The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2

The mental states usually distinguished as feelings are the emotions, and the sensations we get from skin, muscle, viscus, eye, ear, nose, and palate. The 'thoughts,' as recognized in popular parlance, are the conceptions and judgments. When we treat of these mental states in par ticular we shall have to say a word about the cognitive function and value of each. It may perhaps be well to notice now that our senses only give us acquaintance with facts of body, and that of the mental states of other persons

we only have conceptual knowledge. Of our own past states of mind we take cognizance in a peculiar way. They are ' objects of memory,' and appear to us endowed with a sort of warmth and intimacy that makes the perception of them seem more like a process of sensation than like a thought. WE now begin our study of the mind from within. Most books start with sensations, as the simplest mental facts, and proceed synthetically, constructing each higher stage from those below it. But this is abandoning the empirical method of investigation. No one ever had a simple sensa tion by itself. Consciousness, from our natal day, is of a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations, and what we call simple sensations are results of discriminative atten tion, pushed often to a very high degree. It is astonishing what havoc is wrought in psychology by admitting at the outset apparently innocent suppositions, that nevertheless contain a flaw. The bad consequences develop themselves later on, and are irremediable, being woven through the whole texture of the work. The notion that sensations, being the simplest things, are the first things to take up in psychology is one of these suppositions. The only thing which psychology has a right to postulate at the outset is the fact of thinking itself, and that must first be taken up and analyzed. If sensations then prove to be amongst the elements of the thinking, we shall be no worse off as re spects them than if we had taken them for granted at the start.

The first fact for us, then, as psychologists, is that thinking of some sort goes on. I use the word thinking, in accordance with what was said on p. 186, for every form of conscious ness indiscriminately. If we could say in English 'it thinks,' as we say ' it rains ' or 'it blows,' we should be * A good deal of this chapter is reprinted from an article 'On some Omissions of Introspective Psychology ' which appeared in ' Mind ' foi January 1884. stating tlio fact most simply and with the minimum of as sumption. As we cannot, we must simply say that thought goes on.

How does it go on ? We notice immediately five impor tant characters in the process, of which it shall be the dutj of the present chapter to treat in a general way : 1) Every thought tends to be part of a personal con sciousness. 2) Within each personal consciousness thought is always changing. 3) Within each personal consciousness thought is sen sibly continuous. 4) It always appears to deal with objects independent of itself. 5) It is interested in some parts of these objects to the* exclusion of others, and welcomes or rejects — chooses from among them, in a word — all the while.

In considering these five points successively, we shall have to plunge in medias res as regards our vocabulary, and use psychological terms which can only be adequately de fined in later chapters of the book. But every one knows what the terms mean in a rough way ; and it is only in a rough way that we are now to take them. This chapter is like a painter's first charcoal sketch upon his canvas, in which no niceties appear. When I say every thought is part of a personal con sciousness, l personal consciousness ' is one of the terms in question. Its meaning we know so long as no one asks us to define it, but to give an accurate account of it is the most difficult of philosophic tasks. This task we must confront in the next chapter ; here a preliminary word will suffice.

In this room — this lecture-room, say — there are a mul titude of thoughts, yours and mine, some of which cohere mutually, and some not. They are as little each-for-itself and reciprocally independent as they are all-belongingtogether. They are neither : no one of them is separate, but each belongs with certain others and with none beside. My thought belongs with my other thoughts, and your thought with your other thoughts. Whether anywhere in the room there be a mere thought, which is nobody's thought, we have no means of ascertaining, for we have no experience of its like. The only states of consciousness that we naturally deal with are found in personal con sciousnesses, minds, selves, concrete particular I's and you's.

Each of these minds keeps its own thoughts to itself. There is no giving or bartering between them. No thought even comes into direct sight of a thought in another per sonal consciousness than its own. Absolute insulation, irreducible pluralism, is the law. It seems as if the ele mentary psychic fact were not thought or this thought or that thought, but my thought, every thought being oivned. Neither contemporaneity, nor proximity in space, nor similarity of quality and content are able to fuse thoughts together which are sundered by this barrier of belonging to differ ent personal minds. The breaches between such thoughts are the most absolute breaches in nature. Everyone wil? recognize this to be true, so long as the existence of some thing corresponding to the term ' personal mind ' is all that is insisted on, without any particular view of its nature being implied. On these terms the personal self rather than the thought might be treated as the immediate datum in psychology. The universal conscious fact is not ' feel ings and thoughts exist,' but 'I think' and 'I feel.' * No psychology, at any rate, can question the existence of per sonal selves. The worst a psychology can do is so to interpret the nature of these selves as to rob them of their worth. A French writer, speaking of our ideas, says some where in a fit of anti-spiritualistic excitement that, mislej by certain peculiaritities which they display, we ' end by personifying' the procession which they make, — such per sonification being regarded by him as a great philosophic blunder on our part. It could only be a blunder if the notion of personality meant something essentially different

from anything to be found in the mental procession. But if that procession be itself the very ' original ' of the notion of personality, to personify it cannot possibly be wrong. It is already personified. There are no marks of personality to be gathered aliunde, and then found lacking in the train of thought. It has them all already ; so that to whatever farther analysis we may subject that form of personal self hood under which thoughts appear, it is, and must remain, true that the thoughts which psychology studies do contin ually tend to appear as parts of personal selves.

