The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2

* As one example out of a thousand of exceptionally delicate idiosyncrasy in this regard, take this: "I must quit society. I would rather undergo twice the danger from beasts and ten times the danger from rocks. It is not pain, it is not death, that I dread, — it is the hatred of a man; there is something in it so shocking that I would rather submit to any injury than incur or increase the hatred of a man by revenging it. ... . Another suflScient reason for suicide is that I was this morning out of temper with Mrs. Douglas (for no fault of hers). I did not betray myself in the least, but I reflected that to be exposed to the possibility of such an event once a year, was evil enough to render life intolerable. The disgrace of using an impatient word is to me overpowering." (Elton Hammond, quoted in Henry Crabb Robinson's Diary, vol. i. p. 424.)

t Compare H. Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics, bk. m. chap. xm. § 8. in not being themselves to thank or blame for their natural gifts, in having the same desires and pains and pleasures, in short in a host of fundamental relations. Hence, iftheae things he our essence^ we should be substitutable for other men, and they for us, in any proposition in which either of us is involved. The more fundamental and common the essence chosen, and the more simple the reasoning,* the more wildly radical and unconditional will the justice be which is aspired to. Life is one long struggle betweei conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases, and opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive perception of them as individual facts. The logical stickler for justice always seems pedantic and mechanical to the man who goes by tact and the particular instance, and who usually makes a poor show at argument. Sometimes the abstract conceiver's way is better, sometimes that of the man of instinct. But just as in our study of reasoning we found it impossible to lay down any mark whereby to distinguish right conception of a concrete case from confusion (see pp. 336, 350), so here we can give no general rule for deciding when it is morally useful to treat a concrete case as sui generis, and when to lump it with others in an abstract class. t

* A gentleman told me that he had a conclusive argument for opening the Harvard Medical School to women. It was this: "Are not women human ?"— which major premise of course had to be granted. " Then are they not entitled to all the rights of humanity ?" My friend said that he had never met anyone who could successfully meet this reasoning. f You reach the Mephistophelian point of view as well as the point of view of justice by treating cases as if they belonged rigorously to abstract classes. Pure rationalism, complete immunity from prejudice, consists in refusing to see that the case before one is absolutely unique. It is always possible to treat the country of one's nativity, the house of one's fathers, the bed in which one's mother died, nay, the mother herself if need be, on a naked equality with all other specimens of so many respective genera. It shows the world in a clear frosty light from which all fuliginous mists of affection, all swamp-lights of sentimentality, are absent. Straight and immediate action becomes easy then — witness a Napoleon's or a Frederick's career. But the question always remains, ' ' Are not the mists and vapors wm'th retaining?" The illogical refusal to treat certain concretes by the mere law of their genus has made the drama of human history. The obstinate insisting that tweedledum is not tweedledee is the bone and marrow of life Look at the Jews and the Scots, with their miserable factions and sec

An adequate treatment of the way in which we come by our sesthetic and moral judgments would require a separate chapter, which I cannot conveniently include in this book. Suffice it that these judgments express inner harmonies and discords between objects of thought ; and that whilst outer cohesions frequently repeated will often seem harmonious, all harmonies are not thus engendered, but our feeling of many of them is a secondary and incidental function of the mind. Where harmonies are asserted of the real world, they are obviously mere postulates of rationality, so far as they transcend experience. Such postulates are exemplified by the ethical propositions that the individual and universal good are one, and that happiness and goodness are bound to coalesce in the same subject.

