The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2

Turn now to the case of finding the unknoivn means to a distinctly conceived end. The end here stands in the place of a, b, c, in the diagram. It is the starting-point of the irradiations of suggestion ; and here, as in that case, what the voluntary attention does is only to dismiss some of the suggestions as irrelevant, and hold fast to others which are felt to be more pertinent— let these be symbolized by I, m, n. These latter at last accumulate sufficiently to discharge all together into Z, the excitement of which pro cess is, in the mental sphere, equivalent to the solution of our problem. The only difference between this case and the last, is that in this one there need be no original subexcitement in Z, co-operating from the very first. When

* No one has described this process better than Hobbes : " Sometimes a man seeks what he hath lost ; and from that place and time wherein he misses it, his mind runs back from place to place and time to time to and where and when he had it; that is to say, to lind some certain and limited time and place, in which to begin a method of seeking. Again, from thence his thoughts run over the same places and times to find what action or other occasion might make him lose it. This we call Itemem brance, or calling to mind. Sometimes a man knows a place determinate, within the compass whereof he is to seek ; and then his thoughts run over all the parts thereof, in the same manner as one would sweep a room to find a jewel, or as a spaniel ranges the field till he find a scent, or as a man should run over the alphabet *.o start a rhyme." (Leviathan, 165, p. 10.)

we seek a forgotten name, we must suppose the name's centre to be in a state of active tension from the very out set, because of that peculiar feeling of recognition which we get at the moment of recall. The plenitude of the thought seems here but a maximum degree of something which our mind divined in advance. It instantaneously fills a socket completely moulded to its shape ; and it seems most natural to ascribe the identity of quality in our feeling of the gaping socket and our feeling of what comes to fill it, to the sameness of a nerve-tract excited in different degrees. In the solving of a problem, on the contrary, the recognition that we have found the means is much less immediate. Here, what we are aware of in advance seems to be its relations with the items we already know. It must bear a causal relation, or it must be an effect, or it must contain an attribute common to two items, or it must be a uniform concomitant, or what not. We know, in short, a lot about it, whilst as yet we have no knowledge of acquaintance with it (see p. 221), or in Mr. Hodgson's language, " we know what we want to find beforehand, in a certain sense, in its second intention, and do not know it, in another sense, in its first intention." * Our intuition that one of the ideas which turn up is, at last, our quwsitum, is due to our recog nition that its relations are identical with those we had in mind, and this may be a rather slow act of judgment. In fact, every one knows that an object may be for some time present to his mind before its relations to other mat ters are perceived. To quote Hodgson again :

" The mode of operation is common to voluntary memory and reason. . . . But reasoning adds to memory the function of comparing or judging the images which arise. . . . Memory aims at filling the gap with an image which has at some particular time filled it before, rea soning with one which bears certain time- and space-relations to the images before and after" — or, to use perhaps clearer language, one which stands in determinate logical relations to those data round about the gap which filled our mind at the start. This feeling of the blank form of relationship before we get the material quality

of the thing related will surprise no one who has read Chapter IX. From the guessing of newspaper enigmas to the plot ting of the policy of an empire there is no other process than this. We trust to the laws of cerebral nature to pre sent us spontaneously with the appropriate idea : ''Our only command over it is by the effort we make to keep the painful unfilled gap in consciousness.* . . . Two circumstances are important to notice: the first is, that volition has no power of calling up images, but only of rejecting and selecting from those offered by spontaneous redintegration. t But the rapidity with which this selec tion is made, owing to the familiarity of the ways in which spontaneous redintegration runs, gives the process of reasoning the appearance of evoking images that are foreseen to be conformable to the purpose. There is no seeing them before they are offered; there is no summoning them before they are seen. The other circumstance is, that every kind

of reasoning is nothing, in its simplest form, but attention."}: It is foreign to our purpose here to enter into any detailed analysis of the different classes of mental pursuit. In a scientific research we get perhaps as rich an example as can be found. The inquirer starts with a fact of which he seeks the reason, or with an hypothesis of which he seeks the proof. In either case he keeps turning the matter incessantly in his mind until, by the arousal of asso ciate upon associate, some habitual, some similar, one arises which he recognizes to suit his need. This, however, may take years. No rules can be given by which the investi gator may proceed straight to his result; but both here and in the case of reminiscence the accumulation of helps in the way of associations may advance more rapidly by the use of certain routine methods. In striving to recall a thought, for example, we may of set purpose run through the successive classes of circumstance with which it may

