The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2

Subject, is competent, by being present to both of the ideas alike, to hold them together and at the same time to keep them distinct." But if the plain facts be admitted that the pure idea of * 7i ' is never in the mind at all, when ' m ' has once gone be fore ; and that the feeling ' n-different-from-m ' is itself an absolutely unique pulse of thought, the bottom of this precious quarrel drops out and neither party is left with anything to fight about. Surely such a consummation ought to be welcomed, especially when brought about, us here, by a formulation of the facts which offers itself so naturally and unsophistically.*

* There is only one obstacle, and that is our inveterate tendency to be lieve that where two things or qualities are compared, it must be that exact duplicates of both have got into the mind and have matched them selves against each other there. To which the first reply is the empirical one of " Look into the mind and see." When I recognize a weight which I now lift as inferior to the one I just lifted; when, with my tootli now aching, I perceive the pain to be less intense than it was a minute ago; the two things in the mind which are compared would, by the authors I criti cise, be admitted to be an actual sensation and an image in the memory. An image in the memory, by general consent of these same authors, is ad mitted to be a weaker thing than a sensation. Nevertheless it is in these instances judged stronger; that is, an object supposed to be known only in so far forth as this image represents it, is judged stronger. Ought not this to shake one's belief in the notion of separate representative 'ideas' weigh ing themselves, or being weighed by the Ego, against each other in the mind ? And let it not be said that what makes us judge the felt pain to be weaker than the imagined one of a moment since is our recollection of the downward nature of the shock of difference which we felt as we passed to the present moment from the one before it. That shock does undoubtedly have a different character according as it comes between terms of which the second diminishes or increases; and it may be admitted that in cases where the past term is doubtfully remembered, the memory of the shock as pcus or minus, might sometimes enable us to establish a relation whicl otherwise we should not perceive.

But one could hardly expect the mem ory of this shock to overpower our actual comparison of terms, both of which are present (us are the image and the sensation in the case supposed), and make us judge the weaker one to be the stronger. — And hereupon comes the second reply: Suppose the mind does compare two realities by comparing two ideas of its own which represent them — what is gained? The same mystery is still there. The ideas must still be known; and, as the attention in comparing oscillates from one to the other, past must be known with present just as before. If you must end by simply saying that your ' Ego,' whilst being neither the idea of m nor the idea of n, }ret knows and compares both, why not allow your pulse of thought, which u

We may, then, conclude our examination of the manner in which simple involuntary discrimination comes about, by saying, 1) that its vehicle is a thought possessed of a knowl edge of both terms compared and of their difference ; 2) that the necessary and sufficient condition (as the human mind goes) for arousing this thought is that a thought or feeling of one of the terms discriminated should, as imme diately as possible, precede that in which the other term is known ; and 3) and that the thought which knows the second term will then also know the difference (or in more difficult cases will be continuously succeeded by one which does know the difference) and both of the terms between which it holds.

This last thought need, however, not be these terms with their difference, nor contain them. A man's thought can know and mean all sorts of things without those things get ting bodily into it — the distant, for example, the future, and the past* The vanishing term in the case which occupies us vanishes ; but because it is the specific term it is and nothing else, it leaves a specific influence behind it when it vanishes, the effect of which is to determine the succeeding pulse of thought in a perfectly characteristic way. What ever consciousness comes next must know the vanished term and call it different from the one now there.

Here we are at the end of our tether about involuntary discrimination of successively felt simple things ; and must drop the subject, hopeless of seeing any deeper into it for neither the thing m nor the thing n, to know and compare both directly? 'Tis but a question of how to name the facts least artificially. The egoist explains them, by naming them as an Ego 'combining* or ' synthetizing ' two ideas, no more than we do by naming them a pulse of thought know ing two facts.

