The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2

There is yet another set of facts which seem explicable on the supposition that consciousness has causal efficacy. It is a ivell-knoivn fact that pleasures are generally asso ciated with beneficial, pains with detrimental, experiences. All the fundamental vital processes illustrate this law. Starvation, suffocation, privation of food, drink and sleep, work when exhausted, burns, wounds, inflammation, the effects of poison, are as disagreeable as filling the hungry stomach, enjoying rest and sleep after fatigue, exercise after rest, and a sound skin and unbroken bones at all times, are pleasant. Mr. Spencer and others have suggested that these coincidences are due, not to any pre-established harmony, but to the mere action of natural selection which would certainly kill off in the long-run any breed of crea tures to whom the fundamentally noxious experience seemed enjoyable. An animal that should take pleasure in a feel-

ing of suffocation would, if that pleasure were efficacious enough to make him immerse his head in water, enjoy a longevity of four or five minutes. But if pleasures and pains have no efficacy, one does not see (without some such d priori rational harmony as would be scouted by the ' scientific ' champions of the automaton-theory) why the most noxious acts, such as burning, might not give thrills of delight, and the most necessary ones, such as breathing, cause agony. The exceptions to the law are, it is true, numerous, but relate to experiences that are either not vital or not universal. Drunkenness, for instance, which though noxious, is to many persons delightful, is a very exceptional experience. But, as the excellent physiologist Fick re marks, if all rivers and springs ran alcohol instead of water, either all men would now be born to hate it or our nerves would have been selected so as to drink it with impunity. The only considerable attempt, in fact, that has been made to explain the distribution of our feelings is that of Mr. Grant Allen in his suggestive little work Physiological ^Esthetics ; and his reasoning is based exclusively on that causal efficacy of pleasures and pains which the ' double-aspect ' partisans so strenuously deny.

Thus, then, from every point of view the circumstantial evidence against that theory is strong. A priori analysis of both brain-action and conscious action shows us that if the latter were efficacious it would, by its selective emphasis, make amends for the indeterminateness of the former; whilst tile study a posteriori of the distribution of consciousness shows it to be exactly such as we might expect in an organ added for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself. The conclusion that it is use ful is, after all this, quite justifiable. But, if it is useful, it must be so through its causal efficaciousness, and the automaton-theory must succumb to the theory of commonsense. I, at any rate (pending metaphysical reconstruc tions not yet successfully achieved), shall have no hesita tion in using the language of common-sense throughout this book.

THE reader who found himself swamped with too much metaphysics in the last chapter will have a still worse time of it in this one, which is exclusively metaphysical. Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate \\ effort to think clearly. The fundamental conceptions of psychology are practically very clear to us, but theoreti cally they are very confused, and one easily makes the ob scurest assumptions in this science without realizing, until challenged, what internal difficulties they involve. When these assumptions have once established themselves (as they have a way of doing in our very descriptions of the phenomenal facts) it is almost impossible to get rid of them afterwards or to make any one see that they are not essen tial features of the subject. The only way to prevent this disaster is to scrutinize them beforehand and make them give an articulate account of themselves before letting them pass. On« of the obscurest of the assumptions of which I speak is the assumption that our mental states are com posite in structure, made up of smaller states conjoined. This hypothesis has outward advantages which make it almost irresistibly attractive to the intellect, and yet it is inwardly quite unintelligible. Of its unintelligibility, how ever, half the writers on psychology seem unaware. As our own aim is to understand if possible, I make no apology for singling out this particular notion for very explicit treatment before taking up the descriptive part of our work. The theory of ' mindstuff' is the theory that our mental states are compounds, expressed in its most radical form.

In a general theory of evolution the inorganic comes first, then the lowest forms of animal and vegetable life, then forms of life that possess mentality, and finally those like ourselves that possess it in a high degree. As long as we keep to the consideration of purely outward facts, even the most complicated facts of biology, our task as evolution. ists is comparatively easy. We are dealing all the time with matter and its aggregations and separations ; and although our treatment must perforce be hypothetical, this does not prevent it from being continuous. The point which as evo lutionists we are bound to hold fast to is that all the new forms of being that make their appearance are really noth ing more than results of the redistribution of the original and unchanging materials. The self-same atoms which, chaotically dispersed, made the nebula, now, jammed and temporarily caught in peculiar positions, form our brains ; and the ' evolution ' of the brains, if understood, would be simply the account of how the atoms came to be so caught and jammed. In this story no new natures, no factors not present at the beginning, are introduced at any later stage.