i Ibid. p. 400. Compare Bain, Emotions aud Will. p. 377. "The out goings of the mind are necessarily random; the end alone is the thing that is clear to the view, and with that there is a [perception of the fitness of every passing suggestion. The volitional energy keeps up the attention on the active search; and the moment that anything in point rises before the mind, it springs upon that like a wild beast upon its prey." possibly have been connected, trusting that when the right member of the class has turned up it will help the thought's revival. Thus we may run through all the places in which we may have had it. We may run through the persons whom we remember to have conversed with, or we may call up successively all the books we have lately been reading. If we are trying to remember a person we may run through a list of streets or of professions. Some item out of the lists thus methodically gone over will very likely be asso ciated with the fact we are in need of, and may suggest it or help to do so. And yet the item might never have arisen without such systematic procedure. In scientific research this accumulation of associates has been methodized by Mill under the title of ' The Four Methods of Experi mental Inquiry.' By the ' method of agreement,' by that of ' difference,' by those of ' residues ' and ' concomitant variations ' (which cannot here be more nearly defined), we make certain lists of cases ; and by ruminating these lists in our minds the cause we seek will be more likely to emerge. But the final stroke of discovery is only prepared, not effected, by them. The brain-tracts must, of their own accord, shoot the right way at last, or we shall still grope in darkness. That in some brains the tracts do shoot the right way much oftener than in others, and that we cannot tell why, — these are ultimate facts to which we must never close our eyes. Even in forming our lists of instances according to Mill's methods, we are at the mercy of the spontaneous workings of Similarity in our brain. How are a number of facts, resembling the one whose cause we seek, to be brought together in a list unless the one will rapidly suggest the other through association by similarity ?

Such is the analysis I propose, first of the three main types of spontaneous association, and then of voluntary association. It will be observed that the object called up may bear any logical relation whatever to the one which sug gested it. The law requires only that one condition should be fulfilled. The fading object must be due to a brainprocess some of whose elements awaken through habit some of the elements of the brain-process of the ob ject which comes to view. This awakening is the opera tive machinery, the causal agency, throughout, quite as much so in the kind of association I have called by the name of Similarity, as in any other sort. The similarity between the objects, or between the thoughts (if similarity there be between these latter), has no causal agency hi carrying us from one to the other. It is but a result-^the effect of the usual causal agent when this happens to work in a certain particular and assignable way. But ordinary writers talk as if the similarity of the objects were itself an agent, co-ordinate with habit, and independent of it, and like it able to push objects before the mind. This is quite unintelligible. The similarity of two things does not exist till both things are there — it is meaningless to talk of it as an agent of production of anything, whether in the physical or the psychical realms.* It is a relation which the mind perceives after the fact, just as it may perceive the relations of superiority, of distance, of causality, of container and content, of substance and accident, or of contrast, between an object and some second object which the associative machinery calls up.f

There are, nevertheless, able writers who not only insist on preserving association by similarity as a distinct ele mentary law, but who make it the most elementary law, and seek to derive contiguous association from it. Their reasoning is as follows : When the present impression A f Dr. McCosh is accordingly only logical when he sinks similarity in what he calls the "Law of Correlation, according to which, when we have discovered a relation between things, the idea of one tends to bring up the others" (Psychology, the Cognitive Powers, p. 130) The relations men tioned by this author are Identity, Whole and Parts, Resemblance, Space, Time, Quantity, Active Property, and Cause and Effect. If perceived relations among objects are to be treated as grounds for their appearance before the mind, similarity has of course no right to an exclusive, or even to a predominant, place.

awakens the idea b of its past contiguous associate B, ho\v can this occur except through first reviving an image a oi its own past occurrence. This is the term directly con nected with b ; so that the process instead of being simply A — b is A — a — b. Now A and a are similars ; therefore no association by contiguity can occur except through a previ ous association by similarity. The most important suppo sition here made is that every impression on entering the mind must needs awaken an image of its past self, in the light of which itis'apperceived' or understood, and through the intermediation of which it enters into relation with the mind's other objects. This assumption is almost univer sally made ; and yet it is hard to find any good reason for it. It first came before us when we were reviewing the facts of aphasia and mental blindness (see p. 50 if.). But we then saw no need of optical and auditory images to interpret opti cal and auditory sensations by. On the contrary, we agreed that auditory sensations were understood by us only so far as they awakened non-auditory images, and optical sensa tions only so far as they awakened wow-optical images. In the chapters on Memory, on Reasoning, and on Percep tion the same assumption will meet us again, and again will have to be rejected as groundless. The sensational process A and the ideational process a probably occupy essentially the same tracts. When the outer stimulus comes and those tracts vibrate with the sensation A, they discharge as directly into the paths which lead to B as when there is no outer stimulus and they only vibrate with the idea a. To say that the process A can only reach these paths by the help of the weaker process a is like saying that we need a candle to see the sun by.

