The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2

" Ih!^ a priori factor we called active, i\\Q a posteriori factor passive, but this is only relatively true. . . . Although the a priori moment commonly shows itself to be the more powerful, apperceptionprocesses can perfectly well occur in which the new observation transforms or enriches the apperceiving group of ideas. A child who hitherto has seen none but four-cornered tables apperceives a round one as a table; but by this the apperceiving mass ('table') is enriched. To his previous knowledge of tables comes this new feature that they need not be fourcornered, but may be round. In the history of science it' has happened often enough that some discovery, at the same time that it was apperceived, i.e. brought into connection with the system of our knowledge, transformed the whole system. In principle, however, we must maintain that, although either factor is both active and passive, the a 'priori factor is almost always the more active of the two." *

This account of Steinthal's brings out very clearly the difference between our psychological conceptions and what are called concepts in logic. In logic a concept is unalterable ; but what are popularly called our * conceptions of things ' alter by being used. The aim of * Science ' is to attain conceptions so adequate and exact that we shall never need to change them. There is an everlasting struggle in every mind between the tendency to keep unchanged, and the tendency to renovate, its ideas. Our education is a ceaseless compromise between the conservative and the progressive factors. Every new experience must be disposed

of under some old head. The great point is to find the head which has to be least altered to take it in. Certain Polynesian natives, seeing horses for the first time, called them pigs, that being the nearest head. My child of two played for a week with the first orange that was given him, calling it a *ball.' He called the first whole eggs he saw * potatoes,' having been accustomed to see his ' eggs ' broken into a glass, and his potatoes without the skin. A folding pocketcorkscrew he unhesitatingly called * bad-scissors.' Hardly any one of us can make new heads easily when fresh experiences come. Most of us grow more and more enslaved to the stock conceptions with which we have once become familiar, and less and less capable of assimilating impressions in any but the old ways. Old-fogyism, in short, is the inevitable terminus to which life sweeps us on. Objects which violate our established habits of * apperception ' are simply not taken account of at all ; or, if on some occasion we are forced by dint of argument to admit their existence, twenty-four hours later the admission is as if it were not, and every trace of the unassimilable truth has vanished from our thought. Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

On the other hand, nothing is more congenial, from babyhood to the end of life, than to be able to assimilate the new to the old, to meet each threatening violator or burster of our well-known series of concepts, as it comes in, see through its unwontedness, and ticket it off as an old friend in disguise. This victorious assimilation of the new is in fact the type of all intellectual pleasure. The lust for it is curiosity. The relation of the new to the old, before the assimilation is performed, is wonder. We feel neither curiosity nor wonder concerning things so far beyond us that we have no concepts to refer them to or standards by which to measure them.^ The Fuegians, in Darwin's voy-

* The great maxim in pedagogy is to knit every new piece of knowledge on to a pre-existing curiosity — i.e., to assimilate its matter in some way to what is already known. Hence the advantage of " comparing all that is far off and foreign to something that is near home, of making the unknown plain by the example of the known, and of connecting all the Instruction with the personal experience of the pupil. ... If the teacher \% age, wondered at the small boats, but took the big ship as a * matter of course.' Only what we partly know already inspires us with a desire to know more. The more elaborate textile fabrics, the vaster works in metal, to most of us are like the air, the water, and the ground, absolute existences which awaken no ideas. It is a matter of course that an engraving or a copper-plate inscription should possess that degree of beauty. But if we are shown a undrawing of equal perfection, our personal sympathy with the difficulty of the task makes us immediately wonder at the skill. The old lady admiring the Academician's picture, says to him : " And is it really all done hy hand .^"

