italics are my own.) This immixture of the will appears most flagrantly in the fact that although external matter is doubted commonly enough, minds external to our own are never doubted. We need them too much, are too essentially social to dispense with them. Semblances of matter may suffice to react upon, but not semblances of communing souls. A psychic solipsism is too hideous a mockery of our wants, and, so far as I know, has never been seriously entertained.--Chapters ix and x of Prof. Royce's work are on the whole the clearest account of the psychology of belief with which I am acquainted.
[317] "The leading fact in Belief, according to my view of it, is our Primitive Credulity. We begin by believing everything; whatever is, is true.... The animal born in the morning of a summer day proceeds upon the fact of daylight; assumes the perpetuity of that fact. Whatever it is disposed to do, it does without misgivings. If in the morning it began a round of operations continuing for hours, under the full benefit of daylight, it would unhesitatingly begin the same round in the evening. Its state of mind is practically one of unbounded confidence; but, as yet, it does not understand what confidence means.
"The pristine assurance is soon met by checks; a disagreeable experience leading to new insight. To be thwarted and opposed is one of our earliest and most frequent pains. It develops the sense of a distinction between free and obstructed impulses; the unconsciousness of an open way is exchanged for consciousness; we are now said properly to believe in what has never been contradicted, as we disbelieve in what has been contradicted. We believe that, after the dawn of day, there is before us a continuance of light; we do not believe that this light is to continue forever.
"Thus, the vital circumstance in belief is never to be contradicted--never to lose prestige. The number of repetitions counts for little in the process: we are as much convinced after ten as after fifty; we are more convinced by ten unbroken than by fifty for and one against." (Bain: The Emotions and the Will, pp. 511, 512.)
[318] Literature. D. Hume: Treatise on Human Nature, part iii. §§ vii-x. A. Bain: Emotions and Will, chapter on Belief (also pp. 20 ff.). J. Sully: Sensation and Intuition, essay iv. J. Mill: Analysis of Human Mind, chapter xi. Ch. Renouvier: Psychologie Rationnelle, vol. ii. pt. ii. and Esquisse d'une Classification systématique des Doctrines Philosophiques, part vi. J. H. Newman: The Grammar of Assent. J. Venn: Some Characteristics of Belief. V. Brochard: De l'Erreur, part ii. chap. vi, ix; and Revue Philosophique, xxviii. 1. E. Rabier: Psychologie, chap xxi. Appendix. Ollé Laprune: La Certitude Morale (1881). G. F. Stout: On Genesis of Cognition of Physical Reality, in 'Mind,' Jan. 1890. J. Pikler: The Psychology of the Belief in Objective Existence (London, 1890).--Mill says that we believe present sensations; and makes our belief in all other things a matter of association with these. So far so good; but as he makes no mention of emotional or volitional reaction, Bain rightly charges him with treating belief as a purely intellectual state. For Bain belief is rather an incident of our active life. When a thing is such as to make us act on it, then we believe it, according to Bain. "But how about past things, or remote things, upon which no reaction of ours is possible? And how about belief in things which check action?" says Sully; who considers that we believe a thing only when "the idea of it has an inherent tendency to approximate in character and intensity to a sensation." It is obvious that each of these authors emphasizes a true aspect of the question. My own account has sought to be more complete, sensation, association, and active reaction all being acknowledged to be concerned. The most compendious possible formula perhaps would be that our belief and attention are the same fact. For the moment, what we attend to is reality; Attention is a motor reaction; and we are so made that sensations force attention from us. On Belief and Conduct see an article by Leslie Stephen, Fortnightly Review, July 1888.
A set of facts have been recently brought to my attention which I hardly know how to treat, so I say a word about them in this foot-note. I refer to a type of experience which has frequently found a place amongst the 'Yes' answers to the 'Census of Hallucinations,' and which is generally described by those who report it as an 'impression of the presence' of someone near them, although no sensation either of sight, hearing, or touch is involved. From the way in which this experience is spoken of by those who have had it, it would appear to be an extremely definite and positive state of mind, coupled with a belief in the reality of its object quite as strong as any direct sensation ever gives. And yet no sensation seems to be connected with it at all. Sometimes the person whose nearness is thus impressed is a known person, dead or living, sometimes an unknown one. His attitude and situation are often very definitely impressed, and so, sometimes (though not by way of hearing), are words which he wishes to say.
The phenomenon would seem to be due to a pure conception becoming saturated with the sort of stinging urgency which ordinarily only sensations bring. But I cannot yet persuade myself that the urgency in question consists in concomitant emotional and motor impulses. The 'impression' may come quite suddenly and depart quickly; it may carry no emotional suggestions, and wake no motor consequences beyond those involved in attending to it. Altogether, the matter is somewhat paradoxical, and no conclusion can be come to until more definite data are obtained.
Perhaps the most curious case of the sort which I have received is the following. The subject of the observation, Mr. P., is an exceptionally intelligent witness, though the words of the narrative are his wife's.
"Mr. P. has all his life been the occasional subject of rather singular delusions or impressions of various kinds. If I had belief in the existence of latent or embryo faculties, other than the five senses, I should explain them on that ground. Being totally blind, his other perceptions are abnormally keen and developed, and given the existence of a rudimentary sixth sense, it would be only natural that this also should be more acute in him than in others. One of the most interesting of his experiences in this line was the frequent apparition of a corpse some years ago, which may be worth the attention of your Committee on that subject. At the time Mr. P. had a music-room in Boston on Beacon Street, where he used to do severe and protracted practice with little interruption. Now, all one season it was a very familiar occurrence with him while in the midst of work to feel a cold draft of air suddenly upon his face, with a prickling sensation at the roots of his hair, when he would turn from the piano, and a figure which he knew to be dead would come sliding under the crack of the door from without, flattening itself to squeeze through and rounding out again to the human form. It was of a middle-aged man, and drew itself along the carpet on hands and knees, but with head thrown back till it reached the sofa, upon which it stretched itself. It remained some moments, but vanished always if Mr. P. spoke or made a decided movement. The most singular point in the occurrence was its frequent repetition. He might expect it on any day between two and four o'clock, and it came always heralded by the same sudden cold shiver, and was invariably the same figure which went through the same movements. He afterwards traced the whole experience to strong tea. He was in the habit of taking cold tea, which always stimulates him, for lunch, and on giving up this practice he never saw this or any other apparition again. However, even allowing, as is doubtless true, that the event was a delusion of nerves first fatigued by overwork and then excited by this stimulant, there is one point which is still wholly inexplicable and highly interesting to me. Mr. P. has no memory whatever of sight, nor conception of it. It is impossible for him to form any idea of what we mean by light or color, consequently he has no cognizance of any object which does not reach his sense of hearing or of touch, though these are so acute as to give a contrary impression sometimes to other people. When he becomes aware of the presence of a person or an object, by means which seem mysterious to outsiders, he can always trace it naturally and legitimately to slight echoes, perceptible only to his keen ears, or to differences in atmospheric pressure, perceptible only to his acute nerves of touch; but with the apparition described, for the only time in his experience, he was aware of presence, size, and appearance, without the use of either of these mediums. The figure never produced the least sound nor came within a number of feet of his person, yet he knew that it was a man, that it moved, and in what direction, even that it wore a full beard, which, like the thick curly hair, was partially gray; also that it was dressed in the style of suit known as 'pepper and salt.' These points were all perfectly distinct and invariable each time. If asked how he perceived them, he will answer he cannot tell, he simply knew it, and so strongly and so distinctly that it is impossible to shake his opinion as to the exact details of the man's appearance. It would seem that in this delusion of the senses he really saw, as he has never done in the actual experiences of life, except in the first two years of childhood."
On cross-examining Mr. P., I could not make out that there was anything like visual imagination involved, although he was quite unable to describe in just what terms the false perception was carried on. It seemed to be more like an intensely definite conception than anything else, a conception to which the feeling of present reality was attached, but in no such shape as easily to fall under the heads laid down in my text.
XXII. [319]
REASONING.
We talk of man being the rational animal; and the traditional intellectualist philosophy has always made a great point of treating the brutes as wholly irrational creatures. Nevertheless, it is by no means easy to decide just what is meant by reason, or how the peculiar thinking process called reasoning differs from other thought-sequences which may lead to similar results.
Much of our thinking consists of trains of images suggested one by another, of a sort of spontaneous revery of which it seems likely enough that the higher brutes should be capable. This sort of thinking leads nevertheless to rational conclusions, both practical and theoretical. The links between the terms are either 'contiguity' or 'similarity,' and with a mixture of both these things we can hardly be very incoherent. As a rule, in this sort of irresponsible thinking, the terms which fall to be coupled together are empirical concretes, not abstractions. A sunset may call up the vessel's deck from which I saw one last summer, the companions of my voyage, my arrival into port, etc.; or it may make me think of solar myths, of Hercules' and Hector's funeral pyres, of Homer and whether he could write, of the Greek alphabet, etc. If habitual contiguities predominate, we have a prosaic mind; if rare contiguities, or similarities, have free play, we call the person fanciful, poetic, or witty. But the thought as a rule is of matters taken in their entirety. Having been thinking of one, we find later that we are thinking of another, to which we have been lifted along, we hardly know how. If an abstract quality figures in the procession, it arrests our attention but for a moment, and fades into something else; and is never very abstract. Thus, in thinking of the sun-myths, we may have a gleam of admiration at the gracefulness of the primitive human mind, or a moment of disgust at the narrowness of modern interpreters. But, in the main, we think less of qualities than of whole things, real or possible, just as we may experience them.
The upshot of it may be that we are reminded of some practical duty: we write a letter to a friend abroad, or we take down the lexicon and study our Greek lesson. Our thought is rational, and leads to a rational act, but it can hardly be called reasoning in a strict sense of the term.
There are other shorter flights of thought, single couplings of terms which suggest one another by association, which approach more to what would commonly be classed as acts of reasoning proper. Those are where a present sign suggests an unseen, distant, or future reality. Where the sign and what it suggests are both concretes which have been coupled together on previous occasions, the inference is common to both brutes and men, being really nothing more than association by contiguity. A and B, dinner-bell and dinner, have been experienced in immediate succession. Hence A no sooner falls upon the sense than B is anticipated, and steps are taken to meet it. The whole education of our domestic beasts, all the cunning added by age and experience to wild ones, and the greater part of our human knowingness consists in the ability to make a mass of inferences of this simplest sort. Our 'perceptions,' or recognitions of what objects are before us, are inferences of this kind. We feel a patch of color, and we say 'a distant house,' a whiff of odor crosses us, and we say 'a skunk,' a faint sound is heard, and we call it 'a railroad train.' Examples are needless; for such inferences of sensations not presented form the staple and tissue of our perceptive life, and our Chapter XIX was full of them, illusory or veracious. They have been called unconscious inferences. Certainly we are commonly unconscious that we are inferring at all. The sign and the signified melt into what seems to us the object of a single pulse of thought. Immediate inferences would be a good name for these simple acts of reasoning requiring but two terms,[320] were it not that formal logic has already appropriated the expression for a more technical use.
'RECEPTS.'
In these first and simplest inferences the conclusion may follow so continuously upon the 'sign' that the latter is not discriminated or attended to as a separate object by the mind. Even now we can seldom define the optical signs which lead us to infer the shapes and distances of the objects which by their aid we so unhesitatingly perceive. The objects, too, when thus inferred, are general objects. The dog crossing a scent thinks of a deer in general, or of another dog in general, not of a particular deer or dog. To these most primitive abstract objects Dr. G. J. Romanes gives the name of recepts or generic ideas, to distinguish them from concepts and general ideas properly so called.[321] They are not analyzed or defined, but only imagined.
"It requires but a slight analysis of our ordinary mental processes to prove that all our simpler ideas are group-arrangements which have been formed spontaneously or without any of that intentionally comparing, sifting, and combining process which is required in the higher departments of ideational activity. The comparing, sifting, and combining is here done, as it were, for the conscious agent, not by him. Recepts are received; it is only concepts that require to be conceived.... If I am crossing a street and hear behind me a sudden shout, I do not require to wait in order to predicate to myself that there is probably a hansom-cab just about to run me down: a cry of this kind, and in those circumstances, is so intimately associated in my mind with its purpose, that the idea which it arouses need not rise above the level of a recept; and the adaptive movements on my part which that idea immediately prompts are performed without any intelligent reflection. Yet, on the other hand, they are neither reflex actions nor instinctive actions; they are what may be termed receptual actions, or actions depending on recepts."[322]
"How far can this kind of unnamed or non-conceptional ideation extend?" Dr. Romanes asks; and answers by a variety of examples taken from the life of brutes, for which I must refer to his book. One or two of them, however, I will quote:
"Houzeau writes that while crossing a wide and arid plain in Texas, his two dogs suffered greatly from thirst, and that between thirty and forty times they rushed down the hollows to search for water. The hollows were not valleys, and there were no trees in them, or any other difference in the vegetation; and as they were absolutely dry, there could have been no smell of damp earth. The dogs behaved as if they knew that a dip in the ground offered them the best chance of finding water, and Houzeau has often witnessed the same behavior in other animals....
