The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2

All these pathological facts are showing us that the sphere of possible recollection may be wider than we think, and that in certain matters apparent oblivion is no proof against possible recall under other conditions. They give no countenance, however, to the extravagant opinion that tunately deficient, like this one, in the evidence of exact verification wh'.ch ' psychical research ' demands). Compare also Th. Ribot, Diseases of Mem ory, chap. iv. The knowledge of foreign words, etc., reported in trance mediums, etc., may perhaps often be explained by exaltation of memory. An hystero-epileptic girl, whose case I quoted in Proc. of Am. Soc. for Psychical Research, automatically writes an ' Ingoldsby Legend ' in several cantos, which her parents say she ' had never read.' Of course she must have read or heard it, but perhaps never learned it. Of some macaronic Latin-English verses about a sea-serpent which her hand alse wrote uncon consciously, I have vainly sought the original (see Proc., etc., p 553*-

nothing we experience can be absolutely forgotten. In real life, in spite of occasional surprises, most of what hap pens actually is forgotten. The only reasons for supposing that if the conditions were forthcoming everything would revive are of a transcendental sort. Sir Wm. Hamilton quotes and adopts them from the German writer Schmid. Knowledge being a 'spontaneous self-energy' on the part of the mind. " this energy being once determined, it is natural that it should persist, until again annihilated by other causes. This [annihilation] would be the case, were the mind merely passive. . . . But the mental activity, the act of knowledge, of which I now speak, is more than this ; it is an energy of the self-active power of a subject one and indivisible : conse quently a part of the ego must be detached or annihilated, if a cogni tion once existent be again extinguished. Hence it is that the problem most difficult of solution is not, how a mental activity endures, but ho\7 it ever vanishes." *

Those whom such an argument persuades may be left happy with tlreir belief. Other positive argument there is none, none certainly of a physiological sort.f When memory begins to decay, proper names are what go first, and at all times proper names are harder to recol lect than those of general properties and classes of things. This seems due to the fact that common qualities and names have contracted an infinitely greater number of asso ciations in our mind than the names of most of the persons whom we know. Their memory is better organized. Proper names as well organized as those of our family and friends are recollected as well as those of any other objects.^ 'Organ ization* means numerous associations; and the more numer ous the associations, the greater the number of paths of re call. For the same reason adjectives, conjunctions, preposi tions, and the cardinal verbs, those words, in short, which form the grammatical framework of all our speech, are the

very last to decay. Kussmaul* makes the following acute remark on this subject : "The concreter a conception is, the sooner is its name forgotten. This is because our ideas of persons and things are less strongly bound up with their names than with such abstractions as their business, their circumstances, their qualities. We easily can imagine persons and things without their names, the sensorial image of them being more important than that other symbolic image, their name. Abstract con ceptions, on the other hand, are only acquired by means of the words which alone serve to confer stability upon them. This is why verbs, adjectives, pronouns, and still more adverbs, prepositions, and con junctions are more intimately connected with our thinking than are substantives."

The disease called Aphasia, of which a little was said in Chapter II, has let in a flood of light on the phenome non of Memory, by showing the number of ways in which the use of a given object, like a word, may be lost by the mind. We may lose our acoustic idea or our articulatory idea of it ; neither without the other will give us proper command of the word. And if we have both, but have lost the paths of association between the brain-centres which sup port the two, we are in as bad a plight. ' Ataxic ' and ' am nesic ' aphasia, * word-deafness,' and 'associative aphasia' are all practical losses of word-memory. We have thus, as M. Ribot says, not memory so much as memories, f The visual, the tactile, the muscular, the auditory memory may all vary independently of each other in the same individual ; and different individuals may have them developed in dif ferent degrees. As a rule, a man's memory is good in the departments in which his interest is strong ; but those de partments are apt to be those in which his discriminative sensibility is high. A man with a bad ear is not likely to have practically a good musical memory, or a purblind per son to remember visual appearances well. In a later chap ter we shall see illustrations of the differences in men's imagining power. ;f It is obvious that the machinery of memory must be largely determined thereby.

