The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2

* G. Berkeley : Essay towards a new Theory of Vision ; Samuel Bailey : A Review of Berkeley's Theory of Vision (1842) ; J. S. Mill's Review of Bailey, in his Dissertations and Disquisitions, vol. ii ; Jas. Ferrier : Re- view of Bailey, in 'Philosophical Remains,' vol. ii ; A. Bain : Senses and Intellect, 'Intellect,' chap, i ; H. Spencer : Principles of Psychology, pt. VI. chaps. XIV, XVI ; J. S. Mill : Examination of Hamilton, chap, xiii (the best statement of the so-called English empiricist position) ; T. K. Abbott ; Sight and Touch, 1861 (the first English book to go at all minutely inio facts; Mr. Abbott maintaining retinal sensations to be originally of space in three dimensions) ; A. C. Eraser : Review of Abbott, in North British Review for Aug. 1864 ; another review in Macmillan's Magazine, Aug. 1866 ; J. Sully : Outlines of Psychology, chap, vi ; J. Ward : En- cyclop. Britannica, 9th Ed., article ' Psychology,' pp. 53-5 ; J. E. Walter: The Perception of Space and Matter (1879). — I may also refer to a ' discussion ' between Prof. G. Croom Robertson, Mr. J. Ward, and the present writer, in Mind, vol. xiii. — The present chapter is only the filling out with detail of an article entitled ' The Spatial Quale, ' which appeared in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy for January 1879 (xiii. 64).

Everyone knows the difference between imagining a thing and believing in its existence, between supposing a proposition and acquiescing in its truth. In the case of acquiescence or belief, the object is not only apprehended by th^ mind, but is held to have reality. Belief is thus the mental state or function of cognizing reality. As used in the following pages, * Belief ' will mean every degree of assurance, including the highest possible certainty and conviction.

There are, as we know, two ways of studying every psychic state. First, the way of analysis: What does it consist in? What is its inner nature? Of what sort of mind-stuff is it composed ? Second, the way of history : What are its conditions of production, and its connection with other facts ? Into the first way we cannot go very far. In its inner nature, belief, or the sense of reality, is a sort of feeling more allied to the emotions than to anything else. Mr. Bagehot distinctly calls it the 'emotion' of conviction. I just now spoke of it as acquiescence. It resembles more than anything what in the psychology of volition we know as consent. Consent is recognized by all to be a manifestation of our active nature. It would naturally be described by such terms as * willingness ' or the 'turning of our disposition.' What characterizes both consent and belief is the cessation of theoretic agitation, through the advent of an idea which is inwardly stable, and fills the mind solidly to the exclusion of contradictory ideas. When this is the case, motor effects are apt to follow. Hence the states of

consent and belief, characterized by repose on the purely intellectual side, are both intimately connected with subsequent practical activity. This inward stability of the mind's content is as characteristic of disbelief as of belief. But we shall presently see that we never disbelieve anything except for the reason that we believe something else which contradicts the first thing.* Disbelief is thus an incidental complication to belief, and need not be considered by itself.

The trv£ opposites of belief, psychologically considered, are doubt and inquiry , not disbelief. In both these states the content of our mind is in unrest, and the emotion engendered thereby is, like the emotion of belief itself, perfectly distinct, but perfectly indescribable in words. Both sorts of emotion may be pathologically exalted. One of the charms of drunkenness unquestionably lies in the deepening of the sense of reality and truth which is gained therein. In whatever light things may then appear to us, they seem more utterly what they are, more * utterly utter * than when we are sober. This goes to a fully unutterable extreme in the nitrous oxide intoxication, in which a man's very soul will sweat with conviction, and he be all the while unable to tell what he is convinced of at all.f The pathological state opposed to this solidity and deepening has been called the questioning mania {Griibdsuclit by the Germans). It is sometimes found as a substantive affection, paroxysmal or chronic, and consists in the inability to rest in any conception, and the need of having it confirmed and explained. * Why do I stand here where I stand ? ' * Why is a glass a glass, a chair a chair ? ' * How is it that men are only of the size they are ? Why not as big as houses,' etc., etc.J

