The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2

* Von Hartraann devotes a chapter of his ' Philosophy of the Uncon scious ' (English translation, vol. i. p. 72) to proving that they must be both ideas and unconscious. and doubtful whether we should advance our leg if we had no sensation of its movement as executed, and not even a minimal feeling of impulse to set it down. Knitting appears altogether mechanical, and the knitter keeps up her knitting even while she reads or is engaged in lively talk. But if we ask her how this be possible, she will hardly reply that the knitting goes on of itself. She will rather say that she has a feeling of it, that she feels in her hands that she knits and how she must knit, and that therefore the movements of knitting are called forth and regulated by the sensations associated therewithal, even when the attention is called away.

"So of everyone who practises, apparently automatically, alongfamiliar handicraft. The smith turning his tongs as he smites the iron, the carpenter wielding his plane, the lace-maker with her bobbin, the weaver at his loom, all will answer the same question in the same way by saying that they have a feeling of the proper management of the implement in their hands. " In these cases, the feelings which are conditions of the appropriate acts are very faint. But none the less are they necessary. Imagine your hands not feeling; your movements could then only be provoked by ideas, and if your ideas were then diverted away, the movements ought to come to a standstill, which is a consequence that seldom occurs." *

" An idea makes you take, for example, a violin into your left hand. But it is not necessary that your idea remain fixed on the contrac tion of the muscles of the left hand and fingers in order that the violin may continue to be held fast and not let fall. The sensations themselves which the holding of the instrument awakens in the hand, since they are associated with the motor impulse of grasping, are suf ficient to cause this impulse, which then lasts as long as the feeling itself lasts, or until the impulse is inhibited by the idea of some antag onistic motion."

And the same may be said of the manner in which the right hand holds the bow : " It sometimes happens, in beginning these simultaneous combina tions, that one movement or impulse will cease if the consciousness turn particularly toward another, because at the outset the guiding sensations must all be strongly felt. The bow will perhaps slip from the fingers, because some of the muscles have relaxed. But the slipping is a cause of new sensations starting up in the hand, so that the attention is in a moment brought back to the grasping of the bow.

' ' The following experiment shows this well : When one begins to play on the violin, to keep him from raising his right elbow in playing a book is placed under his right armpit, which he is ordered to hold fast by keeping the upper arm tight against his body. The muscular feelings, and feelings of contact connected with the book, provoke an impulse to press it tight. But often it happens that the beginner, whose attention gets absorbed in the production of the notes, lets drop the book. Later, however, this never happens; the faintest sensations of contact suffice to awaken the impulse to keep it in its place, and the attention may be wholly absorbed by the notes and the fingering with the left hand. The simultaneous combination of movements is thus in the first instance conditioned by the facility with which in us, along side of intellectual processes, processes of inattentive feeling may still

This brings us by a very natural transition to the ethical implications of the law of habit. They are numerous and momentous. Dr. Carpenter, from whose ' Mental Physiol ogy ' we have quoted, has so prominently enforced the principle that our organs grow to the way in which they have been exercised, and dwelt upon its consequences, that his book almost deserves to be called a work of edification, on this account alone. We need make no apology, then, for tracing a few of these consequences ourselves :

" Habit a second nature ! Habit is ten times nature," the Duke of Wellington is said to have exclaimed ; and the degree to which this is true no one can probably appreciate as well as one who is a veteran soldier himself. The daily drill and the years of discipline end by fashioning a man completely over again, as to most of the possibilities of his conduct. " There is a story, which is credible enough, though it may not be true, of a practical joker, who, seeing a discharged veteran carrying home his dinner, suddenly called out, * Attention ! ' where upon the man instantly brought his hands down, and lost his mutton and potatoes in the gutter. The drill had been thorough, and its effects had become embodied in the man's nervous structure." t

* 'Der menschliche Wille,' p. 439. The last sentence is rather freely translated — the sense is uualtered. horses, seem to be machines almost pure and simple, undoubtingly, unhesitatingly doing from minute to minute the duties they have been taught, and giving no sign that the possibility of an alternative ever suggests itself to their mind. Men grown old in prison have asked to be read mitted after being once set free. In a railroad accident to a travelling menagerie in the United States some time in 1884, a tiger, whose cage had broken open, is said to have emerged, but presently crept back again, as if too much bewildered by his new responsibilities, so that he was with out difficulty secured.

