The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2

* The traditional conceptualist doctrine is that an abstract must eo ipso be a universal. Even modern and independent authors like Prof. Dewey (Psychology, 207) obey the tradition : "The mind seizes upon some one aspect, . . . abstracts or prescinds it. This very seizure of some one element generalizes the one abstracted. . . . Attention, in drawing it forth, makes it a distinct content of consciousness, and thus universalizes it; it is considered no longer in its particular connection with the object, but on its own account; that is, as an idea, or what it signifies to the mind; and significance is always universal."

|C. F. Reid's Intellectual Powers, Essay v. chap. m.— Whiteneu ia one thing, the whiteness of Utis sheet of paper another thing. ness than lias been given on pp. 249-266. But that is no reason for denying its presence.* But the nominalists and traditional conceptualists find matter for an inveterate quarrel in these simple facts. Full of their notion that an idea, feeling, or state of conscious ness can at bottom only be aware of its own quality ; and agreeing, as they both do, that such an idea or state of con sciousness is a perfectly determinate, singular, and tran sitory thing ; they find it impossible to conceive how it should become the vehicle of a knowledge of anything permanent or universal. " To know a universal, it must be universal ; for like can only be known by like," etc. Unable to reconcile these incompatibles, the knower and the known, each side immolates one of them to save the other. The nominalists ' settle the hash ' of the thing known by denying it to be ever a genuine universal ; the conceptual ists despatch the knower by denying it to be a state of mind, in the sense of being a perishing segment of thoughts' stream, consubstantial with other facts of sensibility. They invent, instead of it, as the vehicle of the knowledge of universals, an actus purus intellect us, or an Ego, whose func tion is treated as quasi-miraculous and nothing if not aweinspiring, and which it is a sort of blasphemy to approach with the intent to explain and make common, or reduce to lowrer terms. Invoked in the first instance as a vehicle for the knowledge of universals, the higher principle presently is made the indispensable vehicle of all thinking whatever, for, it is contended, " a universal element is present in every thought." The nominalists meanwhile, who dislike

*Mr. F. H. Bradley says the conception or the 'meaning' "consists of a part of the content, cut off, fixed by the mind, and considered apart from the existence of the sign. It would not be correct to add, and re ferred away to another real subject ; for where we tnink without judging, and where we deny, that description would not be applicable/' This seems to be the same doctrine as ours; the application to one or to all subjectsof the abstract fact conceived (i.e. its individuality or its universality), constituting a new conception. I am, however, not quite sure that Mr. Bradley steadily maintains this ground. Cf. the first chapter of his Principles of Logic. The doctrine I defend is stoutly upheld in Rosmini's Philosophical System, Introduction by Thomas Davidson, p. 48 (London,

actus puros and awe-inspiring principles and despise the reverential mood, content themselves with saying that we are mistaken in supposing we ever get sight of the face of an universal ; and that what deludes us is nothing but the swarm of 'individual ideas' which may at any time be awakened by the hearing of a name. If we open the pages of either school, wre find it im possible to tell, in all the whirl about universal and particular, when the author is talking about universals in the mind, and when about objective universals, so strangely are the two mixed together. James Ferrier, for example, is the most brilliant of anti-nominalist writers. But who is nimble-witted enough to count, in the following sentences from him, the number of times lie steps from the known to the knower, and attributes to both whatever properties he finds in either one!

" To think is to pass from the singular or particular to the idea [concept] or universal. . . . Ideas are necessary because no thinking can take place without them. They are universal, inasmuch as they are completely divested of the particularity which characterizes all the phenomena of mere sensation. To grasp the nature of this univer sality is not easy. Perhaps the best means by which this end may be compassed is by contrasting it with the particular. It is not difficult to understand that a sensation, a phenomenon of sense, is never more than the particular which it is. As such, that is, in its strict particu larity, it is absolutely unthinkable. In the very act of being thought, something more than it emerges, and this something more cannot be again the particular. . . . Ten particulars per se cannot be thought of any more than one particular can be thought of ; , . . there always emerges in thought an additional something, which is the possibility of other particulars to an indefinite extent. ... The indefinite additional something which they are instances of is a universal. . . . The idea or universal cannot 'possibly be pictured in the imagination, for this would at once reduce it to the particular. . , . This inability to form any sort of picture or representation of an idea does not proceed from any imperfection or limitation of our faculties, but is a quality inherent in the very nature of intelligence. A contradiction is in volved in the supposition that an idea or a universal can become the object either of sense or of the imagination. An idea is thus diamet rically opposed to an image."*

