The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2

* There are two other ' principles of identity ' in philosophy. The ontological one asserts that every real thing is what it is, that a is a, and b, b. The logical one says that what is once true of the subject of a judgment is always true of that subject. The ontological law is a tautological truism; the logical principle is already more, for it implies subjects unal terable by time. The psychological law also implies facts which might not be realized : there might be no succession of thoughts; or if there were, the later ones might not think of the earlier; or if they did, they might not recall the content thereof; or, recalling the content, they might not take it as ' the same ' with anything else.

The function by which we thus identify a numerically dis> tinct and permanent subject of discourse is called CONCEPTION ; and the thoughts which are its vehicles are called concepts. But the word ' coucept ' is often used as if it stood for the object of discourse itself; and this looseness feeds such evasiveness in discussion that I shall avoid the use of the expression concept altogether, and speak of 'conceiving state of mind,' or something similar, instead. The word ' conception ' is unambiguous. It properly denotes neither the mental state nor what the mental state signifies, but the relation between the two, namely, the function of the mental state in signifying just that particular thing. It is plain that one and the same mental state can be the ve hicle of many conceptions, can mean a particular thing, and a great deal more besides. If it has such a multiple conceptual function, it may be called an act of compound conception.

We may conceive realities supposed to be extra-mental, as steam-engine ; fictions, as mermaid; or mere entia rationis, like difference or nonentity. But whatever we do conceive, our conception is of that and nothing else — noth ing else, that is, instead of that, though it may be of much else in addition to that. Each act of conception results from our attention singling out some one part of the mass of matter for thought which the world presents, and hold ing fast to it, without confusion.* Confusion occurs when

* In later chapters we shall see that determinate relations exist between the various data thus fixed upon by the mind. These are called a priori or axiomatic relations. Simple inspection of the data enables us to per ceive them; and one inspection is as effective as a million for engendering in us the conviction that between those data that relation must always hold. To change the relation we should have to make the data different. 'The guarantee for the uniformity and adequacy' of the data can only be the mind's own power to fix upon any objective content, and to mean that content as often as it likes. This right of the mind to ' construct ' perma nent ideal objects for itself out of the data of experience seems, singularly enough, to be a stumbling-block to many. Professor Robertson in his clear and instructive article ' Axioms ' in the Encyclopaedia Britaunica (9th edition) suggests that it may only be where movements enter into the con stitution of the ideal object (as they do in geometrical figures) that we can

we do not know whether a certain object proposed to us is the same with one of our meanings or not ; so that the conceptual function requires, to be complete, that the thought should not only say ' I mean this,' but also say « I don't mean that.' * Each conception thus eternally remains what it is, and never can become another. The mind may change its states, and its meanings, at different times ; may drop one conception and take up another, but the dropped concep tion can in no intelligible sense be said to change into its successor. The paper, a moment ago white, I may now see to have been scorched black. But my conception ' white ' does not change into my conception 'black.' On the con trary, it stays alongside of the objective blackness, as a different meaning in my mind, and by so doing lets me judge the blackness as the paper's change. Unless it stayed, I should simply say ' blackness ' and know no more. Thus, amid the flux of opinions and of physical things, the world of conceptions, or things intended to be thought about, stands stiff and immutable, like Plato's Realm of Ideas, t

Some conceptions are of things, some of events, some of qualities. Any fact, be it thing, event, or quality, may be conceived sufficiently for purposes of identification, if only it be singled out and marked so as to separate it from other things. Simply calling it ' this ' or ' that ' will suffice. "make the ultimate relations to be what for us they must be in all circum stances." He makes, it is true, a concession in favor of conceptions of number abstracted from "subjective occurrences succeeding each other in time" because these also are acts "of construction, dependent on the power we have of voluntarily determining the flow of subjective con sciousness." " The content of passive sensation," on the other hand, ' ' may indefinitely vary beyond any control of ours." What if it do vary, so long as we can continue to think of and mean the qualities it varied from ? We can ' make ' ideal objects for ourselves out of irrecoverable bits of passive experience quite as perfectly as out of easily repeaiable active experiences. And when we have got our objects together and compared them, we do not make, but find, their relations.

f " For though a man in a fever should from sugar have a bitter taste which at another time would produce a sweet one, yet the idea of bitter in that man's mind would be as distinct as if he had tasted only gall." (Locke's Essay bk. n. chap. xi. § 3. Read the whole section !) To speak in technical language, a subject may be conceived by its denotation, with no connotation, or a very minimum of connotation, attached. The essential point is that it should be re-identified by us as that which the talk is about ; and no full representation of it is necessary for this, even when it is a fully representable thing.