* StOrungen der Sprache, quoted by Ribot, Les Maladies de laM. , p. 133. f Op. cit. chap. in. \ " Those who have a good memory for figures are in general those who know best how to handle them, that is, those who are most familia/ Mr. Gallon, in his work on English Men of Science,*^ has given a very interesling collalion of cases showing individ ual varialions in Ihe lype of memory, where il is slrong. Some have il verbal. Others have it good for facls and figures, others for form. Mosl say that what is to be^ re membered must first be rationally conceived and assimilaled.f

There is an interesling facl connected wilh remember ing, which, so far as I know, Mr. R. Verdon was Ihe first writer expressly to call atlenlion lo. We can set our mem ory as il were lo relain things for a certain time, and Ihen lei Ihem depart. " Individuals often remember clearly and well up to the time when they have to use their knowledge, and then, when it is no longer re quired, there follows a rapid and extensive decay of the traces. Many schoolboys forget their lessons after they have said them, many barris ters forget details got up for a particular case. Thus a boy learns thir ty lines of Homer, says them perfectly, and then forgets them so that he could not say five consecutive lines the next morning, and a barris ter may be one week learned in the mysteries of making cog-wheels, but in the next he may be well acquainted with the anatomy of the ribs instead." \ •

The rationale of this fact is obscure ; and the existence of it ought to make us feel how truly subtle are the nervous processes which memory involves. Mr. Verdon adds that " When the use of a record is withdrawn, and attention withdrawn from it, and we think no more about it, we know that we experience a feeling of relief, and we may thus conclude that energy is in some way liberated. If the . . . attention is not withdrawn, so that we keep the record in mind, we know that this feeling of relief does not take place. . . . Also we are well aware, not only that after this feeling of relief takes place, the record does not seem so well conserved as before, but that we have real difficulty in attempting to remember it."

This shows that we are not as entirely unconscious of a topic as we think, during the time in which we seem to be merely retaining it subject to recall. with their relations to each other and to things." (A. Maury, Le Som meil et les Revcs, p. 443.) f For other examples see Hamilton's Lectures, n. 219, and A. Huber Das Gedachtniss, p. 36 ff. "Practically," says Mr. Verdon, "we sometimes keep a matter in hand not exactly by attending to it, but by keeping our attention re ferred to something connected with it from time to time. Translating this into the language of physiology, we mean that by referring atten tion to a part within, or closely connected with, the system of traces [paths] required to be remembered, we keep it well fed, so that the traces are preserved with the utmost delicacy."

This is perhaps as near as we can get to an explanation. S'etting the mind to remember a thing involves a continual minimal irradiation of excitement into paths which lead thereto, involves the continued presence of the thing in the 'fringe' of our consciousness. Letting the thing go involves withdrawal of the irradiation, unconsciousness of the thing, and, after a time, obliteration of the paths. A curious peculiarity of our memory i§ that things are impressed better by active than by passive repetition. I mean that in learning by heart (for example), when we al most know the piece, it pays better to wait and recollect by an effort from within, than to look at the book again. If we re cover the words in the former way, we shall probably know them the next time; if in the latter way, we shall very likely need the 'book once more. The learning by heart means the formation of paths from a former set to a later set of cerebral word-processes: call 1 and 2 in the diagram the processes in question; then when we remember by inward effort, the path is formed by (discharge from 1 to 2, just as it will af terwards be used. But when we excite 2 by the eye, although the path 1 — 2 doubtless is then shot through also, the phenome non which we are discussing shows that the direct discharge from 1 into 2, unaided by the eyes, ploughs the deeper and more permanent groove. There Speech is, moreover, a greater amount of tension accumulated in the brain before the discharge from 1 to 2, when the latter takes place unaided by the eye. This is proved by the gen eral feeling of strain in the effort to remember 2 ; and this