I say ' tend to appear' rather than 'appear,' on account of those facts of subconscious personality, automatic writ ing, etc., of which we studied a few in the last chapter. The buried feelings and thoughts proved now to exist in hysterical anaesthetics, in recipients of post-hypnotic sug gestion, ttc., themselves are parts of secondary personal selves. These selves are for the most part very stupid and contracted, and are cut off at ordinary times from commu nication with the regular and normal self of the individual ; but still they form conscious unities, have continuous mem ories, speak, write, invent distinct names for themselves, or adopt names that are suggested ; and, in short, are entirely worthy of that title of secondary personalities which is now commonly given them. According to M. Janet these second ary personalities are always abnormal, and result from the splitting of what ought to be a single complete self into two parts, of which one lurks in the background whilst the other appears on the surface as the only self the man or woman has. For our present purpose it is unimportant whether this account of the origin of secondary selves is applicable to all possible cases of them or not, for it certainly is true of a large number of them. Now although the size of a secondary self thus formed will depend on the number of thoughts that are thus split-off from the main conscious ness, the form of it tends to personality, and the later thoughts pertaining to it remember the earlier ones and adopt them as their own. M. Janet caught the actual mo ment of inspissation (so to speak) of one of these secondary personalities in his anaesthetic somnambulist Lucie. He found that when this young woman's attention was absorbed

in conversation with a third party, her anaesthetic hand would write simple answers to questions whispered to her by himself. " Do you hear ?" he asked. " No" was the uncon sciously written reply. "But to answer you must hear." " Yes, quite so." "Then how do you manage?" " I don't knoiu" " There must be some one who hears me." " Yes." " Who ?" " Someone other them Lucie." " Ah ! another per son. Shall we give her a name?" "No." "Yes, it will be more convenient." " Well, Adrienne, then." " Once bap< tized, the subconscious personage," M. Janet continues* " grows more definitely outlined and displays better her psychological characters. In particular she shows us that she is conscious of the feelings excluded from the conscious ness of the primary or normal personage. She it is who tells us that I am pinching the arm or touching the little linger in which Lucie for so long has had no tactile sensa tions." *

In other cases the adoption of the name by the second ary self is more spontaneous. I have seen a number of incipient automatic writers and mediums as yet imperfectly * developed,' who immediately and of their own accord write and speak in the name of departed spirits. These may be public characters, as Mozart, Faraday, or real per sons formerly known to the subject, or altogether imagi nary beings. Without prejudicing the question of real 1 spiritcontrol ' in the more developed sorts of tranceutterance, I incline to think that these (often deplorably unintelligent) rudimentary utterances are the work of an inferior fraction of the subject's own natural mind, set free from control by the rest, and working after a set pattern fixed by the prejudices of the social environment. In a spiritualistic community we get optimistic messages, whilst in an ignorant Catholic village the secondary personage calls itself by the name of a demon, and proffers blas phemies and obscenities, instead of telling us how happy it is in the summer-land. f

f Cf. A. Constaus : Relation sur uue Epidemic d'hyslero-demonopathie en 1861. 2rne ed. Paris, 1863.— Chiap e Franzolini: L'Epidemia d'isterodemonopatie in Verzegnis. Reggio, 1879. — See also J. Kernel's little work : Nachricht von dem Vorkornmen des Besessenseins. 1836. Beneath these tracts of thought, which, however rudi mentary, are still organized selves with a memory, habits, and sense of their own identity, M. Janet thinks that the tacts of catalepsy in hysteric patients drive us to suppose that there are thoughts quite unorganized and impersonal A patient in cataleptic trance (which can be produced arti ficially in certain hypnotized subjects) is without memory on waking, and seems insensible and unconscious as long as the cataleptic condition lasts. If, however, one raises the arm of such a subject it stays in that position, and the whole body can thus be moulded like wax under the hands of the operator, retaining for a considerable time whatever attitude he communicates to it. In hysterics whose arm, for example, is anaesthetic, the same thing may happen. The anaesthetic arm may remain passively in positions which it is made to assume ; or if the hand be taken and made to hold a pencil and trace a certain letter, it will continue tracing that letter indefinitely on the paper. These acts, until recently, were supposed to be accompanied by no consciousness at all : they were physiological reflexes. M. Janet considers with much more plausibility that feeling escorts them. The feeling is probably merely that of the position or movement of the limb, and it produces no more than its natural effects when it discharges into the motor centres which keep the position maintained, or the movement incessantly renewed.* Such thoughts as these, says M.

