The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2

After the emotional and active needs come the intellectual and aesthetic ones. The two great aesthetic principles, of richness and of ease, dominate our intellectual as well as our sensuous life. And, ceteris paribus^ no system which should not be rich, simple, and harmonious would have a chance of being chosen for belief, if rich, simple, and harmonious systems were also there. Into the latter we should unhesitatingly settle, with that welcoming attitude of the will

*' This law that our consciousness constantly tends to the minimum of complexity and to the maximum of definiteness, is of great importance for all our knowledge. . . . Our own activity of attention will thus determine what we are to know and what we are to believe. If things have more than a certain complexity, not only will our limited powers of attention forbid us to unravel this complexity, but we shall strongly desire to believe the things much simpler than they are. For our thoughts about them will have a constant tendency to become as simple and definite as possible. Put a man into a perfect chaos of phenomena — sounds, sights, feelings — and if the man continued to exist, and to be rational at all, his attention would doubtless soon find for him a way to make up some kind of rhythmic regularity, which he would impute to the things about him, so as to imagine that he had discovered some laws of sequence in this mad new world. And thus, in every case where we fancy ourselves sure of a simple law of Nature, we must remember that a great deal of the fancied simplicity may be due, in the given case, not to Nature, but to the ineradicable prejudice of our own minds in favor of regularity and simplicity. All our thoughts are determined, in great measure, by this law of least effort, as it is found ixemplifled in our activity of attention. . . . The aim of the whole process seems to be to reach as complete and united a conception of reality as possible, a conception wherein the greatest fulness of data shall be combined with the greatest simplicity of conception. The effort of consciousness seems to be to combine the greatest richness of content with the greatest definiteness of organization."*

The richness is got by including all the facts of sense in the scheme ; the simplicity, by deducing them out of the smallest possible number of permanent and independent primordial entities : the definite organization, by assimilating these latter to ideal objects between which relations of an inwardly rational sort obtain. What these ideal objects and rational relations are will require a separate chapter to show.f Meanwhile, enough has surely been said to justify the assertion made above that no general offhand answer can be given as to which objects mankind shall choose as its realities. The fight is still under way. Our minds are yet chaotic ; and at best we make a mixture and

a compromise, as we yield to the claim of this interest or that, and follow first one and then another principle in turn. It is undeniably true that materialistic, or so-called 'scientific,' conceptions of the universe have so far gratified the purely intellectual interests more than the mere sentimental conceptions have. But, on the other hand, as already remarked, they leave the emotional and active interests cold. Th^ perfect object of belief would be a God or

* Soul of the World,^ represefifited both optimistically and moralistically (if such a combination could be), and vnthal so defi^ nitely conceived as to show us why our phenomenal experiences should be sent to us by Him in just the very way in which they come. All Science and all History would thus be accounted for in the deepest and simplest fashion. The very room in which I sit, its sensible walls and floor, and the feeling the air and fire within it give me, no less than the * scientific ' conceptions which I am urged to frame concerning the mode of existence of all these phenomena when my back is turned, would then all be corroborated, not de-realized, by the ultimate principle of my belief. The World-soul sends me just those phenomena in order that I may react upon them ; and among the reactions is the intellectual one of spinning these conceptions. What is beyond the crude experiences is not an alternative to them, but something that means them for me here and now. It is safe to say that, if ever such a system is satisfactorily excogitated, mankind will drop all other systems and cling to that one alone as real. Meanwhile the other systems coexist with the attempts at that one, and, all being alike fragmentary, each has its little audience and day.