also ought to make the discharge more violent and the path more deep. A similar reason doubtless accounts for the familiar fact that we remember our own theories, our own discoveries, combinations, inventions, in short what ever 'ideas' originate in our own 'brain, a thousand times bet ter than exactly similar things which are communicated to us from without. A word, in closing, about the metaphysics involved in remembering. According to the assumptions of this book, thoughts accompany the brain's workings, and those thoughts are cognitive of realities. The whole relation is one which we can only write down empirically, confessing that no glimmer of explanation of it is yet in sight. That brains should give rise to a knowing consciousness at all, this is the one mystery which returns, no matter of what sort the consciousness and of what sort the knowledge may be. Sensations, aware of mere qualities, involve the mystery as much as thoughts, aware of complex systems, involve it. To the platonizing tradition in philosophy, however, this is not so. Sensational consciousness is something quasi-ma terial, hardly cognitive, which one need not much wonder at. Relating consciousness is quite the reverse, and the mystery of it is unspeakable. Professor Ladd, for exam ple, in his usually excellent book,* after well showing the matter-of-fact dependence of retention and reproduction on brain-paths, says:

"In the study of perception psycho-physics can do much towards a scientific explanation. It can tell what qualities of stimuli produce certain qualities of sensations, it can suggest a principle relating the quantity of the stimuli to the intensity of the sensation; it can investigate the laws under which, by combined action of various excitations, the sensations are combined [?] into presentations of sense; it can show how the time-relations of the sensations and percepts in consciousness correspond to the objective rela tions in time of the stimulations. But for that spiritual activity which actually puts together in consciousness the sensations, it can not even suggest the beginning of a physical explanation. More over, no cerebral process can be conceived of, which — in case it were known to exist— could possibly be regarded as a fitting basis for this unifying actus of mind. Thus also, and even more emphat ically, must we insist upon the complete inability of physiology to * Physiological Psychology, pt. n. chap. x. § 23.

suggest an explanation for conscious memory, in so far as it is memory — that is, in so far as it most imperatively calls for explanation. . . . The very essence of the act of memory consists in the ability to say: This after-image is the image of a percept I had a moment since ; or this image of memory is the image of the percept I had at a certain time— I do not remember precisely how long since. It would, then, be quite contrary to the facts to hold that, when an image of memory ap pears in consciousness, it is recognized as belonging to a particular original percept on account of its perceived resemblance to this percept The original percept does not exist and will never be reproduced. Even more palpably false and absurd would it be to hold that any similarity of the impressions or processes in end organs or central organs ex plains the act of conscious memory. Consciousness knows nothing of such similarity ; knows nothing even of the existence of nervous im pressions and processes. Moreover, we could never know two impres sions or processes that are separated in time to be similar, without involving the same inexplicable act of memory. It is a fact of con sciousness on which all possibility of connected experience and of recorded and cumulative human knowledge is dependent that certain phases or products of consciousness appear with a claim to stand for (to represent)* past experiences to which they are regarded as in some respect similar. It is this peculiar claim in consciousness which con stitutes the essence of an act of memory ; it is this which makes the memory wholly inexplicable as a mere persistence or recurrence of similar impressions.

It is this which makes conscious memory a spiritual phenomenon, the explanation of which, as arising out of nerv ous processes and conditions, is not simply undiscovered in fact, but utterly incapable of approach by the imagination. When, then, we speak of a physical basis of memory, recognition must be made of the complete inability of science to suggest any physical process which can be conceived of as correlated with that peculiar and mysterious actus of the mind, connecting its present and its past, which constitutes the essence of memory."