A replaces a, does all that a does and more ; and there is no intelligible meaning, to my mind, in saying that the weaker process coexists with the stronger. I therefore consider that these writers are altogether wrong. The only plausible proof they give of the coexistence of a with A is when A gives us a sense of familiarity but fails to awaken any distinct thought of past contiguous associates. In a later chapter I shall consider this case. Here I content myself with say ing that it does not seem conclusive as to the point at issue ;

and that I still believe association of coexistent or sequent impressions to be the one elementary law. CONTKAST has also been held to be an independent agent in association. But the reproduction of an object contrasting with one already in the mind is easily explained on our principles. Recent writers, in fact, all reduce it either to similarity or contiguity. Contrast always presupposes generic similarity ; it is only the extremes of a class which are contrasted, black and white, not black and sour, or white and prickly. A machinery which reproduces a simi lar at all, may reproduce the opposite similar, as well as any intermediate term. Moreover, the greater number of contrasts are habitually coupled in speech, young and old, life and death, rich and poor, etc., and are, as Dr. Bain says, in everybody's memory.*

I trust that the student will now feel that the way to a deeper understanding of the order of our ideas lies in the direction of cerebral physiology. The elementary process of revival can be nothing but the law of habit. Truly the clay is distant when physiologists shall actually trace from cell-group to cell-group the irradiations which we have hypothetically invoked. Probably it will never arrive. The schematism we have used is, moreover, taken immediately from the analysis of objects into their elementary parts, and only extended by analogy to the brain. And yet it is only as incorporated in the brain that such a schematism can represent anything causal This is, to my mind, the con clusive reason for saying that the order of presentation of the mind's materials is due to cerebral physiology alone.

The law of accidental prepotency of certain processes over others falls also within the sphere of cerebral proba bilities. Granting such instability as the brain-tissue re quires, certain points must always discharge more quickly and strongly than others ; and this prepotency would shift its place from moment to moment by accidental causes, giving us a perfect mechanical diagram of the capricious play of similar association in the most gifted mind. The study of dreams confirms this view. The usual abundance of paths of irradiation seems, in the dormant brain, reduced. A few only are pervious, and the most fantastic sequences occur because the currents run — ' like sparks in burnt-up paper ' — wherever the nutrition of the moment creates an opening, but nowhere else.

The effects of interested attention and volition remain. These activities seem to hold fast to certain elements, and by emphasizing them and dwelling on them, to make their associates the only ones which are evoked. This is the point at which an anti-mechanical psychology must, if any where, make it stand in dealing with association. Every thing else is pretty certainly due to cerebral laws. My own opinion on the question of active attention and spirit ual spontaneity is expressed elsewhere. But even though there be a mental spontaneity, it can certainly not create ideas or summon them ex abnupto. Its power is limited to selecting amongst those which the associative machinery has already introduced or tends to introduce. If it can emphasize, reinforce, or protract for a second either one of these, it can do all that the most eager advocate of free will need demand ; for it then decides the direction of the next associations by making them hinge upon the emphasized term ; and determining in this wise the course of the man's thinking, it also determines his acts.

inay be briefly glanced at ere we end the chapter.* Aris totle seems to have caught both the facts and the principle of explanation ; but he did not expand his views, and it was not till the time of Hobbes that the matter was again touched on in a definite way. Hobbes first formulated the problem of the succession of our thoughts. He writes in Leviathan, chapter in, as follows : * See, for farther details, Hamilton's Reid, Appendices D** and D***; and L. Ferri, La Psychologic de I'Associatioii (Paris, 1883). Also Kohertson, art. Association in Eucyclop. Britannica.

" By consequence, or train of thoughts, I understand that succession of one thought to another which is called, to distinguish it from dis course in words, mental discourse. When a man thinketh on anything whatsoever, his next thought after is not altogether so casual as it seems to be. Not every thought to every thought succeeds indiffer ently. But as we have no imagination, whereof we have not formerly had sense, in whole or in parts ; so we have no transition from one imagination to another, whereof we never had the like before in our senses. The reason whereof is this. All fancies are motions within us. relics of those made in the sense : and those motions that immediately succeeded one another in the sense continue also together after sense : insomuch as the former coming again to take place, and be predomi nant, the latter followeth, by coherence of the matter moved, in such manner, as water upon a plane table is drawn which way any one part of it is guided by the finger. But because in sense, to one and the same thing perceived, sometimes one thing, sometimes another succeedeth, it comes to pass in time that, in the imagining of anything, there is no certainty what we shall imagine next; only this is certain, it shall be something that succeeded the same before, at one time or another. This train of thoughts, or mental discourse, is of two sorts. The first is unguided, without design, and inconstant ; wherein there is no pas sionate thought, to govern and direct those that follow, to itself, as the end and scope of some desire, or other passion. . . . The second is more constant; as being regulated by some desire and design. For the impression made by such things as we desire, or fear, is strong and permanent, or, if it cease for a time, of quick return : so strong is it, sometimes, as to hinder and break our sleep.

