The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2

* In an article entitled ' Great Men, Great Thoughts, and the Environment,' published in the Atlantic Monthly for October 1880, the reader will find some ampler illustrations of these remarks. I have there tried to show that both mental and social evolution are to be conceived after the Darwinian fashion, and that the function of the environment properly so called is much more that of selecting forms, produced by invisible forces, XhnM producing of such forms, — producing being the only function thought of by the pre-Darwinian evolutionists, and the only one on which stress is laid by such contemporary ones as Mr. Spencer and Mr. Allen.

tion of its truth is far more like a religious faith than like assent to a demonstration. The only cohesions which experience in the literal sense of the word produces in our mind are, as we contended some time back, the proximate laws of nature, and habitudes of concrete things, that heat melts ice, that salt preserves meat, that fish die out of water, and the like.* Such * empirical truths ' as these we * " It is perfectly true that our world of experience begins with such associations as lead us to expect that what has happened to us will happen again. These associations lead the habe to look for milk from its nurse and not from its father, the child to believe that the apple he sees will taste good; and whilst they make him wish for it, they make him fear the bottle which contains his bitter medicine. But whereas a part of these associations grows confirmed by frequent repetition, another part is destroyed by contradictory experiences; and the world becomes divided for us into two provinces, one in which we are at home and anticipate with confidence always the same sequences; another filled with alternating, variable, accidental occurrences.

"... Accident is, in a wide sphere, such an every-day matter that we need not be surprised if it sometimes invades the territory where order is the rule. And one personification or another of the capricious power of chance easily helps us over the diflSculties which further reflection might find in the exceptions. Yes, indeed, Exception has a peculiar fascination; it is a subject of astonishment, a Qavjua, and the credulity with which in this first stage of pure association we adopt our supposed rules is matched by the equal credulity with which we adopt the miracles that interfere with them.

" The whole history of popular beliefs about nature refutes the notion that the thought of an universal physical order can possibly have arisen through the purely passive reception and association of particular perceptions. Indubitable as it is that all men infer from known cases to unknown, it is equally certain that this procedure, if restricted to the phenomenal materials that spontaneously offer themselves, would never have led to the belief in a general uniformity, but only to the belief that law and lawlessness rule the world in motley alternation. From the point of view of strict empiricism nothing exists but the sum of particular perceptions with their coincidences on the one hand, their contradictions on the other.

" That there is more order in the world than appears at first sight is not discovered till the order is looked for. The first impulse to look for it proceeds from practical needs: where ends must be attained, we must know irusiworthy means which infallibly possess a property or produce a result. But the practical need is only the first occasion for our reflection on the conditions of a true knowledge; even were there no such need, motives would still be present to carry us beyond the stage of mere association. For not with an equal interest, or rather with an equal lack of interest, does man contemplate those natural processes in which like is joined to like, and those in which like and unlike are joined; the former processes

admitted to form an enormous part of human wisdom. The * scientific ' truths have to harmonize with these truths, or be given up as useless ; but they arise in the mind in no such passive associative way as that in which the simpler truths arise. Even those experiences which are used to prove a scientific truth are for the most part artificial experiences of the laboratory gained after the truth itself has been conjectured. Instead of experiences engendering the ' inner relations,' the inner relations are what engender the experiences here.

What happens in the brain after experience has done its utmost is what happens in every material mass which has been fashioned by an outward force, — in every pudding or mortar, for example, which I may make with my hands. The fashioning from without brings the elements into collocations which set new internal forces free to exert their effects in turn. And the random irradiations and resettlements of our ideas, which supervene upon experience^ and constitute our free mental play, are due entirely to these secondary internal processes, which vary enormously from brain to brain, even though the brains be exposed to exactly the same ' outer relations.' The higher thoughtprocesses owe their being to causes which correspond far more to the sourings and fermentations of dough, the setting of mortar, or the subsidence of sediments in mixtures, than to the manipulations by which these physical aggregates came to be compounded. Our study of similar association and reasoning taught us that the whole superiority of man depended on the facility with which in his brain the paths worn by the most frequent outer cohesions could be ruptured. The causes of the instability, the reasons why now this point and now that become in him the seat of rupture,

harmonize with the conditions of his thinking, the latter do not; in the former his concepts, judgments, inferences apply to realities, in the latter they have no such application. And thus the intellectual satisfac tion which at first comes to him without reflection, at last excites in him the conscious wish to find realized throughout the entire phenomenal world those rational continuities, uniformities, and necessities which are the fundamental element and guiding principle of his own thought." (C. Sigwart- Logik. II 380-2.)

