The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2

purpose, that the idea which it arouses need not rise above the level of a recept ; and the adaptive movements on my part which that idea immediately prompts are performed without any intelligent reflection. Yet, on the other hand, they are neither reflex actions nor instinctive actions ; they are what may be termed receptual actions, or actions depending on recepts." * " How far can this kind of unnamed or non-conceptional ideation extend ?" Dr. Komanes asks ; and answers by a variety of examples taken from the life of brutes, for which I must refer to his book. One or two of them, however, I will quote :

" Houzeau writes that while crossing a wide and arid plain in Texas, his two dogs suffered greatly from thirst, and that between thirty and forty times they rushed down the hollows to search for water. The hollows were not valleys, and there were no trees in them, or any other difference in the vegetation ; and as they were absolutely dry, there could have been no smell of damp earth. The dogs behaved as if they knew that a dip in the ground offered them the best chance of finding water, and Houzeau has often witnessed the same behavior in other animals. . . .

" Mr. Darwin writes : ' "When I say to my terrier in an eager voice (and I have made the trial many times), " Hi ! hi ! where is it ? " she at once takes it as a sign that something is to be hunted, and generally first looks quickly all round, and then rushes into the nearest thicket, to scout for any game, but finding nothing she looks up into any neighboring tree for a squirrel. Now do not these actions clearly show that she had in her mind a general idea, or concept, that some animal is to be discovered and hunted ? '" f

They certainly show this. But the idea in question is of an object about which nothing farther may be articulately known. The thought of it prompts to activity, but to no theoretic consequence. Similarly in the following example : *' Water-fowl adopt a somewhat different mode of alighting upon land, or even upon ice, from that which they adopt when alighting upon water; and those kinds which dive from a height (such as terns and gannets) never do so upon land or upon ice. These facts prove that the animals have one recept answering to a solid surface, and another answering to a fluid. Similarly a man will not dive from a height over hard ground or over ice, nor will he jump into water in the same way as he jumps upon dry land. In other words, like the water-fowl

he has two distinct recepts, one of which answers to solid ground, and the other to an unresisting fluid. But unlike the water-fowl he is able to bestow upon each of these recepts a name, and thus to raise them both to the level of concepts. So far as the practical purposes of locomotion are concerned, it is of course immaterial whether or not he thus raises his recepts into concepts ; but ... for many other purposes it is of the highest importance that he is able to do this. " *

The chief of these purposes is predication^ a theoretic function which, though it always leads eventually to some kind of action, yet tends as often as not to inhibit the immediate motor response to which the simple inferences of which we have been speaking give rise. In reasoning, A may suggest B ; but B, instead of being an idea which is simply obeyed by us, is an idea which suggests the distinct additional idea C. And where the train of suggestion is one of reasoning distinctively so called as contrasted with mere revery or ' associative ' sequence, the ideas bear certain inward relations to each other which we must proceed to examine with some care.

The result C yielded by a true act of reasoning is apt to be a thing voluntarily sought^ such as the means to a proposed end, the ground for an observed effect, or the effect of an assumed cause. All these results may be thought of as concrete things, but they are not suggested immediately by other concrete things, as in the trains of simply associative thought. They are linked to the concretes which precede them by intermediate steps, and these steps are formed by general characters articulately denoted and expressly analyzed out. A thing inferred by reasoning need neither have been an habitual associate of the datum from which we infer it, nor need it be similar to it. It may be a thing entirely unknown to our previous experience, something which no simple association of concretes could ever have evoked. The great difference, in fact, between that simpler kind of rational thinking which consists in the concrete objects of past experience merely suggesting each other, and reasoning distinctively so called, is this, that

whilst the empirical thinking is only reproductive, reasoning is productive. An empirical, or * rule-of-thumb,' thinker can deduce nothing from data with whose behavior and associates in the concrete he is unfamiliar. But put a reasoner amongst a set of concrete objects which he has neither seen nor heard of before, and with a little time, if he is a good reasoner, he will make such inferences from them as will quite atone for his ignorance. Eeasoning helps us out of unprecedented situations — situations for which all our common associative wisdom, all the * education ' which we share in common with the beasts, leaves us without resource.