"Mr. Darwin writes: 'When I say to my terrier in an eager voice (and I have made the trial many times), "Hi! hi! where is it?" she at once takes it as a sign that something is to be hunted, and generally first looks quickly all round, and then rushes into the nearest thicket, to scout for any game, but finding nothing she looks up into any neighboring tree for a squirrel. Now do not these actions clearly show that she had in her mind a general idea, or concept, that some animal is to be discovered and hunted?'"[323]
They certainly show this. But the idea in question is of an object about which nothing farther may be articulately known. The thought of it prompts to activity, but to no theoretic consequence. Similarly in the following example:
"Water-fowl adopt a somewhat different mode of alighting upon land, or even upon ice, from that which they adopt when alighting upon water; and those kinds which dive from a height (such as terns and gannets) never do so upon land or upon ice. These facts prove that the animals have one recept answering to a solid surface, and another answering to a fluid. Similarly a man will not dive from a height over hard ground or over ice, nor will he jump into water in the same way as he jumps upon dry land. In other words, like the water-fowl he has two distinct recepts, one of which answers to solid ground, and the other to an unresisting fluid. But unlike the water-fowl he is able to bestow upon each of these recepts a name, and thus to raise them both to the level of concepts. So far as the practical purposes of locomotion are concerned, it is of course immaterial whether or not he thus raises his recepts into concepts; but ... for many other purposes it is of the highest importance that he is able to do this."[324]
IN REASONING, WE PICK OUT ESSENTIAL QUALITIES.
The chief of these purposes is predication, a theoretic function which, though it always leads eventually to some kind of action, yet tends as often as not to inhibit the immediate motor response to which the simple inferences of which we have been speaking give rise. In reasoning, A may suggest B; but B, instead of being an idea which is simply obeyed by us, is an idea which suggests the distinct additional idea C. And where the train of suggestion is one of reasoning distinctively so called as contrasted with mere revery or 'associative' sequence, the ideas bear certain inward relations to each other which we must proceed to examine with some care.
The result C yielded by a true act of reasoning is apt to be a thing voluntarily sought, such as the means to a proposed end, the ground for an observed effect, or the effect of an assumed cause. All these results may be thought of as concrete things, but they are not suggested immediately by other concrete things, as in the trains of simply associative thought. They are linked to the concretes which precede them by intermediate steps, and these steps are formed by general characters articulately denoted and expressly analyzed out. A thing inferred by reasoning need neither have been an habitual associate of the datum from which we infer it, nor need it be similar to it. It may be a thing entirely unknown to our previous experience, something which no simple association of concretes could ever have evoked. The great difference, in fact, between that simpler kind of rational thinking which consists in the concrete objects of past experience merely suggesting each other, and reasoning distinctively so called, is this, that whilst the empirical thinking is only reproductive, reasoning is productive. An empirical, or 'rule-of-thumb,' thinker can deduce nothing from data with whose behavior and associates in the concrete he is unfamiliar. But put a reasoner amongst a set of concrete objects which he has neither seen nor heard of before, and with a little time, if he is a good reasoner, he will make such inferences from them as will quite atone for his ignorance. Reasoning helps us out of unprecedented situations--situations for which all our common associative wisdom, all the 'education' which we share in common with the beasts, leaves us without resource.
* * * * *
Let us make this ability to deal with NOVEL data the technical differentia of reasoning. This will sufficiently mark it out from common associative thinking, and will immediately enable us to say just what peculiarity it contains.
It contains analysis and abstraction. Whereas the merely empirical thinker stares at a fact in its entirety, and remains helpless, or gets 'stuck,' if it suggests no concomitant or similar, the reasoner breaks it up and notices some one of its separate attributes. This attribute he takes to be the essential part of the whole fact before him. This attribute has properties or consequences which the fact until then was not known to have, but which, now that it is noticed to contain the attribute, it must have.
Call the fact or concrete datum S; the essential attribute M; the attribute's property P.
Then the reasoned inference of P from S cannot be made without M's intermediation. The 'essence' M is thus that third or middle term in the reasoning which a moment ago was pronounced essential. For his original concrete S the reasoner substitutes its abstract property, M. What is true of M, what is coupled with M, then holds true of S, is coupled with S. As M is properly one of the parts of the entire S, reasoning may then be very well defined as the substitution of parts and their implications or consequences for wholes. And the art of the reasoner will consist of two stages:
First, sagacity,[325] or the ability to discover what part, M, lies embedded in the whole S which is before him;
Second, learning, or the ability to recall promptly M's consequences, concomitants, or implications.[326]
If we glance at the ordinary syllogism--
M is P; S is M; Therefore S is P
--we see that the second or minor premise, the 'subsumption' as it is sometimes called, is the one requiring the sagacity; the first or major the one requiring the fertility, or fulness of learning. Usually the learning is more apt to be ready than the sagacity, the ability to seize fresh aspects in concrete things, being rarer than the ability to learn old rules; so that, in most actual cases of reasoning, the minor premise, or the way of conceiving the subject, is the one that makes the novel step in thought. This is, to be sure, not always the case; for the fact that M carries P with it may also be unfamiliar and now formulated for the first time.
The perception that S is M is a mode of conceiving S. The statement that M is P is an abstract or general proposition. A word about both is necessary.
WHAT IS MEANT BY A MODE OF CONCEIVING.
When we conceive of S merely as M (of vermilion merely as a mercury-compound, for example), we neglect all the other attributes which it may have, and attend exclusively to this one. We mutilate the fulness of S's reality. Every reality has an infinity of aspects or properties. Even so simple a fact as a line which you trace in the air may be considered in respect to its form, its length, its direction, and its location. When we reach more complex facts, the number of ways in which we may regard them is literally endless. Vermilion is not only a mercury-compound, it is vividly red, heavy, and expensive, it comes from China, and so on, in infinitum. All objects are well-springs of properties, which are only little by little developed to our knowledge, and it is truly said that to know one thing thoroughly would be to know the whole universe. Mediately or immediately, that one thing is related to everything else; and to know all about it, all its relations need be known. But each relation forms one of its attributes, one angle by which some one may conceive it, and while so conceiving it may ignore the rest of it. A man is such a complex fact. But out of the complexity all that an army commissary picks out as important for his purposes is his property of eating so many pounds a day; the general, of marching so many miles; the chair-maker, of having such a shape; the orator, of responding to such and such feelings; the theatre-manager, of being willing to pay just such a price, and no more, for an evening's amusement. Each of these persons singles out the particular side of the entire man which has a bearing on his concerns, and not till this side is distinctly and separately conceived can the proper practical conclusions for that reasoner be drawn; and when they are drawn the man's other attributes may be ignored.
All ways of conceiving a concrete fact, if they are true ways at all, are equally true ways. There is no property ABSOLUTELY essential to any one thing. The same property which figures as the essence of a thing on one occasion becomes a very inessential feature upon another. Now that I am writing, it is essential that I conceive my paper as a surface for inscription. If I failed to do that, I should have to stop my work. But if I wished to light a fire, and no other materials were by, the essential way of conceiving the paper would be as combustible material; and I need then have no thought of any of its other destinations. It is really all that it is: a combustible, a writing surface, a thin thing, a hydrocarbonaceous thing, a thing eight inches one way and ten another, a thing just one furlong east of a certain stone in my neighbor's field, an American thing, etc., etc., ad infinitum. Whichever one of these aspects of its being I temporarily class it under, makes me unjust to the other aspects. But as I always am classing it under one aspect or another, I am always unjust, always partial, always exclusive. My excuse is necessity--the necessity which my finite and practical nature lays upon me. My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing, and I can only do one thing at a time. A God, who is supposed to drive the whole universe abreast, may also be supposed, without detriment to his activity, to see all parts of it at once and without emphasis. But were our human attention so to disperse itself we should simply stare vacantly at things at large and forfeit our opportunity of doing any particular act. Mr. Warner, in his Adirondack story, shot a bear by aiming, not at his eye or heart, but 'at him generally.' But we cannot aim 'generally' at the universe; or if we do, we miss our game. Our scope is narrow, and we must attack things piecemeal, ignoring the solid fulness in which the elements of Nature exist, and stringing one after another of them together in a serial way, to suit our little interests as they change from hour to hour. In this, the partiality of one moment is partly atoned for by the different sort of partiality of the next. To me now, writing these words, emphasis and selection seem to be the essence of the human mind. In other chapters other qualities have seemed, and will again seem, more important parts of psychology.
Men are so ingrainedly partial that, for common-sense and scholasticism (which is only common-sense grown articulate), the notion that there is no one quality genuinely, absolutely, and exclusively essential to anything is almost unthinkable. "A thing's essence makes it what it is. Without an exclusive essence it would be nothing in particular, would be quite nameless, we could not say it was this rather than that. What you write on, for example,--why talk of its being combustible, rectangular, and the like, when you know that these are mere accidents, and that what it really is, and was made to be, is just paper and nothing else?" The reader is pretty sure to make some such comment as this. But he is himself merely insisting on an aspect of the thing which suits his own petty purpose, that of naming the thing; or else on an aspect which suits the manufacturer's purpose, that of producing an article for which there is a vulgar demand. Meanwhile the reality overflows these purposes at every pore. Our usual purpose with it, our commonest title for it, and the properties which this title suggests, have in reality nothing sacramental. They characterize us more than they characterize the thing. But we are so stuck in our prejudices, so petrified intellectually, that to our vulgarest names, with their suggestions, we ascribe an eternal and exclusive worth. The thing must be, essentially, what the vulgarest name connotes; what less usual names connote, it can be only in an 'accidental' and relatively unreal sense.[327]
Locke undermined the fallacy. But none of his successors, so far as I know, have radically escaped it, or seen that the only meaning of essence is teleological, and that classification and conception are purely teleological weapons of the mind. The essence of a thing is that one of its properties which is so important for my interests that in comparison with it I may neglect the rest. Amongst those other things which have this important property I class it, after this property I name it, as a thing endowed with this property I conceive it; and whilst so classing, naming, and conceiving it, all other truths about it become to me as naught.[328] The properties which are important vary from man to man and from hour to hour.[329] Hence divers appellations and conceptions for the same thing. But many objects of daily use--as paper, ink, butter, horse-car--have properties of such constant unwavering importance, and have such stereotyped names, that we end by believing that to conceive them in those ways is to conceive them in the only true way. Those are no truer ways of conceiving them than any others; they are only more important ways, more frequently serviceable ways.[330]
So much for what is implied, when the reasoner conceives of the fact S before him as a case of which the essence is to be M. One word now as to what is involved in M's having properties, consequences, or implications, and we can go back to the study of the reasoning process again.
WHAT IS INVOLVED IN GENERAL PROPOSITIONS.
M is not a concrete, or 'self-sufficient,' as Mr. Clay would say. It is an abstract character which may exist, embedded with other characters, in many concretes. Whether it be the character of being a writing surface, of being made in America or China, of being eight inches square, or of being in a certain part of space, this is always true of it. Now we might conceive of this being a world in which all such general characters were independent of each other, so that if any one of them were found in a subject S, we never could be sure what others would be found alongside of it. On one occasion there might be P with M, on another Q, and so on. In such a world there would be no general sequences or coexistences, and no universal laws. Each grouping would be sui generis; from the experience of the past no future could be predicted; and reasoning, as we shall presently see, would be an impossibility.
But the world we live in is not one of this sort. Though many general characters seem indifferent to each other, there remain a number of them which affect constant habits of mutual concomitance or repugnance. They involve or imply each other. One of them is a sign to us that the other will be found. They hunt in couples, as it were; and such a proposition as that M is P, or includes P, or precedes or accompanies P, if it prove to be true in one instance, may very likely be true in every other instance which we meet. This is, in fact, a world in which general laws obtain, in which universal propositions are true, and in which reasoning is therefore possible. Fortunately for us: for since we cannot handle things as wholes, but only by conceiving them through some general character which for the time we call their essence, it would be a great pity if the matter ended there, and if the general character, once picked out and in our possession, helped us to no farther advance. In Chapter XXVIII we shall have again to consider this harmony between our reasoning faculty and the world in which its lot is cast.[331]
To revert now to our symbolic representation of the reasoning process:
M is P S is M ------ S is P
M is discerned and picked out for the time being to be the essence of the concrete fact, phenomenon, or reality, S. But M in this world of ours is inevitably conjoined with P; so that P is the next thing that we may expect to find conjoined with the fact S. We may conclude or infer P, through the intermediation of the M which our sagacity began by discerning, when S came before it, to be the essence of the case.
Now note that if P have any value or importance for us, M was a very good character for our sagacity to pounce upon and abstract. If, on the contrary, P were of no importance, some other character than M would have been a better essence for us to conceive of S by. Psychologically, as a rule, P overshadows the process from the start. We are seeking P, or something like P. But the bare totality of S does not yield it to our gaze; and casting about for some point in S to take hold of, which will lead us to P, we hit, if we are sagacious, upon M, because M happens to be just the character which is knit up with P. Had we wished Q instead of P, and were N a property of S conjoined with Q, we ought to have ignored M, noticed N, and conceived of S as a sort of N exclusively.