I will now sum up our progress so far by a short summary of the most important conclusions which we have reached. tarian disputes, their loyalties and patriotisms and exclusions, — their annals now become a classic heritage, because men of genius took part and sang in them. A thing is important if any one think it important. The process of history consists in certain folks becoming possessed of the mania that certain special things are important infinitely, whilst other folks cannot agree in the belief. The Shah of Persia refused to be taken to the Derby Day, saying " It is already known to me that one horse can run faster than another." He made the question "which horse?" immaterial. Any question can be made immaterial by subsuming all its answers under a common head. Imagine what college ball-games and races would be if the teams were to forget the absolute distinctness of Harvard from Yale and think of both as One in the higher genus College. The sovereign road to indifference, whether to evils or to goods, lies in the thought of the higher genus. "When we have meat before us," says Marcus Aurelius, seeking indifference to <Aa< kir-l of good, "we must receive the impression that this is the dead body ot a fish, and this is the dead body of a bird or of a pig; and again that this Falernian is only a little grape-juice, and this purple robe some sheep's wool dyed with the blood of a shell-fish. Such, then, are these impressions, and they reach the things themselves and penetrate them, and we see what kind of things they are. Just in the same way ought we to act through life, and where there are things which appear most worthy of our approbation, we ought to lay them bare and look at their worthlessness and strip them of all the words by which they are exalted." (Long's Translation, VI. 13.)

The mind has a native structure in this sense, that certain of its objects, if considered together in certain ways, give definite results ; and that no other ways of considering, and no other results, are possible if the same objects be taken. The results are * relations ' which are all expressed by judgments of subsumption and of comparison. The judgments of subsumption are themselves subsumed under the laws of logic. Those of comparison are expressed in classifications , and in the sciences of arithmetic and geometry.

Mr. Spencer's opinion that our consciousness of classificatory, logical, and mathematical relations between ideas is due to the frequency with which the corresponding ' outer relations ' have impressed our minds, is unintelligible. Our consciousness of these relations, no doubt, has a natural genesis. But it is to be sought rather in the inner forces which have made the brain grow, than in any mere paths of * frequent* association which outer stimuli may have ploughed in that organ.

But let our sense for these relations have arisen as it may, the relations themselves form a fixed system of lines of cleavage, so to speak, in the mind, by which we naturally pass from one object to another ; and the objects connected by these lines of cleavage are often not connected by any regular time- and space-associations. We distinguish, therefore, between the empirical order of things, and this their rational order of comparison ; and, so far as possible, we seek to translate the former into the latter, as being the more congenial of the two to our intellect.

Any classification of things into kinds (especially if the kinds form series, or if they successively involve each other) is a more rational way of conceiving the things than is that mere juxtaposition or separation of them as individuals in time and space which is the order of their crude perception. Any assimilation of things to terms between which such classificatory relations, with their remote and mediate transactions, obtain, is a way of bringing the things into a more rational scheme.

philosophy is only a way of conceiving nature so as to arrange its items along some of the more natural lines of cleavage of our mental structure. Other natural lines are the moral and aesthetic relations. Philosophy is still seeking to conceive things so that these relations also may seem to obtain between them. As long as things have not successfully been so conceived, the moral and aesthetic relations obtain only between entia rationis^ terms in the mind ; and the moral and aesthetic principles remain but postulates, not propositions, with regard to the real world outside.

There is thus a large body of a priori or intuitively necessary truths. As a rule, these are truths of comparison only, and in the first instance they express relations between merely mental terms. Nature, however, acts as if some of her realities were identical with these mental terms. So far as she does this, we can make a priori propositions concerning natural fact. The aim of both science and philosophy is to make the identifiable terms more numerous. So far it has proved easier to identify nature's things with mental terms of the mechanical than with mental terms of the sentimental order.

The widest postulate of rationality is that the world is rationally intelligible throughout, after the pattern of some ideal system. The whole war of the philosophies is over that point of faith. Some say they can see their way already to the rationality; others that it is hopeless in any other but the mechanical way. To some the very fact that there is a world at all seems irrational. Nonentity would be a more natural thing than existence, for these minds. One philosopher at least says that the relatedness of things to each other is irrational anyhow, and that a world of relations can never be made intelligible.*

With this I may be assumed to have completed the programme which I announced at the beginning of the chapter, so far as the theoretic part of our organic mental struc- * "An sick, in seinem eignen Wesen, ist jedes reale Direct mit sich selbat identisch und unhedingt " — that is, the " allgemeinste Eindcht a priori," diadi the " allgemeinsie aus Erfahrung" is '' Alles erkennbare ist bedingt." [A. Spir : Denken und Wirklichkeit. Compare also Herbart and Hegel.)

ture goes. It can be due neither to our own nor to our ancestors' experience. I now pass to those practical parts of our organic mental structure. Things are a little different here ; and our conclusion, though it lies in the same direction, can be by no means as confidently expressed. To be as short and simple as possible, I will take the case of instincts, and, supposing the reader to be familiar with Chapter XXIV, I will plunge in medias res.