A widely-spread opinion (which has been held by such men as Schopenhauer, Spencer, Hartmann, Wundt, Helmholtz, and lately interestingly pleaded for by M. Binet *) will have it that perception should he called a sort of reasoning operation^ more or less unconsciously and automatically performed. The question seems at first a verbal one, depending on how broadly the term reasoning is to be taken. If, every time a present sign suggests an absent reality to our mind, we make an inference ; and if every time we make an inference we reason ; then perception is indubitably reasoning. Only one sees no room in it for any unconscious part. Both associates, the present sign and the contiguous things which it suggests, are above-board, and no intermediary

to explain the distance of the sun from the earth, let him ask ... 'If anyone there in the sun fired off a cannon straight at you, what should you do?' 'Get out of the way ' would be the answer. 'No need of that,' the teacher might reply. * You may quietly go to sleep in your room, and get up again, you may wait till your confirmation-day, you may learn a trade, and grow as old as I 2ixn.,—then only will the cannon-ball be getting near, then you may jump to one side! See, so great as that is the sun's distance!'" (K. Lange, Ueber Apperception, 1879, p. 76— a charming though prolix little work.)

* A. Schopenhauer, Satz vom Grunde, chap. iv. H. Spencer, Psychol., part VI. chaps, ix, x. E. v. Hartmann, Phil, of the Unconscious (B), chaps. VII, VIII. W. Wundt, Beitrage, pp. 422 If.; Vorlesungen, iv, xiii. H. Helmholtz, Physiol. Optik, pp. 480, 447. A. Binet, Psychol, du Rai- Bonnement, chaps, in, v. Wundt and Helmholtz have more recently •recanted.' See above, vol i. p. 169 note. ideas are required. Most of those who have upheld the thesis in question have, however, made a more complex supposition. What they have meant is that perception is a mediate inference, and that the middle term is unconscious. When the sensation which I have called * this ' (p. 83, supra) is felt, they think that some process like the following runs through the mind :

Now there seem no good grounds for supposing this additional wheelwork in the mind. The classification of * this ' as M is itself an act of perception, and should, if all perception were inference, require a still earlier syllogism for its performance, and so backwards in infinitum. The only extrication from this coil would be to represent the process in altered guise, thus : *This' is like those; Those are A ; Therefore * this ' is A. The major premise here involves no association by contiguity, no naming of those as M, but only a suggestion of unnamed similar images, a recall of analogous past sensations with which the characters that make up A were habitually conjoined. But here again, what grounds of fact are there for admitting this recall ? We are quite unconscious of any such images of the past. And the conception of all the forms of association as resultants of the elementary fact of habit-worn paths in the brain makes such images entirely superfluous for explaining the phenomena in point. Since the brain-process of ' this,' the sign of A, has repeatedly been aroused in company with the process of the full object A, direct paths of irradiation from the one to the other must be already established. And although roundabout paths may also be possible, as from *this' to 'those,' and then

* When not all M, but only some M, is A, when, in other words, M is ' undistributed ' the conclusion is liable to error. Illusions would thus be logical fallacies, if true perceptions were valid syllogisms. They would dr»w false conclusions from undistributed middle terms. from 'those ' to * A' (paths which would lead to practically the same conclusion as the straighter ones), yet there is no ground whatever for assuming them to be traversed now, especially since appearances point the other way. In explicit reasoning, such paths are doubtless traversed , in perception they are in all probability closed. So far, then, from perception being a species of reasoning properly so called, both it and reasoning are co-ordinate varieties of that deeper sort of process known psychologically as the association of ideas, and physiologically as the law of habit in the brain. To call perception unconscious reasoning is thus either a useless metaphor ^ or a positively misleading confusion between two different things.