From desire ariseth the thought of some means we have seen produce the like of that which we aim at; and from the thought of that, the thought of means to that mean; and so continually, till we come to some beginning within our own power. And because the end, by the greatness of the impression, comes often to mind, in case our thoughts begin to wander, they are quickly again reduced into the way : which observed by one of the seven wise men, made him give men this precept, which is now worn out, Respwefinem; that is to say, in all your actions, look often upon what you would have, as the thing that directs all your thoughts in the way to attain it.

"The train of regulated thoughts is of two kinds; one, when an effect imagined we sock the causes, or means that produce it : and this is common to man and beast. The other is, when imagining anythin" whatsoever, we seek all the possible effects that can by it be pro duced • that is to say, we imagine what we can do with it, when we have it Of which I have not at any time seen any sign, but in man onlv • for this is a curiosity hardly incident to the nature of any living creature that has no other passion but sensual, such as are hunger thirst lust and anger. In sum, the discourse of the mind, when it is governed by design, is nothing bat P*****. <«' the faculty or invention,

which the Latins called sayacitas, and sollertia ; a hunting out of the causes, of some effect, present or past ; or of the effects, of some present or past cause." "As all simple ideas may be separated by the imagination, and may be united again in what form it pleases, nothing would be more unaccountable than the operations of that faculty, were it not guided by some universal principles, which render it, in some measure, uniform with itself in all times and places. Were ideas entirely loose and un connected, chance alone would join them ; and 'tis impossible the same simple ideas should fall regularly into complex ones (as they commonly do) without some bond of union among them, some associating quality, by which one idea naturally introduces another. This uniting princi ple among ideas is not to be considered as an inseparable connection ; for that has been already excluded from the imagination. Nor yet are we to conclude that without it the mind cannot join two ideas ; for nothing is more free than that faculty : but we are only to regard it as a gentle force, which commonly prevails, and is the cause why, among other things, languages so nearly correspond to each other ; nature in a manner pointing to every one those simple ideas which are most proper to be united in a complex one. The qualities from which this association arises, and by which the mind is after this manner con veyed from one idea to another, are three, viz., RESEMBLANCE, CON TIGUITY in time or place, and CAUSE and EFFECT.

" I believe it will not be very necessary to prove that these qualities produce an association among ideas, and upon the appearance of one idea naturally introduce another. Tis plain that in the course of our thinking, and in the constant revolution of our ideas, our imagination runs easily from one idea to any other that resembles it, and that this quality alone is to the fancy a sufficient bond and association. Tis likewise evident, that as the senses, in changing their objects, are necessitated to change them regularly, and take them as they lie con tiguous to each other, the imagination must by long custom acquire the same method of thinking, and run along the parts of space and time in conceiving its objects. As to the connection that is made by the relation of cause and effect, we shall have occasion afterwards to examine it to the bottom, and therefore shall not at present insist upon it. 'Tis sufficient to observe that there is no relation which produces a stronger connection in the fancy, and makes one idea more readily recall another, than the relation of cause and effect betwixt their ob jects. . . . These are therefore the principles of union or cohesion among our simple ideas, and in the imagination supply the place of that inseparable connection by which they are united in our memory. Here is a kind of ATTRACTION, which in the mental world will be found

to have as extraordinary effects as in the natural, and to show itself in as many and as various forms. Its effects are everywhere conspicuous ; but as to its causes, they are mostly unknown, and must be resolved into original qualities of human nature, which I pretend not to explain." * Hume did not, however, any more than Hobbes, follow out the effects of which he speaks, and the task of populariz ing the notion of association and making an effective school based on association of ideas alone was reserved for Hartleyf and James Mill.J These authors traced minutely the presence of association in all the cardinal notions and op erations of the mind. The several ' faculties ' of the Mind were dispossessed ; the one principle of association between ideas did all their work. As Priestley says :