I have now, I trust, shown sufficiently what the psychologic sources of the sense of reality are. Certain postulates are given in our nature ; and whatever satisfies those postulates is treated as if real.^ I might therefore finish the * Prof. Royce puts this well in discussing idealism and the reality of an * external ' world. "If the history of popular speculation on these topics could be written, how much of cowardice and shuflling would be found in the behavior of the natural mind before the question, * How dost thou know of an external reality?' Instead of simply and plainly answering;

* I mean by the external world in the first place something that I accept chapter here, were it not that a few additional words will set the truth in a still clearer light. There is hardly a common man who (if consulted) would not say that things come to us in the first instance OS ideas; and that if we take them for realities, it is because we add something to therriy namely, the predicate of having also * real existence outside of our thought.' This notion that a higher faculty than the mere having of a conscious content is needed to make us know anything real by its means has pervaded psychology from the earliest times, and is the tradition of Scholasticism, Kantism, and Common-sense. Just as sensations must come as inward affections and then be * extradited ;' as objects of memory must appear at fiirst as presently unrealities, and subsequently be * projected' backwards as past realities ; so conceptions must be entia rationis till a higher faculty uses them as windows to look beyond the ego, into the real ea::^ra-mental world ; — so runs the orthodox and popular account.

And there is no question that this is a true account of the way in which many of our later beliefs come to pass. The logical distinction between the bare thought of an object and belief in the object's reality is often a chronological distinction as well. The having and the crediting of an or demand, that I posit, postulate, actively construct on the basis of sensedata,' the natural man gives us all kinds of vague compromise answers. . . . Where shall these endless turnings and twistings have an end ? All

these lesser motives are appealed to, and the one ultimate motive is neglected. The ultimate motive with the man of every-day life is the icill to have an external world. Whatever consciousness contains, reason will persist in spontaneously adding the thought: ' But there shall be something beyond this. ' . . . The popular assurance of an external world is the fixed determination to make one, now and henceforth," (Religious Aspect of Philosophy, p. 304 — the italics are my own.) This immixture of the will appears most flagrantly in the fact that although external matter is doubted commonly enough, minds external to our own are never doubted. We need them too much, are too essentially social to dispense with them. Semblances of matter may suffice to react upon, but not semblances of communing souls. A psychic solipsism is too hideous a mockery of our wants, and, so far as I know, has never been seriously entertained.— Chapters ix and x of Prof. Royce's work are on the whole the clearest account of the psychology ©f belief with which lam acquainted.

idea do not always coalesce ; for often we first suppose and then believe ; first play with the notion, frame the hypothesis, and then affirm the existence, of an object of thought. And we are quite conscious of the succession of the two mental acts. But these cases are none of them primitive cases. They only occur in minds long schooled to doubt by the contradictions of experience. The primitive impulse is to affirm immediately the reality of all that is conceived.^ When we do doubt, however, in what does the subsequent resolution of the doubt consist? It either consists in a purely verbal performance, the coupling of the adjectives

* real ' or ' outwardly existing ' (as predicates) to the thing originally conceived (as subject) ; or it consists in the perception in the given case of that for which these adjectives, abstracted from other similar concrete cases, stand. But what these adjectives stand for, we now know well. They stand for certain relations (immediate, or through intermediaries) to ourselves. Whatever concrete objects have hitherto stood in those relations have been for us * real,' ' outwardly existing.' So that when we now abstractly admit a thing to be

* real ' (without perhaps going through any definite percep- * ' ' The leading fact in Belief, according to my view of it, is our Primitive Credulity. We begin by believing everything ; whatever is, is true. . . . The animal born in the morning of a summer day proceeds upon the fact of daylight ; assumes the perpetuity of that fact. Whatever it is disposed to do, it does without misgivings. If in the morning it began a round of operations continuing for hours, under the full benefit of daylight, it would unhesitatingly begin the same round in the evening. Its state of mind is practically one of unbounded confidence ; but, as yet, it does not understand what confidence means.

' ' The pristine assurance is soon met by checks ; a disagreeable experience leading to new insight. To be thwarted and opposed is one of our earliest and most frequent pains. It develops the sense of a distinction between free and obstructed impulses ; the unconsciousness of an open way is exchanged for consciousness ; we are now said properly to believe in what has never been contradicted, as we disbelieve in what has been contradicted. We believe that, after the dawn of day, there is before us a continuance of light ; we do not believe that this light is to continue forever.