* 1 fear that few will be converted by my words, so obstinately do thinkers of all schools refuse to admit the unmediated function of knowing a thing, and so incorrigibly do they substitute being the thing for it. E.g., in the latest utterance of the spiritualistic philosophy (Bowue's Introduction to Psychological Theory, 1887, published only three days before this writing) one of the first sentences which catch my eye is this : " What remembers 7 The spiritualist says, the soul remembers ; it abides across the years acd the flow of the body, and gathering up its past, carries it with it " (p. 28). Why, for heaven's sake, O Bowne, cannot you say ' knows it "i If there is anything our soul does not do to its past, it is to carry it with it.

the present, and turn to discriminations of a less simple sort. And first, of tlie discrimination of simultaneously felt impressions ! Our first way of looking at a reality is often to suppose it simple, but later we may learn to perceive it as compound. This new way of knowing the same reality may conveniently be called by the name of Analysis. It is manifestly one of the most incessantly performed of all our mental processes, so let us examine the conditions under which it occurs.

I think we may safely lay down at the outset this fun damental principle, that any total impression made on the mind must be unanalyzable, whose elements are never experi enced apart. The components of an absolutely changeless group of not-elsewhere-occurring attributes could never be discriminated. If all cold things were wet and all wet things cold, if all hard things pricked our skin, and no other things did so ; is it likely that we should discrimi nate between coldness and wetness, and hardness and pungency respectively ? If all liquids were transparent and no non-liquid were transparent, it would be long before we had separate names for liquidity and transparenc}r. If heat were a function of position above the earth's surface, so that the higher a thing was the hotter it became, one word would serve for hot and high. We have, in fact, a number of sensations whose concomitants are almost in variably the same, and we find it, accordingly, almost imppssible to analyze them out from the totals in which they are found. The contraction of the diaphragm and the ex pansion of the lungs, the shortening of certain muscles and the rotation of certain joints, are examples. The converg ing of the eyeballs and the accommodation for near objects are, for each distance of the object (in the common use of the eyes) inseparably linked, and neither can (without a sort of artificial training which shall presently be mentioned) be felt by itself, We learn that the causes of such groups of feelings are multiple, and therefore we frame theories about the composition of the feelings themselves, by ' fusion '

1 integration,' ' synthesis,' or what not. But by direct intro spection no analysis of them is ever made. A conspicuous case will come to view when we treat of the emotions. Every emotion has its ' expression,' of quick breathing, palpitating heart, flushed face, or the like. The expression gives rise to bodily feelings; and the emotion is thus neces sarily and invariably accompanied by these bodily feelings. The consequence is that it is impossible to apprehend it as a spiritual state by itself, or to analyze it away from the lower feelings in question. It is in fact impossible to prove that it exists as a distinct psychic fact. The present writer strongly doubts that it does so exist. But those who are most firmly persuaded of its existence must wait, to prove their point, until they can quote some as yetunfound patho logical case of an individual who shall have emotions in a body in which either complete paralysis will have prevented their expression, or complete anaesthesia will have made the latter unfelt.

In general, then, if an object affects us simultaneously in a number of ways, abed, we get a peculiar integral impres sion, which thereafter characterizes to our mind the individ uality of that object, and becomes the sign of its presence ; and which is only resolved into a, b, c, d, respectively by the aid of farther experiences. These we now may turn to consider. If any single quality or constituent, a, of such an object, have previously been known by us isolatedly, or have in any other manner already become an object of separate acquaintance on our part, so that we have an image of it, distinct or vague, in our mind, disconnected with bed, then that constituent a may be analyzed out from the total impression. Analysis of a thing means separate attention to each of its parts. In Chapter XI we saw that one condition of attending to a thing was the formation from within of a separate image of that thing, which should, as it were, go out to meet the impres sion received. Attention being the condition of analysis, and separate imagination being the condition of attention, it follows also that separate imagination is the condition o* analysis. Only such elements as we are acquainted with, and can imagine, separately, can be discriminated within a total