Let us make this ability to deal ivith novel data the technical differentia of reasoning. This will sufficiently mark it out from common associative thinking, and will immediately enable us to say just what peculiarity it contains. It contains analysis and abstraction. Whereas the merely empirical thinker stares at a fact in its entirety, and remains helpless, or gets * stuck,' if it suggests no concomitant or similar, the reasoner breaks it up and notices some one of its separate attributes. This attribute he takes to be the essential part of the whole fact before him. This attribute has properties or consequences which the fact until then was not known to have, but which, now that it is noticed to contain the attribute, it must have.

Call the fact or concrete datum S ; the essential attribute M ; the attribute's property P. Then the reasoned inference of P from S cannot be made without M's intermediation. The * essence ' M is thus that third or middle term in the reasoning which a moment ago was pronounced essential. For his original concrete S the reasoner substitutes its abstract property, M, What is true of M, what is coupled with M, then holds true of 8, is coupled with S. As M is properly one of the parts of the entire S, reasoning may then be very well defined as the substitution of parts and their implications or consequences for whdes. And the art of the reasoner will consist of two stages :

First, sagcmty* or the ability to discover what part, M, lies embedded in the whole S which is before him ; Second, Jearningy or the ability to recall promptly M's consequences, concomitants, or implications, f f To be sagacious is to be a good observer. J. S. Mill has a passage which is so much in the spirit of the text that 1 cannot forbear to quote it. "The observer is net he who merely sees the thing which is before his eyes, but he who sees what parts that thing is composed of. To do this well is a rare talent. One person, from inattention, or attending only in the wrong place, overlooks half of what he sees ; another sets down much more than he sees, confounding it with what he imagines, or with what he infers ; another takes note of the kiJid of all the circumstances, but being inexpert in estimating their degree, leaves the quantity of each vague and uncertain ; another sees indeed the whole, but makes such an awkward division of it into parts, throwing things into one mass which require to be separated, and separating others which might more conveniently be considered as one, that the result is much the same, sometimes even worse, than if no analysis had been attempted at all. It would be possible to point out what qualities of mind, and modes of mental culture, fit a person for being a good observer : that, however, is a question not of Logic, but of the Theory of Education, in the most enlarged sense of the term. There is not properly an Art of Observing. There may be rules for observing. But these, like rules for inventing, are properly instructions for the preparation of one's own mind ; for putting it into the state in which it will be most fitted to observe, or most likely to invent. They are, therefore, essentially rules of self -education, which is a different thing from Logic. They do not teach how to do the thing, but how to make ourselves capable of doing it. They are an art of strengthening the limbs, not an art of using them.

The extent and minuteness of observation which may be requisite, and the degree of decomposition to which it may be necessary to carry the mental analysis, depend on the particular purpose in view. To ascertain the state of the whole universe at any particular moment is impossible, but would also be useless. In making chemical experiments, we do not think it necessary to note the position of the planets ; because experience has shown, as a very superficial experience is suflScient to show, that in such cases that circumstance is not mat_erial to the result : and accordingly, in the ages when man believed in the*occult influences of the heavenly bodies, it might have been unphilosophical to omit ascertaining the precise condition of those bodies at the moment of the experiment." (Logic, bk. iii. chap. Tn. § 1. Cf. also bk. IV. chap. II.)

— we see that the second or minor premise, the * subsumption ' as it is sometimes called, is the one requiring the sagacity ; the first or major the one requiring the fertility, or fulness of learning. Usually the learning is more apt to be ready than the sagacity, the ability to seize fresh aspects in concrete things, being rarer than the ability to learn old rules ; so that, in most actual cases of reasoning, the minor premise, or the way of conceiving the subject, is the one that makes the novel step in thought. This is, to be sure, not always the case ; for the fact that M carries P with it may also be unfamiliar and now formulated for the first time.