" Thus, the vital circumstance in belief is never to be contradicted — never to lose prestige. The number of repetitions counts for little in the process: we are as much convinced after ten as after fifty ; we are more convinced by ten unbroken than by fifty for and one against." (Bain ; The Emotions and the Will, pp. 511, 513.) tion of its relations), it is as if we said " it belongs in the same world with those other objects." Naturally enough, we have hourly opportunities for this summary process of belief. All remote objects in space or time are believed in this way. When I believe that some prehistoric savage chipped this flint, for example, the reality of the savage and of his act makes no direct appeal either to my sensation, emotion, or volition. What I mean by my belief in it is simply my dim sense of a continuity between the long dead savage and his doings and the present world of which the flint forms part. It is pre-eminently a case for applying our doctrine of the ' fringe ' (see Vol I. p. 258). When I think the savage with one fringe of relationship, I believe in him ; when I think him without that fringe, or with another one (as, e.g., if I should class him with * scientific vagaries * in general), I disbelieve him. The word * real ' itself is, in short, a fringe.

We shall see in Chapter XXV that will consists in nothing but a manner of attending to certain objects, or consenting to their stable presence before the mind. The objects, in the case of will, are those whose existence depends on our thought, movements of our own body for example, or facts which such movements executed in future may make real. Objects of belief, on the contrary, are those which do not change according as we think regarding them. I vM to get up early to-morrow morning ; I believe that I got up late yesterday morning; I vnll that my foreign bookseller in Boston shall procure me a German book and write to him to that effect. I believe that he will make me pay three dollars for it when it comes, etc. Now the important thing to notice is that this difference between the objects of will and belief is entirely immaterial, as far as the relation of the mind to them goes. All that the mind does is in both cases the same ; it looks at the object and consents to its existence, espouses it, says * it shall be my reality.' It turns to it, in short, in the interested active emotional way. The rest is done by nature, which in some cases makes the objects real which we think of in this

manner, and in other cases does not. Nature cannot change the past to suit our thinking. She cannot change the stars or the winds ; but she does change our bodies to suit our thinking, and through their instrumentality changes much besides ; so the great practical distinction between objects which we may will or unwill, and objects which we can merely believe or disbelieve, grows up, and is of course one of the most important distinctions in the world. Its roots, however, do not lie in psychology, but in physiology ; as the chapter on Volition will abundantly make plain. Will and Beliefs in shorty meaning a certain relation between objects and the Self, are two names for one and the same psychological phenomenon. All the questions which arise concerning one are questions which arise concerning the other. The causes and conditions of the peculiar relation must be the same in both. The free-will question arises as regards belief. If our wills are indeterminate, so must our beliefs be, etc. The first act of free-will, in short, would naturally be to believe in free-will, etc. In Chapter XXVI, I shall mention this again.

A practical observation may end this chapter. If belief consists in an emotional reaction of the entire man on an object, how can we believe at will ? We cannot control our emotions. Truly enough, a man cannot believe at will abruptly. Nature sometimes, and indeed not very infrequently, produces instantaneous conversions for us. She suddenly puts us in an active connection with objects of which she had till then left us cold. " I realize for the first time," we then say, " what that means !" This happens often with moral propositions. We have often heard them ; but now they shoot into our lives ; they move us ; we feel their living force. Such instantaneous beliefs are truly enough not to be achieved by will. But gradually our will can lead us to the same results by a very simple method : we need only in cold blood act as if the thing in question tvere real, and keejfi acting as if it were real, and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it ivill become real. It will become so knit with habit and emotion that our interests in it will be those which characterize belief.