Reasoning is always for a subjective interest, to attain some particular conclusion, or to gratify some special curiosity. It not only breaks up the datum placed before it and conceives it abstractly; it must conceive it rightly too; and conceiving it rightly means conceiving it by that one particular abstract character which leads to the one sort of conclusion which it is the reasoner's temporary interest to attain.[332]
The results of reasoning may be hit upon by accident, The stereoscope was actually a result of reasoning; it is conceivable, however, that a man playing with pictures and mirrors might accidentally have hit upon it. Cats have been known to open doors by pulling latches, etc. But no cat, if the latch got out of order, could open the door again, unless some new accident of random fumbling taught her to associate some new total movement with the total phenomenon of the closed door. A reasoning man, however, would open the door by first analyzing the hindrance. He would ascertain what particular feature of the door was wrong. The lever, e.g., does not raise the latch sufficiently from its slot--case of insufficient elevation--raise door bodily on hinges! Or door sticks at top by friction against lintel--press it bodily down! Now it is obvious that a child or an idiot might without this reasoning learn the rule for opening that particular door. I remember a clock which the maid-servant had discovered would not go unless it were supported so as to tilt slightly forwards. She had stumbled on this method after many weeks of groping. The reason of the stoppage was the friction of the pendulum-bob against the back of the clock-case, a reason which an educated man would have analyzed out in five minutes. I have a student's lamp of which the flame vibrates most unpleasantly unless the collar which bears the chimney be raised about a sixteenth of an inch. I learned the remedy after much torment by accident, and now always keep the collar up with a small wedge. But my procedure is a mere association of two totals, diseased object and remedy. One learned in pneumatics could have named the cause of the disease, and thence inferred the remedy immediately. By many measurements of triangles one might find their area always equal to their height multiplied by half their base, and one might formulate an empirical law to that effect. But a reasoner saves himself all this trouble by seeing that it is the essence (pro hac vice) of a triangle to be the half of a parallelogram whose area is the height into the entire base. To see this he must invent additional lines; and the geometer must often draw such to get at the essential property he may require in a figure. The essence consists in some relation of the figure to the new lines, a relation not obvious at all until they are put in. The geometer's sagacity lies in the invention of the new lines.
THUS, THERE ARE TWO GREAT POINTS IN REASONING:
First, an extracted character is taken as equivalent to the entire datum from which it comes; and,
Second, the character thus taken suggests a certain consequence more obviously than it was suggested by the total datum as it originally came. Take them again, successively.
* * * * *
1. Suppose I say, when offered a piece of cloth, "I won't buy that; it looks as if it would fade," meaning merely that something about it suggests the idea of fading to my mind,--my judgment, though possibly correct, is not reasoned, but purely empirical; but, if I can say that into the color there enters a certain dye which I know to be chemically unstable, and that therefore the color will fade, my judgment is reasoned. The notion of the dye which is one of the parts of the cloth, is the connecting link between the latter and the notion of fading. So, again, an uneducated man will expect from past experience to see a piece of ice melt if placed near the fire, and the tip of his finger look coarse if he views it through a convex glass. In neither of these cases could the result be anticipated without full previous acquaintance with the entire phenomenon. It is not a result of reasoning.
But a man who should conceive heat as a mode of motion, and liquefaction as identical with increased motion of molecules; who should know that curved surfaces bend light-rays in special ways, and that the apparent size of anything is connected with the amount of the 'bend' of its light-rays as they enter the eye,--such a man would make the right inferences for all these objects, even though he had never in his life had any concrete experience of them; and he would do this because the ideas which we have above supposed him to possess would mediate in his mind between the phenomena he starts with and the conclusions he draws. But these ideas or reasons for his conclusions are all mere extracted portions or circumstances singled out from the mass of characters which make up the entire phenomena. The motions which form heat, the bending of the light-waves, are, it is true, excessively recondite ingredients; the hidden pendulum I spoke of above is less so; and the sticking of a door on its sill in the earlier example would hardly be so at all. But each and all agree in this, that they bear a more evident relation to the conclusion than did the immediate data in their full totality.
The difficulty is, in each case, to extract from the immediate data that particular ingredient which shall have this very evident relation to the conclusion. Every phenomenon or so-called 'fact' has an infinity of aspects or properties, as we have seen, amongst which the fool, or man with little sagacity, will inevitably go astray. But no matter for this point now. The first thing is to have seen that every possible case of reasoning involves the extraction of a particular partial aspect of the phenomena thought about, and that whilst Empirical Thought simply associates phenomena in their entirety, Reasoned Thought couples them by the conscious use of this extract.
* * * * *
2. And, now, to prove the second point: Why are the couplings, consequences, and implications of extracts more evident and obvious than those of entire phenomena? For two reasons.
First, the extracted characters are more general than the concretes, and the connections they may have are, therefore, more familiar to us, having been more often met in our experience. Think of heat as motion, and whatever is true of motion will be true of heat; but we have had a hundred experiences of motion for every one of heat. Think of the rays passing through this lens as bending towards the perpendicular, and you substitute for the comparatively unfamiliar lens the very familiar notion of a particular change in direction of a line, of which notion every day brings us countless examples.
The other reason why the relations of the extracted characters are so evident is that their properties are so few, compared with the properties of the whole, from which we derived them. In every concrete total the characters and their consequences are so inexhaustibly numerous that we may lose our way among them before noticing the particular consequence it behooves us to draw. But, if we are lucky enough to single out the proper character, we take in, as it were, by a single glance all its possible consequences. Thus the character of scraping the sill has very few suggestions, prominent among which is the suggestion that the scraping will cease if we raise the door; whilst the entire refractory door suggests an enormous number of notions to the mind.
Take another example. I am sitting in a railroad-car, waiting for the train to start. It is winter, and the stove fills the car with pungent smoke. The brakeman enters, and my neighbor asks him to "stop that stove smoking." He replies that it will stop entirely as soon as the car begins to move. "Why so?" asks the passenger. "It always does," replies the brakeman. It is evident from this 'always' that the connection between car moving and smoke stopping was a purely empirical one in the brakeman's mind, bred of habit. But, if the passenger had been an acute reasoner, he, with no experience of what that stove always did, might have anticipated the brakeman's reply, and spared his own question. Had he singled out of all the numerous points involved in a stove's not smoking the one special point of smoke pouring freely out of the stove-pipe's mouth, he would, probably, owing to the few associations of that idea, have been immediately reminded of the law that a fluid passes more rapidly out of a pipe's mouth if another fluid be at the same time streaming over that mouth; and then the rapid draught of air over the stove-pipe's mouth, which is one of the points involved in the car's motion, would immediately have occurred to him.
Thus a couple of extracted characters, with a couple of their few and obvious connections, would have formed the reasoned link in the passenger's mind between the phenomena, smoke stopping and car moving, which were only linked as wholes in the brakeman's mind. Such examples may seem trivial, but they contain the essence of the most refined and transcendental theorizing. The reason why physics grows more deductive the more the fundamental properties it assumes are of a mathematical sort, such as molecular mass or wave-length, is that the immediate consequences of these notions are so few that we can survey them all at once, and promptly pick out those which concern us.
Sagacity; or the Perception of the Essence.
To reason, then, we must be able to extract characters,--not any characters, but the right characters for our conclusion. If we extract the wrong character, it will not lead to that conclusion. Here, then, is the difficulty: How are characters extracted, and why does it require the advent of a genius in many cases before the fitting character is brought to light? Why cannot anybody reason as well as anybody else? Why does it need a Newton to notice the law of the squares, a Darwin to notice the survival of the fittest? To answer these questions we must begin a new research, and see how our insight into facts naturally grows.
All our knowledge at first is vague. When we say that a thing is vague, we mean that it has no subdivisions ab intra, nor precise limitations ab extra; but still all the forms of thought may apply to it. It may have unity, reality, externality, extent, and what not--thinghood, in a word, but thinghood only as a whole.[333] In this vague way, probably, does the room appear to the babe who first begins to be conscious of it as something other than his moving nurse. It has no subdivisions in his mind, unless, perhaps, the window is able to attract his separate notice. In this vague way, certainly, does every entirely new experience appear to the adult. A library, a museum, a machine-shop, are mere confused wholes to the uninstructed, but the machinist, the antiquary, and the bookworm perhaps hardly notice the whole at all, so eager are they to pounce upon the details. Familiarity has in them bred discrimination. Such vague terms as 'grass,' 'mould,' and 'meat' do not exist for the botanist or the anatomist. They know too much about grasses, moulds, and muscles. A certain person said to Charles Kingsley, who was showing him the dissection of a caterpillar, with its exquisite viscera, "Why, I thought it was nothing but skin and squash!" A layman present at a shipwreck, a battle, or a fire is helpless. Discrimination has been so little awakened in him by experience that his consciousness leaves no single point of the complex situation accented and standing out for him to begin to act upon. But the sailor, the fireman, and the general know directly at what corner to take up the business. They 'see into the situation'--that is, they analyze it--with their first glance. It is full of delicately differenced ingredients which their education has little by little brought to their consciousness, but of which the novice gains no clear idea.
How this power of analysis was brought about we saw in our chapters on Discrimination and Attention. We dissociate the elements of originally vague totals by attending to them or noticing them alternately, of course. But what determines which element we shall attend to first? There are two immediate and obvious answers: first, our practical or instinctive interests; and, second, our æsthetic interests. The dog singles out of any situation its smells, and the horse its sounds, because they may reveal facts of practical moment, and are instinctively exciting to these several creatures. The infant notices the candle-flame or the window, and ignores the rest of the room, because those objects give him a vivid pleasure. So, the country boy dissociates the blackberry, the chestnut, and the wintergreen, from the vague mass of other shrubs and trees, for their practical uses, and the savage is delighted with the beads, the bits of looking-glass, brought by an exploring vessel, and gives no heed to the features of the vessel itself, which is too much beyond his sphere. These æsthetic and practical interests, then, are the weightiest factors in making particular ingredients stand out in high relief. What they lay their accent on, that we notice; but what they are in themselves, we cannot say. We must content ourselves here with simply accepting them as irreducible ultimate factors in determining the way our knowledge grows.
Now, a creature which has few instinctive impulses, or interests, practical or æsthetic, will dissociate few characters, and will, at best, have limited reasoning powers; whilst one whose interests are very varied will reason much better. Man, by his immensely varied instincts, practical wants, and æsthetic feelings, to which every sense contributes, would, by dint of these alone, be sure to dissociate vastly more characters than any other animal; and accordingly we find that the lowest savages reason incomparably better than the highest brutes. The diverse interests lead, too, to a diversification of experiences, whose accumulation becomes a condition for the play of that law of dissociation by varying concomitants of which I treated in a former chapter (see Vol I. p. 506).
The Help given by Association by Similarity.
It is probable, also, that man's superior association by similarity has much to do with those discriminations of character on which his higher flights of reasoning are based. As this latter is an important matter, and as little or nothing was said of it in the chapter on Discrimination, it behooves me to dwell a little upon it here.
What does the reader do when he wishes to see in what the precise likeness or difference of two objects lies? He transfers his attention as rapidly as possible, backwards and forwards, from one to the other. The rapid alteration in consciousness shakes out, as it were, the points of difference or agreement, which would have slumbered forever unnoticed if the consciousness of the objects compared had occurred at widely distant periods of time. What does the scientific man do who searches for the reason or law embedded in a phenomenon? He deliberately accumulates all the instances he can find which have any analogy to that phenomenon; and, by simultaneously filling his mind with them all, he frequently succeeds in detaching from the collection the peculiarity which he was unable to formulate in one alone; even though that one had been preceded in his former experience by all of those with which he now at once confronts it. These examples show that the mere general fact of having occurred at some time in one's experience, with varying concomitants, is not by itself a sufficient reason for a character to be dissociated now. We need something more; we need that the varying concomitants should in all their variety be brought into consciousness at once. Not till then will the character in question escape from its adhesion to each and all of them and stand alone. This will immediately be recognized by those who have read Mill's Logic as the ground of Utility in his famous 'four methods of experimental inquiry,' the methods of agreement, of difference, of residues, and of concomitant variations. Each of these gives a list of analogous instances out of the midst of which a sought-for character may roll and strike the mind.
Now it is obvious that any mind in which association by similarity is highly developed is a mind which will spontaneously form lists of instances like this. Take a present case A, with a character m in it. The mind may fail at first to notice this character m at all. But if A calls up C, D, E, and F,--these being phenomena which resemble A in possessing m, but which may not have entered for months into the experience of the animal who now experiences A, why, plainly, such association performs the part of the reader's deliberately rapid comparison referred to above, and of the systematic consideration of like cases by the scientific investigator, and may lead to the noticing of m in an abstract way. Certainly this is obvious; and no conclusion is left to us but to assert that, after the few most powerful practical and æsthetic interests, our chief help towards noticing those special characters of phenomena, which, when once possessed and named, are used as reasons, class names, essences, or middle terms, is this association by similarity. Without it, indeed, the deliberate procedure of the scientific man would be impossible: he could never collect his analogous instances. But it operates of itself in highly-gifted minds without any deliberation, spontaneously collecting analogous instances, uniting in a moment what in nature the whole breadth of space and time keeps separate, and so permitting a perception of identical points in the midst of different circumstances, which minds governed wholly by the law of contiguity could never begin to attain.