we saw to be entirely obscure. (Vol. I. p. 580 ; Yol. II. p. 364.) The only clear thing about the peculiarity seems to be its interstitial character, and the certainty that no mere appeal to man's * experience ' suffices to explain it. When we pass from scientific to aesthetic and ethical systems, every one readily admits that, although the elements are matters of experience, the peculiar forms of relation into which they are woven are incongruent with the order of passively received experience. The world of aesthetics and ethics is an ideal world, a Utopia, a world which the outer relations persist in contradicting, but which we as stubbornly persist in striving to make actual. Why do we thus invincibly crave to alter the given order of nature ? Simply because other relations among things are far more interesting to us and more charming than the mere rates of frequency of their time- and space-conjunctions. These other relations are all secondary and brain-born, ' spontaneous variations ' most of them, of our sensibility, whereby certain elements of experience, and certain arrangements in time and space, have acquired an agreeableiess which otherwise would not have been felt. It is true that habitual arrangements ma}^ also become agreeable. But this agreeableuess of the merely habitual is felt to be a mere ape and counterfeit of real inward fitness ; and one sign of intelligence is never to mistake the one for the other.

There are then ideal and inward relatione amongst the objects of our thought ivhich can in no intelligible sense whatever be interpreted as reproductions of the order of outer experience. In the aesthetic and ethical realms they conflict with its order — the early Christian with his kingdom of heaven, and the contemporary anarchist with his abstract dream of justice, will tell you that the existing order must perish, root and branch, ere the true order can come. Now the peculiarity of those relations among the objects of our thought which are dubbed * scientific ' is this, that although they no more are inward reprodvx^tions of the outer order than the ethical and aesthetic relations are, yet they do not conflict with that order, but, once having sprung up by the play of the inward forces, are found — some of them at least, namely the only ones which have survived long enough to

be matters of record — to be congruent with the time- and space-relations which our impressions affect. In other words, though nature's materials lend themselves slowly and discouragingly to our translation of them into ethical forms, but more readily into aesthetic forms ; to translation into scientific forms they lend themselves with relative ease and completeness. The translation, it is true, will probably never be ended. The perceptive order does not give way, nor the right conceptive substitute for it arise, at our bare word of command.^ It is often a deadly fight ; and many a man of science can say, like Johannes Miiller, after an investigation, ^ Es Tdebt Blut an der Arbeit.'' But victory after victory makes us sure that the essential doom of our enemy is defeat, f

f The aspiration to be ' scientific ' is such an idol of the tribe to the present generation, is so sucked in with his mother's milk by every one of us, that we find it hard to conceive of a creature who should not feel it, and harder still to treat it freely as the altogether peculiar and one-sided subjective interest which it is. But as a matter of fact, few even of the cultivated members of the race have shared it ; it was invented but a generation or two ago. In the middle ages it meant only impious magic ; and the way in which it even now strikes orientals is charmingly shown in the letter of a Turkish cadi to an English traveller asking him for statistical information, which Sir A. Layard prints at the end of his ' Nineveh and Babylon.' The document is too full of edification not to be given in full. It runs thus :

" The thing you ask of me is both difllcult and useless. Although I tave passed all my days iu this place, I have neither counted the houses flor inquired into the number of the inhabitants; and as to what one person loads on his mules and the other stows away in the bottom of his ship, that is no business of mine. But, above all, as to the previous history of this city, God only knows the amount of dirt and confusion that the infidels may have eaten before the coming of the sword of Islam. It were unprofitable for us to inquire into it.

" O my soul ! O my lamb 1 seek not after the things which concern thee not. Thou camest unto us and we welcomed thee : go in peace. "Of a truth thou hast spoken many words • and there is no harm done, r)r the speaker is one and the listener is another. After the fashion of thy people thou hast wandered from one place to another, until thou art happy ;nd content in none. We (prnise be to God) were born here, an(i never j^esire to quit it. Is it possible, then, that the idea of a general intercourse'

I have now stated in general terms the relation of the natural sciences to experience strictly so called, and shall complete what I have to say by reverting to the subject on a later page. At present I will pass to the so-called pure or a priori sciences of Classification, Logic, and Mathematics. My thesis concerning these is that they are even less than the natural sciences effects of the order of the world as it comes to our experience. The puee sciences expbess besults OF COMPARISON exclusively ; comparison is not a conceivable effect of the order in which outer impressions are experienced — it is one of the house-horn (p. 627) portions of our mental structure; therefore the pure scienx^es form a body of propositions ivith whose genesis experience has nothing to do.

