The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2

in a pleasure unforeseen. The latter becomes so associated with the motion that whenever we think of it the idea of the motion arises ; and the idea of the motion when vivid causes the motion to occur. This is an act of will. Nothing is easier than for a philosopher of this school to explain from experience such a notion as that of infinitude. " He sees in it an ordinary manifestation of one of the laws of the association of ideas, — the law that the idea of a thing irresistibly sug gests the idea of any other thing which has been often experienced in close conjunction with it, and not otherwise. As we have never had experience of any point of space without other points beyond it, nor of any point of time without others following it, the law of indissoluble association makes it impossible for us to think of any point of space or time, however distant, without having the idea irresistibly realized, in imagination, of other points still more remote. And thus the supposed original and inherent property of these two ideas is completely explained and accounted for by the law of association ; and we are enabled to see that if Space or Time were really susceptible of termination, we should be just as unable as we now are to conceive the idea." *

These examples of the Associationist Psychology are with the exception of the last, very crudely expressed, but they suffice for our temporary need. Hartley and James Mill t improved upon Hume so far as to employ but a single prin ciple of association, that of contiguity or habit. Hartley ignores resemblance, James Mill expressly repudiates it in a passage which is assuredly one of the curiosities of liter ature : " I believe it will be found that we are accustomed to see like rnings together. When we see a tree, we generally see more trees than one ; a sheep, more sheep than one ; a man, more men than one. From this observation, I think, we may refer resemblance to the law of frequency fi.e., contiguity], of which it seems to form only a particular case."

Mr. Herbert Spencer has still more recently tried to con struct a Psychology which ignores Association by Simi larity,:): and in a chapter, which also is a curiosity, he tries f Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, J. S. Mill's edition, vol. i. p. 111. \ On the Associability of Relations between Feelings, in Principles of Psychology, vol. I. p. 259. It is impossible to regard the " cohering of each feeling with previously-experienced feeling? of thfi same class, order,

to explain the association of two ideas by a conscious refer ence of the first to the point of time when its sensation was experienced, which point of time is no sooner thought of than its content, namely, the second idea, arises. Messrs Bam and Mill, however, and the immense majority of con temporary psychologists retain both Resemblance and Con tiguity as irreducible principles of Association. Professor Bain's exposition of association is by common consent looked upon as the best expression of the English school. Perception of agreement and difference, retentiveness, and the two sorts of association, contiguity and similar ity, are by him regarded as constituting all that is meant by intellect proper. His pages are painstaking and instructive from a descriptive point of view ; though, after my own at tempt to deal with the subject causally, I can hardly award to them any profound explanatory value. Associa tion by Similarity, too much neglected by the British school before Bain, receives from him the most generous exempli fication. As an instructive passage, the following, out of many equally good, may be chosen to quote :

" We may have similarity in form with diversity of use, and similar ity of use with diversity of form. A rope suggests other ropes and cords, if we look to the appearance; but looking to the use, it may sug gest an iron cable, a wooden prop, an iron girding, a leather band, or bevelled gear. In spite of diversity of appearance, the suggestion turns on what answers a common end. If we are very much attracted by sensible appearances, there will be the more difficulty in recalling things that agree only in the use; if, on the other hand, we are pro foundly sensitive to the one point of practical efficiency as a tool, the peculiarities not essential to this will be little noticed, and we shall be ever ready to revive past objects corresponding in use to some one pres ent, although diverse in all other circumstances. We become oblivious to the difference between a horse, a steam-engine, and a waterfall, when our minds are engrossed with the one circumstance of moving power. The diversity in these had no doubt for a long time the effect of keeping back their first identification; and to obtuse intellects, this identification might have been for ever impossible. A strong concen tration of mind upon the single peculiarity of mechanical force, and a degree of indifference to the general aspect of the things themselves,