As the first alternative is nowadays obsolete, I proceed directly to the second. The two most prominent suggestions as to the way in which instincts may have been evolved are associated with the names of Lamarck and Darwin. Lamarck's statement is that animals have wants ^ and contract, to satisfy them, habits which transform themselves gradually into so many propensities which they can neither resist nor change. These propensities, once acquired, propagate themselves by way of transmission to the young, so that they come to exist in new individuals, anteriorly to all exercise. Thus are the same emotions, the same habits, the same instincts, perpetuated without variation from one generation to another, so long as the outward conditions of existence remain the same.* Mr. Lewes calls this the theory of * lapsed intelligence.' Mr. Spencer's words are clearer than Lamarck's, so that I will quote from him : f

* Philosophie Zoologique, 3me partie, chap, v., 'de I'lnstinct.' f It should be said that Mr. Spencer's most formal utterance about instinct is in his Principles of Psychology, in the chapter under that name. Dr. Romanes has reformulated and criticised the doctrine of this chapter in his Mental Evolution in Animals, chapter xvii. I must confess my inability to state its vagueness in intelligible terms. It treats instincts as a further development of retiex actions, and as forerunners of intelligence, — which is probably true of many. But when it ascribes their formation to the mere 'multiplication of experiences,' which, at first simple, mould the nervous system to ' correspond to outer relations ' by simple reflex actions, and, afterwards complex, make it ' correspond ' by ' compound reflex actions,' it becomes too mysterious to follow without more of a key than is given. The whole thing becomes perfectly simple if we suppose the reflex actions to be accidental inborn idiosyncrasies preserved

''Setting out with the unquestionable assumption, that every new form of emotion making its appearance in the individual or the race is a modification of some pre-existing emotion, or a compounding of several pre-existing emotions, we should be greatly aided by knowing what always are the pre-existing emotions. When, for example, we find that very few, if any, of the lower animals show any love of accumulation, and that this feeling is absent in infancy ; when we see that an infant in arms exhibits anger, fear, wonder, while yet it manifests no desire of permanent possession ; and that a brute which has no acquisitive emotion can nevertheless feel attachment, jealousy, love of approbation,— we may suspect that the feeling which property satisfies is compouiiued out of simpler and deeper feelings. We may conclude that as when a dog hides a bone there must exist in him a prospective gratification of hunger, so there must similarly, at first, in all cases where anything is secured or taken possession of, exist an ideal excitement of the feeling which that thing will gratify. We may further conclude that when the intelligence is such that a variety of objects come to be utilized for different purposes ; when, as among savages, divers wants are satisfied through the articles appropriated for weapons, shelter, clothing, ornament, — the act of appropriating comes to be one constantly involving agreeable associations, and one which is therefore pleasurable, irrespective of the end subserved.

And when, as in civilized life, the property acquired is of a kind not conducing to one order of gratifications, but is capable of ministering to all gratifications, the pleasure of acquiring property grows more distinct from each of the various pleasures subserved — is more completely differentiated into a separate emotion.* It is well known that on newly-discovered islands not inhabited by man, birds are so devoid of fear as to allow themselves to be knocked over with sticks, but that in the course of genera-