* Compare this psychological fact with the corresponding logical truth that all negation rests on covert assertion of something else than the thing denied. (See Bradley's Principles of Logic, bk. i. ch. 3.) t See that very remarkable little work, ' The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy,' by Benj. P. Blood (Amsterdam, N. Y., 1874). Compare also Mind, vii. 206. t "To one whose mind is healthy thoughts come and go unnoticed; with me they have to be faced, thought about in a peculiar fashion, and then disposed of as finished, and this often when I am utterly wearied and would be at peace ; but the call is imperative. This goes on to the hin-

There is, it is true, another pathological state which is as far removed from doubt as from belief, and which some may prefer to consider the proper contrary of the latter state of mind. I refer to the feeling that everything is hollow, unreal, dead. I shall speak of this state again upon a later page. The point I wish to notice here is simply that belief and disbelief are but two aspects of one psychic state. John Mill, reviewing various opinions about belief, comes to the conclusion that no account of it can be given :

" What," he says, "is the difference to our minds between thinking of a reality and representing to ourselves an imaginary picture ? I confess I can see no escape from the opinion that the distinction is ultimate and primordial. There is no more difficulty in holding it to be so than in holding the difference between a sensation and an idea to be primordial. It seems almost another aspect of the same difference. ... I cannot help thinking, therefore, that there is in the remembrance of a real fact, as distinguished from that of a thought, an element which does not consist ... in a difference between the mere ideas which are present to the mind in the two cases. This element, howsoever we define it, constitutes belief, and is the difference between Memory and Imagination. From whatever direction we approach, this difference seems to close our path. When we arrive at it, we seem to have reached, as it were, the central point of our intellectual nature, presupposed and built upon in every attempt we make to explain the more recondite phenomena of our mental being."*

drance of all natural action. If I were told that the staircase was on fire and I had only a minute to escape, and the thought arose — ' Have they sent for fire-engines ? Is it probable that the man who has the key is on hand ? Is the man a careful sort of person ? Will the key be hanging on a peg? Am I thinking rightly? Perhaps they don't lock the depot' — my foot would be lifted to go down ; I should be conscious to excitement that I was losing my chance ; but I thould be unable to stir until all these absurdities were entertained and disposed of. In the most critical moments of my life, when I ought to have been so engrossed as to leave no room for any secondary thoughts, I have been oppressed by the inability to be at peace. And in the most ordinary circumstances it is all the same. Let me instance the other morning I went to walk. The day was biting cold, but I was unable to proceed except by jerks. Once I got arrested, my feet in a muddy pool. One foot was lifted to go, knowing that it was not good to be standing in water, but there I was fast, the cause of detention being the discussing with myself the reasons why I should not stand in that pool." (T. S. Clouston, Clinical Lectures on Mental Diseases, 1883, p. 43. See aiso Berger, in Archiv f. Psychiatric, vi. 217.) * I^ote to Jas. Mill's Analysis, i. 412-438.

If the words of Mill be taken to apply to the mere snb* jective analysis of belief — to the question, What does it feel like when we have it ? — they must be held, on the whole, to be correct. Belief, the sense of reality, feels like itself — that is about as much as we can say. Prof. Brentano, in an admirable chapter of his Psychohgie, expresses this by saying that conception and belief (which he names judgment) are two different fundamental psychic phenomena. What I myself have called (Vol. I, p. 275) the * object ' of thought may be comparatively simple, like "Ha! what a pain," or "It-thunders"; or it may be complex, like " Columbus-di8covered-America-in-1492," or " There-exists-an-all-wise-Creator-of-the-world." In either case, however, the mere thought of the object may exist as something quite distinct from the belief in its reality. The belief, as Brentano says, presupposes the mere thought :

"Every object comes into consciousness in a twofold way, as simply thought of [vorgestellt] and as admitted [anerkannt] or denied. The relation is analogous to that which is assumed by most philosophers (by Kant no less than by Aristotle) to obtain between mere thought and desire. Nothing is ever desired without being thought of ; but the desiring is nevertheless a second quite new and peculiar form of relation to the object, a second quite new way of receiving it into consciousness. No more is anything judged [i. e., believed or disbelieved] which is not thought of too. But we must insist that, so soon as the object of a thought becomes the object of an assenting or rejecting judgment, our consciousness steps into an entirely new relation towards it. It is then twice present in consciousness, as thought of, and as held for real or denied ; just as when desire awakens for it, it is both thought and simultaneously desired." (P. 266.)