sense-impression. The image seems to welcome its own mate from out of the compound, and to heighten the feel ing thereof ; whereas it dampens and opposes the feeling of the other constituents ; and thus the compound becomes broken for our consciousness into parts. All the facts cited in Chapter XI, to prove that attention involves inward reproduction, go to prove this point as well. In looking for any object in a room, for a book in a library, for example, we detect it the more readily if, in addition to merely knowing its name, etc., we carry in our • mind a distinct image of its appearance. The assafcetida in ' Worcestershire sauce ' is not obvious to anyone who has not tasted assafcetida per se. In a 'cold' color an artist would never be able to analyze out the pervasive presence of blue, unless he had previously made acquaint ance with the color blue by itself. All the colors we ac tually experience are mixtures. Even the purest primaries always come to us with some white. Absolutely pure red or green or violet is never experienced, and so can never be discerned in the so-called primaries with which we have to deal : the latter consequently pass for pure. — The reader will remember how an overtone can only be attended to in the midst of its consorts in the voice of a musical instru ment, by sounding it previously alone. The imagination, being then full of it, hears the like of it in the compound tone. Helmholtz, whose account of this observation we formerly quoted, goes on to explain the difficulty of the case in a way which beautifully corroborates the point I now seek to prove. He says :

" The ultimate simple elements of the sensation of tone, simple tones themselves, are rarely heard alone. Even those instruments by which they can be produced (as tuning-forks before resonance-chambers), when strongly excited, give rise to weak harmonic upper partials, partly within and partly without the ear. . . . Hence the opportunities are very scanty for impressing on our memory an exact and sure image of these simple elementary tones. But if the constituents are only indefi nitely and vaguely known, the analysis of their sum into them must be correspondingly uncertain. If wre do not know with certainty how much of the musical tone under consideration is to be attributed to its prime, we cannot but be uncertain as to what belongs to the partials. Consequently we must begin by making the individual elements which

have to be distinguished individually audible, so as to obtain an en tirely fresh recollection of the corresponding sensation, and the whole business requires undisturbed and concentrated attention. We are even without the ease that can be obtained by frequent repetitions of the experiment, such as we possess in the analysis of musical chords into their individual notes. In that case we hear the individual notes suffi ciently often by themselves, whereas we rarely hear simple tones, and may almost be said never to hear the building up of a crmpound from its simple tones. " *

Very few elements of reality are experienced by us in absolute isolation. The most that usually happens to a constituent a, of a compound phenomenon abed, is that its strength relatively to bed varies from a maximum to a minimum ; or that it appears linked with oilier qualities, in other compounds, as aefg, or ahik. Either of these vicissitudes in the mode of our experiencing a may, under favorable circumstances, lead us to feel the difference be tween it and its concomitants, and to single it out — not absolutely, it is true, but approximately — and so to analyze the compound of which it is a part. The act of singling out is then called abstraction, and the element disengaged is an abstract.

Consider the case of fluctuations of relative strength or intensity first. Let there be three grades of the com pound, as Abed, abed, and abcD. In passing between these compounds, the mind will feel shocks of difference. The differences, moreover, will serially increase, and their direc tion will be felt as of a distinct sort. The increase from abed to Abed is on the a side ; that to abcD is on the d side. And these two differences of direction are differently felt. I do not say that this discernment of the a-direction from the cZ-direction will give us an actual intuition either of a or of d in the abstract. But it leads us to conceive or postulate each of these qualities, and to define it as the extreme of a certain direction. * Dry ' wines and ' sweet ' wines, for example, differ, and form a series. It happens that we have an experience of sweetness pure and simple in the taste of sugar, and this we can

analyze out of the wine-taste. But no one knows what ' dryness ' tastes like, all by itself. It must, however, be something extreme in the dry direction; and we should probably not fail to recognize it as the original of our ab stract conception, in case we ever did come across it. In some such way we get to form notions of the flavor oi meats, apart from their feeling to the tongue, or of that of fruits apart from their acidity, etc., and we abstract the touch of bodies as distinct from their temperature. We may even apprehend the quality of a muscle's contraction as distin guished from its extent, or one muscle's contraction from another's, as when, by practising with prismatic glasses, and varying our eyes' convergence whilst our accommoda tion remains the same, we learn the direction in which our feeling of the convergence differs from that of the accom modation.

