The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2

positively contradicts them must get into another world oi die. The horse, e.g., may have wings to its heart's content, so long as it does not pretend to be the real world's horse — that horse is absolutely wingless. For most men, as we shall immediately see, the * things of sense * hold this prerogative position, and are the absolutely real world's nucleus. Other things, to be sure, may be real for this man or for that — things of science, abstract moral relations, things of the Christian theology, or what not. But even for the special man, these things are usually real with a less real reality than that of the things of sense. They are taken less seriously ; and the very utmost that can be said for anyone's belief in them is that it is as strong as his * belief in his own senses.' *

In all this the everlasting partiality of our nature shows itself, our inveterate propensity to choice. For, in the strict and ultimate sense of the word existence, everything which can be thought of at all exists as some sort of object, whether mythical object, individual thinker's object, or object in outer space and for intelligence at large. Errors, fictions, tribal beliefs, are parts of the whole great Universe which God has made, and He must have meant all these things to be in it, each in its respective place. But for us finite creatures, " 'tis to consider too curiously to considei

* The world of dreams is our real world whilst we are sleeping, because our attention then lapses from the sensible world. Conversely, when we wake the attention usually lapses from the dream-world and that becomes unreal. But if a dream haunts us and compels our attention during the day it is very apt to remain figuring in our consciousness as a sort of subuniverse alongside of the waking world. Most people have probably had dreams which it is hard to imagine not to have been glimpses into an actually existing region of being, perhaps a corner of the ' spiritual world.* And dreams have accordingly in all ages been regarded as revelations, and have played a large part in furnishing forth mythologies and creating themes for faith to lay hold upon. The 'larger universe,' here, which helps us to believe both in the dream and in the waking reality which is its immediate reductive, is the total universe, of Nature plus the Supernatural. The dream holds true, namely, in one half of that universe ; the waking perceptions in the other half. Even to-day dream-objects figure among the realities in which some * psychic-researchers * are seeking to rouse our belief. All our theories, not only those about the supernatural, but our philosophic and scientific theories as well, are like our dreams in rousing such different degrees of belief in different minds.

SO." The mere fact of appearing as an object at all is not enough to constitute reality. That may be metaphysical reality, reality for God ; but what we need is practical reality, reality for ourselves ; and, to have that, an object must not only appear, but it must appear both interesting and important. The worlds whose objects are neither interesting nor important we treat simply negatively, we brand them as t^nreal. In the relative sense^ then, the sense in which we contrast reality with simple ^^nreality, and in which one thing is said to have more reality than another, and to be more believed, reality means simply relation to our emotional and active life. This is the only sense which the word ever has in the mouths of practical men. Tn this sense, whatever excites and stimulates our interest is real ; whenever an object so appeals to us that we turn to it, accept it, fill our mind with it, or practically take account of it, so far it is real for us, and we believe it. Whenever, on the contrary, we ignore it, fail to consider it or act upon it, despise it, reject it, forget it, so far it is unreal for us and disbelieved. Hume's account of the matter was then essentially correct, when he said that belief in anything was simply the having the idea of it in a lively and active manner :

" I say, then, that belief is nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object than the imagination alone is ever able to attain. ... It consists not in the peculiar nature or order of the ideas, but in the manner of their conception and in their feeling to the mind. I confess that it is impossible perfectly to explain this feeling or manner of conception. ... Its true and proper name . . . ia belief, which is a term that everyone sufficiently understands in common life. And in philosophy we can go no farther than assert that belief is something felt by themind, which distinguishes the idea of the judgment from the fictions of the imagination.* It gives them more weight and influence ; makes them appear of greater importance ; enforces them in the mind ; gives them a superior influence on the passions, and renders them the governing principle in our actions." t

* Distinguishes realities from unrealities, the essential from th« rubbishy and neglectable. f Inquiry concerning Hum. Understanding, gee. v. pt. 2 (slightly traufr posed in my Quotatiouj. Or as Prof. Bain puts it : "In its essontial character, belief is a phase of our active nature — otherwise called the Will." * The object of belief, then, reality or real existence, is something quite different from all the other predicates which a subject may possess. Those are properties intellectually or sensibly intuited. When we add any one of them to the subject, we increase the intrinsic content of the latter, we enrich its picture in our mind. But adding reality does not enrich the picture in any such inward way ; it leaves it inwardly as it finds it, and only fixes it and stamps it in to