But with the dawn of consciousness an entirely new nature seems to slip in, something whereof the potency was not given in the mere outward atoms of the original chaos. The enemies of evolution have been quick to pounce upon this undeniable discontinuity in the data of the world, and many of them, from the failure of evolutionary expla nations at this point, have inferred their general incapacity all along the line. Every one admits the entire incommen surability of feeling as such with material motion as such. " A motion became a feeling ! " — no phrase that our lips can frame is so devoid of apprehensible meaning. Accordingly, even the vaguest of evolutionary enthusiasts, when deliberately comparing material with mental facts, have been as forward as any one else to emphasize the •" chasm ' between the inner and the outer worlds.

" Can the oscillations of a molecule," says Mr. Spencer, "be repre sented side by side with a nervous shock [he means a mental shock], and the two b« recognized as one ? No effort enables us to assimilate them. That a unit of feeling has nothing in common with a unit of motion becomes more than ever manifest when we bring the two into juxtaposition. " * "Suppose it to have become quite clear that a shock in conscious ness and a molecular motion are the subjective and objective faces of the same thing; we continue utterly incapable of uniting the two, so as to conceive that reality of which they are the opposite faces."t

In other words, incapable of perceiving in them any com mon character. So Tyndall, in that lucky paragraph which has been quoted so often that every one knows it by heart : "The passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable. Granted that a definite thought and a definite molecular action in the brain occur simultaneously ; we do not possess the intellectual organ, nor apparently any rudiment of the organ, which would enable us to pass, by a process of reasoning, from one to the other." I Or in this other passage :

" We can trace the development of a nervous system and correlate with it the parallel phenomena of sensation and thought. We see with undoubting certainty that they go hand in hand. But we try to soar in a vacuum the moment we seek to comprehend the connection between them. . . . There is no fusion possible between the two classes of facts— no motor energy in the intellect of man to carry it without logical rupture from the one to the other." § None the less easily, however, when the evolutionary afflatus is upon them, do the very same writers leap over the breach whose flagrancy they are the foremost to an nounce, and talk as if mind grew out of body in a con tinuous way. Mr. Spencer, looking back on his review of mental evolution, tells us how " in tracing up the increase

§ Belfast Address, 'Nature,' August 20, 1874, p. 318. I cannot help remarking that the disparity between motious and feelings 011 which these authors lay so much stress, is somewhat less absolute than at first sight it seems. There are categories common to the two worlds. Not only tem poral succession (as Helmholtz admits, Physiol. Optik, p. 445), but such attributes as intensity, volume, simplicity or complication, smooth or im peded change, rest or agitation, are habitually predicated of both physical facts and mental facts. Where surb analogies obtain, the things do have somethingin cominoa.

we found ourselves passing without break from the phenomena of bodily life to the phenomena of mental life." ' And Mr. Tyndall, in the same Belfast Address from which we just quoted, delivers his other famous passage : " Abandoning all disguise, the confession that I feel bound to make before you is that I prolong the vision backward across the boundary of the experimental evidence, and discern in that matter which we, in our ignorance and notwithstanding our professed reverence for its Creator, have hitherto covered with opprobrium the promise and potency of every form and quality of life." t —mental life included, as a matter of course.

So strong a postulate is continuity ! Now this book will tend to show that mental postulates are on the whole to be respected. The demand for continuity has, over large tracts of science, proved itself to possess true prophetic power. We ought therefore ourselves sincerely to try every possible mode of conceiving the dawn of consciousness so that it may not appear equivalent to the irruption into the universe of a new nature, non-existent until then.

