The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2

* Oddly enough, Mr. Spencer seems quite unaware of the general func tion of the theory of elementary units of mind-stuff in the evolutionary philosophy. We have seen it to be absolutely indispensable, if that phi losophy is to work, to postulate consciousness in the nebula, — the simplest way being, of course, to suppose every atom animated. Mr. Spencer, how ever, will have it (e.g. First Principles, § 71) that consciousness is only the occasional result of the ' transformation ' of a certain amount of ' physical force ' to which it is ' equivalent.' Presumably a brain must already be there before any such ' transformation ' can take place ; and so the argument quoted in the text stands as a mere local detail, without general bearings.

analogy and a priori probability can alone guide us. Mr. Spencer assumes that the fusion must come to pass in the mental world, and that the physical processes get through air and ear, auditory nerve and medulla, lower brain and hemispheres, without their number being reduced. Figure 25, on the previous page, will make the point clear. Let the line a — b represent the threshold of conscious^ ness : then everything drawn below that line will symbolize a physical process, everything above it will mean a fact of mind. Let the crosses stand for the physical blows, the circles for theevents in successively higher orders of nervecells, and tll| horizontal marks for the facts of feeling. Spencer's argument implies that each order of cells trans mits just as many impulses as it receives to the cells above it ; so that if the blows come at the rate of 20,000 in a second the cortical cells discharge at the same rate, and one unit of feeling corresponds to each one of the 20,000 discharges. Then, and only then, does 'integration' occur, by the 20,000 units of feeling ' compounding with themselves ' into the 'continuous state of consciousness' represented by the short line at the top of the figure.

Now such an interpretation as this flies in the face of physical analogy, no less than of logical intelligibility. Consider physical analogy first. A pendulum may be deflected by a single blow, and swing back. Will it swing back the more often the more we multi ply the blows ? No ; for if they rain upon the pendulum too fast, it will not swing at all but remain deflected in a sensi bly stationary state. In other words, increasing the cause numerically need not equally increase numerically the eft'ect. Blow through a tube : you get a certain musical note ; and increasing the blowing increases for a certain time the loudness of the note. Will this be true indefinitely ? No ; for when a certain force is reached, the note, instead of growing louder, suddenly disappears and is replaced by its higher octave. Turn on the gas slightly and light it : you get a tiny flame. Turn on more gas, and the breadth of the .flame increases. Will this relation increase indefinitely? No, again ; for at a certain moment up shoots the flame into a ragged streamer and begins to hiss. Send slowly

through the nerve of a frog's gastrocnemius muscle a suo cession of galvanic shocks : you get a succession of twitches. Increasing the number of shocks does not increase the twitching; on the contrary, it stops it, and we have the muscle in the apparently stationary state of contraction called tetanus. This last fact is the true analogue of what must happen between the nerve-cell and the sensory fibre. It is certain that cells are more inert than fibres, and that rapid vibrations in the latter can only arouse relatively simple processes or states in the former. The higher cells may have even a slower rate of explosion than the lower, and so the twenty thousand supposejfcblows of the outer air may be 'integrated' in the cortex into a very small number of cell-discharges in a second. This other diagram will serve to contrast this supposition with Spencer's. In Fig. 26 all 'integration' occurs below the threshold of consciousness. The frequency of cell-events becomes more and more reduced as we approach the cells to which feeling is most directly attached, until at last we come to a condition of things symbolized by the larger ellipse, which may be taken to stand for some rather massive and slow process of tension and discharge in the cortical centres, to which, as a ivliole, the feeling of musical tone symbolized by the line at the top of the diagram simply and totally corresponds. It is as if a long file

of men were to start one afte-' the other to reach a distant point. The road at first is good and they keep their original distance apart. Presently it is intersected by bogs each worse than the last, so that the front men get so re tarded that the hinder ones catch up with them before the journey is done, and all arrive together FIG. 26. at the goal.* * The compounding of colors may be dealt with in an identical way. Helmholtz has shown that if green light and red light fall simultaneously on the retina, we see the color yellow. The mind-stuff theory would in terpret this as a case where the feeling green and the feeling red 'com