The perception that S is M is a mode of conceiving S, The statement that M is P is an abstract or general proposition. A word about both is necessary. When we conceive of S merely as M (of vermilion merely as a mercury-compound, for example), we neglect all the other attributes which it may have, and attend exclusively to this one. We mutilate the fulness of S's reality. Every reality has an infinity of aspects or properties. Even so simple a fact as a line which you trace in the air may be considered in respect to its form, its length, its direction, and its location. When we reach more complex facts, the number of ways in which we may regard them is literally endless. Yermilion is not only a mercury-compound, it is vividly red, heavy, and expensive, it comes from China, and so on, in infinitum. All objects are well-springs of properties, which are only little by little developed to our knowledge, and it is truly said that to know one thing thoroughly would be to know the whole universe. Mediately or immediately, that one thing is related to everything else ; and to know all about it, all its relations need be known. But each relation forms one of its attributes, one angle by which some one may conceive it, and while so conceiving it may ignore the rest of it. A man is such a complex fact. But out of the complexity all that an army commissary picks out as important for his purposes is his property of eating so many pounds a day ; the general,

of marching so many miles; the chair-maker, of having such a shape ; the orator, of responding to such and such feelings ; the theatre-manager, of being willing to pay just such a price, and no more, for an evening's amusement. Each of these persons singles out the particular side of the entire man which has a bearing on his concerns, and not till this side is distinctly and separately conceived can the proper practical conclusions /or that reasoner be drawn ; and when they are drawn the man's other attributes may be ignored.

All ways of conceiving a concrete fact, if they are true ways at all, are equally true ways. There is no property ABSOLUTELY essential to any otw thing. The same property which figures as the essence of a thing on one occasion becomes a very inessential feature upon another. Now that I am writing, it is essential that I conceive my paper as a surface for inscription. If I failed to do that, I should have to stop my work. But if I wished to light a fire, and no other materials were by, the essential way of conceiving the paper would be as combustible material ; and I need then have no thought of any of its other destinations. It is really all that it is : a combustible, a writing surface, a thin thing, a hydrocarbonaceous thing, a thing eight inches one way and ten another, a thing just one furlong east of a certain 3tone in my neighbor's field, an American thing, etc., etc., ad infinitum. Whichever one of these aspects of its being I temporarily class it under, makes me unjust to the other aspects. But as I always am classing it under one aspect or another, I am always unjust, always partial, always exclusive. My excuse is necessity — the necessity which my finite and practical nature lays upon me. My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing, and I can only do one thing at a time. A God, who is supposed to drive the whole universe abreast, may also be supposed, without detriment to his activity, to see all parts of it at once and without emphasis. But were our human attention so to disperse itself we should simply stare vacantly at things at large and forfeit our opportunity of doing any particular act. Mr. Warner, in his Adirondack story, shot a bear by aiming, not at his eye or heart, but * at him gen-

erally.* But we cannot aim * generally * at the universe ; or if we do, we miss our game. Our scope is narrow, and we must attack things piecemeal, ignoring the solid fulness in which the elements of Nature exist, and stringing one after another of them together in a serial way, to suit our little interests as they change from hour to hour. In this, the partiality of one moment is partly atoned for by the different sort of partiality of the next. To me now, writing these words, emphasis and selection seem to be the essence of the human mind. In other chapters other qualities have seemed, and will again seem, more important parts of psychology.

Men are so ingrainedly partial that, for common-sense and scholasticism (which is only common-sense grown articulate), the notion that there is no one quality genuinely, absolutely, and exclusively essential to anything is almost unthinkable. " A thing's essence makes it wJiat it is. Without an exclusive essence it would be nothing in particular, would be quite nameless, we could not say it was this rather than that. What you write on, for example, — why talk of its being combustible, rectangular, and the like, when you know that these are mere accidents, and that what it really is, and was made to be, is just paper and nothing else?" The reader is pretty sure to make some such comment as this. But he is himself merely insisting on an aspect of the thing which suits his own petty purpose, that of naming the thing ; or else on an aspect which suits the manufacturer's purpose, that of producing an article for which there is a vulgar demand. Meanwhile the reality overflows these purposes at every pore. Our usual purpose with it, our commonest title for it, and the properties which this title suggests, have in reality nothing sacramental. They characterize us more than they characterize the thing. But we are so stuck in our prejudices, so petrified intellectually, that to our vulgarest names, with their suggestions, we ascribe an eternal and exclusive worth. The thing must be, essentially, what the vulgarest name connotes ; what less usual names connote, it can be only in an * accidental ' and relatively unreal sense. ^

* Readers brought up on Popular Science may think that the moleculai Locke undermined the fallacy. But none of his successors, so far as I know, have radically escaped it, or seen that the only meaning of essence is teleological, and that classification and conception are purely teleological weapons of the mind. The essence of a thing is that one of its properties which is so important for my interests that in comparison with it I may neglect the rest. Amongst those other things which have this important property I class it, after this property I name it, as a thing endowed with this property I conceive it ; and whilst so classing, naming, and conceiving it, all other truths about it become to me as naught* The properties which are important vary from man to man and from hour to hour.f Hence divers appellations and

structure of things is their real essence in an absolute sense, and that water is H-O-H more deeply and truly than it is a solvent of sugar or a slaker of thirst. Not a whit ! It is all of these things with equal reality, and the only reason why for the chemist it is H-O-H primarily, and only secondarily the other things, is that/<?r his purpose of deduction and compendious definition the H-O-H aspect of it is the more useful one to bear in mind.