Figure 80 shows this. If m, in the present representation A, calls up B, C, D, and E, which are similar to A in possessing it, and calls them up in rapid succession, then m, being associated almost simultaneously with such varying concomitants, will 'roll out' and attract our separate notice.
If so much is clear to the reader, he will be willing to admit that the mind in which this mode of association most prevails will, from its better opportunity of extricating characters, be the one most prone to reasoned thinking; whilst, on the other hand, a mind in which we do not detect reasoned thinking will probably be one in which association by contiguity holds almost exclusive sway.
Geniuses are, by common consent, considered to differ from ordinary minds by an unusual development of association by similarity. One of Professor Bain's best strokes of work is the exhibition of this truth.[334] It applies to geniuses in the line of reasoning as well as in other lines. And as the genius is to the vulgarian, so the vulgar human mind is to the intelligence of a brute. Compared with men, it is probable that brutes neither attend to abstract characters, nor have associations by similarity. Their thoughts probably pass from one concrete object to its habitual concrete successor far more uniformly than is the case with us. In other words, their associations of ideas are almost exclusively by contiguity. It will clear up still farther our understanding of the reasoning process, if we devote a few pages to
THE INTELLECTUAL CONTRAST BETWEEN BRUTE AND MAN.
I will first try to show, by taking the best stories I can find of animal sagacity, that the mental process involved may as a rule be perfectly accounted for by mere contiguous association, based on experience. Mr. Darwin, in his 'Descent of Man,' instances the Arctic dogs, described by Dr. Hayes, who scatter, when drawing a sledge, as soon as the ice begins to crack. This might be called by some an exercise of reason. The test would be, Would the most intelligent Eskimo dogs that ever lived act so when placed upon ice for the first time together? A band of men from the tropics might do so easily. Recognizing cracking to be a sign of breaking, and seizing immediately the partial character that the point of rupture is the point of greatest strain, and that the massing of weight at a given point concentrates there the strain, a Hindoo might quickly infer that scattering would stop the cracking, and, by crying out to his comrades to disperse, save the party from immersion. But in the dog's case we need only suppose that they have individually experienced wet skins after cracking, that they have often noticed cracking to begin when they were huddled together, and that they have observed it to cease when they scattered. Naturally, therefore, the sound would redintegrate all these former experiences, including that of scattering, which latter they would promptly renew. It would be a case of immediate suggestion or of that 'Logic of Recepts' as Mr. Romanes calls it, of which we spoke above on p. 327.
A friend of the writer gave as a proof of the almost human intelligence of his dog that he took him one day down to his boat on the shore, but found the boat full of dirt and water. He remembered that the sponge was up at the house, a third of a mile distant; but, disliking to go back himself, he made various gestures of wiping out the boat and so forth, saying to his terrier, "Sponge, sponge; go fetch the sponge." But he had little expectation of a result, since the dog had never received the slightest training with the boat or the sponge. Nevertheless, off he trotted to the house, and, to his owner's great surprise and admiration, brought the sponge in his jaws. Sagacious as this was, it required nothing but ordinary contiguous association of ideas. The terrier was only exceptional in the minuteness of his spontaneous observation. Most terriers would have taken no interest in the boat-cleaning operation, nor noticed what the sponge was for. This terrier, in having picked those details out of the crude mass of his boat-experience distinctly enough to be reminded of them, was truly enough ahead of his peers on the line which leads to human reason. But his act was not yet an act of reasoning proper. It might fairly have been called so if, unable to find the sponge at the house, he had brought back a dipper or a mop instead. Such a substitution would have shown that, embedded in the very different appearances of these articles, he had been able to discriminate the identical partial attribute of capacity to take up water, and had reflected, "For the present purpose they are identical." This, which the dog did not do, any man but the very stupidest could not fail to do.
If the reader will take the trouble to analyze the best dog and elephant stories he knows, he will find that, in most cases, this simple contiguous calling up of one whole by another is quite sufficient to explain the phenomena. Sometimes, it is true, we have to suppose the recognition of a property or character as such, but it is then always a character which the peculiar practical interests of the animal may have singled out. A dog, noticing his master's hat on its peg, may possibly infer that he has not gone out. Intelligent dogs recognize by the tone of the master's voice whether the latter is angry or not. A dog will perceive whether you have kicked him by accident or by design, and behave accordingly. The character inferred by him, the particular mental state in you, however it be represented in his mind--it is represented probably by a 'recept' (p. 327) or set of practical tendencies, rather than by a definite concept or idea--is still a partial character extracted from the totality of your phenomenal being, and is his reason for crouching and skulking, or playing with you. Dogs, moreover, seem to have the feeling of the value of their master's personal property, or at least a particular interest in objects which their master uses. A dog left with his master's coat will defend it, though never taught to do so. I know of a dog accustomed to swim after sticks in the water, but who always refused to dive for stones. Nevertheless, when a fish-basket, which he had never been trained to carry, but merely knew as his master's, fell over, he immediately dived after it and brought it up. Dogs thus discern, at any rate so far as to be able to act, this partial character of being valuable, which lies hidden in certain things.[335] Stories are told of dogs carrying coppers to pastry-cooks to get buns, and it is said that a certain dog, if he gave two coppers, would never leave without two buns. This was probably mere contiguous association, but it is possible that the animal noticed the character of duality, and identified it as the same in the coin and the cake. If so, it is the maximum of canine abstract thinking. Another story told to the writer is this: a dog was sent to a lumber-camp to fetch a wedge, with which he was known to be acquainted. After half an hour, not returning, he was sought and found biting and tugging at the handle of an axe which was driven deeply into a stump. The wedge could not be found. The teller of the story thought that the dog must have had a clear perception of the common character of serving to split which was involved in both the instruments, and, from their identity in this respect, inferred their identity for the purposes required.
It cannot be denied that this interpretation is a possible one, but it seems to me far to transcend the limits of ordinary canine abstraction. The property in question was not one which had direct personal interest for the dog, such as that of belonging to his master is in the case of the coat or the basket. If the dog in the sponge story had returned to the boat with a dipper it would have been no more remarkable. It seems more probable, therefore, that this wood-cutter's dog had also been accustomed to carry the axe, and now, excited by the vain hunt for the wedge, had discharged his carrying powers upon the former instrument in a sort of confusion--just as a man may pick up a sieve to carry water in, in the excitement of putting out a fire.[336]
Thus, then, the characters extracted by animals are very few, and always related to their immediate interests or emotions. That dissociation by varying concomitants, which in man is based so largely on association by similarity, hardly seems to take place at all in the mind of brutes. One total thought suggests to them another total thought, and they find themselves acting with propriety, they know not why. The great, the fundamental, defect of their minds seems to be the inability of their groups of ideas to break across in unaccustomed places. They are enslaved to routine, to cut-and-dried thinking; and if the most prosaic of human beings could be transported into his dog's mind, he would be appalled at the utter absence of fancy which reigns there.[337] Thoughts will not be found to call up their similars, but only their habitual successors. Sunsets will not suggest heroes' deaths, but supper-time. This is why man is the only metaphysical animal. To wonder why the universe should be as it is presupposes the notion of its being different, and a brute, which never reduces the actual to fluidity by breaking up its literal sequences in his imagination, can never form such a notion. He takes the world simply for granted, and never wonders at it at all.
Professor Strümpell quotes a dog-story which is probably a type of many others. The feat performed looks like abstract reasoning; but an acquaintance with all the circumstances shows it to have been a random trick learned by habit. The story is as follows:
"I have two dogs, a small, long-legged pet dog and a rather large watch-dog. Immediately beyond the house-court is the garden, into which one enters through a low lattice-gate which is closed by a latch on the yard-side. This latch is opened by lifting it. Besides this, moreover, the gate is fastened on the garden-side by a string nailed to the gate-post. Here, as often as one wished, could the following sight be observed. If the little dog was shut in the garden and he wished to get out, he placed himself before the gate and barked. Immediately the large dog in the court would hasten to him and raise the latch with his nose while the little dog on the garden-side leaped up and, catching the string in his teeth, bit it through; whereupon the big one wedged his snout between the gate and the post, pushed the gate open, and the little dog slipped through. Certainly reasoning seems here to prevail. In face of it, however, and although the dogs arrived of themselves, and without human aid, at their solution of the gate question, I am able to point out that the complete action was pieced together out of accidental experiences which the dogs followed, I might say, unconsciously. While the large dog was young, he was allowed, like the little one, to go into the garden, and therefore the gate was usually not latched, but simply closed. Now if he saw anyone go in, he would follow by thrusting his snout between gate and post, and so pushing the gate open. When he was grown I forbade his being taken in, and had the gate kept latched. But he naturally still tried to follow when anyone entered and tried in the old fashion to open it, which he could no longer do. Now it fell out that once, while making the attempt, he raised his nose higher than usual and hit the latch from below so as to lift it off its hook, and the gate unclosed. From thenceforth he made the same movement of the head when trying to open it, and, of course, with the same result. He now knew how to open the gate when it was latched.
"The little dog had been the large one's teacher in many things, especially in the chasing of cats and the catching of mice and moles; so when the little one was heard barking eagerly, the other always hastened to him. If the barking came from the garden, he opened the gate to get inside. But meanwhile the little dog, who wanted to get out the moment the gate opened, slipped out between the big one's legs, and so the appearance of his having come with the intention of letting him out arose. And that it was simply an appearance transpired from the fact that when the little dog did not succeed at once in getting out, the large one ran in and nosed about the garden, plainly showing that he had expected to find something there. In order to stop this opening of the gate I fastened a string on the garden-side which, tightly drawn, held the gate firm against the post, so that if the yard dog raised the latch and let go, it would every time fall back on to the hook. And this device was successful for quite a time, until it happened one day that on my return from a walk upon which the little dog had accompanied me I crossed the garden, and in passing through the gate the dog remained behind, and refused to come to my whistle. As it was beginning to rain, and I knew how he disliked to get wet, I closed the gate in order to punish him in this manner. But I had hardly readied the house ere he was before the gate, whining and crying most piteously, for the rain was falling faster and faster. The big dog, to whom the rain was a matter of perfect indifference, was instantly on hand and tried his utmost to open the gate, but naturally without success. Almost in despair the little dog bit at the gate, at the same time springing into the air in the attempt to jump over it, when he chanced to catch the string in his teeth; it broke, and the gate flew open. Now he knew the secret and thenceforth bit the string whenever he wished to get out, so that I was obliged to change it.
"That the big dog in raising the latch did not in the least know that the latch closed the gate, that the raising of the same opened it, but that he merely repeated the automatic blow with his snout which had once had such happy consequences, transpires from the following: the gate leading to the barn is fastened with a latch precisely like the one on the garden-gate, only placed a little higher, still easily within the dog's reach. Here, too, occasionally the little dog is confined, and when he barks the big one makes every possible effort to open the gate, but it has never occurred to him to push the latch up. The brute cannot draw conclusions, that is, he cannot think."[338]
Other classical differentiæ of man besides that of being the only reasoning animal, also seem consequences of his unrivalled powers of similar association. He has, e.g., been called 'the laughing animal.' But humor has often been defined as the recognition of identities in things different. When the man in Coriolanus says of that hero that "there is no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male tiger," both the invention of the phrase and its enjoyment by the hearer depend on a peculiarly perplexing power to associate ideas by similarity.
Man is known again as 'the talking animal'; and language is assuredly a capital distinction between man and brute. But it may readily be shown how this distinction merely flows from those we have pointed out, easy dissociation of a representation into its ingredients, and association by similarity.
Language is a system of signs, different from the things signified, but able to suggest them.
No doubt brutes have a number of such signs. When a dog yelps in front of a door, and his master, understanding his desire, opens it, the dog may, after a certain number of repetitions, get to repeat in cold blood a yelp which was at first the involuntary interjectional expression of strong emotion. The same dog may be taught to 'beg' for food, and afterwards come to do so deliberately when hungry. The dog also learns to understand the signs of men, and the word 'rat' uttered to a terrier suggests exciting thoughts of the rat-hunt. If the dog had the varied impulse to vocal utterance which some other animals have, he would probably repeat the word 'rat' whenever he spontaneously happened to think of a rat-hunt--he no doubt does have it as an auditory image, just as a parrot calls out different words spontaneously from its repertory, and having learned the name of a given dog will utter it on the sight of a different dog. In each of these separate cases the particular sign may be consciously noticed by the animal, as distinct from the particular thing signified, and will thus, so far as it goes, be a true manifestation of language. But when we come to man we find a great difference. He has a deliberate intention to apply a sign to everything. The linguistic impulse is with him generalized and systematic. For things hitherto unnoticed or unfelt, he desires a sign before he has one. Even though the dog should possess his 'yelp' for this thing, his 'beg' for that, and his auditory image 'rat' for a third thing, the matter with him rests there. If a fourth thing interests him for which no sign happens already to have been learned, he remains tranquilly without it and goes no further. But the man postulates it, its absence irritates him, and he ends by inventing it. This GENERAL PURPOSE constitutes, I take it, the peculiarity of human speech, and explains its prodigious development.