" The real," as Kant says, " contains no more than the possible. A hundred real dollars do not contain a penny more than a hundred possible dollars. ... By whatever, and by however many, predicates I may think a thing, nothing is added to it if I add that the thing exists. . . . Whatever, therefore, our concept of an object may contain, we must always step outside of it in order to attribute to it existence." t The * stepping outside ' of it is the establishment either of immediate practical relations between it and ourselves, or of relations between it and other objects with which we have immediate practical relations. Eelations of this sort, which are as yet not transcended or superseded by others, are ipsofoxito real relations, and confer reality upon their objective term. Thefons et origo of all reality , whether from

f Critique of Pure Reason, trans. MtlUer, ii. 515-17. Hume also : "When, after the simple conception of anything, we would conceive it as existent, we in reality make no addition to, or alteration of, our first idea. Thus, when we affirm that God is existent, we simply form the idea of such a being as He is represented to us ; nor is the existence which we attribute to Him conceived by a particular idea, which we join to His other qualities, and can again separate and distinguish from them. . . . The belief of the existence joins no new idea to those which compose the ideas of the object. When I think of God, when I think of Him as existent, and when I believe Him to be existent, my idea of Him neither increases nor diminishes. But as 'tis certain there is a great difference betwixt the simple conception of the existence of an object and the belief of it, and as thii difference lies not in the facts or compositions of the idea which we conceive, it follows that it must lie in the manner ia which we conceive it." (Treatise of Human Nature, pt. iii. sec. 7.)

the absolute or the practiced point of view, is thus sybjectivu^ is oursdves. As bare logical thinkers, without emotional reaction, we give reality to whatever objects we think of, for they are really phenomena, or objects of our passing thought, if nothing more. But, as thinkers uoith emotional reactiody ive give what seems to us a still higher degree of reality to ivhatever things we select and emphasize and turn to WITH A WILL. These are our living realities; and not only these, but all the other things which are intimately connected with these. Reality, starting from our Ego, thus sheds itself from point to point — first, upon all objects which have an immediate sting of interest for our Ego in them, and next, upon the objects most continuously related with these. It only fails when the connecting thread is lost. A whole system may be real, if it only hang to our Ego by one immediately stinging term. But what contradicts any such stinging term, even though it be another stinging term itself, is either not believed, or only believed after settlement of the dispute.

We reach thus the important conclusion that our own reality y that sense of our own life which we at every moment possess^ is the ultimate of ultimates for our belief, * As sure as I exist ! ' — this is our uttermost warrant for the being of all other things. As Descartes made the indubitable reality of the cogito go bail for the reality of all that the cogito involved, so we all of us, feeling our own present reality with absolutely coercive force, ascribe an all but equal degree of reality, first fco whatever things we lay hold on with a sense of personal need, and second, to whatever farther things continuously belong with these. " Mein Jetzt und Hier,'* as Prof. Lipps says, " ist der letzte Angelpunkt fiir alle Wirklichkeit, also alle Erkenntniss."

The world of living realities as contrasted with unrealities is thus anchored in the Ego, considered as an active and emotional term.* That is the hook from which the rest dangles, the absolute support. And as from a painted * I use the notion of the Ego here, as common -sense uses it. Nothing is prejudged as to the results (or absence of results) of ulterior attempts to analyze the notion. hook it lias been said that one can only hang a painted chain, so conversely, from a real hook only a real chain can properly be hung. JVhatever things Jwve intimate and continuous connection loitli my life are things of whose reality I cannot doubt. Whatever things fail to establish this connection are things which are practically no better for me than if they existed not at all.

In certain forms of melancholic perversion of the sensibilities and reactive powers, nothing touches us intimately, rouses us, or wakens natural feeling. The consequence is the complaint so often heard from melancholic patients, that nothing is believed in by them as it used to be, and that all sense of reality is fled from life. They are sheathed in india-rubber ; nothing penetrates to the quick or draws blood, as it were. According to Griesinger, " I see, I hear !" such patients say, * but the objects do not reach me, it is as if there were a wall between me and the outer world !"