The commonplace doctrine of * judgment ' is that it consists in the combination of * ideas ' by a * copula ' into a 'proposition,' which may be of various sorts, as affirmative, negative, hypothetical, etc. But who does not see that in a disbelieved or doubted or interrogative or conditional proposition, the ideas are combined in the same identical way in which they are in a proposition which is solidly believed ? The way in which the ideas are combined is a part of the inner constitution of the thought's object or content. That object is sometimes an articulated whole with relations between its parts, amongst which relations, that of predicate

to subject may be one. But when we have got our object with its inner constitution thus defined in a proposition, then the question comes up regarding the object as a whole : * Is it a real object ? is this proposition a true proposition or not ? ' And in the answer Yes to this question lies that new psychic act which Brentano calls * judgment,' but which T prefer to call * belief.' In every proposition, then, so far as it is believed, questioned, or disbelieved, four elements are to be distinguished, the subject, the predicate, and their relation (of whatever sort it be) — these form the object of belief — and finally the psychic attitude in which our mind stands towards the proposition taken as a whole — and this is the belief itself.*

Admitting, then, that this attitude is a state of consciousness sui generiSf about which nothing more can be said in the way of internal analysis, let us proceed to the second way of studying the subject of belief : Under what circumstances do we think things real ? We shall soon see how much matter this gives us to discuss. Suppose a new-bom mind, entirely blank and waiting for experience to begin. Suppose that it begins in the form of a visual impression (whether faint or vivid is immaterial) of a lighted candle against a dark background, and nothing else, so that whilst this image lasts it constitutes the entire universe known to the mind in question. Suppose, moreover (to simplify the hypothesis), that the candle is only imaginary, and that no * original ' of it is recognized by us psychologists outside. Will this hallucinatory candle be believed in, will it have a real existence for the mind ?

What possible sense (for that mind) would a suspicion have that the candle was not real ? What would doubt or disbelief of it imply ? When we, the onlooking psychologists, say the candle is unreal, we mean something quite definite, viz., that there is a world known to us which is * For an excellent account of the history of opinion on this subject tee A. Marty, in Vlerteljahrsch. f. wiss. Phii., viii. 161 li. (1884). real, and to which we perceive that the candle does not belong ; it belongs exclusively to that individual mind, has no status anywhere else, etc. It exists, to be sure, in a fashion, for it forms the content of that mind's hallucination ; but the hallucination itself, though unquestionably it is a sort of existing fact, has no knowledge of other facts ; and since those other facts are the realities par excellence for us, and the only things we believe in, the candle is simply outside of our reality and belief altogether.

By the hypothesis, however, the mind lohicli sees the candle can spin no such considerations as these about it, for of other facts, actual or possible, it has no inkling whatever. That candle is its all, its absolute. Its entire faculty of attention is absorbed by it. It is^ it is that ; it is there ; no other possible candle, or quality of this candle, no other possible place, or possible object in the place, no alternative, in short, suggests itself as even conceivable ; so how can the mind help believing the candle real ? The supposition that it might possibly not do so is, under the supposed conditions, unintelligible.^

"Let us conceive a boy," he said, " imagining to himself a horse, and taking note of nothing else. As this imagination involves the existence of the horse, and the hoy has no perception which annuls its existence^ he will necessarily contemplate the horse as present, nor will he be able to doubt of its existence, however little certain of it he may be. I deny that a man in so far as he imagines [percipit^ affirms nothing. For what is it to imagine a winged horse but to affirm that the horse [that horse, namely] has wings ? For if the mind had nothing before it but the winged horse it would contemplate the same as present, would have no cause to doubt of its existence, nor any power of dissenting from its existence, unless the imagination of the winged horse were joined to an idea which contradicted \tolUt] its existence." (Ethics, n. 49, Scholium.)