In this sense, creatures extremely low in the intellectual scale may have conception. All that is required is that they should recognize the same experience again. A polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of * Hollo ! thing umbob again ! ' ever flitted through its mind. Most of the objects of our thought, however, are to some degree represented as well as merely pointed out. Either they are things and events perceived or imagined, or they are qualities apprehended in a positive way. Even where we have no intuitive acquaintance with the nature of a thing, if we know any of the relations of it at all, anything about it, that is enough to individualize and distinguish it from all the other things which we might mean. Many of our topics of discourse are thus problematical, or defined by their relations only. We think of a thing about which cer tain facts must obtain, but we do not yet know how the thing will look when it is realized. Thus we conceive of a perpetual -motion machine. It is a quwsitum of a perfectly definite kind, — we can always tell whether the actual machines offered us do or do not agree with what we mean by it. The natural possibility or impossibility of the thing does not touch the question of its conceivability in this problematic way. ' Eound square,' ' black-white-thiug,' are absolutely definite conceptions ; it is a mere accident, as far as conception goes, that they happen to stand for things which nature never lets us sensibly perceive.*

* Black round things, square white things, per contra, Nature gives us freely enough. But the combinations which she refuses to realize may exist as distinctly, in the shape of postulates, as those which she gives may exist in the shape of positive images, in our mind. As u mutter of fact, she may realize a warm cold thing whenever two points of the skin, so near together as not to be locally distinguished, are touched, the one with a warm, the other with a cold, piece of metal. The warmth and the cold are then often felt as if in the same objective place. Under similar conditions two objects, one sharp and the other blunt, may feel like one sharp blunt thing. The

The fact that the same real topic of discourse is at one time conceived as a mere 'that' or 'that which, etc.,' and is at another time conceived with additional specifications, has been treated by many authors as a proof that concep tions themselves are fertile and self -developing. A concep tion, according to the Hegelizers in philosophy, * develops its own significance,' ' makes explicit what it implicitly con tained,' passes, on occasion, ' over into its opposite,' and in short loses altogether the blankly self-identical character we supposed it to maintain. The figure we viewed as a polygon appears to us now as a sum of juxtaposed triangles ; the number hitherto conceived as thirteen is at last noticed to be six plus seven, or prime ; the man thought honest is believed a rogue. Such changes of our opinion are viewed by these thinkers as evolutions of our conception, from within.

The facts are unquestionable ; our knowledge does grow and change by rational and inward processes, as well as by empirical discoveries. Where the discoveries are empirical, no one pretends that the propulsive agency, the force that makes the knowledge develop, is mere con ception. All admit it to be our continued exposure to the thing, with its power to impress our senses. Thus strychnin, which tastes bitter, we find will also kill, etc. Now I say that where the new knowledge merely comes from thinking, the facts are essentially the same, and that to talk of selfdevelopment on the part of our conceptions is a very bad ivay of stating the case. Not new sensations, as in theem-

same space may appear of two colors if, by optical artifice, one of the colors is made to appear as if seen through the other.— Whether any two attributes whatever shall be compatible or not, in the sense of appearing or not to occupy the same place and moment, depends simply on de facto peculiarities of natural bodies and of our sense-organs. Logically, anyone combination of qualities is to the full as conceivable as any other, and has as distinct a meaning for thought. What necessitates this remark is the confusion deliberately kept up by certain authors (e.g. Spencer, Psychol ogy, §§ 42fi-7) between the inconceivable and the not-distinctly-imagin able. How do we know which things we cannot imagine unless by first con ceiving them, meaning iliem and not other things?