On this supposition there are no unperceived units of mind-stuff preceding and composing the full consciousness. The latter is itself an immediate psychic fact and bears an immediate relation to the neural state which is its un conditional accompaniment. Did each neural shock give rise to its own psychic shock, and the psychic shocks then combine, it would be impossible to understand why sever ing one part of the central nervous system from another should break up the integrity of the consciousness. The cut has nothing to do with the psychic world. The atoms of mind-stufkouglit to float off from the nerve-matter on either side*c^pt, and come together over it and fuse, just as well as i^t had not been made. We know, however, that they do not ; that severance of the paths of conduction between a man's left auditory centre or optical centre and the rest of his cortex will sever all communication between the words which he hears or sees written and the rest of his ideas.

Moreover, if feelings can mix into a tertium quid, why do we not take a feeling of greenness and a feeling of red ness, and make a feeling of yellowness out of them ? Why has optics neglected the open road to truth, and wasted centuries in disputing about theories of color-composition which two minutes of introspection would have settled forever ? * We cannot mix feelings as such, though we may mix the objects we feel, and from their mixture get new feelings. We cannot even (as we shall later see) have two feelings in our mind at once. At most we can compare together objects previously presented to us in distinct feel ings ; but then we find each object stubbornly maintaining

bine ' into the tertium quid of feeling, yellow. What really occurs is no doubt that a third kind of nerve-process is set up when the combined lights impinge on the retina, — not simply the process of red plus the process of green, but something quite different from both or either. Of course, then, there are no feelings, either of red or of green, present to the mind at all , but the feeling of yellow which is there, answers as directly to the nerve, process which momentarily then exists, as the feelings of green and red would answer to their respective nerve-processes did the latter happen to be taking place.

its separate identity before consciousness, whatever the verdict of the comparison may be.* But there is a still more fatal objection to the theory of mental units ' compounding with themselves ' or ' integrat ing.' It is logically unintelligible ; it leaves out the es sential feature of all the ' combinations ' we actually know. All the ' combinations ' which we actually know are EFFECTS, wrought by the units said to be ' combined,' UPONSOME ENTITY OTHER THAN THEMSELVES. Without this featu^U a medium or vehicle, the notion of combination has noWvi

" A multitude of contractile units, by joint action, and by being all connected, for instance, with a single tendon, will pull at the same, and will bring about a dynamical effect which is undoubtedly the resultant of their combined individual energies. ... On the whole, tendons are to muscular fibres, and bones are to tendons, combining recipients of mechanical energies. A medium of composition is indispensable to the summation of energies. To realize the complete dependence of mechan ical resultants on a combining substratum, one may fancy for a moment all the individually contracting muscular elements severed from their attachments. They might then still be capable of contracting with the same energy as before, yet no co-operative result would be accomplished. The medium of dynamical combination would be wanting. The mul tiple energies, singly exerted on no common recipient, would lose themselves on entirely isolated and disconnected efforts, "f

In other words, no possible number of entities (call them as you like, whether forces, material particles, or mental elements) can sum themselves together. Each remains, in the sum, what it always was ; and the sum itself exists only for a bystander who happens to overlook the units and to * I find in my students an almost invincible tendency to think that we can immediately perceive that feelings do combine. " What !" they say, " is not the taste of lemonade composed of that of leinon plus that of sugar?" This is taking the combining of objects for that of feelings. The physical lemonade contains both the lemon and the sugar, but its taste does not contain their tastes, for if there are any two things which are certainly not present in the taste of lemonade, those are the lemon-sour on the one hand and the sugar-sweet on the other. These tastes are absent utterly. Ths entirely new taste which is present resembles, it is true, both those tastes ; but in Chapter XIII we shall see that resemblance can not always be held to involve partial identity.

apprehend the sum as such ; or else it exists in the shape of some other effect on an entity external to the sum itself. Let it not be objected that H2 and O combine of themselves into 'water,' and thenceforward exhibit new properties. They do not. The ' water ' is just the old atoms in the new position, H-O-H ; the ' new properties ' are just their combined effects , when in this position, upon external media, such as our sense-organs and the various reagents on which water may exert its properties and be known.