'' In such patients there often is an alteration of the cutaneous sensibility, such that things feel indistinct or sometimes rough and woolly. But even were this change always present, it would not completely explain the psychic phenomenon . . . which reminds us more of the alteration in our psychic relations to the outer world which advancing age on the one hand, and on the other emotions and passions, may bring about. In childhood we feel ourselves to be closer to the world of sensible phenomena, we live immediately with them and in them; an intimatel;^ vital tie binds us and them together. But with the ripening of reflection this tie is loosened, the warmth of our interest cools, things look differently to us, and we act more as foreigners to the outer world, even though we know it a great deal better. Joy and expansive emotions in general draw it nearer to us again. Everything makes a more lively impression, and with the quick immediate return of this warm receptivity for sense impressions, joy makes us feel young again. In depressing emotions it is the other way. Outer things, whether living or inorganic, suddenly grow cold and foreign to us, and even our favorite objects of interest feel as if they belonged to us no more. Under these circumstances, receiving no longer from anything a lively impression, we cease to turn towards outer things, and the sense of inward loneliness grows upon us. . . . Where there is no strong intelligence to control this blas^ condition, this psychic coldness and lack of interest, the issue of these states in which all seems so cold and hollow, the heart dried up, the world grown dead and empty, is often suicide or the deeper forms of insanity.*

• Griesinger, Mental Diseases, §§ 50, 98. The neoloj^sm we so often But DOW we are met by questions of detail. What does this siirnng, this exciting power, this interest, consist in, which some objects have ? which are those * intimate relations ' with our life which give reality ? And what things stand in these relations immediately, and what others are so closely connected with the former that (in Hume's language) we * carry our disposition * also on to them ?

In a simple and direct way these questions cannot be answered at all. The whole history of human thought is but an unfinished attempt to answer them. For what have men been trying to find out, since men were men, but just those things : " Where do our true interests lie — which relations shall we call the intimate and real ones — which things shall we call living realities and which not ?" A few psychological points can, however, be made clear.

Any relation to our mind at all^ in the absence of a stronger relation, suffices to make an object real. The barest appeal to our attention is enough for that. Eevert to the beginning of the chapter, and take the candle entering the vacant mind. The mind was waiting for just some such object to make its spring upon. It makes its spring and the candle is believed. But when the candle appears at the same time with other objects, it must run the gauntlet of their rivalry, and then it becomes a question which of the various candidates for attention shall compel belief. As a rule we believe as much as we can. We would believe everything if we only could. When objects are represented by us quite unsystematically they conflict but little with each other, and the number of them which in this chaotic manner we can believe is limitless. The primitive savage's mind is a jungle in which hallucinations, dreams, superstitions, conceptions, and sensible objects all flourish alongside of each other, unregulated except by the attention turning in this way or in that. The child's mind is the same. It is only as objects become permanent and their relations fixed that

bear, that an experience ' gives us a realizing sense ' of the truth of some proposition or other, illustrates the dependence of the sense of reality upon exeitement. Only what stirs us is ' realized.' discrepancies and contradictions are felt and must be settled in some stable way. As a rule, the success with which a contradicted object maintains itself in our belief is proportional to several qualities which it must possess. Of these the one which would be put first by most people, because it characterizes objects of sensation, is its —

(1) Coerciveness over attention, or the mere power to possess consciousness : then follow — (2) Liveliness, or sensible pungency, especially in the way of exciting pleasure or pain ; (3) Stimulating effect upon the will, i.e., capacity to arouse active impulses, the more instinctive the better ; (4) Emotional interest, as object of love, dread, admiration, desire, etc. ; (5) Congruity with certain favorite forms of contemplation— unity, simplicity, permanence, and the like ;

(6) Independence of other causes, and its own causal importance. These characters run into each other. Coerciveness is the result of liveliness or emotional interest. What is lively and interesting stimulates eo ipso the will ; congruity holds of active impulses as well as of contemplative forms ; causal independence and importance suit a certain contemplative demand, etc. I will therefore abandon all attempt at a formal treatment, and simply proceed to make remarks in the most convenient order of exposition.