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. It keeps the fisherman and the deck-hand at sea through the winter ; it holds the miner in his darkness, and nails the countryman to his log-cabin and his lonely farm through all the months of snow ; it protects us from invasion by the natives of the desert and the frozen zone. It dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again. It keeps different social strata from mixing. Already at the age of twenty-five you see the professional mannerism settling down on the young commercial traveller, on the young doctor, on the young minister, on the young counsellor-at-law. You see the little lines of cleavage running through the character, the tricks of thought, the prejudices, the ways of the ' shop,' in a word, from which the man can by-and-by no more escape than his coat-sleeve can suddenly fall into a new set of folds. On the whole, it is best he should not escape. It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.

If the period between twenty and thirty is the critical one in the formation of intellectual and professional habits, the period below twenty is more important still for the fix ing of personal habits, properly so called, such as vocaliza tion and pronunciation, gesture, motion, and address. Hardly ever is a language learned after twenty spoken without a foreign accent ; hardly ever can a youth trans ferred to the society of his betters unlearn the nasality and other vices of speech bred in him by the associations of his growing years. Hardly ever, indeed, no matter how much money there be in his pocket, can he even learn to dress like a gentleman-born. The merchants offer their wares as eagerly to him as to the veriest ' swell,' but he simply cannot buy the right things. An invisible law, as strong as gravitation, keeps him within his orbit, arrayed this year as he was the last; and how his better-bred acquaintances contrive to get the things they wear will be for him a mystery till his dying day.

j nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. It is to fund * and capitalize our acquisitions, aiid live at ease upon the interest of the fund. For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we cant and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the '• plague. The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every

, cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express ' volitional deliberation. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. If there be such daily duties not yet ingrained in any one of my readers, let him begin this very hour to set the matter right. In Professor Bain's chapter on 'The Moral Habits' there are some admirable practical remarks laid down. Two great maxims emerge from his treatment. The first

is tliat in the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an old one, we must take care to launch ourselves with as A strong and decided an initiative as possible. Accumulate all the possible circumstances which shall re-enforce the right motives ; put yourself assiduously in conditions that en courage the new way ; make engagements incompatible with the old ; take a public pledge, if the case allows ; in short, envelop your resolution with every aid you know. This will give your new beginning such a momentum that the temptation to break down will not occur as soon as it otherwise might ; and every day during which a breakdown is postponed adds to the chances of its not occurring at all. The second maxim is : Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is care fully winding up ; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again. Continuity of training is the great means of making the nervous system act infallibly right. As Professor Bain says :

"The peculiarity of the moral habits, contradistinguishing them from the intellectual acquisitions, is the presence of two hostile powers, one to be gradually raised into the ascendant over the other. It is necessary, above all things, in such a situation, never to lose a battle. Every gain on the wrong side undoes the effect of many conquests on the right. The essential precaution, therefore, is so to regulate the ' two opposing powers that the one may have a series of uninterrupted successes, until repetition has fortified it to such a degree as to enable it to cope with the opposition, under any circumstances. This is the theoretically best career of mental progress."

The need of securing success at the outset is imperative. Failure at first is apt to dampen the energy of all future attempts, whereas past experience of success nerves one to future vigor. Goethe says to a man who consulted him about an enterprise but mistrusted his own powers : "Ach ! you need only blow on your hands ! " And the remark illustrates the effect on Goethe's spirits of his own habitu ally successful career. Prof. Baumann, from whom I bor row the anecdote,* says that the collapse of barbarian

* See the admirable passage about success at the outset, in his Handbuch der Moral (1878), pp. 38-43. nations when Europeans come among them is due to their despair of ever succeeding as the new-comers do in the larger tasks of life. Old ways are broken and new ones not formed. The question of 'tapering-off,' in abandoning such habits as drink and opium-indulgence, comes in here, and is a question about which experts differ within certain limits, and in regard to what may be best for an individual case. In the main, however, all expert opinion would agree that abrupt acquisition of the new habit is the best way, 'if there be a real possibility of carrying it out. We must be careful not to give the will so stiff a task as to in sure its defeat at the very outset; but, provided one can stand it, a sharp period of suffering, and then a free time, is the best thing to aim at, whether in giving up a habit like that of opium, or in simply changing one's hours of rising or of work. It is surprising how soon a desire will die of inanition if it be never fed.