How, then, does the general purpose arise? It arises as soon as the notion of a sign as such, apart from any particular import, is born; and this notion is born by dissociation from the outstanding portions of a number of concrete cases of signification. The 'yelp,' the 'beg,' the 'rat,' differ as to their several imports and natures. They agree only in so far as they have the same use--to be signs, to stand for something more important than themselves. The dog whom this similarity could strike would have grasped the sign per se as such, and would probably thereupon become a general sign-maker, or speaker in the human sense. But how can the similarity strike him? Not without the juxtaposition of the similars (in virtue of the law we have laid down (Vol. I. p. 506), that in order to be segregated an experience must be repeated with varying concomitants)--not unless the 'yelp' of the dog at the moment it occurs recalls to him his 'beg,' by the delicate bond of their subtle similarity of use--not till then can this thought flash through his mind: "Why, yelp and beg, in spite of all their unlikeness, are yet alike in this: that they are actions, signs, which lead to important boons. Other boons, any boons, may then be got by other signs!" This reflection made, the gulf is passed. Animals probably never make it, because the bond of similarity is not delicate enough. Each sign is drowned in its import, and never awakens other signs and other imports in juxtaposition. The rat-hunt idea is too absorbingly interesting in itself to be interrupted by anything so uncontiguous to it as the idea of the 'beg for food,' or of 'the door-open yelp,' nor in their turn do these awaken the rat-hunt idea.
In the human child, however, these ruptures of contiguous association are very soon made; far off cases of sign-using arise when we make a sign now; and soon language is launched. The child in each case makes the discovery for himself. No one can help him except by furnishing him with the conditions. But as he is constituted, the conditions will sooner or later shoot together into the result.[339]
The exceedingly interesting account which Dr. Howe gives of the education of his various blind-deaf mutes illustrates this point admirably. He began to teach Laura Bridgman by gumming raised letters on various familiar articles. The child was taught by mere contiguity to pick out a certain number of particular articles when made to feel the letters. But this was merely a collection of particular signs, out of the mass of which the general purpose of signification had not yet been extracted by the child's mind. Dr. Howe compares his situation at this moment to that of one lowering a line to the bottom of the deep sea in which Laura's soul lay, and waiting until she should spontaneously take hold of it and be raised into the light. The moment came, 'accompanied by a radiant flash of intelligence and glow of joy'; she seemed suddenly to become aware of the general purpose imbedded in the different details of all these signs, and from that moment her education went on with extreme rapidity.
Another of the great capacities in which man has been said to differ fundamentally from the animal is that of possessing self-consciousness or reflective knowledge of himself as a thinker. But this capacity also flows from our criterion, for (without going into the matter very deeply) we may say that the brute never reflects on himself as a thinker, because he has never clearly dissociated, in the full concrete act of thought, the element of the thing thought of and the operation by which he thinks it. They remain always fused, conglomerated--just as the interjectional vocal sign of the brute almost invariably merges in his mind with the thing signified, and is not independently attended to in se.[340]
Now, the dissociation of these two elements probably occurs first in the child's mind on the occasion of some error or false expectation which would make him experience the shock of difference between merely imagining a thing and getting it. The thought experienced once with the concomitant reality, and then without it or with opposite concomitants, reminds the child of other cases in which the same provoking phenomenon occurred. Thus the general ingredient of error may be dissociated and noticed per se, and from the notion of his error or wrong thought to that of his thought in general the transition is easy. The brute, no doubt, has plenty of instances of error and disappointment in his life, but the similar shock is in him most likely always swallowed up in the accidents of the actual case. An expectation disappointed may breed dubiety as to the realization of that particular thing when the dog next expects it. But that disappointment, that dubiety, while they are present in the mind, will not call up other cases, in which the material details were different, but this feature of possible error was the same. The brute will, therefore, stop short of dissociating the general notion of error per se, and a fortiori will never attain the conception of Thought itself as such.
* * * * *
We may then, we think, consider it proven that the most elementary single difference between the human mind and that of brutes lies in this deficiency on the brute's part to associate ideas by similarity--characters, the abstraction of which depends on this sort of association, must in the brute always remain drowned, swamped in the total phenomenon which they help constitute, and never used to reason from. If a character stands out alone, it is always some obvious sensible quality like a sound or a smell which is instinctively exciting and lies in the line of the animal's propensities; or it is some obvious sign which experience has habitually coupled with a consequence, such as, for the dog, the sight of his master's hat on and the master's going out.
DIFFERENT ORDERS OF HUMAN GENIUS.
But, now, since nature never makes a jump, it is evident that we should find the lowest men occupying in this respect an intermediate position between the brutes and the highest men. And so we do. Beyond the analogies which their own minds suggest by breaking up the literal sequence of their experience, there is a whole world of analogies which they can appreciate when imparted to them by their betters, but which they could never excogitate alone. This answers the question why Darwin and Newton had to be waited for so long. The flash of similarity between an apple and the moon, between the rivalry for food in nature and the rivalry for man's selection, was too recondite to have occurred to any but exceptional minds. Genius, then, as has been already said, is identical with the possession of similar association to an extreme degree. Professor Bain says: "This I count the leading fact of genius. I consider it quite impossible to afford any explanation of intellectual originality except on the supposition of unusual energy on this point." Alike in the arts, in literature, in practical affairs, and in science, association by similarity is the prime condition of success.
But as, according to our view, there are two stages in reasoned thought, one where similarity merely operates to call up cognate thoughts, and another farther stage, where the bond of identity between the cognate thoughts is noticed; so minds of genius may be divided into two main sorts, those who notice the bond and those who merely obey it. The first are the abstract reasoners, properly so called, the men of science, and philosophers--the analysts, in a word; the latter are the poets, the critics--the artists, in a word, the men of intuitions. These judge rightly, classify cases, characterize them by the most striking analogic epithets, but go no further. At first sight it might seem that the analytic mind represented simply a higher intellectual stage, and that the intuitive mind represented an arrested stage of intellectual development; but the difference is not so simple as this. Professor Bain has said that a man's advance to the scientific stage (the stage of noticing and abstracting the bond of similarity) may often be due to an absence of certain emotional sensibilities. The sense of color, he says, may no less determine a mind away from science than it determines it toward painting. There must be a penury in one's interest in the details of particular forms in order to permit the forces of the intellect to be concentrated on what is common to many forms.[341] In other words, supposing a mind fertile in the suggestion of analogies, but, at the same time, keenly interested in the particulars of each suggested image, that mind would be far less apt to single out the particular character which called up the analogy than one whose interests were less generally lively. A certain richness of the æsthetic nature may, therefore, easily keep one in the intuitive stage. All the poets are examples of this. Take Homer:
"Ulysses, too, spied round the house to see if any man were still alive and hiding, trying to get away from gloomy death. He found them all fallen in the blood and dirt, and in such number as the fish which the fishermen to the low shore, out of the foaming sea, drag with their meshy nets. These all, sick for the ocean water, are strewn around the sands, while the blazing sun takes their life from them. So there the suitors lay strewn round on one another." Or again:
"And as when a Mæonian or a Carian woman stains ivory with purple to be a cheek-piece for horses, and it is kept in the chamber, and many horsemen have prayed to bear it off; but it is kept a treasure for a king, both a trapping for his horse and a glory to the driver--in such wise were thy stout thighs, Menelaos, and legs and fair ankles stained with blood."[342]
A man in whom all the accidents of an analogy rise up as vividly as this, may be excused for not attending to the ground of the analogy. But he need not on that account be deemed intellectually the inferior of a man of drier mind, in whom the ground is not as liable to be eclipsed by the general splendor. Barely are both sorts of intellect, the splendid and the analytic, found in conjunction. Plato among philosophers, and M. Taine, who cannot quote a child's saying without describing the 'voix chantante, étonnée, heureuse' in which it is uttered, are only exceptions whose strangeness proves the rule.
An often-quoted writer has said that Shakespeare possessed more intellectual power than any one else that ever lived. If by this he meant the power to pass from given premises to right or congruous conclusions, it is no doubt true. The abrupt transitions in Shakespeare's thought astonish the reader by their unexpectedness no less than they delight him by their fitness. Why, for instance, does the death of Othello so stir the spectator's blood and leave him with a sense of reconcilement? Shakespeare himself could very likely not say why; for his invention, though rational, was not ratiocinative. Wishing the curtain to fall upon a reinstated Othello, that speech about the turbaned Turk suddenly simply flashed across him as the right end of all that went before. The dry critic who comes after can, however, point out the subtle bonds of identity that guided Shakespeare's pen through that speech to the death of the Moor. Othello is sunk in ignominy, lapsed from his height at the beginning of the play. What better way to rescue him at last from this abasement than to make him for an instant identify himself in memory with the old Othello of better days, and then execute justice on his present disowned body, as he used then to smite all enemies of the State? But Shakespeare, whose mind supplied these means, could probably not have told why they were so effective.
But though this is true, and though it would be absurd in an absolute way to say that a given analytic mind was superior to any intuitional one, yet it is none the less true that the former represents the higher stage. Men, taken historically, reason by analogy long before they have learned to reason by abstract characters. Association by similarity and true reasoning may have identical results. If a philosopher wishes to prove to you why you should do a certain thing, he may do so by using abstract considerations exclusively; a savage will prove the same by reminding you of a similar case in which you notoriously do as he now proposes, and this with no ability to state the point in which the cases are similar. In all primitive literature, in all savage oratory, we find persuasion carried on exclusively by parables and similes, and travellers in savage countries readily adopt the native custom. Take, for example, Dr. Livingstone's argument with the negro conjuror. The missionary was trying to dissuade the savage from his fetichistic ways of invoking rain. "You see," said he, "that, after all your operations, sometimes it rains and sometimes it does not, exactly as when you have not operated at all." "But," replied the sorcerer, "it is just the same with you doctors; you give your remedies, and sometimes the patient gets well and sometimes he dies, just as when you do nothing at all." To that the pious missionary replied: "The doctor does his duty, after which God performs the cure if it pleases Him." "Well," rejoined the savage, "it is just so with me. I do what is necessary to procure rain, after which God sends it or withholds it according to His pleasure."[343]
This is the stage in which proverbial philosophy reigns supreme. "An empty sack can't stand straight" will stand for the reason why a man with debts may lose his honesty; and "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" will serve to back up one's exhortations to prudence. Or we answer the question: "Why is snow white?" by saying, "For the same reason that soap-suds or whipped eggs are white"--in other words, instead of giving the reason for a fact, we give another example of the same fact. This offering a similar instance, instead of a reason, has often been criticised as one of the forms of logical depravity in men. But manifestly it is not a perverse act of thought, but only an incomplete one. Furnishing parallel cases is the necessary first step towards abstracting the reason imbedded in them all.
As it is with reasons, so it is with words. The first words are probably always names of entire things and entire actions, of extensive coherent groups. A new experience in the primitive man can only be talked about by him in terms of the old experiences which have received names. It reminds him of certain ones from among them, but the points in which it agrees with them are neither named nor dissociated. Pure similarity must work before the abstraction can work which is based upon it. The first adjectives will therefore probably be total nouns embodying the striking character. The primeval man will say, not 'the bread is hard,' but 'the bread is stone'; not 'the face is round,' but 'the face is moon'; not 'the fruit is sweet,' but 'the fruit is sugar-cane.' The first words are thus neither particular nor general, but vaguely concrete; just as we speak of an 'oval' face, a 'velvet' skin, or an 'iron' will, without meaning to connote any other attributes of the adjective-noun than those in which it does resemble the noun it is used to qualify. After a while certain of these adjectively-used nouns come only to signify the particular quality for whose sake they are oftenest used; the entire thing which they originally meant receives another name, and they become true abstract and general terms. Oval, for example, with us suggests only shape. The first abstract qualities thus formed are, no doubt, qualities of one and the same sense found in different objects--as big, sweet; next analogies between different senses, as 'sharp' of taste, 'high' of sound, etc.; then analogies of motor combinations, or form of relation, as simple, confused, difficult, reciprocal, relative, spontaneous, etc. The extreme degree of subtlety in analogy is reached in such cases as when we say certain English art critics' writing reminds us of a close room in which pastilles have been burning, or that the mind of certain Frenchmen is like old Roquefort cheese. Here language utterly fails to hit upon the basis of resemblance.