pirical instance, but new conceptions, are the indispensable conditions of advance. For if the alleged cases of self-development be examined it will be found, I believe, that the new truth affirms in every case a relation between the original subject of con ception and some new subject conceived later on. These new subjects of conception arise in various ways. Every one of our conceptions is of something which our attention originally tore out of the continuum ©f felt experience, and provisionally isolated so as to make of it an individual topic of discourse. Every one of them has a way, if the mind is left alone with it, of suggesting other parts of the continuum from which it was torn, for conception to work upon in a similar way. This ' suggestion ' is often no more than what we shall later know as the association of ideas. Often, however, it is a sort of invitation to the mind to play, add lines, break number-groups, etc. Whatever it is, it brings new conceptions into consciousness, which latter thereupon may or may not expressly attend to the relation in which the new stands to the old. Thus I have a conception of equidistant lines. Suddenly, I know not whence, there pops into my head the conception of their meeting. Sud denly again I think of the meeting and the equidistance both together, and perceive them incompatible. " Those lines will never meet," I say. Suddenly again the word ' paral lel' pops into my head. 'They are parallels,' I continue ; and so on. Original conceptions to start with ; adventitious conceptions pushed forward by multifarious psychologic causes ; comparisons and combinations of the two ; result ant conceptions to end with ; which latter may be of either rational or empirical relations.

As regards these relations, they are conceptions of the second degree, as one might say, and their birthplace is the mind itself. In Chapter XXVIII I shall at considerable length defend the mind's claim to originality and fertility in bringing them forth. But no single one of the mind's conceptions is fertile of itself, as the opinion which I criti cise pretends. When the several notes of a chord are sounded together, we get a new feeling from their combi nation. This feeling is due to the mind reacting upon that

group of sounds in that determinate way, and no one would think of saying of any single note of the chord that it ' de veloped ' of itself into the other notes or into the feeling of harmony. So of Conceptions. No one of them develops into any other. But if two of them are thought at once, their relation may come to consciousness, and form matter for a third conception. Take ' thirteen ' for example, which is said to develop into * prime.' What really happens is that we compare the utterly changeless conception of thirteen with various other conceptions, those of the different multiples of two, three, four, five, and six, and ascertain that it differs from them all. Such difference is a freshly ascertained relation. It is only for mere brevity's sake that we call it a property of the original thirteen, the property of being prime. We shall see in the next chapter that (if we count out aesthetic and moral relations between things) the only important relations of which the mere inspection of conceptions makes us aware are relations of comparison, that is, of difference and no-differ ence, between them. The judgment 6 -(- 7 = 13 expresses the relation of equality between two ideal objects, 13 on the one hand and 6 -J- 7 on the other, sucessively conceived and compared. The judgments 6 -f 7 > 12, or 6 + 7 < 14, express in like manner relations of inequality between ideal objects. But if it be unfair to say that the conception of 6 -f- 7 generates that of 12 or of 14, surely it is as un fair to say that it generates that of 13.

The conceptions of 12, 13, and 14 are each and all gen erated by individual acts of the mind, playing with its ma terials. When, comparing two ideal objects, we find them equal, the conception of one of them may be that of a whole and of the other that of all its parts. This particular case is, it seems to me, the only case which makes the notion of one conception evolving into another sound plausible. But even in this case the conception, as such, of the whole does not evolve into the conception, as such, of the parts. Let the conception of some object as a whole be given first. To begin with, it points to and identifies for future thought a certain that. The 'whole' in question might be one of those mechanical puzzles of which the difficultv is to un-