First, consider the nature of comparison. The relatione of resemblance and difference among things have nothing to do with the time- and space-order in which we may experience the latter. Suppose a hundred beings created by God and gifted with the faculti&s of memory and comparison. Suppose that upon each of them the same lot of sensations are imprinted, but in different orders. Let some between mankind should make any impression on our understandings? God forbid 1

'* Listen, O my son I There is no wisdom equal unto the belief in God I He created the world, and shall we liken ourselves unto Him in seeking to penetrate into the mysteries of His creation ? Shall we say, Behold this star spinneth round that star, and this other star with a tail goeth and Cometh in so many years I Let it go I He from whose hand it came will guide and direct it. ' ' But thou wilt say unto me, Stand aside, O man, for I am more learned than thou art, and have seen more things. If thou tbinkest that thou art in this respect better than I am, thou art welcome. I praise God that I seek not that which I require not. Thou art learned in the things I care not for ; and as for that which thou hast seen, I spit upon it. Will much knowledge create thee a double belly, or wilt thou seek Paradise with thine eyes ?

*• O my friend I if thou wilt be happy, say, There is no God but God I Do no evil, and thus wilt thou fear neither man nor death ; foi surely thine hour will come 1 of them have no single sensation more than once. Let gome have this one and others that one repeated. Let every conceivable permutation prevail. And then let the magic-lantern show die out, and keep the creatures in a void eternity, with naught but their memories to muse upon. Inevitably in their long leisure they will begin to play with the items of their experience and rearrange them, make classificatory series of them, place gray between white and black, orange between red and yellow, and trace all other degrees of resemblance and difference. And this new construction will be absolutely identical in all the hundred creatures, the diversity of the sequence of the original experiences having no effect as regards this rearrangement. Any and every form of sequence will give the same result, because the result expresses the relation between the inward natures of the sensations ; and to that the question of their outward succession is quite irrelevant. Black will differ from white just as much in a world in which they always come close together as in one in which they always come far apart ; just as much in one in which they appear rarely as in one in which they appear all the time.

But the advocate of * persistent outer relations * may still return to the charge : These are what make us so sure that white and black differ, he may say ; for in a world where sometimes black resembled white and sometimes differed from it, we could never be so sure. It is because in this world black and white have always differed that the sense of their difference has become a necessary form of thought. The pair of colors on the one hand and the sense of difference on the other, inseparably experienced, not only by ourselves but by our ancestors, have become inseparably connected in the mind. Not through any essential structure of the mind, which made difference the only possible feeling which they could arouse ; no, but because they simply did differ so often that at last they begat in us an impotency to imagine them doing anything else, and made us accept such a fabulous account as that just presented, of creatures to whom a single experience would suffice to make us feel the necessity of this relation.

1 know not whether Mr. Spencer would subscribe to this or not ; — nor do I care, for there are mysteries which press more for solution than the meaning of this vague writer's words. But to me such an explanation of our difference-judgment is absolutely unintelligible. We now Und black and white different, the explanation says, hecause we have always have so found them. But why should we always have so found them ? Why should difference have popped into our heads so invariably with the thought of them ? There must have been either a subjective or an objective reason. The subjective reason can only be that our minds were so constructed that a sense of difference was the only sort of conscious transition possible between black and white; the objective reason can only be that difference was always there, with these colors, outside the mind as an objective fact. The subjective reason explains outer frequency by inward structure, not inward structure by outer frequency; and so surrenders the experiencetheory. The objective reason simply says that if an outer difference is there the mind must needs know it — which is no explanation at all, but a mere appeal to the fact that somehow the mind does know what is there.

The only clear thing to do is to give up the sham of a pretended explanation, and to fall back on the fact that the sense of difference has arisen, in some natural manner doubtless, but in a manner which we do not understand It was by the back-stairs way, at all events ; and, from the very first, happened to be the only mode of reaction by which consciousness could feel the transition from one term to another of what (in consequeirwe of this very reaction) we BOW call a contrasted pair.