But the fluctuation in a quality's intensity is a less effi cient aid to our abstracting of it than the diversity of the other qualities in whose company it may appear. What is associated now with one thing and now with another tends to become dissociated from either, and to groiv into an object of ab stract contemplation by the mind. One might call this the law of dissociation by varying concomitants. The practical result of it will be to allow the mind which has thus disso ciated and abstracted a character to analyze it out of a total, whenever it meets with it again. The law has been frequently recognized by psychologists, though I know of none who has given it the emphatic prominence in our men tal history which it deserves. Mr. Spencer says :

" If the property A occurs here along with the properties B, C, D, there along with C, F, H, and again with E, G, B, . . . it must happen that by multiplication of experiences the impressions produced by these properties on the organism will be disconnected and rendered so far independent in the organism as the properties are in the environ ment, whence must eventually result a power to recognize attributes in themselves, apart from particular bodies.1' *

And still more to the point Dr. Martineau, in the passage I have already quoted, writes : "When a red ivory ball, seen for the first time, has been with drawn, it will leave a mental representation of itself, in which all that it simultaneously gave us will indistinguishably coexist. Let a white ball succeed to it ; now, and not before, will an attribute detach itself, and the color, by force of contrast, be shaken out into the foreground. Let the white ball be replaced by an egg, and this new difference will bring the form into notice from its previous slumber, and thus that which began by being simply an object cut out from the surrounding scene becomes for us first a red object, then a red round object, and so on."

Why the repetition of the character in combination with different wholes will cause it thus to break up its adhesion with any one of them, and roll out, as it were, alone upon the table of consciousness, is a little of a mystery. One might suppose the nerve-processes of the various concom itants to neutralize or inhibit each other more or less and to leave the process of the common term alone distinctly active. Mr. Spencer appears to think that the mere fact that the common term is repeated more often than any one of its associates will, of itself, give it such a degree of in tensity that its abstraction must needs ensue.

This has a plausible sound, but breaks down when ex amined closely. For it is not always the often-repeated character which is first noticed when its concomitants have varied a certain number of times ; it is even more likely to be the most novel of all the concomitants, which wall arrest the attention. If a boy has seen nothing all his life but sloops and schooners, he will probably never distinctly have singled out in his notion of ' sail ' the character of be ing hung lengthwise. When for the first time he sees a square-rigged ship, the opportunity of extracting the length wise mode of hanging as a special accident, and of disso ciating it from the general notion of sail, is offered. But there are twenty chances to one that that will not be the form of the boy's consciousness. What he notices will be the new and exceptional character of being hung crosswise. He will go home and speak of that, and perhaps never con sciously formulate what the more familiar peculiarity con sists in.

This mode of abstraction is realized on a very wide scale, because the elements of the world in which we find ourselves appear, as a matter of fact, here, there, and every where, and are changing their concomitants all the while. But on the other hand the abstraction is, so to speak, never complete, the analysis of a compound never perfect, be cause no element is ever given to us absolutely alone, and we can never therefore approach a compound with the image in our mind of any one of its components in a perfectly pure form. Colors, sounds, smells, are just as much en tangled with other matter as are more formal elements of experience, such as extension, intensity, effort, pleasure, difference, likeness, harmony, badness, strength, and even consciousness itself. All are embedded in one world. But by the fluctuations and permutations of which we have spoken, we come to form a pretty good notion of the direc tion in which each element differs from the rest, and so we frame the notion of it as a terminus, and continue to mean it as an individual thing. In the case of many elements, the simple sensibles, like heat, cold, the colors, smells, etc., the extremes of the directions are almost touched, and in these instances we have a comparatively exact perception of what it is we mean to abstract. But even this is only an approximation ; and in literal mathematical strictness all our abstracts must be confessed to be but imperfectly im aginable things. At bottom the process is one of concep tion, and is everywhere, even in the sphere of simple sensi ble qualities, the same as that by which we are usually understood to attain to the notions of abstract goodness, perfect felicity, absolute power, and the like : the direct perception of a difference between compounds, and the imaginary prolongation of the direction of the difference to an ideal terminus, the notion of which we fix and keep as one of our permanent subjects of discourse.