This passage seems to me characteristic of the reigning half-way modes of thought. It puts the difficulties in the wrong places. At one moment it seems to admit with the cruder sensationalists that the material of our thoughts is independent sensations reproduced, and that the * putting together' of these sensations would be knowledge, if it could only be brought about, the only mystery being as to the what ' actus ' can bring it about. At another moment it seems to contend that even this sort of ' combining ' would not be knowledge, because certain of the elements con-

nected must ' claim to represent or stand for ' past originals, which is incompatible with their being mere images revived. The result is various confused and scattered mysteries and unsatisfied intellectual desires. But why not 'pool' our mysteries into one great mystery, the mystery that brainprocesses occasion knowledge at all ? It is surely no dif ferent mystery to feel myself by means of one brain-pro cess writing at this table now, and by means of a different brain-process a year hence to remember myself writing. All that psychology can do is to seek to determine what the several brain-processes are ; and this, in a wretchedly im perfect way, is what such writings as the present chapter have begun to do. But of ' images reproduced,' and ' claim ing to represent,' and ' put together by a unifying actus,' I have been silent, because such expressions either signify nothing, or they are only roundabout ways of simply say ing that the past is known when certain brain-conditions are fulfilled, and it seems to me that the straightest and shortest way of saying that is the best.

For a history of opinion about Memory, and other biblio graphic references, I must refer to the admirable little monograph on the subject by Mr. W. H. Burnham in the American Journal of Psychology, vols. I and n. Useful books are : D. Kay's Memory, What It Is, and How to Improve It (1888) ; and F. Fauth's Das Gedachtniss, Studie zu einer Padagogik, etc., 1888.

from the Library Collection of Holy Redeemer College, Windsor Its distinction from perception, 1. Its cognitive function — acquaintance with qualities, 3. No pure sensations after the first days of life, 7. The ' relativity of knowledge,' 9. The law of contrast, 13. The psychological and the physiological theories of it, 17. Bering's experiments, 20. The ' eccentric projection ' of sensations, 31. Our images are usually vague, 45. Vague images not necessarily general notions, 48. Individuals differ in imagination ; Galton's researches, 50 The 'visile' type, 58. The 'audile' type, 60. The motile' type, 61. Tactile images, 65. The neural process of imagination, 68. Its relations to that of sensation, 73.

Perception and sensation, 76. Perception is of definite and probable things, 82. Illusions, 85 ;— of the first type, 86 ;— of the second type, 95. The neural process in perception, 103. 'Apperception,' 107. Is perception an unconscious inference? 111. Hallucinations, 114. The neural process in hallucination, 123. Binet's theory, 129. ' Perception -time, ' 131. The feeling of crude extensity, 134. The perception of spatial order, 145. Space-' relations,' 148. The meaning of localization, 153. 'Local signs.' 155. The construction of ' real ' space, 166. The subdivision of the original sense-spaces, 167. The sensation

of motion over surfaces, 171. The measurement of the sensespaces by each other, 177. Their summation, 181. Feelings of movement in joints, 189. Feelings of muscular contraction, 197. Summary so far, 202. How the blind perceive space, 203. Visual space, 211. Helmholtz and Reid on the test of a sensation, 216. The theory of identical points, 222. The theory of projection, 228. Ambiguity of retinal impressions, 231 ; — of eye-movements, 234 The choice of the visual reality, 237. Sensations which we ignore, 240. Sensations which seem suppressed, 243. Discussion of Wundt's and Helmholtz 's reasons for denying that retinal sensations are of extension, 248. Summary, 368. Historical remarks, 270.

Belief and its opposites, 283. The various orders of reality, 287. * Practical ' realities, 393. The sense of our own bodily existence is the nucleus of all reality, 297. The paramount reality of sensations, 299. The influence of emotion and active impulse on belief, 307. Belief in theories, 311. Doubt, 818. Relations of belief and will, 330. ' Recepts,' 327. In reasoning, we pick out essential qualities, 329. What is meant by a mode of conceiving, 332. What is involved in the existence of general propositions, 337. The two factors of reasoning, 340. Sagacity, 343. The part played by association by similarity, 345, The intellectual contrast between brute and man : association by similarity the fundamental human distinction, 348. Different orders of human genius, 860 .