The nominalists, on their side, admit a gwcm-universal, something which we think as if it were universal, though it is not ; and in all that they say about this something, which they explain to be ' an indefinite number of particular ideas,' the same vacillation between the subjective and the objective points of view appears. The reader never can tell whether an ' idea ' spoken of is supposed to be a knower or a known. The authors themselves do not distinguish. They want to get something in the mind which shall resem ble what is out of the mind, however vaguely, and they think that when that fact is accomplished, no farther questions will be asked. James Mill writes : *

" The word, man, we shall say, is first applied to an individual ; it is first associated with the idea of that individual, and acquires the power of calling up the idea of him ; it is next applied to another indi vidual and acquires the power of calling up the idea of him ; so of an other and another, till it has become associated with an indefinite num ber, and has acquired the power of calling up an indefinite number of those ideas indifferently. What happens ? It does call up an indefinite number of the ideas of individuals as often as it occurs ; and calling them in close connection, it forms a species of complex idea of them. ... It is also a fact, that when an idea becomes to a certain extent complex, from the multiplicity of the ideas it comprehends, it is of ne cessity indistinct ; . . . and this indistinctness has, doubtless, been a main cause of the mystery which has appeared to belong to it. ... It thus appears that the word man is not a word having a very simple idea, as was the opinion of the realists ; nor a wrord having no idea at all, as was that of the [earlier] nominalists ; but a word calling up an indefinite number of ideas, by the irresistible laws of association, and forming them into one very complex and indistinct, but not therefore unintelligible, idea."

" A word becomes general by being made the sign, not of an ab stract general idea, but of many several particular ideas, any one of which it indifferently suggests to the mind. An idea which, consid ered in itself, is particular, becomes general by being made to represent or stand for all other particular ideas of the same sort." ' Stand for,' not knoiv ; ' becomes general,' not becomes aware of something general ; ' particular ideas,' not par ticular things — everywhere the same timidity about beg ging the fact of knowing, and the pitifully impotent attempt to foist it in the shape of a mode of being of ' ideas.' If

the fact to be conceived be the indefinitely numerous ac tual and possible members of a class, then it is assumed that if we can only get enough ideas to huddle together for a moment in the rnind, the being of each several one of them there will be an equivalent for the knoiving, or mean ing, of one member of the class in question ; and their num ber will be so large as to confuse our tally and leave it doubtful whether all the possible members of the class have thus been satisfactorily told off or not.

Of course this is nonsense. An idea neither is what it knows, nor knows what it is ; nor will swarms of copies of the same ' idea,' recurring in stereotyped form, or ' by the irresistible laws of association formed into one idea,' ever be the same thing as a thought of ' all the possible members ' of a class. We must mean that by an altogether special bit of consciousness ad hoc. But it is easy to translate Berkeley's, Hume's, and Mill's notion of a swarm of ideas into cerebral terms, and so to make them stand for some thing real ; and, in this sense, I think the doctrine of these authors less hollow than the opposite one which makes the vehicle of universal conceptions to be an actus purus of the soul. If each ' idea ' stand for some special nascent nerve-process, then the aggregate of these nascent processes might have for its conscious correlate a psychic * fringe,' which should be just that universal meaning, or intention that the name or mental picture employed should mean all the possible individuals of the class. Every peculiar compli cation of brain-processes must have some peculiar correlate in the soul. To one set of processes will correspond the thought of an indefinite taking of the extent of a word like man ; to another set that of a particular taking ; and to a third set that of a universal taking, of the extent of the same word, The thought corresponding to either set of processes, is always itself a unique and singular event, whose dependence on its peculiar nerve-process I of course am far from professing to explain.*