lock the parts. In this case, nobody would pretend that the richer and more elaborate conception which we gain of the puzzle after solving it came directly out of our first crude conception of it, for it is notoriously the outcome of experimenting with our hands. It is true that, as they both mean that same puzzle, our earlier thought and our later thought have one conceptual function, are vehicles of one conception. But in addition to being the vehicle of this bald unchanging conception, ' that same puzzle,' the later thought is the vehicle of all those other conceptions which it took the manual experimentation to acquire. Now, it is just the same where the whole is mathematical instead of being mechanical. Let it be a polygonal space, which we cut into triangles, and of which we then affirm that it is those triangles. Here the experimentation (although usu ally done by a pencil in the hands) may be done by the unaided imagination. We hold the space, first conceived as polygonal simply, in our mind's eye until our atten tion wandering to and fro within it has carved it into the triangles. The triangles are a new conception, the result of this new operation. Having once conceived them, however, and compared them with the old polygon which we origi nally conceived and which we have never ceased conceiving, we judge them to fit exactly into its area. The earlier and later conceptions, we say, are of one and the same space. But this relation between triangles and polygon which the mind cannot help finding if it compares them at all, is very badly expressed by saying that the old conception has de veloped into the new.

New conceptions come from new sensations, new movements, new emotions, new associations, new acts of attention, and new comparisons of old concep tions, and not in other ways, Endogenous prolification is not a mode of growth to which conceptions can lay claim. I hope, therefore, that I shall not be accused of hud dling mysteries out of sight, when I insist that the psychol ogy of conception is not the place in which to treat of those of continuity and change. Conceptions form the one class of entities that cannot under any circumstances change. They can cease to be, altogether : or they can stay, as what

they severally are ; but there is for them no middle They form an essentially discontinuous system, and trans late the process of our perceptual experience, which is nat urally a flux, into a set of stagnant and petrified terms. The very conception of flux itself is an absolutely changeless meaning in the mind : it signifies just that one thing, flux, immovably. — And, with this, the doctrine of the flux of the concept may be dismissed, and need not occupy cur atten tion again.*

We have now to pass to a less excusable mistake. There are philosophers who deny that associated things can be broken asunder at all, even provisionally, by the conceiving mind. The opinion known as Nominalism says that we really never frame any conception of the partial elements of an experience, but are compelled, whenever we think it, to think it in its totality, just as it came. I will be silent of mediaeval Nominalism, and begin with Berkeley, who is supposed to have rediscovered the doc-

* Arguments seldom make converts in matters philosophical; and some readers, I know, who find that they conceive a certain matter differently from what they did, will still prefer saying they have two different editions of the same conception, one evolved from the other, to saying they have two different conceptions of the same thing. It depends, after all, on how we define conception. We ourselves defined it as the function by which a state of mind means to think the same whereof it thought on a former occasion. Two states of mind will accordingly be two editions of the same conception just so far as either does mean to think what the other thought; but no farther. If either mean to think what the other did not think, it is a different conception from the other. And if either mean to think all that the other thought, and more, it is a different conception, so far as the more goes. In this last case one state of mind has two conceptual func tions. Each thought decides, by its own authority, which, out of all the conceptive functions open to it, it shall now renew; with which other thought it shall identify itself as a conceiver, and just how far. " The same A which I once meant," it says, " I shall now mean again, and mean it with C as its predicate (or what not) instead of B. as before." In all this, therefore, there is absolutely no changing, but only uncoupling and recoupling of conceptions. Compound conceptions come, as functions of new states of mind. Some of these functions are the same with previous ones, some not. Any changed opinion, then, partly contains new editions (absolutely identical with the old, however) of former conceptions, partly absolutely new conceptions. The division is a perfectly easy one to make in each particular case.

trine for himself. His asseverations against * abstract ideas ' are among the oftenest quoted passages in philo sophic literature. " It is agreed," he says, " on all hands that the qualities or modes of things do never really exist each of them apart by itself, and sepa rated from all others, but are mixed, as it were, and blended together, several in the same object. But, we are told, the mind being able to consider each quality singly, or abstracted from those other qualities with which it is united, does by that means frame to itself abstract ideas. . . . After this manner, it is said, we come by the abstract idea of man, or, if you please, humanity, or human nature ; wherein it is true there is included color, because there is no man but has some color, but then it can be neither white, nor black, nor any particular color, because there is no one particular color wherein all men partake. So likewise there is included stature, but then it is neither tall stature nor low stature, nor yet middle stature, but something abstracted from all these. And so of the rest. . . . Whether others have this wonder ful faculty of abstracting their ideas, they best can tell : for myself, I find indeed I have a faculty of imagining or representing to myself the ideas of those particular things I have perceived and of variously com pounding and dividing them. ... I can consider the hand, the eye, the nose, each by itself abstracted or separated from the rest of the body. But then, whatever hand or eye I imagine, it must have some particular shape and color. Likewise the idea of man that I frame to myself must be either of a white, or a black, or a tawny, a straight, or a crooked, a tall, or a low, or a middle-sized man. I cannot by any effort of thought conceive the abstract idea above described.