genus, species, and, so far as may be, the same variety," which Spencer calls (p. 257) ' the sole process of association of feelings,' as any equivalent for What is commonly known as Association by similarity. must conspire with the intellectual energy of resuscitation by similars, in order to summon together in the view three structures so different. We can see, by an instance like this, how new adaptations of existing machinery might arise in the mind of a mechanical inventor. When it first occurred to a reflecting mind that moving water had a property identical with human or brute force, namely, the property ot setting other masses in motion, overcoming inertia and resistance, — when the sight of the stream suggested through this point of likeness the power of the animal, — a ne\v addition was made to the class cf prime movers, and when circumstances permitted, this power could become a substi tute for the others. It may seem to the modern understanding, famil iar with water-wheels and drifting rafts, that the similarity here was an extremely obvious one. But if we put ourselves back into an early state of mind, when running water affected the mind by its brilliancy, its roar, and irregular devastation, we may easily suppose that to iden tify this with animal muscular energy was by no means an obvious effect. Doubtless when a mind arose, insensible by natural constitution to the superficial aspects of things, and having withal a great stretch of identifying intellect, such a comparison would then be possible. We may pursue the same example one stage further, and come to the dis covery of steam power, or the identification of expanding vapor with the previously known sources of mechanical force. To the common eye, for ages, vapor presented itself as clouds in the sky; or as a hissing noise at the spout of a kettle, with the formation of a foggy curling cloud at a few inches' distance. The forcing up of the lid of a kettle may also have been occasionally observed.

But how long was it ere any one was struck with the parallelism of this appearance with a blast of wrind, a rush of water, or an exertion of animal muscle ? The dis cordance was too great to be broken through by such a faint and limited amount of likeness. In one mind, however, the identification did take place, and was followed out into its consequences. The likeness had occurred to other minds previously, but not with the same results. Such minds must have been in some way or other distinguished above the millions of mankind; and we are now endeavoring to give the ex planation of their superiority. The intellectual character of Watt con tained all the elements preparatory to a great stroke of similarity in such a case; — a high susceptibility, both by nature and by education, to the mechanical properties of bodies; ample previous knowledge or familiarity; and indifference to the superficial and sensational effects of things. It is not only possible, however, but exceedingly probable, that many men possessed all these accomplishments; they are of a kind not transcending common abilities. They would in some degree attach to a mechanical education almost as a matter of course. That the dis covery was not sooner made supposes that something farther, and not of common occurrence, was necessary; and this additional endowment appears to be the identifying power of Similarity in general; the ten dency to detect likeness in the midst of disparity and disguise. This

supposition accounts for the fact, and is consistent with the known in tellectual character of the inventor of the steam-engine." * Dr. Hodgson's account of association is by all odds the best yet propounded in English, f All these writers hold more or less explicitly to the notion of atomistic ' ideas ' which recur. In Germany, the same mythological suppo sition has been more radically grasped, and carried out to a still more logical, if more repulsive, extreme, by Herbart J and his followers, who until recently may be said to have reigned almost supreme in their native country.§ For Herbart each idea is a permanently existing entity, the entrance whereof into consciousness is but an accidental determination of its being. So far as it succeeds in occu pying the theatre of consciousness, it crowds out another idea previously there. This act of inhibition gives it, how ever, a sort of hold on the other representation which on all later occasions facilitates its following the other into the mind. The ingenuity with which most special cases of as sociation are formulated in this mechanical language of struggle and inhibition, is great, and surpasses in analytic thoroughness anything that has been done by the British school. This, however, is a doubtful merit, in a case where the elements dealt with are artificial ; and I must confess that to my mind there is something almost hideous in the glib Herbartian jargon about Vorstellungsmassen and their Hemmungen and Hemmungssummen, and sinken and erJteben and schiveben, and Verschmehungen and Complexionen. Herr Lipps, the most recent systematic German Psychologist, has, I regret to say, carried out the theory of ideas in a way which the great originality, learning, and acuteness he

f See his Time and Space, chapter v, and his Theory of Practice, §§ 53 to 57. § Prof. Ribot, in chapter i of his ' Contemporary German Psychol ogy,' has given a good account of Herbart and his school, and of Beneke, his rival and partial analogue. See also two articles on the Herbartian Psychology, by G. F. Stout, in Mind for 1888. J. T). Morrell'p Outlines of Mental Philosophy (2d ed., London, 1862) largely follows Herbart and Beneke. I know of no other English book which does so.