In noticing the differences and resemblances of things, and their degrees, the mind feels its own activity, and has given the name of comparison thereto. It need not compare its materials, but if once roused to do so, it can compare them with but one result, and this a fixed consequence of the nature of the materials themselves. Difference and resemblance are thus relations between ideal objects, or conceptions as such. To learn whether black and white differ,

I need not consult the world of experience at all ; the mere ideas suffice. What I mean by black differs from what 1 mean by white, whether such colors exist extra mentem meam or not. If they ever do so exist, they ivill differ. AVhite things may blacken, but the black of them will differ from the white of them, so long as I mean anything definite by these three words.* / shall now in what foUows caU aU propositions which ectpress time- and space-relations empirical propositions ; and 1 shall give the name of rational propositions to all propositions which express the results of a comparison. The latter denomination is in a sense arbitrary, for resemblance and difference are not usually held to be the only rational relations between things. I will next proceed to show, however, how many other rational relations commonly supposed distinct can be resolved into these, so that my definition of rational propositions will end, I trust, by proving less arbitrary than it now appears to be.

In Chapter XII we saw that the mind can at successive moments mean the same, and that it gradually comes into possession of a stock of permanent and fixed meanings, ideal objects, or conceptions, some of which are universal qualities, like the black and white of oui example, and some, individual things. We now see that not only are the objects permanent mental possessions, but the results of their comparison are permanent too. The objects and their differences together form an immutable system. The same objects, compared in the same way, always give the same results ;

* " Though a man in a fever should from sugar have a bitter taste which at another time would produce a sweet one, yet the idea of bitter in that man's mind would be as clear and distinct from the idea of sweet as if he had tasted only gall. Nor does it make any more confusion between the two ideas of sweet and bitter that the same sort of body produces at one time one and at another time another idea by the taste, than it makes a confusion in two ideas of white and sweet, or white and round, that the same piece of sugar produces them both in the mind at the same time. * Locke's Essay, bk. li. ch. xi. § 8.

if the result be not the same, then the objects are not those originally meant. This last principle, which we may call the axiom of conslant result y holds good throughout all our mental operations, not only when we compare, but when we add, dividej class, or infer a given matter in any conceivable way. Its most general expression would be '^the Same operated on in the same way gives the Same.'' In mathematics it takes the form of " equals added to, or subtracted from, equals give equals," and the like. We shall meet with it again.

The next thing which we observe is that the operation of comparing may he repeated on its own results ; in other words, that we can think of the various resemblances and differences which we find and compare them with each other, making differences and resemblances of a higher order. jTAe miind thus becomes aware of sets of similar differences, and forms series of terms with the same kind and amount of difference between them, terms which, as they succeed each other, maintain a constant direction of serial inxirease. This sense of constant direction in a series of operations we saw in Chapter XIII (p. 490) to be a cardinal mental fact. "A differs from B differs from C differs from D, etc.," makes a series only when the differences are in the same direction. In any such difference-series all terms differ in just the same way from their predecessors. The numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, . . . the notes of the chromatic scale in music, are familiar examples. As soon as the mind grasps such a series as a whole, it perceives that two terms taken far apart differ more than two terms taken near togethert and that any one term differs more from a remote than from a near successor, and this no matter what the terms may be, or what the sort of difference may be, provided it is always the same sort.

This PKiNciPLE OF MEDIATE COMPARISON might be briefly (though obscurely) expressed by the formula *^more than the more is more than the less '* — the words more and less standing simply for degrees of increase along a constant direction of differences. Such a formula would cover all possible cases, as, earlier than early is earlier than late, worse than bad is worse than good, east of east is east of west ; etc., etc., od libitum.'^ Symbolically, we might write ita8a<&<c<c?.... and say that any number of intermediaries may be expunged without obliging us to alter anything in what remains written.

The principle of mediate comparison is only one form of a law which holds in many series of homogeneously related terms, the law that skipping intermediary terim leaves relations the same. This axiom of skipped intermediaries or of TRANSFERRED RELATIONS occurs, as we soon shall see, in logic as the fundamental principle of inference, in arithmetic as the fundamental property of the numberseries, in geometry as that of the straight line, the plane and the parallel. It seems to be on the whole the broadest and deepest law of man's thought.

In certain lists of terms the result of comparison may be to find no-difference, or equality in place of difference. Here also intermediaries may be skipped, and mediate comparison be carried on with the general result expressed by the axiom of mediate equality ^ " equals of equals are equal," which is the great principle of the mathematical sciences. This too as a result of the mind's mere acuteness, and in utter independence of the order in which experiences come associated together. Symbolically, again : a = b = c:=d . . , with the same consequence as regards expunging terms which we saw before.