And it is equally impossible for me to form the abstract idea of motion distinct from the body moving, and which is neither swift nor slow, curvilinear nor rectilinear; and the like may be said of all other abstract general ideas whatsoever. . . . And there is ground to think most' men will acknowledge themselves to be in my case. The generality of men which are simple and illiterate never pretend to abstract notions. It is said they are difficult, and not to be attained without pains and study. Now I would fain know at what time it is men are employed in surmounting that difficulty, and furnishing themselves with those neeessary helps for discourse. It cannot be when they are grown up, fop then it seems they are not conscious of any such painstaking; it remains therefore to be the business of their childhood. And surely tha great and multiplied labor of framing abstract notions will be found a hard task for that tender age. Is it not a hard thing to imagine that a couple of children cannot prate together of their sugar-plums and rat tles and the rest of their little trinkets, till they have first tacked to gether numberless inconsistencies, and so framed in their minds ab stract general ideas, and annexed them to every common name they make use of ?'' *

The note, so bravely struck by Berkeley, could not, however, be well sustained in face of the fact patent to every human being that we can mean color without mean ing any particular color, and stature without meaning any particular height. James Mill, to be sure, chimes in heroi cally in the chapter on Classification of his 'Analysis '; but in his son John the nomiualistic voice has grown so weak that, although ' abstract ideas ' are repudiated as a matter of traditional form, the opinions uttered are really nothing but a conceptualism ashamed to call itself by its own legit imate name.* Conceptualism says the mind can conceive any quality or relation it pleases, and mean nothing but it, in isolation from everything else in the world. This is, of course, the doctrine which we have professed. John Mill says :

" The formation of a Concept does not consist in separating the at tributes which are said to compose it from all other attributes of the same object, and enabling us to conceive those attributes, disjoined from any others. We neither conceive them, nor think them, nor cog nize them in any way, as a thing apart, but solely as forming, in com bination with numerous other attributes, the idea of an individual ob ject. But, though meaning them only as part of a larger agglomera tion, we have the power of fixing our attention on them, to the neglect of the other attributes with which we think them combined. While the concentration of attention lasts, if it is sufficiently intense, we may be temporarily unconscious of any of the other attributes, and may really, for a brief interval, have nothing present to our mind but the attributes constituent of the concept. . . . General concepts, therefore, we have, properly speaking, none ; we have only complex ideas of ob jects in the concrete : but we are able to attend exclusively to certain parts of the concrete idea : and by that exclusive attention we enable those parts to determine exclusively the course of our thoughts as subsequently called up by association ; and are in a condition to carry on a tram of meditation or reasoning relating to those parts only, ex actly as if we were able to conceive them separately from the rest." f

This is a lovely example of Mill's way of holding piously to his general statements, but conceding in detail all that their adversaries ask. If there be a better description ex tant, of a mind in possession of an ' abstract idea,' than is contained in the words I have italicized, I am unacquainted with it. The Berkeleyan nominalism thus breaks down. It is easy to lay bare the false assumption which under lies the whole discussion of the question as hitherto carried on. That assumption is that ideas, in order to know, must be cast in the exact likeness of whatever things they know, and that the only things that can be known are those which ideas can resemble. The error has not been confined to nominalists. Omnis cognitiojit per assimilationem cognoscentis el cogniti has been the maxim, more or less explicitly assumed, of writers of every school. Practically it amounts to saying that an idea must be a duplicate edition of what it knows * — in other words, that it can only know itself — or, more shortly still, that knowledge in any strict sense of the word, as a selftranscendent function, is impossible.