" Nothing is requisite to make any man whatever he is, but a sentient principle with this single law. . . . Not only all our intel lectual pleasures and pains but all the phenomena of memory, imagina tion, volition, reasoning and every other mental affection and operation, are but different modes or cases of the association of ideas." § An eminent French psychologist, M. Bibot, repeats Hume's comparison of the law of association with that of gravitation, and goes on to say :

"It is remarkable that this discovery was made so late. Nothing is simpler, apparently, than to notice that this law of association is the truly fundamental, irreducible phenomenon of our mental life ; that it is at the bottom of all our acts ; that it permits of no exception ; that neither dream, revery, mystic ecstasy, nor the most abstract reasoning can exist without it ; that its suppression would be equivalent to that of thought itself. Nevertheless no ancient author understood it, for one cannot seriously maintain that a few scattered lines in Aristotle and the Stoics constitute a theory and clear view of the subject. It is to Hobbes, Hume, and Hartley that we must attribute the origin of these studies on the connection of our ideas. The discovery of the ultimate law of our psychologic acts has this, then, in common with many other discoveries : it came late and seems so simple that it may justly astonish us.

" Perhaps it is not superfluous to ask in what this manner of ex planation is superior to the current theory of Faculties. || The most extended usage consists, as we know, in dividing intellectual phenom ena into classes, in separating those which differ, in grouping together those of the same nature and in giving to these a common name and in attributing them to the same cause ; it is thus that we have come to dis tinguish those diverse aspects of intelligence which are called judgment, reasoning, abstraction, perception, etc. This method is precisely the one followed in Physics, where the words caloric, electricity, gravity, designate the unknown causes of certain groups of phenomena. If one thus never forgets that the diverse faculties are only the unknown causes of known phenomena, that they are simply a convenient means of classifying the facts and speaking of them, if one does not fall into the common fault of making out of them substantial entities, creations which now agree, now disagree, so forming in the intelligence a little republic ; then, we can see nothing reprehensible in this distribution into faculties, conformable as it is to the rules of a sound method and of a good natural classification. In what then is Mr. Bain's procedure superior to the method of the faculties ? It is that the latter is simply a classification while his is an explanation. Between the psychology which traces intellectual facts back to certain faculties, and that which reduces them to the single law of association, there is, according to our way of thinking, the same difference that we find in Physics between those who attribute its phenomena to five or six causes, and those who 'derive gravity caloric, light, etc., from motion. The system of the faculties explains nothing because each one of them is only & flatus vocis which is of value merely through the phenomena which it contains, and signifies nothing more than these phenomena.

The new theory, on the contrary, shows that the different processes of intelligence are only diverse cases of a single law ; that imagination, deduction, induction, perception, etc., are but so many determinate ways in which ideas may combine with each other ; and that the differences of faculties are only differences of association. It explains all intellectual facts, certainly not after the manner of Metaphysics which demands the ultimate and absolute reason of things ; but after the manner of Physics which seeks only their secondary and immediate cause." *

The inexperienced reader may be glad of a brief indica tion of the manner in which all the different mental oper ations may be conceived to consist of images of sensation associated together. Memory is the association of a present image with others known to belong to the past. Expectation the same, with future substituted for past. Fancy, the association of images without temporal order. strong, and steadfast association of the image of that thing with some present sensation, so that as long as the sensation persists the image cannot be excluded from the mind.

^ Judgment is ' transferring the idea of truth by associ ation from one proposition to another that resembles it.'* Reasoning is the perception that " whatever has any mark has that which it is a mark of " ; in the concrete case the mark or middle term being always associated with each of the other terms and so serving as a link by which they are themselves indirectly associated together. This same kind of transfer of a sensible experience associated with another to a third also associated with that other, serves to explain emotional facts. When we are pleased or hurt we express it, and the expression associates itself with the feeling. Hearing the same expression from another revives the as sociated feeling, and we sympathize, i.e. grieve or are glad with him.

The other social affections, Benevolence, Conscientiouness, Ambition, etc., arise in like manner by the transfer of the bodily pleasure experienced as a reward for social service, and hence associated with it, to the act of service itself, the link of reward being dropped out. Just so Avarice when the miser transfers the bodily pleasures associated with the spending of money to the money itself, dropping the link of spending. Fear is a transfer of the bodily hurt associated by ex perience with the thing feared, to the thought of the thing, with the precise features of the hurt left out. Thus we feai a dog without distinctly imagining his bite.

Love is the association of the agreeableness of certain sensible experiences with the idea of the object capable of affording them. The experiences themselves may cease to be distinctly imagined after the notion of their pleasure has been transferred to the object, constituting our love there for. Volition is the association of ideas of muscular motion with the ideas of those pleasures which the motion pro duces. The motion at first occurs automatically and results