The diffusive wave, 373. Every sensation produces reflex effects on the whole organism, 874. Its definition, 883. Instincts not always blind or invariable, 389. Two principles of non -uniformity in instincts : 1) Their inhibition by habits, 394 ; 3) Their transitoriness, 898. Man has Instinctive reaction and emotional expression shade imperceptibly into each other, 442. The expression of grief, 443 ; of fear, 446 ; of hatred, 449. Emotion is a consequence, not the cause, of the bodily expression, 449. Difficulty of testing this view, 454. Objections to it discussed, 456, The subtler emotions, 468. No special brain-centres for emotion, 472. Emotional differences between individuals, 474. The genesis of the various emotions, 477.

Voluntary movements : they presuppose u memory of involuntary movements, 487. Kinsesthetic impressions, 488. No need to assume feelings of innervation, 503, The ' mental cue ' for a movement may be an image of its visual or auditory effects as well as an image of the way it feels, 518. Ideo motor action, 522. Action after deliberation, 528. Five types of decision, 531. The feeling of effort, 535. Unhealthiness of will : 1) The explosive type, 537 ; 2) The obstructed type, 546, Pleasure and pain are not the only springs of action, 549. All consciousness is impulsive, 551. What we will depends on what idea dominates in our mind, 559. The idea's outward effects follow from the cerebral machinery, 560. Effort of attention to a naturally repugnant idea is the essential feature of willing, 562. The free-will controversy, 571, Psychology, as a science, can safely postulate determinism, even if free-will be true, 576. The education of the Will, 579. Hypothetical brain-schemes, 582.

Modes of operating and susceptibility, 594. Theories about the hypnotic state, 596. The symptoms of the trance, 601. Programme of the chapter, 617. Elementary feelings are innate, 618. The question refers to their combinations, 619. What is meant by 'experience,' 620. Spencer on ancestral experience, 630. Two ways in which new cerebral structure arises : the 'back-door ' and the ' front-door' way, 625. The genesis of the elementary mental categories, 631. The genesis of the natural sciences, 633. Scientific conceptions arise as accidental variations, 636. The genesis of the pure sciences, 641. Series of evenly increasing terms, 644. The principle of mediate comparison, 645. That of skipped intermediaries, 646. Classification, 646. Predication, 647. Formal logic, 648. Mathematical propositions, 652. Arithmetic, 653. Geometry, 656. Our doctrine is the same as Locke's, 661. Relations of ideas v. couplings of things, 663. The natural sciences are inward ideal schemes with which the order of nature proves congruent, 666. Metaphysical principles are properly only postulates, 669. -Esthetic and moral principles are quite incongruent with the order of nature, 672. Summary of what precedes, 675. The origin of instincts, 678. Insufficiency of proof for the transmission to the next generation of acquired nabits, 681, Weismann's views, 683. Conclusion, 688.

After inner perception, outer perception ! The next three chapters will treat of the processes by which we cognize at all times the present world of space and the material things which it contains. And first, of the process called Sensation. The vxyrds Sensation and Perception do not carry very definitely discriminated meanings in popular speech, and in Psychology also their meanings run into each other. Both of them name processes in which we cognize an objective world ; both (under normal conditions) need the stimulation of incoming nerves ere they can occur ; Perception always involves Sensation as a portion of itself ; and Sensation in turn never takes place in adult life without Perception also being there. They are therefore names for different cognitive functions^ not for diff'erent sorts of mental /ac^. The nearer the object cognized comes to being a simple quality like *hot,' *cold,* *red,' * noise,' *pain,* apprehended irrelatively to other things, the more the state of mind approaches pure sensation. The fuller of relations the object is, on the contrary ; the more it is something classed, located, measured, compared, assigned to a function, etc., etc.; the more unreservedly do we call the state of mind a perception, and the relatively smaller is the part in it which sensation plays.