shows make only the more regrettable.* Such elaborately artificial constructions are, it seems to me, only a burden and a hindrance, not a help, to our science, t In French, M. Babier in his chapter on Association,^ handles the subject more vigorously and acutely than any one. His treatment of it, though short, seems to me for general soundness to rank second only to Hodgson's. In the last chapter we already invoked association to account for the effects of use in improving discrimination. In later chapters we shall see abundant proof of the im mense part which it plays in other processes, and shall then readily admit that few principles of analysis, in any science, have proved more fertile than this one, however vaguely formulated it often may have been. Our own attempt to formulate it more definitely, and to escape the usual con fusion between causal agencies and relations merely known, must not blind us to the immense services of those by whom the confusion was unfelt. From this practical point of view it would be a true ignoratio elenchi to flatter one's self that one has dealt a heavy blow at the psychology of association, when one has exploded the theory of atomistic ideas, or shown that contiguity and similarity between ideas can only be there after association is done.§ The whole body of the associationist psychology remains stand ing after you have translated 'ideas' into 'objects,' on the one hand, and ' brain-processes ' on the other ; and the analysis of faculties and operations is as conclusive in these terms as in those traditionally used.

f The most burdensome and utterly gratuitous of them are perhaps Steintlial's, in his Einleitung in die Psychologic, 2te Aufl. (1881). Cf. also G. Glogau: Steintlial's Psychologische Formelu (1886). §Mr. F. H. Bradley seems to me to have been guilty of something very like this ignoratio elenchi in the, of course, subtle and witty but decidedly long-winded critique of the association of ideas, contained in book n. part ii. chap. i. of his Principles of Logic.

IN the next two chapters I shall deal with what is some times called internal perception, or the perception of time, and of events as occupying a date therein, especially when the date is a past one, in which case the perception in question goes by the name of memory. To remember a thing as past, it is necessary that the notion of ' past ' should be one of our ' ideas.' We shall see in the chapter on Mem ory that many things come to be thought by us as past, not because of any intrinsic quality of their own, but rather because they are associated with other things which for us signify pastness. But how do these things get their pastuess ? What is the original of our experience of pastuess, from whence we get the meaning of the term ? It is this question which the reader is invited to consider in the pres ent chapter. We shall see that we have a constant feeling sui generis of -pastness, to which every one of our experi ences in turn falls a prey. To think a thing as past is to think it amongst the objects or in the direction of the ob jects which at the present moment appear affected by this quality. This is the original of our notion of past time, upon which memory and history build their svstem.s. And in this chapter we shall consider this immediate sense of time alone.

If the constitution of consciousness were that of a string of bead-like sensations and images, all separate, " we never cou*d have <iny knowledge except that of the present instant. The moment each of our sensations ceased it would be gone for ever; and we should be as if we had never been. ... We should be wholly *This chapter is reprinted almost verbatim from the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. xx. p. 374. incapable of acquiring experience. - . . Even if our ideas were associ ated in trains, but only as they are in imagination, we should still be without the capacity of acquiring knowledge. One idea, upon this supposition, would follow another. But that would be all. Each of our successive states of consciousness, the moment it ceased, would be gone forever. Each of those momentary states would be our whole being."*

We might, nevertheless, under these circumstances, act in a rational way, provided the mechanism which produced our trains of images produced them in a rational order. We should make appropriate speeches, though unaware of any word except the one just on our lips ; we should decide upon the right policy without ever a glimpse of the total grounds of our choice. Our consciousness would be like a glow-worm spark, illuminating the point it immediately covered, but leaving all beyond in total darkness. Whether a very highly developed practical life be possible under such conditions as these is more than doubtful ; it is, how ever, conceivable.