Merely to call the consciousness * nascent ' will not serve our turn.:f It is true that the word signifies not yet \ ' Nascent ' is Mr. Spencer's great word. lu showing how at a certain point consciousness must appear upon the evolving scene this author fairly outdoes himself in vagueness. " In its higher forms, Instinct is probably accompanied by a rudimen tary consciousness. There cannot be co-ordination of many stimuli without some ganglion through which they are all brought into relation. In the process of bringing them into relation, this ganglion must be subject to the influence of each— must undergo many changes. And the quick suc cession of changes in a ganglion, implying as it does perpetual experiences of differences and likenesses, constitutes the raw material of consciousness. The implication is that as fast as Instinct is developed, some kind of con sciousness becomes nascent." (Psychology, § 195.)

The words ' raw material ' and ' implication ' which I have italicized aie the words which do the evolving. They are supposed to have ail the rigor which the ' synthetic philosophy ' requires. In the following passage, when ' impressions ' pass through a common ' centre of communication' in succession (much as people might pass into a theatre through a turnstile) consciousness, non-existent until then, is supposed to result : "Separate impressions are received by the senses — by different parts of the body. If they go no further than the places at which they are received, they are useless. Or if only some of them are brought into relation with one an other, they are useless. That an effectual adjustment may be made, they must be all brought into relation with one another. But this implies some centre of communication common to them all, through which they severally pass,-

quite born, and so seems to form a sort of bridge between existence and nonentity. But that is a verbal quibble. The fact is that discontinuity comes in if a new nature comes in at all. The quantity of the latter is quite imma terial. The girl in ' Midshipman Easy ' could not excuse the illegitimacy of her child by saying, *it was a little small one.' And Consciousness, however little, is an illegiti mate birth in any philosophy that starts without it, and yet professes to explain all facts by continuous evolution.

If evolution is to work smoothly, consciousness in some shape must have been present at the very origin of things. Accord ingly we find that the more clear-sighted evolutionary phi losophers are beginning to posit it there. Each atom of the nebula, they suppose, must have had an aboriginal atom of consciousness linked with it ; and, just as the material atoms have formed bodies and brains by massing them selves together, so the mental atoms, by an analogous process of aggregation, have fused into those larger con sciousnesses which we know in ourselves and suppose to exist in our fellow-animals. Some such doctrine of atomistic hylozoism as this is an indispensable part of a thorough-going philosophy of evolution. According to it there must be an infinite number of degrees of conscious-

and as they cannot pass through it simultaneously, they must pass through it in succession. So that as the external phenomena responded to become greater in number and more complicated in kind, the variety and rapidity of the changes to which this common centre of communication is subject must increase — there must result an unbroken series of these changes — there must arise a consciousness. "Hence the progress of the correspondence between the organism and its environment necessitates a gradual reduction of the sensorial changes to a succession ; and by so doing evolves a distinct consciousness— & consciousness that becomes higher as the succession becomes more rapid and the corre spondence more complete." (Ibid. § 179.)

It is true that in the Fortnightly Review (vol. xiv. p. 716) Mr. Spencer denies thnt he means by this passage to tell us anything about the origin of consciousness at all. It resembles, however, too many other places in his Psychology (e.g. §§ 43, 110, 244) not to be taken as a serious attempt to ex plain how consciousness must at a certain point be 'evolved.' That, when a critic calls his attention to the inanity of his words, Mr. Spencer should say he never meant anything particular by them, is simply an example of the scandalous vagueness with which this sort of ' chromophilosophy ' is carried on.

ness, following the degrees of complication and aggrega tion of tlie primordial mind-dust. To prove the separate existence of these degrees of consciousness by indirect evi dence, since direct intuition of them is not to be had, be comes therefore the first duty of psychological evolutionism. Some of this duty we find already performed by a num ber of philosophers who, though not interested at all in evolution, have nevertheless on independent grounds con vinced themselves of the existence of a vast amount ef sub-conscious mental life. The criticism of this general opinion and its grounds will have to be postponed for a while. At present let us merely deal with the arguments assumed to prove aggregation of bits of mind-stuff into distinctly sensible feelings. They are clear and admit of a clear reply.