Now our own blunt statements about the ultimateuess of the cognitive relation, and the difference between the ' object ' of the thought and its mere ' topic ' or ' subject of discourse ' (cf. pp. 275 ff.), are all at variance with any such theory ; and we shall find more and more occasion, as we advance in this book, to deny its general truth. All that a state of mind need do, in order to take cognizance of a real ity, intend it, or be ' about ' it, is to lead to a remoter state of mind which either acts upon the reality or resembles it. The only class of thoughts which can with any show of plausibility be said to resemble their objects are sensations. The stuff of which all our other thoughts are composed is symbolic, and a thought attests its pertinency to a topic by simply terminating, sooner or later, in a sensation which re sembles the latter.

But Mill and the rest believe that a thought must be what it means, and mean what it is, and that if it be a pic ture of an entire individual, it cannot mean any part of him to the exclusion of the rest. I say nothing here of the pre posterously false descriptive psychology involved in the statement that the only things we can mentally picture are * E.g. : "The knowledge of things must mean that the mind finds itself in them, or that, in some way, the difference between them and the mind is dissolved." (E. Caird, Philosophy of Kant, first edition, p. 55:?.)

individuals completely determinate in all regards. Chap ter XVIII will have something to say on that point, and we can ignore it here. For even if it were true that our images were always of concrete individuals, it would not in the least follow that our meanings were of the same. The sense of our meaning is an entirely peculiar ele ment of the thought. It is one of those evanescent and * transitive ' facts of mind which introspection cannot turn round upon, and isolate and hold up for examination, as an entomologist passes round an insect on a pin. In the (somewhat clumsy) terminology I have used, it pertains to the ' fringe ' of the subjective state, and is a ' feeling of ten dency,' whose neural counterpart is undoubtedly a lot of dawning and dying processes too faint and complex to be traced. The geometer, with his one definite figure before him, knows perfectly that his thoughts apply to countless other figures as well, and that although he sees lines of a certain special bigness, direction, color, etc., he means not one of these details. When I use the word man in two dif ferent sentences, I may have both times exactly the same sound upon my lips and the same picture in my mental eye, but I may mean, and at the very moment of utter ing the word and imagining the picture, know that I mean, two entirely different things. Thus when I say : " What a wonderful man Jones is ! " I am perfectly aware that I mean by man to exclude Napoleon Bonaparte or Smith. But when I say : " What a wonderful thing Man is ! " I am equally well aware that I mean to mclude not only Jones, but Napoleon and Smith as well. This added conscious ness is an absolutely positive sort of feeling, transforming what would otherwise be mere noise or vision into some thing understood; and determining the sequel of my think ing, the later words and images, in a perfectly definite way. We saw in Chapter IX that the image per se, the nucleus, {^functionally the least important part of the thought. Our doctrine, therefore, of the 'fringe ' leads to a perfectly satisfac tory decision of the nominalistic and conceptualistic controversy, so far as it touches psychology.

We must decide in favor of tlie conceptualists, and affirm that the power to think things, qualities, relations, or whatever other elements there maj be, isolated and abstracted from the total experience in which they appear, is the most indisputable function of our thought. After abstractions, universals ! The * fringe,' which lets us believe in the one, lets us believe in the other too. An individual conception is of something restricted, in its application, to a single case. A universal or general con ception is of an entire class, or of something belonging to an entire class, of things. The conception of an abstract quality is, taken by itself, neither universal nor particular.* If I abstract white from the rest of the wintry landscape this morning, it is a perfectly definite conception, a selfidentical quality which I may mean again ; but, as I have not yet individualized it by expressly meaning to restrict it to this particular snow, nor thought at all of the possibility of other things to which it may be applicable, it is so far nothing but a ' that,' a ' floating adjective,' as Mr. Bradlev calls it, or a topic broken out from the rest of the world. Properly it is, in this state, a singular — I have ' singled it out ;' and when, later, I universalize or indi vidualize its application, and my thought turns to mean either this white or all possible whites, I am in reality mean ing two new things and forming two new conceptions, f Such an alteration of my meaning has nothing to do with any change in the image I may have in my mental eye, but solely with the vague consciousness that surrounds the image, of the sphere to which it is intended to apply. We can give no more definite account of this vague conscious-