view, differs from Perception only in the extreme simplicity of its object or content.* Its function is that of mere acquaintance with a fact. Perception's function, on the other hand, is knowledge about f a fact ; and this knowledge admits of numberless degrees of complication. But in both sensation and perception we perceive the fact as an immediately present outward reality, and this makes them differ from 'thought' and * conception,' whose objects do not appear present in this immediate physical way. From the physio-

* Some persons will say that we never have a really simple object or content. My definition of sensation does not require the simplicity to be absolutely, but only relatively, extreme. It is worth while in passing, however, to warn the reader against a couple of inferences that are often made. One is that because we gradually learn to analyze so many qualities we ought to conclude that there are no really indecomposable feelings in the mind. The other is that because the processes that produce our sensations are multiple, the sensations regarded as subjective facts must also be compound. To take an example, to a child the taste of lemonade comes at first as a simple quality. He later learns both that many stimuli and many nerves are involved in the exhibition of this taste to his mind, and he also learns to perceive separately the sourness, the coolness, the sweet, the lemon aroma, etc. , and the several degrees of strength of each and all of these things, — the experience falling into a large number of aspects, each of which is abstracted, classed, named, etc., and all of which appear to be the elementary sensations into which the original * lemonade flavor ' is decomposed. It is argued from this that the latter never was ine simple thing which it seemed. I have already criticised this sort of reasoning in Chapter VI (see pp. 170 ff.). The mind of the child enjoying the simple lemonade flavor and that of the same child grown up and analyzing it are in two entirely different conditions. Subjectively considered, the two states of mind are two altogether distinct sorts of fact. The later mental state says ' this is the same flavor {or fluid) which that earlier state perceived as simple,' but that does not make the two states themselves identical. It is nothing but a case of learning more and more aibout the same topics of discourse or things.

— Many of these topics, however, must be confessed to resist all analysis, the various colors for example. He who sees blue and yellow * in ' a certain green means merely that when green is confronted with these other colors he sees relations of similarity. He who sees abstract ' color * in it means merely that he sees a similarity between it and all the other objects known as colors. (Similarity itself cannot ultimately be accounted for by an identical abstract element buried in all the similars, as has been already shown, p. 492 ff.) He who sees abstract paleness, intensity, purity, in the green means other similarities still. These are all outward determinations of that special green, knowledges «&(m< it, zufdlligeAn- sichten, as Herbart would say, not elements of its composition. Compare the article by Meinong in the Vierteljahrschrif t f ilr wiss. Phil. , xn. 384.

logtccd point of view both sensations and perceptions differ from * thoughts ' (in the narrower sense of the word) in th^fad that nerve-currents coming in from the periphery are involved in their production. In perception these nerve-currents arouse voluminous associative or reproductive processes in the cortex; but when sensation occurs alone, or with a minimum of perception, the accompanying reproductive processes are at a minimum too. I shall in this chapter discuss some general questions more especially relative to Sensation. In a later chapter perception will take its turn» I shall entirely pass by the classification and natural history of our special 'sensations/ such matters finding their proper place, and being sufficiently well treated, in all the physiological books.*

A pmre sensation is an abstraction; and when we adults talk of our * sensations ' we mean one of two things : either certain objects, namely simple qualities or attributes like hard, hot, pain; or else those of our thoughts in which acquaintance with these objects is least combined with knowledge about the relations of them to other things. As we can only think or talk about the relations of objects with which we have acquaintance already, we are forced to postulate a function in our thought whereby we first become aware of the bare immediate natures by which our several objects are distinguished. This function is sensation. And just as logicians always point out the distinction between substantive terms of discourse and relations found to obtain between them, so psychologists, as a rule, are ready to admit this function, of the vision of the terms or matters meant, as something distinct from the knowledge about them and of their relations inter se. Thought with the former function is sensational, with the latter, intellectual. Our earliest thoughts are almost exclusively sensationaL They merely give us a set of thats, or its, of subjects