* This account of acquisitiveness differs from our own. Without denying the associationist account to be a true description of a great deal of our proprietary feeling, we admitted in addition an entirely primitive form of desire. (See above, p. 430 ff .) The reader must decide as to the plausibilities of the case. Certainly appearances are in favor of there being in us some cupidities quite disconnected with the ulterior uses of the things appropriated. The source of their fascination lies in their appeal to our aesthetic sense, and we wish thereupon simply to own them. Glittering, hard, metallic, odd, pretty things ; curious things especially ; natural objects that look as if they were artificial, or that mimic other objects,— these form a class of things which human beings snatch at as magpies snatch rags. They simply fascinate us. What house does not contain some drawer or cupboard full of senseless odds and ends of this sort, with which nobody knows what to do, but which a blind instinct saves from the ash-barrel ? Witnew people returning from a walk on the sea-shore or in the woods, each carrying some liums natural in the shape of stone or shell, or strip of bark or odd-shaped fungus, which litter the house and grow daily more unsightly, until at last reason triumphs over blind propensity and sweeps them away

tions they acquire such a dread of man as to fly on his approach, And that this dread is manifested by young as well as old. Now unless this change be ascribed to the killing off of the least fearful, and the preservation and multiplication of the more fearful, which, considering the small number killed by man, is an inadequate cause, it must be ascribed to accumulated experiences, and each experience must be held to have a share in producing it. We must conclude that in each bird that escapes with injuries inflicted by man, or is alarmed by the outcries of other members of the flock, . . . there is established an association of ideas between the human aspect and the pains, direct and indirect, suffered from human agency. And we must further conclude that the state of consciousness which impels the bird to take flight is at first nothing more than an ideal reproduction of those painful impressions which before followed man's approach ; that such ideal reproduction becomes more vivid and more massive as the painful experiences, direct or sympathetic, increase ; and that thus the emotion, in its incipient state, is nothing else than an aggregation of the revived pains before experienced.

As, in the course of generations, the young birds of this race begin to display a fear of man before they have been injured by him, it is an unavoidable inference that the nervous system of the race has been organically modified by these experiences ; we have no choice but to conclude that when a young bird is thus led to fly, it is because the impression produced on its senses by the approaching man entails, through an incipiently reflex action, a partial excitement of all those nerves which, in its ancestors, had been excited under the like conditions ; that this partial excitement has its accompanying painful consciousness ; and that the vague painful consciousness thus arising constitutes emotion proper — emotion undecomposable into specific experiences, and therefore seemingly homogeneous. If such he the explanation of the fact in this case, then it is in all cases. If the emotion is so generated here, then it is so generated throughout. If so, we must perforce conclude that the emotional modifications displayed by different nations, and those higher emotions by which civilized are distinguished from savage, are to be accounted for on the same principle. And, concluding this, we are led strongly to suspect that the emotions in general have severally thus originated. " *

Obviously the word * emotion ' here means instinct as well, — the actions we call instinctive are expressions or manifestations of the emotions whose genesis Mr. Spencer describes. Now if habit could thus bear fruit outside the individual life, and if the modifications so painfully acquired by the parents' nervous systems could be found ready-made at birth in those of the young, it would be hard to overestimate the importance, both practical and theoretical, of such an extension of its sway. In principle, instincts would then be assimilated to * secondarily-automatic ' habits, and the origin of many of them out of tentative experiments made during ancestral lives, perfected by repetition, addition, and association through successive generations, would be a comparatively simple thing to understand.

Contemporary students of instinct have accordingly been alert to discover all the facts which would seem to establish the possibility of such an explanation. The list is not very long, considering what a burden of conclusions it has to bear. Let acquisitiveness and fear of man, as just argued for by Spencer, lead it off. Other cases of the latter sort are the increased shyness of the woodcock noticed to have occurred within sixty years' observation by Mr. T. A. Knight, and the greater shyness everywhere shown by large than by small birds, to which Darwin has called attention. Then we may add —

The propensities of * pointing,' * retrieving,' etc., in sporting dogs, which seem partly, at any rate, to be due to training, but which in well-bred stock are all but innate. It is in these breeds considered bad for a litter of young if its sire or dam have not been trained in the field. Tameness of young of tame rabbit — young wild rabbits being invincibly timid. Young foxes are most wary in those places where they are most severely hunted. Wild ducks, hatched out by tame ones, fly off. But if kept close for some generations, the young are said to become tame.*