* It may add to the effect of the text to quote a passage from the essay in 'Mind,' referred to en p. 224. " Why may we not side with the conceptualists in saying that the uni versal sense of a word does corresoond to a mental fact of some kind, but Truly in comparison with the fact that every conception, whatever it be of, is one of the mind's immutable possesat the same time, agreeing with the nominalists that all mental facts are modifications of subjective sensibility, why may we not call that fact a 'feeling'? Man meant for mankind is in short a different feeling from man as a mere noise, or from man meant for that man, to wit, John Smith alone. Not that the difference consists simply in the fact that, when taken universally, the word has one of Mr. Gallon's ' blended ' images of man associated with it. Many persons have seemed to think that these blended or, as Prof. Huxley calls them, 'generic ' images are equivalent to concepts. But, in itself, a blurred thing is just as particular as a sharp thng ; and the generic character of either sharp image or blurred image depends on its being felt with its representative function. This function is the mysterious plus, the understood meaning. But it is nothing applied to the image from above, no pure act of reason inhabiting a supersensible and semi-supernatural plane. It can be diagrammatized as continuous with all the other segments of the subjective stream. It is just that staining, fringe, or halo of obscurely felt relation to masses of other imagery about to come, but not yet distinctly in focus, which we have so abundantly set forth [in Chapter IX].

" If the image come unfringed, it reveals but a simple quality, thing, or event ; if it come fringed, it may reveal something expressly taken uni versally or in a scheme of relations. The difference between thought and feeling thus reduces itself, in the last subjective analysis, to the presence or absence of ' fringe.' And this in turn reduces itself, with much proba bility, in the last physiological analysis, to the absence or presence of sub excitements in other convolutions of the brain than those whose discharges underlie the more definite nucleus, the substantive ingredient, of the thought, — in this instance, the word or image it may happen to arouse.

"The contrast is not, then, as the Platonists would have it, between certain subjective facts called images and sensations, and others called acts of relating intelligence; the former being blind perishing things, knowing not even their own existence as such, whilst the latter combine the poles in the mysterious synthesis of their cognitive sweep. The con trast is really between two aspects, in which all mental facts without excep tion may be taken ; their structural aspect, as being subjective, and their functional aspect, as being cognitions. In the former aspect, the highest as well as the lowest is a feeling, a peculiarly tinged segment of the stream. Thistingeing is its sensitive body, the wie Him zu Muthe ist, the way it feels whilst passing. In the latter aspect, the lowest mental fact as well as the highest may grasp some bit of truth as its content, even though that truth were as relationless a matter as a bare imlocalized and undated quality of pain. From the cognitive point of view, all mental facts are intellections. From the subjective point of view all are feelings. Once admit that the oassiiig and evanescent are as real parts of the stream as the distinct and comparatively abiding; once allow that fringes and halos, inarticulate perceptions, whereof the objects are as yet unnamed, mere nascencies of cognition, premonitions, awarenesses of direction , arc thoughts sui generis,

sions, the question whether a single thing, or a whole class of things, or only an unassigned quality, be meant by it, is an insignificant matter of detail. Our meanings are of singulars, particulars, indefinites, and universals, mixed together in every way. A singular individual is as much conceived when he is isolated and identified away from the rest of the world in my mind, as is the most rarefied and universally applicable quality he may possess — being, for example, when treated in the same way.* From every point of view, the overwhelming and portentous character ascribed to universal conceptions is surprising. Why, from Plato and Aristotle downwards, philosophers should have vied with each other in scorn of the knowledge of the par ticular, and in adoration of that of the general, is hard to understand, seeing that the more adorable knowledge ought to be that of the more adorable things, and that the things of worth are all concretes and singulars. The only value of universal characters is that they help us, by reasoning,