The sense that anything we think of is unreal can only come, then, when that thing is contradicted by Some other * We saw near the end of Chapter XIX that a candle-image taking exclusive possession of the mind in this way would probably acquire the sensational vividness. But this physiological accident is logically immaterial to the argument in the text, which ought to apply as well to the 'limmest sort of mental image as to the brightest sensation.

thing of which we think. Any object which remains unoonrtradicted is ipso facto believed and posited as absolute reality. Now, how comes it that one thing though^; of can be contradicted by another ? It cannot unless it begins the quarrel by saying something inadmissible about that other. Take the mind with the candle, or the boy with the horse. If either of them say, ' That candle or that horse, even when I don't see it, exists in the outer ivorldy he pushes into * the outer world ' an object which may be incompatible with everything which he otherwise knows of that world. If so, he must take his choice of which to hold by, the present perceptions or the other knowledge of the world. If he holds to the other knowledge, the present perceptions are contradicted, so far as their relation to that world goes. Candle and horse, whatever they may be, are not existents in outward space. They are existents, of course ; they are mental objects ; mental objects have existence as mental objects. But they are situated in their own spaces, the space in which they severally appear, and neither of those spaces is the space in which the realities called * the outer world ' exist.

Take again the horse with wings. If I merely dream of a horse with wings, my horse interferes with nothing else and has not to be contradicted. That horse, its wings, and its place, are all equally real. That horse exists no otherwise than as winged, and is moreover really there, for that place exists no otherwise than as the place of that horse, and claims as yet no connection with the other places of the world. But if with this horse I make an inroad into the world otherwise knoivn, and say, for example, * That is my old mare Maggie, having grown a pair of wings where she stands in her stall,' the whole case is altered ; for now the horse and place are identified with a horse and place otherwise known, and what is known of the latter objects is incompatible with what is perceived with the former. * Maggie in her stall with wings ! Never ! ' The wings are unreal, then, visionary. I have dreamed a lie about Maggie in her stall.

The reader will recognize in these two cases the two sorts of judgment called in the logic-books existential and attributive respectively. * The candle exists as an outei reality ' is an existential, * My Maggie has got a pair of wings ' is an attributive, proposition ;* and it follows from what was first said that oil propositions, whetlier attributive or existential, are believed through the very fact of being conceived, unless th^y clash tvith other propositions believed at the same time, by affirming that their terms are the same tvith the term^ of these other propositions. A dream-candle has existence, true enough ; but not the same existence (existence for itself, namely, or extra mentem meam) which the candles of waking perception have. A dream-horse has wings ; but then neither horse nor wings are the same with any horses or wings known to memory. That we can at any moment think of the same thing which at any former moment we thought of is the ultimate law of our intellectual constitution. But when we now think of it incompatibly with our other ways of thinking it, then we must choose which way to stand by, for we cannot continue to think in two contradictory ways at once. The whole distinction of real and unreal, the whole psychology of belief, disbelief, and doubt, is thus grounded on two mental facts— first, that we are liable to think differently of the same ; and second, that ivhen we have done so, we can choose which way of thinking to adhere to and ivhich to disregard.

The subjects adhered to become real subjects, the attributes adhered to real attributes, the existence adhered to real existence ; whilst the subjects disregarded become imaginary subjects, the attributes disregarded erroneous * In both existential and attributive judgments a synthesis is represented. The syllable ex in the word Existence, da in the word Dasein^ express it. ' The candle exists ' is equivalent to ' The candle is over there." And the ' over there ' means real space, space related to other reals. The proposition amounts to saying : ' The candle is in the same space with other reals.' It affirms of the candle a very concrete predicate — namely, this relation to other particular concrete things. Their real existence, as we shall later see, resolves itself into their peculiar relation to ourselves. Existence is thus no substantive quality when we predicate it of any object ; it is a relation, ultimately terminating in ourselves, and at the moment when it terminates, becoming a practical relation. But of this more anon. I only wish now to indicate the superficial nature of the distinction between the existential and the attributive proposition.

attributes, and the existence disregarded an existence in no man's land, in the limbo * where footless fancies dwell.' The real things are, in M. Taine's terminology, the reductives of the things judged unreal. Habitually and practically we do not count these disregarded things as existents at all. For them Vce victis is the law in the popular philosophy ; they are not even treated as appearances ; they are treated as if they were mere waste, equivalent to nothing at all. To the genuinely philosophic mind, however, they still have existence, though not the same existence, as the real things. As objects of fancy, as errors, as occupants of dreamland, etc., they are in their way as indefeasible parts of life, as undeniable features of the Universe, as the realities are in their way. The total world of which the philosophers must take account is thus composed of the realities pliis the fancies and illusions.