English greyhounds taken to the high plateau of Mexico could not at first run well, on account of rarefied air. Their whelps entirely got over the difficulty. Mr. Lewes somewhere t tells of a terrier pup whose parents had been taught to * beg,' and who constantly t Quoted (without reference) in Spencer's Biology, vol. i. p. 247. threw himself spontaneously into the begging attitude. Darwin tells of a French orphan -child, brought up out of France, yet shrugging like his ancestors.^

Musical ability often increases from generation to generation in the families of musicians. The hereditarily epileptic guinea-pigs of Brown-8e- quard, whose parents had become epileptic through surgical operations on the spinal cord or sciatic nerve. The adults often lose some of their hind toes, and the young, in addition to being epileptic, are frequently born with the corresponding toes lacking. The offspring of guinea-pigs whose cervical sympathetic nerve has been cut on one side will have the ear larger, the eyeball smaller, etc., just like their parents after the operation. Puncture of the 'restiform body ' of the medulla will, in the same animal, congest and enlarge one eye, and cause gangrene of one ear. In the young of such parents the same symptoms occur.

Physical refinement, delicate hands and feet, etc., appear in families well-bred and rich for several generations. The ' nervous ' temperament also develops in the descendants of sedentary brain-working people. Nearsightedness is produced by indoor occupation for generations. It has been found in Europe much more frequent among schoolchildren in towns than among children of the same age in the country. These latter cases are of the inheritance of structural rather than of functional peculiarities. But as structure gives rise to function it may be said that the principle is the same. Amongst other inheritances of adaptive! structural change may be mentioned :

Scrofula, rickets, and other diseases of bad conditions of life. f ' Adaptive ' changes are those produced by the direct effect of outward conditions on an organ or organism. Sunburned complexion, horny bands, muscular toughness, are illustrations. The udders and permanent milk of the domestic breeds of cow. The * fancy ' rabbit's ears, drooping through lack of need to erect them. Dog's, ass's, etc., in some breeds ditto. The obsolete eyes of mole and various cave-dwelling animals.

The diminished size of the wing-bones of domesticated ducks, due to ancestral disuse of flight.* These are about all the facts which, by one author or another, have been invoked as evidence in favor of the * lapsed intelligence ' theory of the origin of instincts. Mr. Darwin's theory is that of the natural selection of accidentally produced tendencies to action. "It would," says he, " be the most serious error to suppose that the greater number of instincts have been acquired by habit in one generation, and then transmitted by inheritance in succeeding generations. It can clearly be shown that the most wonderful instincts with which we are acquainted, namely, those of the hive-bee and of many ants, could not possibly have been thus acquired, f It will be universally admitted that instincts are as important as corporeal structure for the welfare of each species, under its present conditions of life. Under changed conditions of life, it is at least possible that slight modifications of instinct might be profitable to a species ; and if it can be shown that instincts do vary ever so little, then I can see no difficulty in natural selection preserving and continually accumulating variations of instinct to any extent that may be profitable. It is thus, as I believe, that all the most complex and wonderful instincts have arisen. ... I believe that the effects of habit are of quite subordinate importance to the effects of the natural selection of what may be called accidental variations of instincts ;— that is, of variations produced by the same unknown causes which produce slight deviations of bodily structure. " %

f [Because, being exhibited by neuter insects, the effects of mere practice cannot accumulate from one generation to another. — W. J.] The evidence for Mr. Darwin's view is too complex to be given in this place. To my own mind it is quite convincing. If, with the Darwinian theory in mind, one re-reads the list of examples given in favor of the Lamarckian theory, one finds that many of the cases are irrelevant, and that some make for one side as well as for the other. This is so obvious in many of the cases that it is needless to point it out in detail. The shrugging child and the begging pup, e.g., prove somewhat too much. They are examples so unique as to suggest spontaneous variation rather than inherited habit. In other cases the observations much need corroboration, e.g., the effects of not training for a generation in sporting dogs and race-horses, the difference between young wild rabbits born in captivity and young tame ones, the cumulative effect of many generations of captivity on wild ducks, etc.