" One must first learn, unmoved, looking neither to the right nor left, to walk firmly on the straight and narrow path, before one oan begin 'to make one's self over again.' He who every day makes a fresh resolve is like one who, arriving at the edge of the ditch he is to leap, forever stops and returns for a fresh run. Without unbroken .advance there is no such thing as accumulation of the ethical forces possible, and to make this possible, and to exercise us and habituate us in it, is the sovereign blessing of regular work." *

A third maxim may be added to the preceding pair: Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolu tion you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain. It is not in the moment of their forming, but in the moment of their producing motor effects, that resolves and aspira tions communicate the new 'set' to the brain. As the author last quoted remarks : "The actual presence of the practical opportunity alone furnishes the fulcrum upon which the lever can rest, by means of which the moral will may multiply its strength, and raise itself aloft. He who has no solid ground to press against will never get beyond the stage of empty gesture-making."

No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may pos sess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be, if one have not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to ^act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better. With mere good intentions, hell is proverbially paved. And this is an obvious consequence of the prin ciples we have laid down. A ' character,' as J. S. Mill says, lis a completely fashioned will' ; and a will, in the sense in which he means it, is an aggregate of tendencies to act in a firm and prompt and definite way upon all the principal emergencies of life. A tendency to act only becomes effec tively ingrained in us in proportion to the uninterrupted frequency with which the actions actually occur, and the brain ' grows ' to their use. Every time a resolve or a fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing practical fruit is worse than a chance lost; it works so as positively to hinder future resolutions and emotions from taking the normal path of discharge. There is no more contemptible type of human character than that of the nerveless senti mentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering - sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed. Rousseau, inflaming all the mothers oft France, by his eloquence, to follow Nature and nurse their babies themselves, while he sends his own children to the foundling hospital, is the classical example of what I mean. But every one of us in his measure, whenever, after glow ing for an abstractly formulated Good, he practically ignores some actual case, among the squalid ' other partic ulars ' of which that same Good lurks disguised, treads straight on Rousseau's path.

All Goods are disguised by the vulgarity of their concomitants, in this work-a-day world ; but woe to him who can only recognize them when he thinks them in their pure and abstract form ! The habit of excessive novel-reading and theatre-going will produce true monsters in this line. The weeping of a Russian lady over the fictitious personages in the play, while her coach man is freezing to death on his seat outside, is the sort of • thing that everywhere happens on a less glaring scale. Even the habit of excessive indulgence in music, for those who are neither performers themselves nor musically gifted

enough to take it in a purely intellectual way, has probably a relaxing effect upon the character. One becomes filled with emotions which habitually pass without prompting to any deed, and so the inertly sentimental condition is kept up. The remedy would be, never to suffer one's self to have an emotion at a concert, without expressing it after ward in some active way.* Let the expression be the least thing in the world — speaking genially to one's aunt, or giving up one's seat in a horse-car, if nothing more heroic ' offers — but let it not fail to take place.

These latter cases make us aware that it is not simply particular lines of discharge, but also general forms of dis charge, that seem to be grooved out by habit in the brain. Just as, if we let our emotions evaporate, they get into a way of evaporating ; so there is reason to suppose that if we often flinch from making an effort, before we know it the effort-making capacity will be gone ; and that, if we suffer the wandering of our attention, presently it will wander all the time. Attention and effort are, as we shall see later,

*** /but two names for the same psychic fact. To what brainprocesses they correspond we do not know. The strongest reason for believing that they do depend on brain-processes at all, and are not pure acts of the spirit, is just this fact, that they seem in some degree subject to the law of habit, which is a material law. As a final practical maxim, rela tive to these habits of the will, we may, then, offer some- I I thing like this : Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematic ally ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do ' every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained Ho stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insur ance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a return. But if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has

* See for remarks on this subject a readable article by Miss V. Scudde* on 'Musical Devotees aiid Morals/ in the Andover Keview for January daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, j ^ j^ energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. ) He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast. The physiological study of mental conditions is thus the most powerful ally of hortatory ethics. The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually \/) X) fashioning our characters in the wrong way. Could the / young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their con duct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. The drunken Kip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, 'I won't count ( / this time ! ' Well ! he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it ; but it is being counted none the less. Down among his nerve-cells and fibres the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes. Nothing v\re ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out. Of course, this has its good side as well as its bad one. As we become permanent drunkards by so many separate drinks, so wre become saints in the moral, and authorities and experts in the practical and scientific spheres, by so many separate f acts and hours of work. Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working- ^/ day, he may safely leave the final result to itself. He can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morn ing, to find himself one of the competent ones of his gen eration, in whatever pursuit he may have singled out. Silently, between all the details of his business, the poiver oj ^ judging in all that class of matter will have built itself up within him as a possession that will never pass away.