" Aggregations are organized wholes only when they behave as such in the presenajji other things. A statue is an aggregation of par ticles of marb^^Bbt as such it has no unity. For the spectator it is one; in itself ro^Pan aggregate; just as, to the consciousness of an ant crawling over it, it may again appear a mere aggregate. No summing up of parts can make an unity of a mass of discrete constituents, unless this unity exist for some other subject, not for the mass itself." *

Just so, in the parallelogram of forces, the ' forces ' themselves do not combine into the diagonal resultant ; a body is needed on which they may impinge, to exhibit their resultant effect. No more do musical sounds combine per se into concords or discords. Concord and discord are names for their combined effects on that external medium, the ear. * J. Royce, ' Mind,' vi. p. 376. Lotze has set forth the truth of this law more clearly and copiously than any other writer. Unfortunately lie is too lengthy to quote. See his Microco&mus, bk. ir. ch. i. § 5; Metaphysik, §§ 242, 260 ; Outlines of Metaphysics, part n. chap. i. §§ 3, 4, 5. Compare ulso Reid's Intellectual Powers, essay v, chap, mad Jin.,- Bowne's Meta physics, pp. 361-76; St. J. Mivart : Nature and Thought, pp. 98-101; E. Gurney: 'Monism,' in 'Mind.'vi. 153; and the article by Prof . Royce, just quoted, on ' Mind-stuff and Reality.'

"Where the elemental units are supposed to be feelings, the case is in no wise altered. Take a hundred of them, shuffle them and pack them as close together as you can (whatever that may mean) ; still each remains the same feel ing it always was, shut in its own skin, windowless, igno rant of what the other feelings are and mean. There would be a hundred-and-first feeling there, if, when a group or series of such feelings were set up, a consciousness belong ing to the group as such should emerge. And this 101st feel ing would be a totally new fact ; the 100 original feelings might, by a curious physical law, be a signa^tkits creation, when they came together; but they woulc^lpive no sub stantial identity with it, nor it with them, Ima one could never deduce the one from the others, or (in any intelligible sense) say that they evolved it.

Take a sentence of a dozen words, and take twelve men and tell to each one word. Then stand the men in a row or jam them in a bunch, and let each think of his word as intently as he will; nowhere will there be a consciousness of the whole sentence.* We talk of the 'spirit of the age,' and the ' sentiment of the people,' and in various ways we hypostatize 'public opinion.' But we know this to be sym bolic speech, and never dream that the spirit, opinion, sentiment, etc., constitute a consciousness other thai], and additional to, that of the several individuals whom the words 'age,' 'people,' or 'public' denote. The private minds do not agglomerate into a higher compound mind. This has always been the invincible contention of the spiritualists against the associationists in Psychology, — a contention which we shall take up at greater length in Chapter X. The associationists say the mind is constituted

*" Someone might say that although it is true that neither a blind man nor a deaf man by himself can compare sounds with colors, yet since one hears and the other sees they might do so both together. . . . But whether they are apart or close together makes no difference ; not even if they permanently keep house together ; no, not if they were Siamese twins, or more than Siamese twins, and were inseparably grown together, would it make the assumption any more possible. Only when sound and color are represented in the same reality is it thinkable that they should be compared." (Brentano: Psychologic, p. 209.)

by a multiplicity of distinct ' ideas ' associated into a unity. There is, they say, an idea of a, and also an idea of b. Therefore, they say, there is an idea of a -f- &, or of a and b together. Which is like saying that the mathematical square of a plus that of b is equal to the square of a -\- b, a palpable untruth. Idea of a -j- idea of b is not identical with idea of (a -{- b). It is one, they are two ; in it, what knows a also knows &; in them, what knows a is expressly posited as not knowing b ; etc. In short, the two separate ideas can never by any logic be made to figure as one and the same tl^fl^is the 'associated' idea.