as much as articulate imaginings and propositions are; once restore, I say, the vague to its psychological rights, and the matter presents no further difficulty. ' And then we see that the current opposition of Feeling to Knowledge is quite a false issue. If every feeling is at the same time a bit of knowl edge, we ought no longer to talk of mental states differing by having more or less of the cognitive quality; they only differ in knowing more or less, in having much fact or little fact for their object. The feeling of a broad scheme of relations is a feeling that knows much ; the feeling of a simple quality is a feeling that knows little. But the knowing itself, whether of much or of little, has the same essence, and is as good knowing in the one case as in the other. Concept and image, thus discriminated through their objects, are consubstantial in their inward nature, as modes of feeling, The one, as particular, will no longer be held to be a relatively base sort of entity, to be taken as a matter of course, whilst the other, as universal, is celebrated as a sort of standing miracle, to be adored but not explained. Both concept and image, qua subjective, are singular and particular. Both are moments of the stream, which come and in an instant are no more. The word universality has no meaning as applied to their psychic body or structure, which is always Unite. It only has a meaning when applied to their use, import, or reference to the kind of object they may reveal. The representation, as such, of the universal object is as particular as that of an object about which we know so little that the interjection ' Ha I' is all it can evoke from us in the way of speech. Both should be weighed in the same scales, and have the same measure meted out to them whether of worship or of contempt." (Mind, ix. pp. 18-19.)

to know new truths about individual things. The restric tion of one's meaning, moreover, to an individual thing, probably requires even more complicated brain-processes than its extension to all the instances of a kind ; and the mere mystery, as such, of the knowledge, is equally great, whether generals or singulars be the things known. In sum, therefore, the traditional universal-worship can only be called a bit of perverse sentimentalism, a philosophic ' idol of the cave.'

It may seem hardly necessary to add (what follows as a matter of course from pp. 229-237, and what has been implied in our assertions all along) that nothing can be conceived twice over without being conceived in entirely different states of mind. Thus, my arm-chair is one of the things of which I have a conception ; I knew it yesterday and recognized it when I looked at it. But if I think of it to-day as the same arm-chair which I looked at yesterday, it is obvious that the very conception of it as the same is an additional complication to the thought, whose inward con stitution must alter in consequence. In short, it is logically impossible that the same thing should be known as the same by two successive copies of the same thought. As a matter of fact, the thoughts by which we know that we mean the same thing are apt to be very different indeed from each other. We think the thing now in one context, now in another ; now in a definite image, now in a symbol. Sometimes our sense of its identity pertains to the mere fringe, sometimes it involves the nucleus, of our thought. We never can break the thought asunder and tell just which one of its bits is the part that lets us know which subject is referred to ; but nevertheless we always do know which of all possible subjects we have in mind. Introspective psychology must here throw up the sponge ; the fluctuations of subjective life are too exquisite to be arrested by its coarse means. It must confine itself to bearing witness to the fact that all sorts of different subjective states do form the vehicle by which the same is known ; and it must contradict the opposite view.

if the vehicle of the same thing-known must be the same re current state of mind, and as if the having over again of the same ' idea ' were not only a necessary but a sufficient con dition for meaning the same thing twice. But this recur rence of the same idea would utterly clef eat' the existence of a repeated knowledge of anything. It would be a simple re version into a pre-existent state, with nothing gained in the interval, and with complete unconsciousness of the state having existed before. Such is not the way in which we think. As a rule we are fully aAvare that we have thought before of the thing we think of now. The continuity and permanency of the topic is of the essence of our intellection. We recognize the old problem, and the old solutions ; and we go on to alter and improve and substitute one predicate for another without ever letting the subject change.

This is what is meant when it is said that thinking con sists in making judgments. A succession of judgments may all be about the same thing. The general practical postulate which encourages us to keep thinking at all is that by going on to do so we shall judge better of the same things than if we do not.* In the successive judgments, all sorts of new operations are performed on the things, and all sorts of new results brought out, without the sense of the main topic ever getting lost. At the outset, we merely have the topic ; then we operate on it ; and finally we have it again in a richer and truer way. A compound conception has been substituted for the simple one, but with full conscious ness that both are of the Same.