The German physiologist A. Tick, in 1862, was, so far as I know, the first to use them. He made experiments on the discrimination of the feelings of warmth and of touch, when only a very small portion of the skin was excited through a hole in a card, the surrounding parts being pro tected by the card. He found that under these circum stances mistakes were frequently made by the patient,* and concluded that this must be because the number of * His own words are: " Mistakes are made in the sense that he admits having been touched, when in reality it was radiant heat that affected his skin. In our own before-mentioned experiments there was never any de ception on the entire palmar side of the hand or on the face. On the back of the hand in one case in a series of 60 stimulations 4 mistakes occurred, in another case 2 mistakes in 45 stimulations. On the extensor side of the upper arm 3 deceptions out of 48 stimulations were noticed, and in the case of another individual, 1 out of 31. In one case over the spine 3 deceptions in a series of 11 excitations were observed ; in another, 4 out of 19. On the lumbar spine 6 deceptions came among 29 stimulations, and again 4 out of 7. There is certainly not yet enough material on which to rest a calculation of probabilities, but any one can easily convince himself that on the back there is no question of even a moderately accurate discrimina tion between warmth and a light pressure so far as but small portions of skin come into play. It has been as yet impossible to make corresponding experiments with regard to sensibility to cold." (Lehrb. d. Anat. u Physiol. d. Siuuesorgane (1862), p. 29.)

sensations from the elementary nerve-tips affected was too small to sum itself distinctly into either of the qualities of feeling in question. He tried to show how a different manner of the summation might give rise in one case to the heat and in another to the touch. "A feeling of temperature." he says, ''arises when the intensities of the units of feeling are evenly gradated, so that between two elements a and 6 no other unit can spatially intervene whose intensity is not also between that of a and b, A feeling of contact perhaps arises when this condition is not fulfilled. Both kinds of feeling, however, are composed of the same units."

But it is obviously far clearer to interpret such a grada tion of intensities as a brain-fact than as a mind-fact. If in the brain a tract were first excited in one of the ways suggested by Prof. Tick, and then again in the other, it might very well happen, for aught we can say to the con trary, that the psychic accompaniment in the one case would be heat, and in the other pain. The pain and the heat would, however, not be composed of psychic units, but would each be the direct result of one total brain-process. So long as this latter interpretation remains open, Tick cannot be held to have proved psychic summation.

Later, both Spencer and Taine, independently of each other, took up the same line of thought. Mr. Spencer's reasoning is worth quoting in extenso. He writes : " Although the individual sensations and emotions, real or ideal, of which consciousness is built up, appear to be severally simple, homo geneous, unanalyzable, or of inscrutable natures, yet they are not so. There is at least one kind of feeling which, as ordinarily experienced, seems elementary, that is demonstrably not elementary. And after re solving it into its proximate components, we can scarcely help suspect ing that other apparently-elementary feelings are also compound, and may have proximate components like those which we can in this one instance identify.

" Musical sound is the name we give to this seemingly simple feeling which is clearly resolvable into simpler feelings. Well-known experi ments prove that when equal blows or taps are made one after another at a rate not exceeding some sixteen per second, the effect of each is perceived as a separate noise ; but when the rapidity with which the blows follow one another exceeds this, the noises are no longer identified in separate states of consciousness, and there arises in place of them a continuous state of consciousness, called a tone- In further increasing

the rapidity of the blows, the tone undergoes the change of quality dis tinguished as rise in pitch ; and it continues to rise in pitch as the blows continue to increase in rapidity, until it reaches an acuteness beyond which it is no longer appreciable as a tone. So that out of units of feel ing of the same kind ~ many feelings distinguishable from one another in quality result, according as the units are more or less integrated. " This is not all. The inquiries of Professor Helmholtz have shown that when, along with one series of these rapidly-recurring noises, there is generated another series in which the noises are more rapid though not so loud, the effect is a change in that quality known as its timbre. As various musical instruments show us, tones which are alike in pitch and strength are distinguishable by their harshness or sweetness, their ringing or their liquid characters; and all their specific(peculiarities are proved to arise from the combination of one, two, thrfee, or more, sup plementary series of recurrent noises with the chief series of recurrent noises. So that while the unlikenesses of feeling known as differences of pitch in tones are due to differences of integration among the recur rent noises of one series, the unlikenesses of feeling known as differ ences of timbre, are due to the simultaneous integration with this series of other series having other degrees of integration. And thus an enormous number of qualitatively-contrasted kinds of consciousness that seem severally elementary prove to be composed of one simple kind of consciousness, combined and recombined with itself in multi tudinous ways.