One more point and we may leave the subject of Perception. Sir Wm, Hamilton thought that he had discovered a * great law ' which had been wholly overlooked by psychologists, and which, * simple and universal,' is this : " Knowledge and Feeling, — Perception and Sensation, though always coexistent, are always in the inverse ratio of each other." Hamilton wrote as if perception and sensation were two coexistent elements entering into a single state of consciousness. Spencer refines upon him by contending that they are two mutually exclusive states of consciousness, not two elements of a single state. If sensation be taken, as both Hamilton and Spencer mainly take it in this discussion, to mean the feeling of pleasure or pain, there is no doubt that the law, however expressed, is true ; and that the mind which is strongly conscious of the pleasantness or painfulness of an experience is ipso facto less fitted to observe and analyze its outward cause.* Apart from pleasure and pain, however, the law seems but a corollary of the fact that the more concentrated a state of consciousness is, the more vivid it is. When feeling a color, or listening to a tone per se, we get it more intensely, notice it better, than when we are aware of it merely as one among many other properties of a total object. The more diffused cerebral excitement of the perceptive state is probably incompatible

* See Spencer, Psychol. , ii. p. 250, note, for a physiological hypothesis to account for this fact. with quite as strong an excitement of separate parts as the sensational state comports. So we come back here to our own earlier discrimination between the perceptive and the sensational processes, and to the examples which we gave on pp. 80, 81.* Between normal perception and illusion we have seen that there is no break, the process being identically the same in both. The last illusions we considered might fairly be called hallucinations. We must now consider the false perceptions more commonly called by that name.f In or-

* Here is another good example, taken from Helmholtz's Optics, p. 435: *'The sight of a man walking is a familiar spectacle to us. We perceive it as a connected whole, and at most notice the most striking of its peculiarities. Strong attention is required, and a special choice of the point of view, in order to feel the perpendicular and lateral oscillations of such a walking figure. We must choose fitting points or lines in the background with which to compare the positions of its head. But if a distant walking man be looked at through an astronomical telescope (which inverts the object), what a singular hopping and rocking appearance he presents ! No difficulty now in seeing the body's oscillations, and many other details of the gait. . . . But, on the other hand, its total character, whether light or clumsy, dignified or graceful, is harder to perceive than in the upright position."

f Illusions and hallucinations must both be distinguished from delusions. A delusion is a false opinion about a matter of fact, which need not necessarily involve, though it often does involve, false perceptions of sensible things. We may, for example, have religious delusions, medical delusions, delusions about our own importance, about other peoples' characters, etc., ad libitum. The delusions of the insane are apt to affect certain typical forms, often very hard to explain. But in many cases they are certainly theories which the patients invent to account for their abnormal bodily sensations. In other cases they are due to hallucinations of hearing and of sight. Dr. Clouston (Clinical Lectures on Mental Disease, lecture iii ad fin.) gives the following special delusions as having been found in about a hundred melancholy female patients who were afflicted in this way. There were delusions of

dinary parlance hallucination is held to differ from illusion in that, whilst there is an object really there in illusion, inhcdlu-^ dnation there is no objective stimulus at aU. We shall presently see that this supposed absence of objective stimulus in hal^ lucination is a mistake, and that hallucinations are often only extremes of the perception process, in which the secondary cerebral reaction is out of all normal proportion to the peripheral stimulus which occasions the activity. Hallucinations usually appear abruptly and have the character of being forced upon the subject. But they possess various degrees of apparent objectivity. One mistake in limine must be guarded against. They are often talked of as mental images projected outwards by mistake. But where an hallucination is complete, it is much more than a mental image. An JiaRucimxtion is a strictly sensational form of consciousnesSj as good and true a sensation as if there were a real object there. The object happens not to be there, that is all.

The milder degrees of hallucination have been designated as pseudo-hallmylnations. Pseudo-hallucinations and hallucinations have been sharply distinguished from each having a bone In the throat; having neither stomach nor biains; that the flesh is boiling; having horns on the head; that the head is severed from the being chloroformed; that murders take place around; being called names by person ; being possessed of the devil; insects coming from the bod/ having committed an unpardonrape being practised on her:

other only within a few years. Dr. Kandinsty writes of their difference as follows : ^ ' In carelessly questioning a patient we may confound his pseudohallucinatory perceptions with hallucinations. But to the unconfused consciousness of the patient himself, even though he be imbecile, the identification of the two phenomena is impossible, at least in the sphere of vision. At the moment of having a pseudo-hallucination of sight^ the patient feels himself in an entirely different relation to this subjective sensible appearance, from that in which he finds himself whilst subject to a true visual hallucination. The latter is reality itself ; the former, on the contrary, remains always a subjective phenomenon which the individual commonly regards either as sent to him as a sign of God's grace, or as artificially induced by his secret persecutors . . . If he knows by his own expei'ience what a genuine hallucination is, it is quite impossible for him to mistake the pseudo-hallucination for it. . . . A concrete example will make the difference clear :