I make the fanciful hypothesis merely to set off our real nature by the contrast. Our feelings are not thus con tracted, and our consciousness never shrinks to the dimen sions of a glow-worm spark. The knowledge of some other part of the stream, past or future, near or remote, is always mixed in with our knowledge of the, present thing. A simple sensation, as we shall hereafter see, is an abstrac tion, and all our concrete states of mind are representations of objects with some amount of complexity. Part of the com plexity is the echo of the objects just past, and, in a less degree, perhaps, the foretaste of those just to arrive. Ob jects fade out of consciousness slowly. If the present thought is of ABCDEFG, the next one will be of B C D E E G H, and the one after that of C D E F G H I— the lingerings of the past dropping successively away, and the incomings of the future making up the loss. These lingerings of old objects, these incomings of new, are the germs of memory and expectation, the retrospective and the prospective sense of time. They give that continuity to

consciousness without wliich it could not be called a stream.* * " What I find, when I look at consciousness at all, is, that what I can not divest myself of, or not have in consciousness, if I have consciousness at all, is a sequence of different feelings. . . . The simultaneous percep tion of both sub-feelings, whether as parts of a coexistence or of a sequence, is the total feeling — the minimum of consciousness— and this minimum lias duration. . . . Time-duration, however, is inseparable from the minimum, notwithstanding that, in an isolated moment, we could not tell which part of it came first, which last. . . . We do not require to know that the subfeelings come in sequence, first one, then the other; nor to know what coming in sequence means. But we have, in any artificially isolated mini mum of consciousness, the rudiments of the perception of former and latter in time, in the sub-feeling that grows fainter, and the sub-feeling that grows stronger, and the change between them. . . .

" In the next place, I remark that the rudiments of memory are involved in the minimum of consciousness. The first beginnings of it appear in that minimum, just as the first beginnings of perception do. As each momber of the change or difference which goes to compose that minimum is the rudiment of a single perception, so the priority of one member to the other, although both are given to consciousness in one empirical present moment, is the rudiment of memory. The fact that the minimum of consciousness is difference or change in"feelings, is the ultimate explanation of memory as well as of single perceptions. A former and a latter are included in the minimum of consciousness; and this is what is meant by saying that all consciousness is in the form of time, or that time is the form of feeling, the form of sensibility. Crr.dely and popularly we divide the course of time into past, present, and future; but, strictly speaking, there is no present; it is composed of past and future divided by an indivisible point or instant. That instant, or time-point, is the strict present. What we call, loosely, the present is an empirical portion of the course of time, containing at least a minimum of consciousness, in which the instant of change is the

present time-point If we take this as the present time-point, it is ciear that the minimum of feeling contains two portions-a sub-feehng that goes and a sub-feeling that comes. One is remembered the other imagined. The limits of both are indefinite at beginning and end of the minimum, and ready to melt into other minima, proceeding from other stimuli. •Time and consciousness do not come to us ready marked out into minimawe have to do that by reflection, asking ourselves. What , least empirical moment of consciousness ? That least empirical moment is what we usually call the present moment; and even this is too minute for ordinary use; the present moment is often extended practically to a few Londs or even minutes, beyond which we specify what length of time we mean, as the present hour, or day, or year, or century.

•• But this popular way of thinking imposes itself on great numbers even of philosophically-minded people, and they talk about the pr<™« ™ } was a datum-** if time came to us marked into present periods like a Let any one try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice 01 attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present ? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming. As a poet, quoted by Mr. Hodg son, says,

and it is only as entering into the living and moving organ ization of a much wider tract of time that the strict present is apprehended at all. It is, in fact, an altogether ideal abstraction, not only never realized in sense, but probably never even conceived of by those unaccustomed to philo sophic meditation. Reflection leads us to the conclusion measuring-tape." (S. H. Hodgson: Philosophy of Reflection, vol. i. pp. " The representation of time agrees with that of space in that a certain amount of it must be presented together — included between its initial and terminal limit. A continuous ideation, flowing from one point to another, would indeed occupy time, but not represent it, for it would exchange one element of succession for another instead of grasping the whole succession at once. Both points— the beginning and the end— are equally essential to the conception of time, and must be present with equal clearness together.'' (Herbart: Psychol. als W., § 115.)