Over immense departments of our thought we are still, all of us, in the savage state. Similarity operates in us, but abstraction has not taken place. We know what the present case is like, we know what it reminds us of, we have an intuition of the right course to take, if it be a practical matter. But analytic thought has made no tracks, and we cannot justify ourselves to others. In ethical, psychological, and æsthetic matters, to give a clear reason for one's judgment is universally recognized as a mark of rare genius. The helplessness of uneducated people to account for their likes and dislikes is often ludicrous. Ask the first Irish girl why she likes this country better or worse than her home, and see how much she can tell you. But if you ask your most educated friend why he prefers Titian to Paul Veronese, you will hardly get more of a reply; and you will probably get absolutely none if you inquire why Beethoven reminds him of Michael Angelo, or how it comes that a bare figure with unduly flexed joints, by the latter, can so suggest the moral tragedy of life. His thought obeys a nexus, but cannot name it. And so it is with all those judgments of experts, which even though unmotived are so valuable. Saturated with experience of a particular class of materials, an expert intuitively feels whether a newly-reported fact is probable or not, whether a proposed hypothesis is worthless or the reverse. He instinctively knows that, in a novel case, this and not that will be the promising course of action. The well-known story of the old judge advising the new one never to give reasons for his decisions, "the decisions will probably be right, the reasons will surely be wrong," illustrates this. The doctor will feel that the patient is doomed, the dentist will have a premonition that the tooth will break, though neither can articulate a reason for his foreboding. The reason lies imbedded, but not yet laid bare, in all the countless previous cases dimly suggested by the actual one, all calling up the same conclusion, which the adept thus finds himself swept on to, he knows not how or why.
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A physiological conclusion remains to be drawn. If the principles laid down in Chapter XIV are true, then it follows that the great cerebral difference between habitual and reasoned thinking must be this: that in the former an entire system of cells vibrating at any one moment discharges in its totality into another entire system, and that the order of the discharges tends to be a constant one in time; whilst in the latter a part of the prior system still keeps vibrating in the midst of the subsequent system, and the order--which part this shall be, and what shall be its concomitants in the subsequent system--has little tendency to fixedness in time. This physical selection, so to call it, of one part to vibrate persistently whilst the others rise and subside, we found, in the chapter in question, to be the basis of similar association. (See especially Vol. I. pp. 578-81.) It would seem to be but a minor degree of that still more urgent and importunate localized vibration which we can easiest conceive to underlie the mental fact of interest, attention, or dissociation. In terms of the brain-process, then, all these mental facts resolve themselves into a single peculiarity: that of indeterminateness of connection between the different tracts, and tendency of action to focalize itself, so to speak, in small localities which vary infinitely at different times, and from which irradiation may proceed in countless shifting ways. (Compare figure 80, p. 347.) To discover, or (what more befits the present stage of nerve-physiology) to adumbrate by some possible guess, on what chemical or molecular-mechanical fact this instable equilibrium of the human brain may depend, should be the next task of the physiologist who ponders over the passage from brute to man. Whatever the physical peculiarity in question may be, it is the cause why a man, whose brain has it, reasons so much, whilst his horse, whose brain lacks it, reasons so little. We can but bequeath the problem to abler hands than our own.
But, meanwhile, this mode of stating the matter suggests a couple of other inferences. The first is brief. If focalization of brain-activity be the fundamental fact of reasonable thought, we see why intense interest or concentrated passion makes us think so much more truly and profoundly. The persistent focalization of motion in certain tracts is the cerebral fact corresponding to the persistent domination in consciousness of the important feature of the subject. When not 'focalized,' we are scatter-brained; but when thoroughly impassioned, we never wander from the point. None but congruous and relevant images arise. When roused by indignation or moral enthusiasm, how trenchant are our reflections, how smiting are our words! The whole network of petty scruples and by-considerations which, at ordinary languid times, surrounded the matter like a cobweb, holding back our thought, as Gulliver was pinned to the earth by the myriad Lilliputian threads, are dashed through at a blow, and the subject stands with its essential and vital lines revealed.
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The last point is relative to the theory that what was acquired habit in the ancestor may become congenital tendency in the offspring. So vast a superstructure is raised upon this principle that the paucity of empirical evidence for it has alike been matter of regret to its adherents, and of triumph to its opponents. In Chapter XXVIII we shall see what we may call the whole beggarly array of proof. In the human race, where our opportunities for observation are the most complete, we seem to have no evidence whatever which would support the hypothesis, unless it possibly be the law that city-bred children are more apt to be near-sighted than country children. In the mental world we certainly do not observe that the children of great travellers get their geography lessons with unusual ease, or that a baby whose ancestors have spoken German for thirty generations will, on that account, learn Italian any the less easily from its Italian nurse. But if the considerations we have been led to are true, they explain perfectly well why this law should not be verified in the human race, and why, therefore, in looking for evidence on the subject, we should confine ourselves exclusively to lower animals. In them fixed habit is the essential and characteristic law of nervous action. The brain grows to the exact modes in which it has been exercised, and the inheritance of these modes--then called instincts--would have in it nothing surprising. But in man the negation of all fixed modes is the essential characteristic. He owes his whole pre-eminence as a reasoner, his whole human quality of intellect, we may say, to the facility with which a given mode of thought in him may suddenly be broken up into elements, which recombine anew. Only at the price of inheriting no settled instinctive tendencies is he able to settle every novel case by the fresh discovery by his reason of novel principles. He is, par excellence, the educable animal. If, then, the law that habits are inherited were found exemplified in him, he would, in so far forth, fall short of his human perfections; and, when we survey the human races, we actually do find that those which are most instinctive at the outset are those which, on the whole, are least educated in the end. An untutored Italian is, to a great extent, a man of the world; he has instinctive perceptions, tendencies to behavior, reactions, in a word, upon his environment, which the untutored German wholly lacks. If the latter be not drilled, he is apt to be a thoroughly loutish personage; but, on the other hand, the mere absence in his brain of definite innate tendencies enables him to advance by the development, through education, of his purely reasoned thinking, into complex regions of consciousness that the Italian may probably never approach.
We observe an identical difference between men as a whole and women as a whole. A young woman of twenty reacts with intuitive promptitude and security in all the usual circumstances in which she may be placed.[344] Her likes and dislikes are formed; her opinions, to a great extent, the same that they will be through life. Her character is, in fact, finished in its essentials. How inferior to her is a boy of twenty in all these respects! His character is still gelatinous, uncertain what shape to assume, 'trying it on' in every direction. Feeling his power, yet ignorant of the manner in which he shall express it, he is, when compared with his sister, a being of no definite contour. But this absence of prompt tendency in his brain to set into particular modes is the very condition which insures that it shall ultimately become so much more efficient than the woman's. The very lack of preappointed trains of thought is the ground on which general principles and heads of classification grow up; and the masculine brain deals with new and complex matter indirectly by means of these, in a manner which the feminine method of direct intuition, admirably and rapidly as it performs within its limits, can vainly hope to cope with.
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In looking back over the subject of reasoning, one feels how intimately connected it is with conception; and one realizes more than ever the deep reach of that principle of selection on which so much stress was laid towards the close of Chapter IX. As the art of reading (after a certain stage in one's education) is the art of skipping, so the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook. The first effect on the mind of growing cultivated is that processes once multiple get to be performed by a single act. Lazarus has called this the progressive 'condensation' of thought. But in the psychological sense it is less a condensation than a loss, a genuine dropping out and throwing overboard of conscious content. Steps really sink from sight. An advanced thinker sees the relations of his topics in such masses and so instantaneously that when he comes to explain to younger minds it is often hard to say which grows the more perplexed, he or the pupil. In every university there are admirable investigators who are notoriously bad lecturers. The reason is that they never spontaneously see the subject in the minute articulate way in which the student needs to have it offered to his slow reception. They grope for the links, but the links do not come. Bowditch, who translated and annotated Laplace's Mécanique Céleste, said that whenever his author prefaced a proposition by the words 'it is evident,' he knew that many hours of hard study lay before him.
When two minds of a high order, interested in kindred subjects, come together, their conversation is chiefly remarkable for the summariness of its allusions and the rapidity of its transitions. Before one of them is half through a sentence the other knows his meaning and replies. Such genial play with such massive materials, such an easy flashing of light over far perspectives, such careless indifference to the dust and apparatus that ordinarily surround the subject and seem to pertain to its essence, make these conversations seem true feasts for gods to a listener who is educated enough to follow them at all. His mental lungs breathe more deeply, in an atmosphere more broad and vast than is their wont. On the other hand, the excessive explicitness and short-windedness of an ordinary man are as wonderful as they are tedious to the man of genius. But we need not go as far as the ways of genius. Ordinary social intercourse will do. There the charm of conversation is in direct proportion to the possibility of abridgment and elision, and in inverse ratio to the need of explicit statement. With old friends a word stands for a whole story or set of opinions. With new-comers everything must be gone over in detail. Some persons have a real mania for completeness, they must express every step. They are the most intolerable of companions, and although their mental energy may in its way be great, they always strike us as weak and second-rate. In short, the essence of plebeianism, that which separates vulgarity from aristocracy, is perhaps less a defect than an excess, the constant need to animadvert upon matters which for the aristocratic temperament do not exist. To ignore, to disdain to consider, to overlook, are the essence of the 'gentleman.' Often most provokingly so; for the things ignored may be of the deepest moral consequence. But in the very midst of our indignation with the gentleman, we have a consciousness that his preposterous inertia and negativeness in the actual emergency is, somehow or other, allied with his general superiority to ourselves. It is not only that the gentleman ignores considerations relative to conduct, sordid suspicions, fears, calculations, etc., which the vulgarian is fated to entertain; it is that he is silent where the vulgarian talks; that he gives nothing but results where the vulgarian is profuse of reasons; that he does not explain or apologize; that he uses one sentence instead of twenty; and that, in a word, there is an amount of interstitial thinking, so to call it, which it is quite impossible to get him to perform, but which is nearly all that the vulgarian mind performs at all. All this suppression of the secondary leaves the field clear,--for higher flights, should they choose to come. But even if they never came, what thoughts there were would still manifest the aristocratic type and wear the well-bred form. So great is our sense of harmony and ease in passing from the company of a philistine to that of an aristocratic temperament, that we are almost tempted to deem the falsest views and tastes as held by a man of the world, truer than the truest as held by a common person. In the latter the best ideas are choked, obstructed, and contaminated by the redundancy of their paltry associates. The negative conditions, at least, of an atmosphere and a free outlook are present in the former.
I may appear to have strayed from psychological analysis into æsthetic criticism. But the principle of selection is so important that no illustrations seem redundant which may help to show how great is its scope. The upshot of what I say simply is that selection implies rejection as well as choice; and that the function of ignoring, of _in_attention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function of attention itself.
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[319] The substance of this chapter, and a good many pages of the text, originally appeared in an article entitled 'Brute and Human Intellect,' in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy for July 1878 (vol. xii. p. 236).
[320] I see no need of assuming more than two terms in this sort of reasoning--first, the sign, and second, the thing inferred from it. Either may be complex, but essentially it is but A calling up B, and no middle term is involved. M. Binet, in his most intelligent little book, La Psychologie du Raisonnement, maintains that there are three terms. The present sensation or sign must, according to him, first evoke from the past an image which resembles it and fuses with it, and the things suggested or inferred are always the contiguous associates of this intermediate image, and not of the immediate sensation. The reader of Chapter XIX will see why I do not believe in the 'image' in question as a distinct psychic fact.
[321] Mental Evolution in Man (1889), chapters iii and iv. See especially pp. 68-80, and later 353, 396.
[322] Loc. cit. p. 50.
[323] P. 52.
[324] Loc. cit. p. 74.
[325] J. Locke, Essay conc. Hum. Understanding, bk. iv. chap. ii. § 3.
[326] To be sagacious is to be a good observer. J. S. Mill has a passage which is so much in the spirit of the text that I cannot forbear to quote it. "The observer is not he who merely sees the thing which is before his eyes, but he who sees what parts that thing is composed of. To do this well is a rare talent. One person, from inattention, or attending only in the wrong place, overlooks half of what he sees; another sets down much more than he sees, confounding it with what he imagines, or with what he infers; another takes note of the kind of all the circumstances, but being inexpert in estimating their degree, leaves the quantity of each vague and uncertain; another sees indeed the whole, but makes such an awkward division of it into parts, throwing things into one mass which require to be separated, and separating others which might more conveniently be considered as one, that the result is much the same, sometimes even worse, than if no analysis had been attempted at all. It would be possible to point out what qualities of mind, and modes of mental culture, fit a person for being a good observer: that, however, is a question not of Logic, but of the Theory of Education, in the most enlarged sense of the term. There is not properly an Art of Observing. There may be rules for observing. But these, like rules for inventing, are properly instructions for the preparation of one's own mind; for putting it into the state in which it will be most fitted to observe, or most likely to invent. They are, therefore, essentially rules of self-education, which is a different thing from Logic. They do not teach how to do the thing, but how to make ourselves capable of doing it. They are an art of strengthening the limbs, not an art of using them. The extent and minuteness of observation which may be requisite, and the degree of decomposition to which it may be necessary to carry the mental analysis, depend on the particular purpose in view. To ascertain the state of the whole universe at any particular moment is impossible, but would also be useless. In making chemical experiments, we do not think it necessary to note the position of the planets; because experience has shown, as a very superficial experience is sufficient to show, that in such cases that circumstance is not material to the result: and accordingly, in the ages when man believed in the occult influences of the heavenly bodies, it might have been unphilosophical to omit ascertaining the precise condition of those bodies at the moment of the experiment." (Logic, bk. iii. chap. vii. § 1. Cf. also bk. iv. chap. ii.)