"Dr. N". L. . . . heard one day suddenly amongst the voices of his persecutors (' coming from a hollow space in the midst of the wall ') a rather loud voice impressively saying to him ; ' Change your national allegiance.' Understanding this to mean that his only hope consisted in ceasing to be subject to the Czar of Kussia, he reflected a moment what allegiance would be better, and resolved to become an English subject. At the same moment he saw a pseudo-hallucinatory lion of natural size, which appeared and quickly laid its fore-paws on his shoulders. He had a lively feeling of these paws as a tolerably painful local pressure (complete hallucination of touch). Then the same voice from the wall said : ' Now you have a lion — now you will rule,' whereupon the patient recollected that the lion was the national emblem of England. The lion appeared to L. very distinct and vivid, but he nevertheless remained conscious, as he afterwards expressed it, that he saw the animal, not with his bodily but with his mental eyes. (After his recovery he called analogous apparitions by the name of ' expressive-plastic ideas.') Accordingly he felt no terror, even though he felt the contact of the claws. . . . Had the lion been a complete hallucination, the patient, as he himself remarked after recovery, would have felt great fear, and very likely screamed or taken to flight. Had it been a simple image of the fancy he would not have connected it with the voices, of whose objective reality he was at the time quite convinced." *

From ordinary images of memory and fancy, pseudohallucinations differ in being much more vivid, minute, de- *V. Kandinsky: Kritische u. Klinische Betrachtungeu imGebleted BinnestAuschungen (1885), p. 42. tailed, steady, abrupt, and spontaneous, in the sense that all feeling of our own activity in producing them is lacking. Dr. Kandiusky had a patient who, after taking opium or haschisch, had abundant pseudo-hallucinations and hallucinations. As he also had strong visualizing power and was an educated physician, the three sorts of phenomena could be easily compared. Although projected outwards {usually not farther than the limit of distinctest vision, a foot or so) the pseudohallucinations Icwked the character of objective reality which the hallucinations possessed, but,' unlike the pictures of imagination, it was almost impossible to produce them at will. Most of the * voices ' which people hear (whether they give rise to delusions or not) are pseudohallucinations. They are described as * inner' voices, although their character is entirely unlike the inner speech of the subject with himself. I know two persons who hear such inner voices making unforeseen remarks whenever they grow quiet and listen for them. They are a very common incident of delusional insanity, and at last grow into vivid hallucinations. The latter are comparatively frequent occurrences in sporadic form ; and certain individuals are liable to have them often. From the results of the * Census of Hallucinations,' which was begun by Edmund Gurney, it would appear that, roughly speaking, one person at least in every ten is likely to have had a vivid hallucination at some time in his life.* The following cases from healthy people will give an idea of what these hallucinations are :

"When a girl of eighteen, I was one evening engaged in a very painful discussion with an elderly person. My distress was so great that I took up a thick ivory knitting-needle that was lying on the mantelpiece of the parlor and broke it into small pieces as I talked. In the midst of the discussion 1 was very wishful to know the opinion of a brother with whom I had an unusually close relationship. I turned round and saw him sitting at the further side of a centretable, with his arms folded (an unusual position with him), but, to my dismay, I per-

* See Proceedings of Soc. for Psych. Research, Dec. 1889, pp. 7, 188L The International Congress for Experimental Psychology has now cAuacge of the Census, and the present writer is its agent for America. oeired from the sarcastic expression of his mouth that he was not in sympathy with me, was not 'taking my side,' as I should then liave expressed it. The surprise cooled me, and the discussion was dropped. "Some minutes after, having occasion to speak to my brother, I turned towards him, but he was gone. I inquired when he left the room, and was told that he had not been in it, which I did not believe, thinking that he had come in for a minute and had gone out without being noticed. About an hour and a half afterwards he appeared, and convinced me, with some trouble, that he had never been near th» house that evening. He is still alive and well."