" Assume that . . . similar pendulum-strokes follow each other at reg ular intervals in a consciousness otherwise void. When the first one is over, an imago of it remains in the fancy until the second succeeds. This, then, reproduces the first by virtue of the law of association by similarity, but at the same time meets with the aforesaid persisting image. . . . Thus does the simple repetition of the sound provide all the elements of time, perception. The first sound [as it is recalled by association] gives the beginning, the second the end, and the persistent image in the fancy repre sents the length of the interval. At the moment of the second impression, the entire time-perception exists at once, for then all its elements are presented together, the second sound and the image in the fancy immedi ately, and the first impression by reproduction. But, in the same act, we are aware of a state in which only the first sound existed, and of another in which only its image existed in the fancy. Such a consciousness as this M that of time. . . . In it no succession of ideas takes place." (Wundt : Physiol. Psych., 1st ed. pp. 681-2.) Note here the assumption that the persistence and the reproduction of an impression are two processes which may go on simultaneously. Also that Wundt's description is merely an attempt to analyze the ' deliverance ' of a time-perception, and no explanation of the manner in which it comes about.

that it must exist, but that it does exist caii never be a fact of our immediate experience. The only fact of our imme diate experience is what Mr. E. R. Clay has well called * the tspecious present.' His words deserve to be quoted in full ; * " The relation of experience to time has not been profoundly studied. Its objects are given as being of the present, but the part of time re ferred to by the datum is a very different thing from the conterminous of the past and future which philosophy denotes by the name Present. The present to which the datum refers is really a part of the past — a recent past— delusively given as being a time that intervenes between the past and the future. Let it be named the specious present, and lei the past, that is given as being the past, be known as the obvious past. All the notes of a bar of a song seem to the listener to be contained in the present. All the changes of place of a meteor seem to the beholder to be contained in the present. At the instant of the termination of such series, no part of the time measured by them seems to be a past. Time, then, considered relatively to human apprehension, consists of four parts, viz., the obvious past, the specious present, the real present, and the future. Omitting the specious present, it consists of three . . . nonentities — the past, which does not exist, the future, which does not exist, and their conterminous, the present; the faculty from which it proceeds lies to us in the fiction of the specious present."

In short, the practically cognized present is no knifeedge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time. The unit of composition of our per ception of time is a duration, with a bow and a stern, as it were — a rearward- and a forward-looking end. t It is only f Locke, in his dim way, derived the sense of duration from reflec tion on the succession of our ideas (Essay, book n. chap. xiv. £ 3; chap. xv. § 12). Reid justly remarks that if ten successive elements are to make duration, "then one must make duration, otherwise duration must be made up of parts that have no duration, which is impossible. . I con clude, therefore, that there must be duration in every single interval or element of which the whole duration is made up. Nothing, indeed, is more certain than that every elementary part of duration must have dura tion, as every elementary part of extension must have extension. Now, it must be observed that in these elements of duration, or single intervals of successive ideas, there is no succession of ideas, yet we must conceive them to have duration; whence we may conclude with certainty that there ^ is a conception of duration where there is no succession of ideas in the mind." (Intellectual Powers, essay in. chap, v.) " Qu'on ne cherche point," says Royer Collard in the Fragments added to Jouffroy's Translation of Reid,

as parts of this duration-block that the relation ol succession of one end to the other is perceived. We do not first feel one end and then feel the other after it, and from the per ception of the succession infer an interval of time between, but we seem to feel the interval of time as a whole, with its two ends embedded in it. The experience is from the out set a synthetic datum, not a simple one ; and to sensible perception its elements are inseparable, although attention looking back may easily decompose the experience, and distinguish its beginning from its end.