As a whole, sensations are more lively and are judged more real than conceptions ; things met with every hour more real than things seen once ; attributes perceived when awake, more real than attributes perceived in a dream. But, owing to the diverse relations contracted by the various objects with each other, the simple rule that the lively and permanent is the real is often enough disguised. A conceived thing may be deemed more real than a certain sensible thing, if it only be intimately related to other sensible things more vivid, permanent, or interesting than the first one. Conceived molecular vibrations, e.g., are by the physicist judged more real than felt warmth, because so intimately related to all those other facts of motion in the

world which he has made his special study. Similarly, a rare thing may be deemed more real than a permanent thing if it be more widely related to other permanent things. All the occasional crucial observations of science are examples of this. A rare experience, too, is likely to be judged more real than a permanent one, if it be more interesting and exciting. Such is the sight of Saturn through a telescope ; such are the occasional insights and illuminations which upset our habitual ways of thought.

But no mere floating conception, no mere disconnected rarity, ever displaces vivid things or permanent things from our belief. A conception^ to prevail, must terminate in the world of orderly sensible experience. A rare phenomenon, to displace frequent ones, must belong with others more frequent still. The history of science is strewn with wrecks and ruins of theory — essences and principles, fluids and forces — once fondly clung to, but found to hang together with no facts of sense. And exceptional phenomena solicit our belief in vain until such time as we chance to conceive them as of kinds already admitted to exist. What science means by ' verification ' is no more than this, that no object of conception shall be believed which sooner or later has not some permanent and vivid object of sensation for its term. Compare what was said on pages 3-7, above.

Sensible objects are thus either our realities or the tests of our realities. Conceived objects must show sen^sible effects or else be disbelieved. And the effects, even though reduced to relative unreality when their causes come to view (as heat, which molecular vibrations make unreal), are yet the things on which our knowledge of the causes rests. Strange mutual dependence this, in which the appearance needs the reality in order to exist, but the reality needs the appearance in order to be known !

Sensible vividness or pungency is then the vital factor in reality ivhen once the conflict bettoeen objects, and the connecting of them together in the mind, has begun. No object which neither possesses this vividness in its own right nor is able to borrow it from anything else has a chance of making headway against vivid rivals, or of rousing in us that reaction in which belief consists. On the vivid objects w© pin, as the saying is, our faith in all the rest ; and ouf belief returns instinctively even to those of them from which reflection has led it away. Witness the obduracy with which the popular world of colors, sounds, and sra jlls holds its own against that of molecules and vibrations. Let the physicist himself but nod, like Homer, and the world of sense becomes his absolute reality again.*

That things originally devoid of this stimulating power should be enabled, by association with other things which have it, to compel our belief as if they had it themselves, is a remarkable psychological fact, which since Hume's time it has been impossible to overlook. *'The vividness of the first conception," he writes, "diffuses itself along the relations and is conveyed, as by so many pipes or channels, to every idea that has any communication with the primary one. . . . Superstitious people are fond of the relics of saints and holy men, for the same reason that they seek after types and images, in order to enliven their devotion and give them a more intimate and strong conception of those exemplary lives. . . . Now, 'tis evident one of the best relics a devotee could procure would be the handiwork of a saint, and if his clothes and furniture are ever to be considered in this light, 'tis because they were once at his disposal, and were moved and affected by him; in which respect they are . . . connected with him by a shorter train of consequences than any of those from which we learn the reality of his

* The way in which sensations are pitted against systematized conceptions, and in which the one or the other then prevails according as the sensations are felt by ourselves or merely known by report, is interestingly illustrated at the present day by the state of public belief about ' spiritualistic ' phenomena. There exist numerous narratives of movement without contact on the part of articles of furniture and other material objects, in the presence of certain privileged individuals called mediums. Such movement violates our memories, and the whole system of accepted physical 'science.' Consequently those who have not seen it either brand the narratives immediately as lies or call the phenomena ' illusions ' of sense, produced by fraud or due to hallucination. But one who has actually seen such a phenomenon, under what seems to him sufficiently ' test-conditions,' will hold to his sensible experience through thick and thin, even though the whole fabric of ' science ' should be rent in twain. That man would be a weak-spirited creature indeed who should allow any fly blown generalities about * the liability of the senses to be deceived ' to bully him out of his adhesion to what for him was an indubitable experience of sight. A man may err in this obstinacy, sure enough, in any particular case. But the spirit that animates him is that on which ultimately the very life and health of Science rest.