"One night in March 1873 or '74, I cannot recollect which year, I was attending on the sick-bed of my mother. About eight o'clock in the evening I went into the dining room to fix a cup of tea, and on turning from the sideboard to the table, on the other side of the table before the fire, which was burning brightly, as was also the gas, I saw standing with his hand clasped to his side in true military fashion a soldier of about thirty years of age, with dark, piercing eyes looking directly into mine. He wore a small cap with standing feather ; his costume was also of a soldierly style. He did not strike me as being a spirit, ghost, or anything uncanny, only a living man ; but after gazing for fully a minute I realized that it was nothing of earth, for he neither moved his eyes nor his body, and in looking closely I could see the fire beyond. I was of course startled, and yet did not run out of the room. I fell stunned. I walked out rapidly, however, and turning to the servant in the hall asked her if she saw anything. She said not. I went into my mother's room and remained talking for about an hour, but never mentioned the above subject for fear of exciting her, and finally forgot it altogether, returning to the dining-room, still in forgetfulness of what had occurred, but repeating, as above, the turning from sideboard to table in act of preparing more tea. I looked casually towards the fire, and there I saw the soldier again. This time I was entirely alarmed, and fled from the room in haste. I called to my father, but when he came he saw nothing."

Sometimes more than one sense is affected. The following is a case : " In response to your request to write out my experience of Oct. 30, 1886, I will inflict on you a letter. where I was teaching. I had performed my regular routine work for the day, and was sitting in my room working out trigonometrical formulsB. I was expecting every day to hear of the confinement of my wife, and naturally my thoughts for some time had been more or less with her. She was, by the way, in B , some fifty miles from me.

" At the time, however, neither she nor the expected event was in my mind ; as I said, I was working out trigonometrical formulab, and I had been working on trigonometry the entire evening. About eleven o'clock, as I sat there buried in sines, cosines, tangents, cotangents, aecants, and cosecants, I felt very distinctly upon my left shoulder 9 touch, and a slight shake, as if somebody had tried to attract my attention by other means and had failed. Without rising I turned my head, and there between me and the door stood my wife, dressed exactly as I last saw her, some five weeks before. As I turned she said : ' It is a little Herman ; he has come.' Something more was said, but this is the only sentence i can recall. To make sure that I was not asleep and dreaming, I rose from the chair, pinched myself and walked toward the figure, which disappeared immediately as I rose. I can give no information as to the length of time occupied by this episode, but I know I was awake, in my usual good health. The touch was very distinct, the figure was absolutely perfect, stood about three feet from the door, which was closed, and had not been opened during the evening. The sound of the voice was unmistakable, and I should have recognized it as my wife's voice even if I had not turned and had not seen the figure at all. The tone was conversational, just as if she would have said the same words had she been actually standing there.

*' In regard to myself, I would say, as I have already intimated, I was in my usual good health ; I had not been sick before, nor was I after the occurrence, not so much as a headache having afflicted me. " Shortly after the experience above described, I retired for the night and, as I usually do, slept quietly until morning. I did not speculate particularly about the strange appearance of the night before, and though I thought of it some, I did not tell anybody. The following morning I rose, not conscious of having dreamed anything, but I was very firmly impressed with the idea that there was something for me at the telegraph-office. I tried to throw off the impression, for so far as I knew there was no reason for it. Having nothing to do, I went out for a walk ; and to help throw off the impression above noted, I walked away from the telegraph-office. As T proceeded, however, the impression became a conviction, and I actually turned about and went to the very place I had resolved not to visit, the telegraph-office. The first person I saw on arriving at said office was the telegraph-operator, who being on terms of intimacy with me, remarked : ' Hello, papa, I've got a telegram for you.' The telegram announced the birth of a boy, weighing nine pounds, and that all were doing well. Now, then, I have no theory at all about the events narrated above ; I never had any such experience before nor since ; I am no believer in spiritualism, am not in the least superstitious, know very little about ' thought-transference/