When we come to study the perception of Space, we shall find it quite analogous to time in this regard. Date in time corresponds to position in space ; and although we now mentally construct large spaces by mentallv imagin ing remoter and remoter positions, just as we now construct great durations by mentally prolonging a series of success ive dates, yet the original experience of both space and time is always of something already given as a unit, inside of which attention afterward discriminates parts in relation to each other. Without the parts already given as in a time and in a space, subsequent discrimination of them could hardly do more than perceive them as different from each other ; it would have no motive for calling the difference temporal order in this instance and spatial position in that.

And just as in certain experiences we may be conscious of an extensive space full of objects, without locating each of them distinctly therein ; so, when many impressions fol low in excessively rapid succession in time, although we may be distinctly aware that they occupy some duration, and are not simultaneous, we may be quite at a loss to tell which comes first and which last ; or we may even invert their real order in our judgment. In complicated reactiontime experiments, where signals and motions, and clicks of the apparatus come in exceedingly rapid order, one is at first much perplexed in deciding what the order is, yet of the fact of its occupancy of time we are never in doubt.

" la duree dans la succession; on ne 1'y trouvera jamais; la duree a precede la succession; la notion de la duree a precede la notion de la succession. Kile en est done tout-a-fait independaute, dira-t-ou? Oui, elle en est tout- i-t'ait iudependante." We must now proceed to an account of the facts ot timeperception in detail as preliminary to our speculative con clusion. Many of the facts are matters of patient experi mentation, others of common experience.

First of all, we note a marked difference between the ele mentary sensations of duration and those of space. The former have a much narrower range ; the time-sense may be called a myopic organ, in comparison with the eye, for example. The eye sees rods, acres, even miles, at a single glance, arid these totals it can afterward subdivide into an almost infi nite number of distinctly identified parts. The units of duration, 011 the other hand, which the time-sense is able to take in at a single stroke, are groups of a few seconds, and within these units very few subdivisions — perhaps forty at most, as we shall presently see — can be clearly discerned. The durations we have practically most to deal with — minutes, hours, and days — have to be symbolically conceived, and constructed by mental addition, after the fashion of those extents of hundreds of miles and up ward, which in the field of space are beyond the range of most men's practical interests altogether. To ' realize ' a quarter of a mile we need only look out of the window and feel its length by an act which, though it may in part result from organized associations, yet seems immediately per formed. To realize an hour, we must count ' now !— now !

of a separate bit of time, and the exact sum of the bits never makes a very clear impression on our mind. How many bits can we clearly apprehend at once? Very few if they are long bits, more if they are extremely short, most if they come to us in compound groups, each including smaller bits of its own. Hearing is the sense by which the subdivision of dura tions is most sharply made. Almost all the experimental work on the time-sense has been done by means of strokes of sound. How long a series of sounds, then, can we group in the mind so as not to confound it with a longer or a shorter series V

Our spontaneous tendency is to break up any monoto* nously given series of sounds into some sort of a rhythm. We involuntarily accentuate every second, or third, 01 fourth beat, or we break the series in still more intricate ways. Whenever we thus grasp the impressions in rhythmic form, we can identify a longer string of them without con fusion. Each variety of verse, for example, has its Maw'; and the recurrent stresses and sinkings make us feel with pe culiar readiness the lack of a syllable or the presence of one too much. Divers verses may again be bound together in the form of a stanza, and we may then say of another stanza, " Its second verse differs by so much from that of the first stanza," when but for the felt stanza-form the two differing verses would have come to us too separately to be compared at all. But these superposed systems of rhythm soon reach their limit. In music, as Wundt * says, " while the measure may easily contain 12 changes of intensity of sound (as in ^2- time), the rhythmical group may embrace 6 measures, and the period consist of 4, exceptionally of 5 [8?] groups."