Those to whom * God ' and * Duty ' are now mere names can make them much more than that, if they make a little sacrifice to them every day. But all this is so well known in moral and religious education that I need say no more."*^ * Literature. D. Hume : Treatise on Human Nature, part iii. §§ vii- X. A. Bain : Emotions and Will, chapter on Belief (also pp. 20 fl). J. Sully: Sensation and Intuition, essay iv. J. Mill: Analysis of Human Mind, chapter xi. Ch. Renouvier : Psychologic Rationnelle, vol. ii. pt. II ; and Esquisse d'une Classification systematique des Doctrines Philosophiques, part vi. J. H. Newman: The Grammar of Assent. J. Venn: Some Characteristics of Belief. V. Brochard : De I'Erreur, part II. chap. VI, IX ; and Revue Philosophique, xxviii. 1. E. Rabier : Psychologic, chap XXI, Appendix. OlleLaprune: La Certitude Morale (1881). G. F. Stout: On Genesis of Cognition of Physical Reality, in ' Mind,' Jan. 1890. J. Pikler: The Psychology of the Belief in Objective Existence (London, 1890). — Mill says that we believe present sensations ; and makes our belief in all other things a matter of association with these. So far so good; but as he makes no mention of emotional or volitional reaction. Bain rightly charges him with treating belief as a purely intellectual state. For Bain belief is rather an incident of our active life. When a thing is such as to make us act on it, then we believe it, according to Bain. " But how about past things, or remote things, upon which no reaction of ours is possible? And how about belief in things which cAecA; action?" says Sully; who considers that we believe a thing only when " the idea of it has an inherent tendency to approximate in character and intensity to a sensation." It is obvious that each of these authors emphasizes a true aspect of the question. My own account has sought to be more complete, seusation, association, and active reaction all being acknowledged to be concerned. The most compendious possible formula perhaps would be that our belief and attention are the same fact.

For the moment, what we attend to is reality ; Attention is a motor reaction; and we are so made that sensations force attention from us. On Belief and Conduct see an article by Leslie Stephen, Fortnightly Review, July 1888. A set of facts have been recently brought to my attention which I hardly know how to treat, so I say a word about them in this footnote. I refer to a type of experience which has frequently found a place amongst the 'Yes' answers to the ' Census of Hallucinations,' and which is generally described by those who report it as an ' impression of the presence ' of someone near them, although no sensation either of sight, hearing, or touch is involved. From the way in which this experience is spoken of by those who have had it, it would appear to be an extremely definite and positive state of mind, coupled with a belief in the reality of its object quite as strong as any direct sensation ever gives. And yet no sensation seems to be connected with it at all. Sometimes the person whose nearness is thus impressed is a known person, dead or living, sometimes an unknown one. His attitude and situation are often very definitely impressed, and so, sometimes (though not by way of hearing), are words which he wishes to say.

The phenomenon would seem to be due to a pure conception becoming Baturated with tlie sort of stinging urgency which ordinarily only sensa tions bring. But 1 cannot yet persuade myself that the urgency in question consists in concomitant emotional and motor impulses. The ' impression ' may come quite suddenly and depart quickly; it may carry no emotional suggestions, and wake no motor consequences beyond those involved in attending to it. Altogether, the matter is somewhat paradoxical, and no conclusion can be come to until more delinite data are obtained.