* unconscious cerebration/ etc., etc., but I am absolutely certain about what I have tried to relate. " In regard to the remark which I heard, ' It is a little Herman,' etc., I would add that we had previously decided to call the child, if a boy, Herman— my own name, by the way."* The hallucination sometimes carries a change cf the general consciousness with it, so as to appear mor« like a sudden lapse into a dream. The following case was given me by a man of 43, who hac' never anything resembling it before :

*' While sitting at my desk this a. m. reading a circular of the Loyal Legion a very curious thing happened to me, such as I have never experienced. It was perfectly real, so real that it took some minutes to recover from. It seems to me like a direct intromission into some other world. I never had anything approaching it before save when dreaming at night. I was wide awake, of course. But this was the feeling. I had only just sat down and become interested in the circular, when I seemed to lose myself for a minute and then found myself in the top story of a high building very white and shining and clean, with a noble window immediately at the right of where I sat. Through this window I looked out upon a marvellous reach of landscape entirely new. I never had before such a sense of infinity in nature, such superb stretches of light and color and clean7iess. T know that for the space of three minutes I was entirely lost, for when I began to come to, so to speak, — sitting in that other world, I debated for three or four minutes more as to which was dream and which was reality. Sitting there I got

a faint sense of C [the town in which the writer was], away off and dim at first. Then I remember thinking ' Why, I used to live in C ; perhaps I am going back.' Slowly C. . . . did come back, and I found myself at my desk again. For a few minutes the process of determining where I was was very funny. But the whole experience was perfectly delightful, there was such a sense of brilliancy and clearness and lightness about it. I suppose it lasted in all about seven minutes or ten minutes."

The hallucinations of fever-delirium are a mixture of pseudo-hallucination, true hallucination, and illusion. Those of opium, hasheesh, and belladonna resemble them *This case is of the class which Mr. Myers terms 'veridical.' In c subsequent letter the writer informs me that his vision occurred some flv« houn brfore the child was born. in this respect. The following vivid account of a fit of hasheesh-delirium has been given me by a friend : " I was reading a newspaper, and the indication of the approaching delirium was an inability to keep my mind fixed on the narrative. Di- rectly I lay down upon a sofa there appeared before my eyes several rows of human hands, which oscillated for a moment, revolved and then changed to spoons. The same motions were repeated, the objects changing to wheels, tin soldiers, lamp-posts, brooms, and countless other absurdities. This stage lasted about ten minutes, and during that time it is safe to say that I saw at least a thousand different objects. These whirling images did not appear like the realities of life, but had the character of the secondary images seen in the eye after looking at some brightly-illuminated object. A mere suggestion from the person who was with me in the room was sufficient to call up an image of the thing suggested, while without suggestion there appeared all the common objects of life and many unreal monstrosities, which it is absolutely impossible to describe, and which seemed to be creations of the brain.

" The character of the symptoms changed rapidly. A sort of wave seemed to pass over me, and I became aware of the fact that my pulse was beating rapidly. I took out my watch, and by exercising considerable will-power managed to time the heart-beats, 135 to the minute. *' I could feel each pulsation through my whole system, and a curious twitching commenced, which no effort of the mind could stop. '* There were moments of apparent lucidity, when it seemed as if I could see within myself, and watch the pumping of my heart. A strange fear came over me, a certainty that I should never recover from the effects of the opiate, which was as quickly followed by a feeling of great interest in the experiment, a certainty that the experience was the most novel and exciting that I had ever been through.