existence. This phenomenon clearly proves that a present impression, with a relation of causation, may enliven any idea, and consequently produce belief or assent, according to the precedent definition of it. . . . It has been remarked among the Mahometans as well as Christians that those pilgrims who have seen Mecca or the Holy Land are ever after more faithful and zealous believers than those who have not had that advantage. A man whose memory presents him with a lively image of the Red Sea and the Desert and Jerusalem and Galilee can never doubt of any miraculous events which are related either by Moses or the Evangelists. The lively idea of the places passes by an easy transition to the facts which are supposed to have been related to them by contiguity, and increases the belief by increasing the vivacity of the conception. The remembrance of those fields and rivers has the same influence as a new argument. . . . The ceremonies of the Catholic religion may be considered as instances of the same nature. The devotees of that strange superstition usually plead in excuse for the mummeries with which they are upbraided that they feel the good effect of external motions and postures and actions in enlivening their devotion and quickening their fervor, which otherwise would decay, if directed entirely to distant and immaterial objects. "We shadow out the objects of our faith, say they, in sensible types and images, and render them more present to us by the immediate presence of these types than it is possible for us to do merely by an intellectual view and contemplation." *

Hume's cases are rather trivial ; and the things which associated sensible objects make us believe in are supposed bj him to be unreal. But all the more manifest for that is the fact of their psychological influence. Who does not 'realize' more the fact of a dead or distant friend's existence, at the moment when a portrait, letter, garment or other material reminder of him is found '? The whole notion of him then grows pungent and speaks to us and shakes us, in a manner unknown at other times. In children's minds, fancies and realities live side by side. But however lively their fancies may be, they still gain help from association with reality. The imaginative child identifies its dramatis personce with some doll or other material object, and this evidently solidifies belief, little as it may resemble what it is held to stand for. A thing not too interesting by its own real qualities generally does the best service here. The most useful doll I ever saw was a large cucumber in the hands of a little Amazonian-Indian

girl ; she nursed it and washed it and rocked it to sleep in a hammock, and talked to it all day long — there was no part in life which the cucumber did not play. Says Mr. Tylor: "An imaginative child will make a dog do duty for a horse, or a soldier for a shepherd, till at last the objective resemblance almost disappears, and a bit of wood may be dragged about, resembling a ship on the sea or a coach on the road. Here the likeness of the bit of wood to a ship or coach is very slight indeed; but it is a thing, and can be moved about, . . . and is an evident assistance to the child in enabling it to arrange and develop its ideas. ... Of how much use . . . may be seen by taking it away, and leaving the child nothing to play with. . . . In later years and among highly educated people the mental process which goes on in a child's playing with wooden soldiers and horses, though it never disappears, must be sought for in more complex phenomena. Perhaps nothing in after-life more closely resembles the effect of a doll upon a child than the effect of the illustrations of a tale upon a grown reader. Here the objective resemblance is very indefinite . . . yet what reality is given to the scene by a good picture. . . . Mr. Backhouse one day noticed in Van Diemen's Land a woman arranging several stones that were flat, oval, and about two inches wide, and marked in various directions with black and red lines. These, he learned, represented absent friends, and one larger than the rest stood for a fat native woman on Flinder's Island, known by the name of Mother Brown. Similar practices are found among far higher races than the ill-fated Tasmanians. Among some North American tribes a mother who has lost a child keeps its memory ever present to her by filling its cradle with black feathers and quills, and carrying it about with her for a year or more. When she stops anywhere, she sets up the cradle and talks to it as she goes about her work, just as she would have done if the dead body had been still alive within it.

Here we have an image; but in Africa we find a rude doll representing the child, kept as a memorial. . . . Bastian saw Indian women in Peru who had lost an infant carrying about on their backs a wooden doll to represent it."* To many persons among us, photographs of lost ones seem to be fetishes. They, it is true, resemble ; but th© fact that the mere materiality of the reminder is almost as important as its resemblance is shown by the popularity a hundred years ago of the black taffeta * silhouettes ' which are still found among family relics, and of one of which Fichte could write to his affianced : * Die Farhe felrHi, das Auge/eJdtf es fehlt der himmlische Ausdruck deiner lieblichen