The distinction between having and operating is as natural in the mental as in the material world. As our hands may hold a bit of wood and a knife, and yet do naught with either; so bur mind may simply be aware of a thing's existence, and yet neither attend to it nor discrimi nate it, neither locate nor count nor compare nor like nor dislike nor deduce it, nor recognize it articulately as having been met with before. At the same time we know that, instead of staring at it in this entranced and senseless way, we may rally our activity in a moment, and locate, class,

Compare the admirable passage in Hodgson's Time and Space, p. 310. compare, count, and judge it. There is nothing involved in all this which we did not postulate at the very outset of our introspective work . realities, namely, extra mentem, thoughts, and possible relations of cognition between the two. The result of the thoughts' operating on the data given to sense is to transform the order in which experience comes into an entirely different order, that of the conceived world. There is no spot of light, for example, which I pick out and proceed to define as a pebble, which is not thereby torn from its mere time- and space-neighbors, and thought in conjunction with things physically parted from it by the width of nature. Compare the form in which facts appear in a text-book of physics, as logically subordinated laws, with that in which we naturally make their acquaintance. The conceptual scheme is a sort of sieve in which we try to gather up the world's contents. Most facts and relations fall through its meshes, being either too subtle or insig nificant to be fixed in any conception. But whenever a physical reality is caught and identified as the same with something already conceived, it remains on the sieve, and all the predicates and relations of the conception with which it is identified become its predicates and relations too ; it is subjected to the sieve's network, in other words. Thus comes to pass what Mr. Hodgson calls the translation of the perceptual into the conceptual order of the world.* In Chapter XXII we shall see how this translation always takes place for the sake of some subjective interest, and how the conception with which we handle a bit of sen sible experience is really nothing but a teleological instru ment. This whole function of conceiving, of fixing, and hold ing fast to meanings, has no significance apart from the fact that the conceiver is a creature with partial purposes and pri vate ends.

There remains, therefore, much more to be saic? about conception, but for the present this will suffice. IT is matter of popular observation that some men have sharper senses than others, and that sonic have acuter minds and are able to 'split hairs' and see two shades of meaning where the majority see but one. Locke long ago set apart the faculty of discrimination as one in which men differ individually. What he wrote is good enough to quote us an introduction to this chapter:

" Another faculty we may take notice of in our minds is that of discerning and distinguishing between the several ideas it has. It i*S not enough to have a confused perception of something in general : un less the mind had a distinct perception of different objects and their qualities, it would be capable of very little knowledge ; though the bodies that affect us were as busy about us as they are now, and the mind were continually employed in thinking. On this faculty of dis tinguishing one thing from another depends the evidence and certainty of several even very general propositions, which have passed for innate truths ; because men, overlooking the true cause why those propositions find universal assent, impute it wholly to native uniform impressions -. whereas it in truth depends upon this clear discerning faculty of the mind, whereby it perceives two ideas to be the same or different. But of this more hereafter ?

" How much the imperfection of accurately discriminating ideas one from another lies either in the dulness or faults of the organs of sense, or want of acuteness, exercise, or attention in the understanding, or hastiness and precipitancy natural to some tempers, I will not here ex amine : it suffices to take notice that this is one of the operations that the mind may reflect on and observe in itself. It is of that conse quence to its other knowledge, that so far as this faculty is in itself dull, or not rightly made use of for the distinguishing one thing from another, so far our notions are confused, and our reason and judgment disturbed or misled. If in having our ideas in the memory ready at hand consists quickness of parts ; in this of having them unconfused, and being able nicely to distinguish one thing from another where there is but the least difference, consists in a great measure the exactness of judgment and clearness of reason which is to be observed \n one man above another. 4iu! lieuce, perhaps, may be given some

reason of that common observation, — that men who have a great deal of wit and prompt memories have not always the clearest judg ment or deepest reason. For, wit lying most in the assemblage of ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, thereby to make up pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the fancy; judgment, on the contrary, lies quite on the other side, in separating carefully one from another ideas wherein can be found the least difference, thereby to avoid being misled by similitude and by affinity to take one thing for another. This is a way of proceeding quite contrary to metaphor and allusion, wherein for the most part lies that entertainment and pleasantry of wit which strikes so lively on the fancy, and therefore, so acceptable to all people because its beauty appears at first sight, and there is required no labor of thought to ex amine what truth or reason there is in it." *