[327] Readers brought up on Popular Science may think that the molecular structure of things is their real essence in an absolute sense, and that water is H-O-H more deeply and truly than it is a solvent of sugar or a slaker of thirst. Not a whit! It is all of these things with equal reality, and the only reason why for the chemist it is H-O-H primarily, and only secondarily the other things, is that for his purpose of deduction and compendious definition, the H-O-H aspect of it is the more useful one to bear in mind.
[328] "We find that we take for granted irresistibly that each kind [of thing] has some character which distinguishes it from other classes.... What is the foundation of this postulate? What is the ground of this assumption that there must exist a definition which we have never seen, and which perhaps no one has seen in a satisfactory form?... I reply that our conviction that there must needs be characteristic marks by which things can be defined in words is founded upon the assumption of the necessary possibility of reasoning." (W. Whewell: Hist. of Scientific Ideas, bk. viii. chap. i, § 9.)
[329] I may quote a passage from an article entitled 'The Sentiment of Rationality,' published in vol. iv of Mind, 1879: "What is a conception? It is a teleological instrument. It is a partial aspect of a thing which for our purpose we regard as its essential aspect, as the representative of the entire thing. In comparison with this aspect, whatever other properties and qualities the thing may have are unimportant accidents which we may without blame ignore. But the essence, the ground of conception, varies with the end we have in view. A substance like oil has as many different essences as it has uses to different individuals. One man conceives it as a combustible, another as a lubricator, another as a food; the chemist thinks of it as a hydrocarbon; the furniture-maker as a darkener of wood; the speculator as a commodity whose market-price to-day is this and to-morrow that. The soap-boiler, the physicist, the clothes-scourer severally ascribe to it other essences in relation to their needs. Ueberweg's doctrine that the essential quality of a thing is the quality of most worth is strictly true; but Ueberweg has failed to note that the worth is wholly relative to the temporary interests of the conceiver. And, even, when his interest is distinctly defined in his own mind, the discrimination of the quality in the object which has the closest connection with it is a thing which no rules can teach. The only a priori advice that can be given to a man embarking on life with a certain purpose is the somewhat barren counsel: Be sure that in the circumstances that meet you, you attend to the right ones for your purpose. To pick out the right ones is the measure of the man. 'Millions,' says Hartmann, 'stare at the phenomenon before a genialer Kopf pounces on the concept.' The genius is simply he to whom, when he opens his eyes upon the world, the 'right' characters are the prominent ones. The fool is he who, with the same purposes as the genius, infallibly gets his attention tangled amid the accidents."
[330] Only if one of our purposes were itself truer than another, could one of our conceptions become the truer conception. To be a truer purpose, however, our purpose must conform more to some absolute standard of purpose in things to which our purposes ought to conform. This shows that the whole doctrine of essential characters is intimately bound up with a teleological view of the world. Materialism becomes self-contradictory when it denies teleology, and yet in the same breath calls atoms, etc., the essential facts. The world contains consciousness as well as atoms--and the one must be written down as just as essential as the other, in the absence of any declared purpose regarding them on the creator's part, or in the absence of any creator. As far as we ourselves go, the atoms are worth more for purposes of deduction, the consciousness for purposes of inspiration. We may fairly write the Universe in either way, thus: ATOMS-producing-consciousness; or CONSCIOUSNESS-produced-by-atoms. Atoms alone, or consciousness alone, are precisely equal mutilations of the truth. If, without believing in a God, I still continue to talk of what the world 'essentially is,' I am just as much entitled to define it as a place in which my nose itches, or as a place where at a certain corner I can get a mess of oysters for twenty cents, as to call it an evolving nebula differentiating and integrating itself. It is hard to say which of the three abstractions is the more rotten or miserable substitute for the world's concrete fulness. To conceive it merely as 'God's work' would be a similar mutilation of it, so long as we said not what God, or what kind of work. The only real truth about the world, apart from particular purposes, is the total truth.
[331] Compare Lotze, Metaphysik, §§ 58, 67, for some instructive remarks on ways in which the world's constitution might differ from what it actually is. Compare also Chapter XXVIII.
[332] Sometimes, it must be confessed, the conceiver's purpose falls short of reasoning and the only conclusion he cares to reach is the bare naming of the datum. "What is that?" is our first question relative to any unknown thing. And the ease with which our curiosity is quenched as soon as we are supplied with any sort of a name to call the object by, is ridiculous enough. To quote from an unpublished essay by a former student of mine, Mr. R. W. Black: "The simplest end which a thing's predicate can serve is the satisfaction of the desire for unity itself, the mere desire that the thing shall be the same with something else. Why, the other day, when I mistook a portrait of Shakespeare for one of Hawthorne, was I not, on psychological principles, as right as if I had correctly named it?--the two pictures had a common essence, bald forehead, mustache, flowing hair. Simply because the only end that could possibly be served by naming it Hawthorne was my desire to have it so. With reference to any other end that classification of it would not serve. And every unity, every identity, every classification is rightly called fanciful unless it serves some other end than the mere satisfaction, emotion, or inspiration caught by momentarily believing in it."
[333] See above, p. 8.
[334] See his Study of Character, chap. xv; also Senses and Intellect, 'Intellect,' chap. ii, the latter half.
[335] Whether the dog has the notion of your being angry or of your property being valuable in any such abstract way as we have these notions is more than doubtful. The conduct is more likely an impulsive result of a conspiracy of outward stimuli; the beast feels like acting so when these stimuli are present, though conscious of no definite reason why. The distinction of recept and concept is useful here. Some breeds of dogs, e.g. collies, seem instinctively to defend their master's property. The case is similar to that of a dog's barking at people after dark, at whom he would not bark in daylight. I have heard this quoted as evidence of the dog's reasoning power. It is only, as Chapter III has shown us, the impulsive result of a summation of stimuli, and has no connection with reasoning.
In certain stages of the hypnotic trance the subject seems to lapse into the non-analytic state. If a sheet of ruled foolscap paper, or a paper with a fine monotonous ornamental pattern printed on it, be shown to the subject, and one of the ruled lines or elements of the pattern be pointed to for an instant, and the paper immediately removed, he will then almost always, when after a short interval the paper is presented to him again, pick out the indicated line or element with infallible correctness. The operator, meanwhile, has either to keep his eye fixed upon it, or to make sure of its position by counting, in order not to lose its place. Just so we may remember a friend's house in a street by the single character of its number rather than by its general look. The trance-subject would seem, in these instances, to surrender himself to the general look. He disperses his attention impartially over the sheet. The place of the particular line touched is part of a 'total effect' which he gets in its entirety, and which would be distorted if another line were touched instead. This total effect is lost upon the normal looker-on, bent as he is on concentration, analysis, and emphasis. What wonder, then, that, under these experimental conditions, the trance-subject excels him in touching the right line again? If he has time given him to count the line, he will excel the trance-subject; but if the time be too short to count, he will best succeed by following the trance-method, abstaining from analysis, and being guided by the 'general look' of the line's place on the sheet. One is surprised at one's success in this the moment one gives up one's habitually analytic state of mind.
Is it too much to say that we have in this dispersion of the attention and subjection to the 'general effect' something like a relapse into the state of mind of brutes? The trance-subject never gives any other reason for his optical discriminations, save that 'it looks so.' So a man, on a road once traversed inattentively before, takes a certain turn for no reason except that he feels as if it must be right. He is guided by a sum of impressions, not one of which is emphatic or distinguished from the rest, not one of which is essential, not one of which is conceived, but all of which together drive him to a conclusion to which nothing but that sum-total leads. Are not some of the wonderful discriminations of animals explicable in the same way? The cow finds her own stanchions in the long stable, the horse stops at the house he has once stopped at in the monotonous street, because no other stanchions, no other house, yield impartially all the impressions of the previous experience. The man, however, by seeking to make some one impression characteristic and essential, prevents the rest from having their effect. So that, if the (for him) essential feature be forgotten or changed, he is too apt to be thrown off altogether, and then the brute or the trance-subject may seem to outstrip him in sagacity.
Dr. Romanes's already quoted distinction between 'receptual' and 'conceptual' thought (published since the body of my text and my note were written) connotes conveniently the difference which I seek to point out. See also his Mental Evolution in Man, p. 197 ff., for proofs of the fact that in a receptual way brutes cognize the mental states of other brutes and men.
[336] This matter of confusion is important and interesting. Since confusion is mistaking the wrong part of the phenomenon for the whole, whilst reasoning is, according to our definition, based on the substitution of the right part for the whole, it might be said that confusion and reasoning are generically the same process. I believe that they are so, and that the only difference between a muddle-head and a genius is that between extracting wrong characters and right ones. In other words, a muddle-headed person is a genius spoiled in the making. I think it will be admitted that all eminently muddle-headed persons have the temperament of genius. They are constantly breaking away from the usual consecutions of concretes. A common associator by contiguity is too closely tied to routine to get muddle-headed.
[337] The horse is a densely stupid animal, as far as everything goes except contiguous association. We reckon him intelligent, partly because he looks so handsome, partly because he has such a wonderful faculty of contiguous association and can be so quickly moulded into a mass of set habits. Had he anything of reasoning intelligence, he would be a less faithful slave than he is.
[338] Th. Schumann: Journal Daheim, No. 19, 1878. Quoted by Strümpell: Die Geisteskräfte der Menschen verglicken mit denen der Thiere (Leipzig, 1878), p. 39. Cats are notorious for the skill with which they will open latches, locks, etc. Their feats are usually ascribed to their reasoning powers. But Dr. Romanes well remarks (Mental Evolution, etc., p. 351, note) that we ought first to be sure that the actions are not due to mere association. A cat is constantly playing with things with her paws; a trick accidentally hit upon may be retained. Romanes notes the fact that the animals most skilled in this way need not be the most generally intelligent, but those which have the best corporeal members for handling things, cat's paws, horse's lips, elephant's trunk, cow's horns. The monkey has both the corporeal and the intellectual superiority. And my deprecatory remarks on animal reasoning in the text apply far less to the quadrumana than to quadrupeds.--On the possible fallacies in interpreting animals' minds, compare C. L. Morgan in Mind, xi. 174 (1886).
[339] There are two other conditions of language in the human being, additional to association by similarity, that assist its action, or rather pave the way for it. These are: first, the great natural loquacity; and, second, the great imitativeness of man. The first produces the original reflex interjectional sign; the second (as Bleek has well shown) fixes it, stamps it, and ends by multiplying the number of determinate specific signs which are a requisite preliminary to the general conscious purpose of sign-making, which I have called the characteristic human element in language. The way in which imitativeness fixes the meaning of signs is this: When a primeval man has a given emotion, he utters his natural interjection; or when (to avoid supposing that the reflex sounds are exceedingly determinate by nature) a group of such men experience a common emotion, and one takes the lead in the cry, the others cry like him from sympathy or imitativeness. Now, let one of the group hear another, who is in presence of the experience, utter the cry; he, even without the experience, will repeat the cry from pure imitativeness. But, as he repeats the sign, he will be reminded by it of his own former experience. Thus, first, he has the sign with the emotion; then, without it; then, with it again. It is "dissociated by change of concomitants"; he feels it as a separate entity and yet as having a connection with the emotion. Immediately it becomes possible for him to couple it deliberately with the emotion, in cases where the latter would either have provoked no interjectional cry or not the same one. In a word, his mental procedure tends to fix this cry on that emotion; and when this occurs, in many instances, he is provided with a stock of signs, like the yelp, beg, rat of the dog, each of which suggests a determinate image. On this stock, then, similarity works in the way above explained.
[340] See the 'Evolution of Self-consciousness' in 'Philosophical Discussions,' by Chauncey Wright (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1877). Dr. Romanes, in the book from which I have already quoted, seeks to show that the 'consciousness of truth as truth' and the deliberate intention to predicate (which are the characteristics of higher human reasoning) presuppose a consciousness of ideas as such, as things distinct from their objects; and that this consciousness depends on our having made signs for them by language. My text seems to me to include Dr. Romanes's facts, and formulates them in what to me is a more elementary way, though the reader who wishes to understand the matter better should go to his clear and patient exposition also.
[341] Study of Character, p. 317.
[342] Translated by my colleague, Professor G. H. Palmer.
[343] Quoted by Renouvier, Critique Philosophique, October 19, 1879.
[344] Social and domestic circumstances, that is, not material ones. Perceptions of social relations seem very keen in persons whose dealings with the material world are confined to knowing a few useful objects, principally animals, plants, and weapons. Savages and boors are often as tactful and astute socially as trained diplomatists. In general, it is probable that the consciousness of how one stands with other people occupies a relatively larger and larger part of the mind, the lower one goes in the scale of culture. Woman's intuitions, so fine in the sphere of personal relations, are seldom first-rate in the way of mechanics. All boys teach themselves how a clock goes: few girls. Hence Dr. Whately's jest, "Woman is the unreasoning animal, and pokes the fire from on top."