This is all that I can say usefully about abstraction, or about analysis, to which it leads. In all the cases considered hitherto I have supposed the differences involved to be so large as to be flagrant, and the discrimination, where successive, was treated as invol untary. But, so far from being always involuntary, dis criminations are often difficult in the extreme, and by most men never performed. Professor de Morgan, thinking, it is true, rather of conceptual than of perceptive discrimi nation, wrote, wittily enough:

"The great bulk of the illogical part of the educated community— whether majority or minority I know not ; perhaps six of one and half a dozen of the other— have not power to make a distinction, and of course cannot be made to take a distinction, and of course never at tempt to shake a distinction. With them all such things are evasions, subterfuges, come-offs, loop-holes, etc. They would hang a man for horse-stealing under a statute against sheep-stealing ; and would laugh at you if you quibbled about the distinction between a horse and a sheep." *

Any personal or practical interest, however, in the re sults to be obtained by distinguishing, makes one's wits amazingly sharp to detect differences. The culprit himself is not likely to overlook the difference between a horse and a sheep. And long training and practice in distinguishing has the same effect as personal interest. Both of these agencies give to small amounts of objective difference the same effectiveness upon the mind that, under other circum stances, only large ones would have. Let us seek to pene trate the modus operandi of their influence — beginning with that of practice and habit.

That ' practice makes perfect ' is notorious in the field of motor accomplishments. But motor accomplishments depend in part on sensory discrimination. Billiard-play ing, rifleshooting, tight-rope-dancing, demand the most delicate appreciation of minute disparities of sensation, as well as the power to make accurately graduated muscular response thereto. In the purely sensorial field we have the well-known virtuosity displayed by the professional buyers and testers of various kinds of goods. One man will distinguish by taste between the upper and the lower half of a bottle of old Madeira. Another will recognize, by feeling the flour in a barrel, whether the wheat was grown in Iowa or Tennessee. The blind deaf-mute, Laura Bridgman, had so improved her touch as to recognize, after a year's interval, the hand of a person who once had shaken hers ; and her sister in misfortune, Julia Brace, is said to have been employed in the Hartford Asylum to sort

the linen of its multitudinous inmates, after it came from the wash, by her wonderfully educated sense of smell. The fact is so familiar that few, if any, psychologists have even recognized it as needing explanation. They have seemed to think that practice must, in the nature of things, improve the delicacy of discernment, and have let the matter rest. At most they have said : " Attention accounts for it ; we attend more to habitual things, and what we at tend to we perceive more minutely." This answer is true, but too general ; it seems to me that we can be a little more precise.

There are at least two distinct causes which we can see at work whenever experience improves discrimination : First, the terms Avhose difference comes to be felt con tract disparate associates and these help to drag them apart. Second, the difference reminds us of larger differences of the same sort, and these help us to notice it. Let us study the first cause first, and begin by suppos ing two compounds, of ten elements apiece. Suppose no one element of either compound to differ from the correspond ing element of the other compound enough to be distin guished from it if the two are compared alone, and let the amount of this imperceptible difference be called equal to 1. The compounds will differ from each other, however, in ten different ways ; and, although each difference by it self might pass unperceived, the total difference, equal to 10, may very well be sufficient to strike the sense. In a word, increasing the number of 'points' involved in a difference may excite our discrimination as effectually as increasing the amount of difference at any one point. Two men whose mouth, nose, eyes, cheeks, chin, and hair, all differ slightly, will be as little confounded by us, as two appearances of the same man one with, and the other without, a false nose. The only contrast in the cases is that we can easily name the point of difference in the one, whilst in the other we cannot.

Two things, then, B and C, indistinguishable when compared together alone, may each contract adhesions with different associates, and the compounds thus formed may, ^ as wholes, be judged very distinct. The effect of practice in increasing discrimination must then, in part be due to the reinforcing effect, upon an original slight difference between the terms, of additional differences between the diverse associates lohich they severally affect. Let B and C be the terms : If A contract adhesions with B, and C with D, AB may ap pear very distinct from CD, though B and C per se might have been almost identical.