' Young people should know this truth in advance. The ignorance of it has probably engendered more discourage ment and faint-lieartedness in youths embarking on arduous careers than all other causes put together. IN describing the functions of the hemispheres a short way back, we used language derived from both the bodily and the mental life, saying now that the animal made inde terminate and unforeseeable reactions, and anon that he was swayed by considerations of future good and evil ; treating his hemispheres sometimes as the seat of mem ory and ideas in the psychic sense, and sometimes talk ing of them as simply a complicated addition to his reflex machinery. This sort of vacillation in the point of view is a fatal incident of all ordinary talk about these questions ; but I must now settle my scores with those readers to whom I already dropped a word in passing (see page 24, note) and who have probably been dissatisfied with my conduct ever since.

Suppose we restrict our view to facts of one and the same plane, and let that be the bodily plane : cannot all the out ward phenomena of intelligence still be exhaustively de scribed ? Those mental images, those ' considerations,' whereof we spoke, — presumably they do not arise without neural processes arising simultaneously with them, and presumably each consideration corresponds to a process sui generis, and unlike all the rest. In other words, however numerous and delicately differentiated the train of ideas may be, the train of brain-events that runs alongside of it must in both respects be exactly its match, and we must postulate a neural machinery that offers a living counterpart for every shading, however fine, of the history of its owner's mind. Whatever degree of complication the latter may reach, the complication of the machinery must be quite as extreme, otherwise we should have to admit that there may be mental events to which no brain-events correspond,

But such an admission as this the physiologist is reluctant to make. It would violate all his beliefs. ' No psychosis \ without neurosis,' is one form which the principle of con- [ tinuity takes in his mind. But this principle forces the physiologist to make still another step. If neural action is as complicated as mind ; and if in the sympathetic system and lower spinal cord we see what, so far as we know, is unconscious neural action executing deeds that to all outward intent may be called intelligent ; what is there to hinder us from supposing that even where we know consciousness to be there, the still more complicated neural action which we believe to be its inseparable companion is alone and of itself the real agent / ^ of whatever intelligent deeds may appear ? " As actions of a certain degree of complexity are brought about by mere mechanism, why may not actions of a still greater degree of complexity be the result of a more refined mechanism ?" The conception of reflex action is surely one of the best conquests of physiological theory ; why not be radical with it ? Why not say that just as the spinal cord is a machine with few reflexes, so the hemispheres are a machine with many, and that that is all the difference ? The principle of continuity would press us to accept this view.

But what on this view could be the function of the con sciousness itself ? Mechanical function it would have none. The sense-organs would awaken the brain-cells ; these would awaken each other in rational and orderly sequence, until the time for action came ; and then the last brain« • vibration would discharge downward into the motor tracts. ( But this would be a quite autonomous chain of occur rences, and whatever mind went with it would be there only as an ' epiphenomenon,' an inert spectator, a sort of * foam, aura, or melody ' as Mr. Hodgson says, whose oppo sition or whose furtherance would be alike powerless over the occurrences themselves. When talking, some time ago, < we ought not, accordingly, as physiologists, to have said any thing about ' considerations ' as guiding the animal. We j ought to have said ' paths left in the hemispherical cortex ' by former currents,' and nothing more.

consistently physiological point of view, that it is quite wonderful to see how late it was stumbled on in philosophy, and how few people, even when it has been explained to them, fully and easily realize its import. Much of the polemic writing against it is by men who have as }^et failed ' k> take it into their imaginations. Since this has been the case, it seems worth while to devote a few more words to making it plausible, before criticising it ourselves.

To Descartes belongs the credit of having first been bold enough to conceive of a completely self-sufficing nervous mechanism which should be able to perform complicated and apparently intelligent acts. By a singularly arbitrary \ jj restriction, however, Descartes stopped short at man, and while contending that in beasts the nervous machinery was all, he held that the higher acts of man were the result of the agency of his rational soul. The opinion that beasts have no consciousness at all was of course too para doxical to maintain itself long as anything more than a curious item in the history of philosophy. And with its i, abandonment the very notion that the nervous system per se might work the work of intelligence, which was an integral, though detachable part of the whole theory, seemed also to slip out of men's conception, until, in this century, the elaboration of the doctrine of reflex action made it possible and natural that it should again arise. But it was not till 1870, I believe, that Mr. Hodgson made the decisive step, by saying that feelings, no matter how intensely they may be present, can have no causal efficacy whatever, and com paring them to the colors laid on the surface of a mosaic, of which the events in the nervous system are represented by the stones.* Obviously the stones are held in place by each other and not by the several colors which they support.