* " We find that we take for granted irresistibly that each kind [of thing] has some character which distinguishes it from other classes. . . . What is the foundation of this postulate ? What is the ground of this assumption that there must exist a definition which we have never seen, and which perhaps no one has seen in a satisfactory form ?....! reply that our conviction that there must needs be characteristic marks by which things can be defined in words is founded upon the assumption of th£ necessary possibility of reasoning." (W. Whewell : Hist, of Scientific Ideas, bk. viii. chap.

f I may quote a passage from an article entitled ' The Sentiment of Rationality,' published in vol. iv of Mind, 1879 : "What is a conception? It is a teleological instrument. It is a partial aspect of a thing which for our purpose we regard as its essential aspect, as the representative of the entire thing. In comparison with this aspect, whatever other properties and qualities the thing may have are unimportant accidents which we may without blame ignore. But the essence, the ground of conception, varies with the end we have in view. A substance like oil has as many different essences as it has uses to different individuals. One man conceives it as a combustible, another as a lubricator, another as a food ; the chemist thinks of it as a hydrocarbon ; the furniture-maker as a darkener of wood ; the speculator as a commodity whose market-price to-day is this and to-morrow that. The soap-boiler, the physicist, the clothes scourer severally ascribe to it other essences in relation to their needs. Ueberweg's doctrine that the essential quality of a thing is the

conceptions for the same thing. But many objects of daily nse — as paper, ink, butter, horse-car — have properties of such constant unwavering importance, and have such stereotyped names, that we end by believing that to conceive them in those ways is to conceive them in the only true way. Those are no truer ways of conceiving them than any others ; they are only more important ways, more frequently serviceable ways.* quality of most worth is strictly true ; but Ueberweg has failed to note that the worth is wholly relative to the temporary interests of the conceiver. And, even, when his interest is distinctly defined in his own mind, the discrimination of the quality in the object which has the closest connection with it is a thing which no rules can teach. The only a priori advice that can be given to a man embarking on life with a certain purpose is the somewhat barren counsel : Be sure that in the circumstances that meet you, you attend to the right ones for your purpose. To pick out the right ones is the measure of the man. ' Millions,' says Hartmann, 'stare at the phenomenon before a genialer jBToj^/ pounces on the concept.' The genius is simply he to whom, when he opens his eyes upon the world, the ' right ' characters are the prominent ones. The fool is he who, with the same purposes as the genius, infallibly gets his attention tangled amid the accidents."

* Only if one of our purposes were itself truer than another, could one of our conceptions become the truer conception. To be a truer purpose, however, our purpose must conform more to some absolute standard of purpose in things to which our purposes ought to conform. This shows that the whole doctrine of essential characters is intimately bound up with a teleological view of the world. Materialism becomes self-contradictory when it denies teleology, and yet in the same breath calls atoms, etc., the essential facts. The world contains consciousness as well as atoms — and the one must be written down as just as essential as the other, in the absence of any declared purpose regarding them on the creator's part, or in the absence of any creator. As far as we ourselves go, the atoms are worth more for purposes of deduction, the consciousness for purposes of inspiration. We may fairly write the Universe in either way, thus : Atomsproducing-consciousness ; or CoNSCiousNESS-produced-by-atoms. Atoms alone, or consciousness alone, are precisely equal mutilations of the truth. If, without believing in a God, I still continue to talk of what the world * essentially is, ' I am just as much entitled to define it as a place in which my nose itches, or as a place where at a certain corner I can get a mess of oysters for twenty cents, as to call it an evolving nebula differentiating and integrating itself. It is hard to say which of the three abstractions is the more rotten or miserable substitute for the world's concrete fulness. To conceive it merely as * God's work ' would be a similar mutilation of it, so loi^ as we said not what God, or what kind of work. The only real truth about the world, apart from particular purposes, is the total truth.