Perhaps the most curious case of the sort which I have received is the following. The subject of the observation, Mr. P., is an exceptionally intelligent witness, though the words of the narrative are his wife's. ' ' Mr. P. has all his life been the occasional subject of rather singular delusions or impressions of various kinds. If I had belief in the existence of latent or embryo faculties, other than the five senses, I shoi id explain them on that ground. Being totally blind, his other perceptions are abnormally keen and dcvelcped, and given the existence of a rudimentary sixth sense, it would be only natural that this also should be more acute in him than in others. One of the most interesting of his experiences in this line was the frequent apparition of a corpse some years ago, which may be worth the attention of your Committee on that subject. At the time Mr. P. had a musicroom in Boston on Beacon Street, where he used to do severe and protracted practice with little interruption. Now, all one season it was a very familiar occurrence with him while in the midst of work to feel 8 c^ld draft of air suddenly upon his face, with a prickling sensation at the ii>ots of his hair, when he would turn from the piano, and a figure which he knew to be dead would come sliding under the crack of the door from without, flattening itself to squeeze through and rounding out agaia to the human form. It was of a middle-aged man, and drew itself along the carpet on hands and knees, but with head thrown back till it reached the sofa, upon which it stretched itself. It remained some moments, but vanished always if Mr. P. spoke or made a decided movement. The most singular point in the occurrence was its frequent repetition. He might expect it on any day between two and four o'clock, and it came always heralded by the same sudden cold shiver, and was invariably the same fig Uie which went through the same movements. He afterwards traced the whole experience to strong tea.

He was in the habit of taking cold tea, which always stimulates him, for lunch, and on giving up this practice he never saw this or any other apparition again. However, even allowing, as is doubtless true, that the event was a delusion of nerves first fatigued by overwork and then excited by this stimulant, there is one point which is still wholly inexplicable and highly interesting to me. Mr. P. has no memory whatever of sight, nor conception of it. It is impossible for him to form any idea of what we mean by light or color, consequently he has no cognizance of any object which does not reach his sense of hearing or of touch, though these are so acute as to give a contrary impression sometimes to other people. When he becomes aware of the presence cf a person or an object, by means which seem mysterious to outsiders, he can always trace it naturally and legitimately to slight echoes, perceptible only to his keen ears, or to differences in atmospheric pressure, perceptible only to his acute nerves of touch; but with the apparition described, for the only time in his xperience, he was aware of presenf'e, size, and appearance, without

the use of either of these mediums. The figure never produced the least sound nor came within a number of feet of his person, yet he knew that it was a man, that it moved, and in what direction, even that it wore a full beard, which, like the thick curly hair, was partially gray ; also that it was dressed in the style of suit known as ' pepper and salt.' These points were all perfectly distinct and invariable each time. If asked how he perceived them, he will answer he cannot tell, he simply knew it, and so strongly and so distinctly that it is impossible to shake his opinion as to the exact details of the man's appearance. It would seem that in this delusion of the senses he really aaWj as he has never done in the actual ex periences of life, except in the first two years of childhood."

On cross-examining Mr. P., I could not make out that there was anything like visual imagination involved, although he was quite unable to describe in just what terms the false perception was carried on. It seemed to be more like an intensely definite conception than anything else, a conception to which the feeling ot present r6a?% was attached, but in no such shape as easily to fall under the heads laid down in my text. We talk of man being the rational animal ; and the traditional intellectualist philosophy has always made a great point of treating the brutes as wholly irrational creatures. Nevertheless, it is by no means easy to decide just what is meant by reason, or how the peculiar thinking process called reasoning differs from other thought-sequences which may lead to similar results.

Much of our thinking consists of trains of images suggested one by another, of a sort of spontaneous revery of which it seems likely enough that the higher brutes should be capable. This sort of thinking leads nevertheless to rational conclusions, both practical and theoretical. The links between the terms are either * contiguity ' or * similarity,' and with a mixture of both these things we can hardly be very incoherent. As a rule, in this sort of irresponsible thinking, the terms which fall to be coupled together are empirical concretes, not abstractions. A sunset may call up the vessel's deck from which I saw one last summer, the companions of my voyage, my arrival into port, etc.; or it may make me think of solar myths, of Hercules' and Hector's funeral pyres, of Homer and whether he could write, of the Greek alphabet, etc. If habitual contiguities predominate, we have a prosaic mind ; if rare contiguities, or similarities, have free play, we call the person fanciful, poetic, or witty. But the thought as a rule is of matters taken in their entirety. Having been thinking of one, we find later that we are thinking of another, to which we have been lifted along, we hardly know how. If an abstract

* The substance of this chapter, and a good many pages of the text, originally appeared in an article entitled ' Brute and Human Intellect,' in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy for July 1878 (vol. xn. p. 336). quality figures in the procession, it arrests our attention but for a moment, and fades into something else ; and is never very abstract. Thus, in thinking of the sun-myths, we may have a gleam of admiration at the gracefulness of the primitive human mind, or a moment of disgust at the narrowness of modern intsrpreters. But, in the main, we think less of qualities than of whole things, real or possible, just as we may experience them.