XXIII. THE PRODUCTION OF MOVEMENT
The reader will not have forgotten, in the jungle of purely inward processes and products through which the last chapters have borne him, that the final result of them all must be some form of bodily activity due to the escape of the central excitement through outgoing nerves. The whole neural organism, it will be remembered, is, physiologically considered, but a machine for converting stimuli into reactions; and the intellectual part of our life is knit up with but the middle or 'central' portion of the machine's operations. Let us now turn to consider the final or emergent operations, the bodily activities, and the forms of consciousness connected therewithal.
Every impression which impinges on the incoming nerves produces some discharge down the outgoing ones, whether we be aware of it or not. Using sweeping terms and ignoring exceptions, we might say that every possible feeling produces a movement, and that the movement is a movement of the entire organism, and of each and all its parts. What happens patently when an explosion or a flash of lightning startles us, or when we are tickled, happens latently with every sensation which we receive. The only reason why we do not feel the startle or tickle in the case of insignificant sensations is partly its very small amount, partly our obtuseness. Professor Bain many years ago gave the name of the Law of Diffusion to this phenomenon of general discharge, and expressed it thus: "According as an impression is accompanied with Feeling, the aroused currents diffuse themselves over the brain, leading to a general agitation of the moving organs, as well as affecting the viscera."
In cases where the feeling is strong the law is too familiar to require proof. As Prof. Bain says:
"Each of us knows in our own experience that a sudden shock of feeling is accompanied with movements of the body generally, and with other effects. When no emotion is present, we are quiescent; a slight feeling is accompanied with slight manifestations; a more intense shock has a more intense outburst. Every pleasure and every pain, and every mode of emotion, has a definite wave of effects, which our observation makes known to us; and we apply the knowledge to infer other men's feelings from their outward display.... The organs first and prominently affected, in the diffused wave of nervous influence, are the moving members, and of these, by preference, the features of the face (with the ears in animals), whose movements constitute the expression of the countenance. But the influence extends to all the parts of the moving system, voluntary and involuntary; while an important series of effects are produced on the glands and viscera--the stomach, lungs, heart, kidneys, skin, together with the sexual and mammary organs.... The circumstance is seemingly universal, the proof of it does not require a citation of instances in detail; on the objectors is thrown the burden of adducing unequivocal exceptions to the law."[345]
There are probably no exceptions to the diffusion of every impression through the nerve-centres. The effect of the wave through the centres may, however, often be to interfere with processes, and to diminish tensions already existing there; and the outward consequences of such inhibitions may be the arrest of discharges from the inhibited regions and the checking of bodily activities already in process of occurrence. When this happens it probably is like the draining or siphoning of certain channels by currents flowing through others. When, in walking, we suddenly stand still because a sound, sight, smell, or thought catches our attention, something like this occurs. But there are cases of arrest of peripheral activity which depend, not on central inhibition, but on stimulation of centres which discharge outgoing currents of an inhibitory sort. Whenever we are startled, for example, our heart momentarily stops or slows its beating, and then palpitates with accelerated speed. The brief arrest is due to an outgoing current down the pneumogastric nerve. This nerve, when stimulated, stops or slows the heart-beats, and this particular effect of startling fails to occur if the nerve be cut.
In general, however, the stimulating effects of a sense-impression preponderate over the inhibiting effects, so that we may roughly say, as we began by saying, that the wave of discharge produces an activity in all parts of the body. The task of tracing out all the effects of any one incoming sensation has not yet been performed by physiologists. Recent years have, however, begun to enlarge our information; and although I must refer to special treatises for the full details, I can briefly string together here a number of separate observations which prove the truth of the law of diffusion.
First take effects upon the circulation. Those upon the heart we have just seen. Haller long ago recorded that the blood from an open vein flowed out faster at the beat of a drum.[346] In Chapter III. (Vol. I. p. 98) we learned how instantaneously, according to Mosso, the circulation in the brain is altered by changes of sensation and of the course of thought. The effect of objects of fear, shame, and anger upon the blood-supply of the skin, especially the skin of the face, are too well known to need remark. Sensations of the higher senses produce, according to Couty and Charpentier, the most varied effects upon the pulse-rate and blood-pressure in dogs. Fig. 81, a pulse-tracing from these authors, shows the tumultuous effect on a dog's heart of hearing the screams of another dog. The changes of blood-pressure still occurred when the pneumogastric nerves were cut, showing the vaso-motor effect to be direct and not dependent on the heart. When Mosso invented that simple instrument, the plethysmograph, for recording the fluctuations in volume of the members of the body, what most astonished him, he says, "in the first experiments which he made in Italy, was the extreme unrest of the blood-vessels of the hand, which at every smallest emotion, whether during waking or during sleep, changed their volume in surprising fashion."[347] Figure 82 (from Féré[348]) shows the way in which the pulse of one subject was modified by the exhibition of a red light lasting from the moment marked a to that marked b.
The effects upon respiration of sudden sensory stimuli are also too well known to need elaborate comment. We 'catch our breath' at every sudden sound. We 'hold our breath' whenever our attention and expectation are strongly engaged, and we sigh when the tension of the situation is relieved. When a fearful object is before us we pant and cannot deeply inspire; when the object makes us angry it is, on the contrary, the act of expiration which is hard. I subjoin a couple of figures from Féré which explain themselves. They show the effects of light upon the breathing of two of his hysteric patients.[349]
On the sweat-glands, similar consequences of sensorial stimuli are observed. Tarchanoff, testing the condition of the sweat-glands by the power of the skin to start a galvanic current through electrodes applied to its surface, found that "nearly every kind of nervous activity, from the simplest sensations and impressions, to voluntary motions and the highest forms of mental exertion, is accompanied by an increased activity in the glands of the skin."[350] On the pupil observations are recorded by Sanders which show that a transitory dilatation follows every sensorial stimulus applied during sleep, even if the stimulus be not strong enough to wake the subject up. At the moment of awaking there is a dilatation, even if strong light falls on the eye.[351] The pupil of children can easily be observed to dilate enormously under the influence of fear. It is said to dilate in pain and fatigue; and to contract, on the contrary, in rage.
As regards effects on the abdominal viscera, they unquestionably exist, but very few accurate observations have been made.[352]
The bladder, bowels, and uterus respond to sensations, even indifferent ones. Mosso and Pellicani, in their plethysmographic investigations on the bladder of dogs, found all sorts of sensorial stimuli to produce reflex contractions of this organ, independent of those of the abdominal walls. They call the bladder 'as good an æsthesiometer as the iris,' and refer to the not uncommon reflex effects of psychic stimuli in the human female upon this organ.[353] M. Féré has registered the contractions of the sphincter ani which even indifferent sensations will produce. In some pregnant women the fœtus is felt to move after almost every sensorial excitement received by the mother. The only natural explanation is that it is stimulated at such moments by reflex contractions of the womb.[354] That the glands are affected in emotion is patent enough in the case of the tears of grief, the dry mouth, moist skin, or diarrhœa of fear, the biliary disturbances which sometimes follow upon rage, etc. The watering of the mouth at the sight of succulent food is well known. It is difficult to follow the smaller degrees of all these reflex changes, but it can hardly be doubted that they exist in some degree, even where they cease to be traceable, and that all our sensations have some visceral effects. The sneezing produced by sunshine, the roughening of the skin (goose-flesh) which certain strokings, contacts, and sounds, musical or non-musical, provoke, are facts of the same order as the shuddering and standing up of the hair in fear, only of less degree.
Effects on Voluntary Muscles. Every sensorial stimulus not only sends a special discharge into certain particular muscles dependent on the special nature of the stimulus in question--some of these special discharges we have studied in Chapter XI, others we shall examine under the heads of Instinct and Emotion--but it innervates the muscles generally. M. Féré has given very curious experimental proofs of this. The strength of contraction of the subject's hand was measured by a self-registering dynamometer. Ordinarily the maximum strength, under simple experimental conditions, remains the same from day to day. But if simultaneously with the contraction the subject received a sensorial impression, the contraction was sometimes weakened, but more often increased. This reinforcing effect has received the name of dynamogeny. The dynamogenic value of simple musical notes seems to be proportional to their loudness and height. Where the notes are compounded into sad strains, the muscular strength diminishes. If the strains are gay, it is increased.--The dynamogenic value of colored lights varies with the color. In a subject[355] whose normal strength was expressed by 23, it became 24 when a blue light was thrown on the eyes, 28 for green, 30 for yellow, 35 for orange, and 42 for red. Red is thus the most exciting color. Among tastes, sweet has the lowest value, next comes salt, then bitter, and finally sour, though, as M. Féré remarks, such a sour as acetic acid excites the nerves of pain and smell as well as of taste. The stimulating effects of tobacco-smoke, alcohol, beef-extract (which is innutritious), etc., etc., may be partly due to a dynamogenic action of this sort.--Of odors, that of musk seems to have a peculiar dynamogenic power. Fig. 85 is a copy of one of M. Féré's dynamographic tracings, which explains itself. The smaller contractions are those without stimulus; the stronger ones are due to the influence of red rays of light.
Everyone is familiar with the patellar reflex, or jerk upwards of the foot, which is produced by smartly tapping the tendon below the knee-pan when the leg hangs over the other knee. Drs. Weir Mitchell and Lombard have found that when other sensations come in simultaneously with the tap, the jerk is increased.[356] Heat, cold, pricking, itching, or faradic stimulation of the skin, sometimes strong optical impressions, music, all have this dynamogenic effect, which also results whenever voluntary movements are set up in other parts of the body, simultaneously with the tap.[357]
These 'dynamogenic' effects, in which one stimulation simply reinforces another already under way, must not be confounded with reflex acts properly so called, in which new activities are originated by the stimulus. All instinctive performances and manifestations of emotion are reflex acts. But underneath those of which we are conscious there seem to go on continually others smaller in amount, which probably in most persons might be called fluctuations of muscular tone, but which in certain neurotic subjects can be demonstrated ocularly. M. Féré figures some of them in the article to which I have already referred.[358]
* * * * *
Looking back over all these facts, it is hard to doubt the truth of the law of diffusion, even where verification is beyond reach. A process set up anywhere in the centres reverberates everywhere, and in some way or other affects the organism throughout, making its activities either greater or less. We are brought again to the assimilation which was expressed on a previous page of the nerve-central mass to a good conductor charged with electricity, of which the tension cannot be changed anywhere without changing it everywhere.
* * * * *
Herr Schneider has tried to show, by an ingenious and suggestive zoological review,[359] that all the special movements which highly evolved animals make are differentiated from the two originally simple movements, of contraction and expansion, in which the entire body of simple organisms takes part. The tendency to contract is the source of all the self-protective impulses and reactions which are later developed, including that of flight. The tendency to expand splits up, on the contrary, into the impulses and instincts of an aggressive kind, feeding, fighting, sexual intercourse, etc. Schneider's articles are well worth reading, if only for the careful observations on animals which they embody. I cite them here as a sort of evolutionary reason to add to the mechanical a priori reason why there ought to be the diffusive wave which our a posteriori instances have shown to exist.
I will now proceed to a detailed study of the more important classes of movement consequent upon cerebro-mental change. They may be enumerated as--
1) Instinctive or Impulsive Performances;
2) Expressions of Emotion; and
3) Voluntary Deeds;
and each shall have a chapter to itself.
* * * * *
[345] Emotions and Will, pp. 4, 5.
[346] Cf. Féré. Sensation et Mouvement (1887), p. 56.
[347] La Paura (1884), p. 117. Compare Féré: Sensation et Mouvement, chap. xvii.
[348] Revue Philosophique, xxiv. 570.
[349] Revue Phil., xxiv. pp. 566-7.--For further information about the relations between the brain and respiration, see Danilewsky's Essay in the Biologisches Centralblatt, ii. 690.
[350] Quoted from the report of Tarchanoff's paper (in Pflüger's Archiv, xlvi. 46) in the American Journal of Psych., ii. 652.
[351] Archiv f. Psychiatrie, vii. 652; ix. 129.
[352] Sensation et Mouvement, 57-8.
[353] R. Accad. dei Lincei (1881-2). I follow the report in Hofmann Schwalbe's Jahresbericht, x. ii. 93.
[354] Cf. Féré, Sensation et Mouvement, chap. xiv.
[355] The figures given are from an hysterical subject, and the differences are greater than normal. M. Féré considers that the unstable nervous system of the hysteric ('ces grenouilles de la psychologie') shows the law on a quantitatively exaggerated scale, without altering the qualitative relations. The effects remind us a little of the influence of sensations upon minimal sensations of other orders discovered by Urbantschitsch, and reported on page 29 of this volume.
[356] Mitchell in (Philadelphia) Medical News (Feb. 13 and 20, 1886); Lombard in American Journal of Psychology (Oct. 1887).
[357] Prof. H. P. Bowditch has made the interesting discovery that if the reinforcing movement be as much as 0.4 of a second late, the reinforcement fails to occur, and is transformed into a positive inhibition of the knee-jerk for retardations of between 0.4' and 1.7'. The knee-jerk fails to be modified at all by voluntary movements made later than 1.7' after the patellar ligament is tapped (see Boston Med. and Surg. Journ., May 31, 1888).
[358] Revue Phil., xxiv. 572 ff.
[359] In the Vierteljahrschrift für wiss. Philos., iii. 294.