"Can we stop short here? If the different sensations known as sounds are built out of a common unit, is it not to be rationally inferred that so likewise are the different sensations known as tastes, and the different sensations known as odors, and the different sensations known as colors ? Nay, shall we not regard it as probable that there is a unit common to all these strongly-contrasted classes of sensations ? If the unlikenesses among the sensations of each class may be due to unlike nesses among the modes of aggregation of a unit of consciousness com mon to them all ; so too may the much greater unlikenesses between the sensations of each class and those of other classes. There may be a single primordial element of consciousness, and the countless kinds of consciousness may be produced by the compounding of this element with itself and the recompounding of its compounds with one another in higher and higher degrees : so producing increased multiplicity, variety, and complexity.

"Have we any clue to this primordial element ? I think we have. That simple mental impression which proves to be the unit of composi tion of the sensation of musical tone, is allied to certain other simple mental impressions differently originated. The subjective effect pro duced by a crack or noise that has no appreciable duration is little else than a nervous shock. Though we distinguish such a nervous shock as belonging to what we call sounds, yet it does not differ very much from nervous shocks of other kinds. An electric discharge sent

through the body causes a feeling akin to that which a sudden loud re port causes. A strong unexpected impression made through the eyes, as by a flash of lightning, similarly gives rise to a start or shock ; and though the feeling so named seems, like the electric shock, to have the body at large for its seat, and may therefore be regarded as the correla' tive rather of the efferent than of the afferent disturbance, yet on re membering the mental change that results from the instantaneous transit of an object across the field of vision, I think it may be perceived that the feeling accompanying the efferent disturbance is itself reduced very nearly to the same form. The state of consciousness so generated is, in fact, comparable in quality to the initial state of consciousness caused by a blow (distinguishing it from the pain or other feeling that commences theJnstant after); which state of consciousness caused by a blow may be tSten as the primitive and typical form of the nervous shock. The fa'ct that sudden brief disturbances thus set up by differ ent stimuli through different sets of nerves cause feelings scarcely distinguishable in quality will not appear strange when we recollect that distinguishableness of feeling implies appreciable duration; and that when the duration is greatly abridged, nothing more is known than that some mental change has occurred and ceased. To have a sensation of redness, to know a tone as acute or grave, to be conscious of a taste as sweet, implies in each case a considerable continuity of state. If tl# state does not last long enough to admit of its being contemplated, it cannot be classed as of this or that kind; and becomes a momentary modification very similar to momentary modifications otherwise caused.

"It is possible, then — may we not even say probable? — that some thing of the same order as that which we call a nervous shock is the ultimate unit of consciousness ; and that all the unlikenes^es among our feelings result from unlike modes of integration of this ultimate unit. I say of the same order, because there are discernible differences among nervous shocks that are differently caused ; and the primitive nervous shock probably differs somewhat from each of them. And I say of the same order, for the further reason that while we may ascribe to them a general likeness in nature, we must suppose a great unlikeness in degree. The nervous shocks recognized as such are vio lent — must be violent before they can be perceived amid the proces sion of multitudinous vivid feelings suddenly interrupted by them. But the rapidly-recurring nervous shocks of which the different forms of feeling consist, we must assume to be of comparatively moderate, or even of very slight intensity. Were our various sensations and emotions composed of rapidly-recurring shocks as strong as those ordinarily called shocks, they would be unbearable ; indeed life would cease at once. We must think of them rather as successive faint pulses of sub jective change, each having the same quality as the strong pulse of subjective change distinguished as a nervous shock." *

Convincing as this argument of Mr. Spencer's may appear on a first reading, it is singular how weak it really is.* We do, it is true, when we study the connection be tween a musical note and its outward cause, find the note simple and continuous while the cause is multiple and dis crete. Somewhere, then, there is a transformation, reduc tion, or fusion. The question is, Where ? — in the nerve* world or in the mindworld ? Really we have no experi mental proof by which to decide ; and if decide we must,