But Locke's descendants have been slow to enter into the path whose fruitfulness was thus pointed out by their mas ter, and have so neglected the study of discrimination that one might almost say that the classic English psychologists have, as a school, hardly recognized it to exist. 'Associa tion' has proved itself in their hands the one all-absorbing power of the mind. Dr. Martineau, in his review of Bain, makes some very weighty remarks on this onesidedness of the Lockian sc'hool. Our mental history, says he, is, in its view,

" a perpetual formation of new compounds : and the words * associ ation,' ' cohesion,' ' fusion,' ' indissoluble connection,' all express the change from plurality of data to some unity of result. An explanation of the process therefore requires two things : a true enumeration of the primary constituents, and a correct statement of their laws of com bination : just as, in chemistry, we are furnished with a list of the simple elements, and the with then principles of their synthesis. Now the latter of these two conditions we find satisfied by the associationpsychologists : but not the former. They are not agreed upon their catalogue of elements, or the marks by which they may know the simple from the compound. The psychologic unit is not fixed ; that which is called one impression by Hartley is treated as half-a-dozen or more by Mill : and the tendency of the modern teachers on this point is to recede more and more from the better-chosen track of their master. Hartley, for example, regarded the whole present effect upon us of any single object — say, an orange — as a single sensation ; and the whole vestige it left behind, as a single *idea of sensation.' His modern disciples,

on the other hand, consider this same effect as an aggregate from a plurality of sensations, and the ideal trace it leaves as highly compound. 'The idea of an object,' instead of being an elementary starting-point with them, is one of the elaborate results of repetition and experience ; and is continually adduced as remarkably illustrating the fusing power of habitual association. Thus James Mill observes : " ' It is to this great law of association that we trace the formation of our ideas of what we call external objects ; that is, the ideas of a cer tain number of sensations, received together so frequently that they coalesce as it were, and are spoken of under the idea of unity. Hence, what we call the idea of a tree, the idea of a stone, the idea of a horse, the idea of a man. In using the names, tree, horse, man, the names of what I call objects, I am referring, and can be referring, only to my own sensations ; in fact, therefore, only naming a certain number of sensations regarded as in a particular state of combination, that is, concomitance. Particular sensations of sight, of touch, of the muscles, are the sensations to the ideas of which, color, extension, roughness, hardness, smoothness, taste, smell, so coalescing as to appear one idea, I give the name of the idea of a tree.' *

"'External objects usually affect us through a plurality of senses. The pebble on the sea-shore is pictured on the eye as form and color. We take it up in the hand and repeat the impression of form, with the additional feeling of touch. Knock two together, and there is a charac teristic sound. To preserve the impression of an object of this kind, there must be an association of all these different effects. Such associa tion, when matured and firm, is our idea, our intellectual grasp of the pebble. Passing to the organic world, and plucking a rose, we have the same effects of form to the eye and hand, color and touch, with new effects of odor and taste. A certain time is requisite for the co herence of all these qualities in one aggregate, so as to give us for all purposes the enduring image of the rose. When fully acquired, any one of the characteristic impressions will revive the others ; the odor, the sight, the feeling of the thorny stalk — each of these by itself will hoist the entire impression into the view.' \

"Now, this order of derivation, making our objective knowledge be gin with plurality of impression and arrive at unity, we take to be a complete inversion of our psychological history. Hartley, we think, was perfectly right in taking no notice of the number of inlets through which an object delivers its effect upon us, and, in spite of this circum stance, treating the effect as one. . . . Even now, after life has read us so many analytic lessons, in proportion as we can fix the attitude of our scene and ourselves, the sense of plurality in our impressions re treats, and we lapse into an undivided consciousness ; losing, for in-