Two sub-universes, at least, connected by relations which philosophy tries to ascertain ! Really there are more than two sub-universes of which we take account, some of us of this one, and others of that. For there are various categories both of illusion and of reality, and alongside of the world of absolute error (i.e., error confined to single individuals) but still within the world of absolute reality (i.e., reality believed by the complete philosopher) there is the world of collective error, there are the worlds of abstract reality, of relative or practical reality, of ideal relations, and there is the supernatural world. The popular mind conceives of all these sub-worlds more or less disconnectedly ; and when dealing with one of them, forgets for the time being its relations to the rest. The complete philosopher is he who seeks not only to assign to every given object of his thought its right place in one or other of these sub-worlds, but he also seeks to determine the relation of each sub-world to the others in the total world which is.

The most important sub-universes commonly discriminated from each other and recognized by most of us as existing, each with its own special and separate style of existence, are the following : (1) The world of sense, or of physical * things * as we instinctively apprehend them, with such qualities as heat^ color, and sound, and such * forces ' as life, chemical affinity, gravity, electricity, all existing as such within or on the surface of the things.

(2) The world of science, or of physical things as the learned conceive them, with secondary qualities and * forces ' (in the popular sense) excluded, and nothing real but solids and fluids and their * laws' (i.e., customs) of motion.* (3) The world of ideal relations, or abstract truths believed or believable by all, and expressed in logical, mathematical, metaphysical, ethical, or sesthetic propositions. (4) The world of * idols of the tribe,' illusions or prejudices common to the race. All educated people recognize these as forming one sub-universe. The motion of the sky round the earth, for example, belongs to this world. That motion is not a recognized item of any of the other worlds ; but as an * idol of the tribe ' it really exists. For certain philosophers * matter ' exists only as an idol of the tribe. For science, the * secondary qualities ' of matter are but * idols of the tribe.'

(5) The various supernatural worlds, the Christian heaven and hell, the world of the Hindoo mythology, the world of Swedenborg's visa et audita^ etc. Each of these is a consistent system, with definite relations among its own parts. Neptune's trident, e.g., has no status of reality whatever in the Christian heaven ; but within the classic Olympus certain definite things are true of it, whether one believe in the reality of the classic mythology as a whole or not. The various worlds of deliberate fable may be ranked with these worlds of faith — the world of the Iliads that of King Lear^ of the PicJcivich Papers, etc.f

* I define the scientific universe here in the radical mechanical way. Practically, it is oftener thought of in a mongrel way and resembles in more points the popular physical world. f It thus comes about that we can say such things as that Ivanhoe did not reallp marry Rebecca, as Thackeray falsely makes him do. The real Ivanhoeworld is the one which Scott wrote down for us. In that toorld Ivanhoe does not marry Rebecca. The objects within that world are knit together by perfectly definite relations, which can be affirmed or denied. Whilst absorbed in the novel, we turn our backs on all othef

(6) The various worlds of individual opinion, as numerous as men are. (7) The worlds of sheer madness and vagary, also indefinitely numerous. Every object we think of gets at last referred to one world or another of this or of some similar list. It settles into our belief as a common-sense object, a scientific object, an abstract object, a mythological object, an object of some one's mistaken conception, or a madman's object; and it reaches this state sometimes immediately, but often only after being hustled and bandied about amongst other objects until it finds some which will tolerate its presence and stand in relations to it which nothing contradicts. The molecules and ether-waves of the scientific world, for example, simply kick the object's warmth and color out, they refuse to have any relations with them. But the world of * idols of the tribe ' stands ready to take them in. Just so the world of classic myth takes up the winged horse ; the world of individual hallucination, the vision of the candle ; the world of abstract truth, the proposition that justice is kingly, though no actual king be just. The various worlds themselves, however, appear (as aforesaid) to most men's minds in no very definitely conceived relation to each other, and our attention, when it turns to one, is apt to drop the others for the time being out of its account. Propositions concerning the different worlds are made from 'different points of view'; and in this more or less chaotic state the consciousness of most thinkers remains to the end. Each world whilst it is attended to is real after its own fashion ; only the reality lapses with the attention.

Each thinker, however, has dominant habits of attention ; and these prax^tically elect from among the various worlds some one to be for him the world of ultimate realities. From this world's objects he does not appeal. Whatever worlds, and, for the time, the Ivanhoe-world remains our absolute reality. When we wake from the spell, however, we find a still more real world, which reduces Ivanhoe, and all things connected with him, to the fictive status, and relegates them to one of the sub-universes grouped under Ko. 5.