The upshot of it may be that we are reminded of some practical duty : we write a letter to a friend abroad, or we take down the lexicon and study our Greek lesson. Our thought is rational, and leads to a rational act, but it can hardly be called reasoning in a strict sense of the term. There are other shorter flights of thought, single couplings of terms which suggest one another by association, which approach more to what would commonly be classed as acts of reasoning proper. Those are where a present sign suggests an unseen, distant, or future reality. Where the sign and what it suggests are both concretes which have been coupled together on previous occasions, the inference is common to both brutes and men, being really nothing more than association by contiguity. A and B, dinner-bell and dinner, have been experienced in immediate succession. Hence A no sooner falls upon the sense than B is anticipated, and steps are taken to meet it. The whole education of our domestic beasts, all the cunning added by age and experience to wild ones, and the greater part of our human knowingness consists in the ability to make a mass of inferences of this simplest sort. Our * perceptions,* or recognitions of what objects are before us, are inferences of this kind. We feel a patch of color, and we say * a distant house,' a whiff of odor crosses us, and we say *a skunk,' a faint sound is heard, and we call it ' a railroad train.' Examples are needless ; for such inferences of sensations not presented form the staple and tissue of our perceptive life, and our Chapter XIX was full of them, illusory or veracious. They have been called unconscious inferences. Certainly we are commonly unconscious that we are inferring at all. The sign and the signified melt into what seems to us the object of a single pulse of

thought. Immediate inferences would be a good name for these simple acts of reasoning requiring but two terms,"^ were it not that formal logic has already appropriated the expression for a more technical use. In these first and simplest inferences the conclusion may follow so continuously upon the * sign ' that the latter is not discriminated or attended to as a separate object by the mind. Even now we can seldom define the optical signs which lead us to infer the shapes and distances of the objects which by their aid we so unhesitatingly perceive. The objects, too, when thus inferred, are general objects. The dog crossing a scent thinks of a deer in general, or of another dog in general, not of a particular deer or dog. To these most primitive abstract objects Dr. G. J. Komanes gives the name of recepts or generic ideas, to distinguish them from concepts and general ideas properly so called, f They are not analyzed or defined, but only imagined.

" It requires but a slight analysis of our ordinary mental processes to prove that all our simpler ideas are group-arrangements which have been formed spontaneously or without any of that intentionally comparing, sifting, and combining process which is required in the higher departments of ideational activity. The comparing, sifting, and combining is here done, as it were, for the conscous agent, not hy him. Kecepts are received ; it is only concepts that require to be conceived. ... If I am crossing a street and hear behind me a sudden shout, I do not require to w^ait in order to predicate to myself that there is probably a hansom-cab just about to run me down : a cry of this kind, and in those circumstances, is so intimately associated in my mind with its

* I see no need of assuming more than two terms in this sort of reasoning— first, the sign, and second, the thing inferred from it. Either may be complex, but essentially it is but A calling up B, and no middle term is involved. M. Binet, in his most intelligent little book. La Psychologic du Raisonnement, maintains that there are three terms. The present sensation or sign must, according to him, first evoke from the past an image which resembles it and fuses with it, and the things suggested or inferred are always the contiguous associates of this intermediate image, and not of the immediate sensation. The reader of Chapter XIX will see why I do not believe in the ' image ' in question as a distinct psychic fact.