This is J^P the spiritualists keep saying ; and since we do, as a matter of fact, have the ' compounded ' idea, and do know a and b together, they adopt a farther hypothesis to explain that fact. The separate ideas exist, they say, but affect a third entity, the soul. This has the l compounded ' idea, if you please so to call it ; and the compounded idea is an altogether new psychic fact to which the separate ideas stand in the relation, not of constituents, but of occasions of production.

This argument of the spiritualists against the associationists has never been answered by the latter. It holds good against any talk about self-compounding amongst feelings, against any ' blending,' or ' complication,' or ' mental chemistry,' or 'psychic synthesis,' which supposes a re sultant consciousness to float off from the constituents per se, in the absence of a supernumerary principle of conscious ness which they may affect. The mind-stuff theory, in short, is unintelligible. Atoms of feeling cannot compose higher feelings, any more than atoms of matter can compose physical things! The 'things,' for a clear-headed ato mistic evolutionist, are not. Nothing is but the everlasting atoms. When grouped in a certain way, ive name them this ' thing ' or that ; but the thing we name has no exist ence out of our mind. So of the states of mind which are supposed to be compound because they know many differ ent things together. Since indubitably such states do exist, they must exist as single new facts, effects, possibly, as the spiritualists say, on the Soul (we will not decide that

point here), but at any rate independent and integral, and not compounded of psychic atoms.* The passion for unity and smoothness is in some minds so insatiate that, in spite of the logical clearness of these reasonings and conclusions, many will fail to be influenced by them. They establish a sort of disjointedness in things which in certain quarters will appear intolerable. They * The reader must observe that we are reasoning ab^^her about the logic of the mind-stuff theory, about whether it can ea^KBthe constitution of higher mental states by viewing them as identv^^Hlih lower ones summed together. We say the two sorts of fact are not icrentical : a higher state is not a lot of lower states ; it is itself. When, however, a lot of lower states have come together, or when certain brain-conditions occur together which, if they occurred separately, would produce a lot of lower states, we have not for a moment pretended that a higher state may not emerge. In fact it does emerge under those conditions ; and our Chapter IX will be mainly devoted to the proof of this fact. But such emergence is that of a new psychic entity, and is ioto coslo different from such an 'integration' of the lower states as the mind-stuff theory affirms.

It may seem strange to suppose that anyone should mistake criticism of a certain theory about a fact for doubt of the fact itself. And yet the confusion is made in high quarters enough to justify our remarks. Mr. J. Ward, in his article Psychology in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, speak ing of the hypothesis that "a series of feelings can be aware of itself as a series," says (p. 39): " Paradox is too mild a word for it, even contradiction will hardly suffice." Whereupon, Professor Bain takes him thus to task: " As to 'a series of states being aware of itself, I confess I see no insur mountable difficulty. It may be a fact, or not a fact ; it may be a very clumsy expression for what it is applied to ; but it is neither paradox nor contradiction. A series merely contradicts an individual, or it may be two or more individuals as coexisting ; but that is too general to exclude the possibility of self-knowledge. It certainly does not bring the property of self-knowledge into the foreground, which, however, is not the same as denying it. An algebraic series might know itself, without any con tradiction : the only thing against it is the want of evidence of the fact.' (' Mind,' xt. 459). Prof. Bain thinks, then, that all the bother is about the difficulty of seeing how a series of feelings can have the knowledge of itself added to it f ! ! As if anybody ever was troubled about that. That, notoriously enough, is a fact : our consciousness is a series of feelings to which every now and then is added a retrospective consciousness that they have come and gone. What Mr.

Ward and I are troubled about is merely the silliness of the mind-stuffists and associationists continuing to say that the ' series of states ' is the ' awareness of itself ;' that if the states be posited severally, their collective consciousness is eo ipso given ; and that we need no farther explanation, or ' evidence of the fact.' sweep away all chance of ' passing without break ' either from the material to the mental, or from the lower to the higher mental ; and they thrust us back into a pluralism of consciousnesses — each arising discontinuously in the midst of two disconnected worlds, material and mental — which is even worse than the old notion of the separate creation of each particular soul. But the malcontents will hardly try to refute oi?r reasonings by direct attack. It is more prob able that, turning their back upon them altogether, they will devote themselves to sapping and mining the region roundabou^^til it is a bog of logical liquefaction, into the midst of NN^^V all definite conclusions of any sort may be trusted ere J^g to sink and disappear.