So much for what is implied, when the reasoner conceives of the fact S before him as a case of which the essence is to be M. One word now as to what is involved in M's having properties, consequences, or implications, and we can go back to the study of the reasoning process again. M is not a concrete, or * self-sufficient,' as Mr. Clay would say. It is an abstract character which may exist, embedded with other characters, in many concretes. Whether it be the character of being a writing surface, of being made in America or China, of being eight inches square, or of being in a certain part of space, this is always true of it. Now we might conceive of this being a world in which all such general characters were independent of each other, so that if any one of them were found in a subject S, we never could be sure what others would be found alongside of it. On one occasion there might be P with M, on another Q, and so on. In such a world there would be no general sequences or coexistences, and no universal laws. Each grouping would be sui generis ; from the experience of the past no future could be predicted ; and reasoning, as we shall presently see, would be an impossibility.

But the world we live in is not one of this sort. Though many general characters seem indifferent to each other, there remain a number of them which affect constant habits of mutual concomitance or repugance. They involve or imply each other. One of them is a sign to us that the other will be found. They hunt in couples, as it were ; and such a proposition as that M is P, or includes P, or precedes or accompanies P, if it prove to be true in one instance, may very likely be true in every other instance which we meet. This is, in fact, a world in which general laws obtain, in which universal propositions are true, and in which reasoning is therefore possible. Fortunately for us : for since we cannot handle things as wholes, but only by conceiving them through some general character which for the time we call their essence, it would be a great pity if the matter ended there, and if the general character, once picked out Mui in our possession, helped us to no farther advance. In

Chapter XXVIII we shall have again to consider this harmony between our reasoning faculty and the world in which its lot is cast.* To revert now to our symbolic representation of the reasoning process : M is discerned and picked out for the time being to be the essence of the concrete fact, phenomenon, or reality, S. But M in this world of ours is inevitably conjoined with P ; so that P is the next thing that we may expect to find conjoined with the fact 8. We may conclude or infer P, through the intermediation of the M which our sagacity began by discerning, when S came before it, to be the essence of the case.

Now note that if P have any value or importance for us, M was a very good character for our sagacity to pounce upon and abstract. If, on the contrary, P were of no importance, some other character than M would have been a better essence for us to conceive of S by. Psychologically, as a rule, P overshadows the process from the start. We are seeking P, or something like P. But the bare totality of S does not yield it to our gaze ; and casting about for some point in S to take hold of, which will lead us to P, we hit, if we are sagacious, upon M, because M happens to be just the character which is knit up with P. Had we wished Q instead of P, and were N a property of S conjoined with Q, we ought to have ignored M, noticed N, and conceived of S as a sort of N exclusively.

Reasoning is always for a subjective interest, to attain some particular conclusion, or to gratify some special curiosity. It not only breaks up the datum placed before it and conceives it abstractly ; it must conceive it rightly too ; and conceiving it rightly means conceiving it by that one particular abstract character which leads to the one * Compare Lotze, Metaphysik, §§ 58, 67, for some instructive remarks on ways in which the world's constitution might diller from what it actu allj is. Compare also Chapter XXYIII.

sort of conclusion which it is the reasoner's temporary interest to attain.* The results of reasoning may be hit upon by accident. The stereoscope was actually a result of reasoning; it is conceivable, however, that a man playing with pictures and mirrors might accidentally have hit upon it. Cats have been known to open doors by pulling latches, etc. But no cat, if the latch got out of order, could open the door again, unless some new accident of random fumbling taught her to associate some new total movement with the total phenomenon of the closed door. A reasoning man, however, would open the door by first analyzing the hindrance. He would ascertain what particular feature of the door was wrong. The lever, e.g., does not raise the latch sufficiently from its slot — case of insufficient elevation — raise door bodily on hinges ! Or door sticks at top by friction against lintel — press it bodily down! Now it is obvious that a child or an idiot might without this reasoning learn the ride for opening that particular door. I remember a clock which the maid-servant had discovered would not go unless it were supported so as to tilt slightly forwards. She had stumbled on this method after many weeks of groping. The reason of the stoppage was the friction of the pendulumbob against the back of the clock-case, a reason which an educated man would have analyzed out in five minutes. I