Our reasonings have assumed that the ' integration ' of a thousand psychic units must be either just the units over again, simply rebaptized, or else something real, but then other than and additional to those units ; that if a certain existing fact is that of a thousand feelings, it cannot at the same time be that of ONE feeling ; for the essence of feeling is to be felt, and as a psychic existent feels, so it must be. If the one feeling feels like no one of the thousand, in what sense can it be said to be the thousand ? These assumptions are what the monists will seek to undermine. The Hegelizers amongst them will take high ground at once, and say that the glory and beauty of the psychic life is that in it all contradictions find their reconciliation ; and that it is just because the i'acts we are considering are facts of the self that they are both one and many at the same time. With this intellectual temper I confess that I cannot contend. As in striking at some unresisting gossamer with a club, one but overreaches one's self, and the thing one aims at gets no harm. So I leave this school to its devices.

The other monists are of less deliquescent frame, and try to break down distinctness among mental states by making a distinction. This sounds paradoxical, but it is only ingenious. The distinction is that between the uncon scious and the conscious being of the mental state. It is the sovereign means for believing what one likes in psychology, and of turning what might become a science into a tum bling-ground for whimsies. It has numerous champions.

and elaborate reasons to give for itself. We must there* fore accord it due consideration. In discussing the question : it will be best to give the list of so-called proofs as briefly as possible, and to follow each by its objection, as in scho lastic books.* First Proof. The minimum visibile, the minimum audibile, are objects composed of parts. How can the whole affect the sense unless each part does ? And yet each part does so without being separately sensible. Leifrjta calls the total consciousness an ' aperception,' the su^^Bd insensi ble consciousness by the name of l petites^^eptions*

"To judge of the latter," he says, " I am accustomed to use the ex ample of the roaring of the sea with which one is assailed when near the shore. To hear this noise as one does, one must hear the parts which compose its totality, that is, the noise of each wave, . . . although this noise would not be noticed if its wave were alone. One must be affected a little by the movement cf one wave, one must have some perception of each several noise, however small it be. Otherwise one would not hear that of 100,000 waves, for of 100,000 zeros one can never make a quantity." f

Reply. This is an excellent example of the so-called ' fallacy of division,' or predicating what is true only of a collection, of each member of the collection distributively. It no more follows that if a thousand things together cause sensation, one thing alone must cause it, than it follows that if one pound weight moves a balance, then one ounce weight must move it too, in less degree. One ounce weight does not move it at all ; its movement begins with

* The writers about ' unconscious cerebration ' seem sometimes to mean that and sometimes unconscious thought. The arguments which follow are culled from various quarters. The reader will find them most sys tematically urged by E. von Hartmann: Philosophy of the Unconscious, vol. i, and by E, Colsenet : La vie luconsciente de 1'Esprit (1880). Consult also T. Laycock : Mind and Brain, vol. i. chap, v (1860); W. B. Carpenter: Mental Physiology, chap, xin; F. P. Cobbe : Darwinism in Morals and other Essays, essay xi, Unconscious Cerebration (1872); F. Bowen: Mod ern Philosophy, pp. 428-480 ; R. H. Hutton : Contemporary Review, vol. xxiv. p. 201 ; J. S. Mill: Exam, of Hamilton, chap, xv; G. H. Lewes: Problems of Life and Mind, 3d series, Prob. n. cbap. x, arid also Prob. in. chap, ii : D. G. Thompson: A System of Psychology, chap, xxxni1 J. M. Baldwin, Hand-book of Psychology, chap. rv.

the pound. At most we can say that each ounce affects it in some way which helps the advent of that move ment. And so each infra-sensible stimulus to a nerve no doubt affects the nerve and helps the birth of sensa tion when the other stimuli come. But this affection is a nerve-affection, and there is not the slightest ground for supposing it to be a * perception ' unconscious of itsell " A certain quantity of the cause may be a necessary con dition to the production of any of the effect," * when the latter is a mental state.