Janet, " are known by no one, for disaggregated sensations reduced to a state of mental dust are not synthetized in any personality." f He admits, however, that these very same unutterably stupid thoughts tend to develop memory, — the cataleptic ere long moves her arm at a bare hint ; so that they form no important exception to the law that all thought tends to assume the form of personal conscious ness. I do not mean necessarily that no one state of mind has any duration — even if true, that would be hard to establish, *For the Physiology of this compare the chapter oil the Will * Loc. cit. p. 316.

The change which I have more particularly in view is thai which takes place in sensible intervals of time ; and the result on which I wish to lay stress is this, that no state once gone can recur and be identical witli ivhat it ivas before. Let us begin with Mr. Shadworth Hodgson's description : " I go straight to the facts, without saying I go to perception, or sensation, or thought, or any special mode at all. What I find when 1 look at my consciousness at all is that what I cannot divest myself of, or not have in consciousness, if I have any consciousness at all, is a sequence of different feelings. I may shut my eyes and keep perfectly still, and try not to contribute anything of my own will ; but whether I think or do not think, whether I perceive external things or not, I always have a succession of different feelings. Anything else that I may have also, of a more special character, comes in as parts of this suc cession. Not to have the succession of different feelings is not to be conscious at all. . . . The chain of consciousness is a sequence of diff Brents." *

Such a description as this can awaken no possible pro test from any one. We all recognize as different great classes of our conscious states. Now we are seeing, now hearing ; now reasoning, now willing ; now recollecting, now expecting ; now loving, now hating ; and in a hundred other ways we know our minds to be alternately engaged. But all these are complex states. The aim of science is always to reduce complexity to simplicity ; and in psychological science we have the celebrated 'theory of ideas9 which, admitting the great difference among each other of what may be called concrete conditions of mind, seeks to show how this is all the resultant effect of variations in the corabination of certain simple elements of consciousness that always remain the same. These mental atoms or molecules are what Locke called 'simple ideas.' Some of Locke's successors made out that the only simple ideas were the sensations strictly so called. Which ideas the simple ones may be does not, however, now concern us. It is enough that certain philosophers have thought they could see under the dissolving-view-appearance of the mind elemen tary facts of any sort that remained unchanged amid the flow.

And the view of these philosophers has been called little into question, for our common experience seems at first sight to corroborate it entirely. Are not the sensations we get from the same object, for example, always the same ? Does not the same piano-key, struck with the same force, make us hear in the same way ? Does not the same grass give us the same feeling of green, the same sky the same feeling of blue, and do we not get the same olfactory sen sation no matter how many times we put our nose to the same flask of cologne ? It seems a piece of metaphysical sophistry to suggest that we do not; and yet a close at tention to the matter shows that there is no proof that the same bodily sensation is ever got by us twice.

What is got tioice is the same OBJECT. We hear the same note over and over again ; we see the same quality of green, or smell the same objective perfume, or experience the same species of pain. The realities, concrete and abstract, physi cal and ideal, whose permanent existence we believe in, seem to be constantly coming up again before our thought, and lead us, in our carelessness, to suppose that our 'ideas ' of them are the same ideas. When we come, some time later, to the chapter on Perception, we shall see how invet erate is our habit of not attending to sensations as subjec tive facts, but of simply using them as stepping-stones to pass over to the recognition of the realities whose presence they reveal. The grass out of the window now looks to me of the same green in the sun as in the shade, and yet a painter would have to paint one part of it dark brown, arother part bright yellow, to give its realj Sensational effect. We take no heed, as a rule, of the different way in which the same things look and sound arid smell at different dis tances and under different circumstances. The sameness of the things is what we are concerned to ascertain ; and any sensations that assure us of that will probably be con sidered in a rough way to be the same with each other. This is what makes off-hand testimony about the subjective identity of different sensations well-nigh worthless as a proof of the fact. The entire history of Sensation is a com mentary on our inability to tell whether two sensations received apart are exactly alike. What appeals to our

attention far more than the absolute quality or quantity oi a given sensation is its ratio to whatever other sensations we may have at the same time. When everything is dark a somewhat less dark sensation makes us see an object white. Helmholtz calculates that the white marble painted in a picture representing an architectural view by moon light is, when seen by daylight, from ten to twenty thousand times brighter than the real moonlit marble would be.*

Such a difference as this could never have been sensibly learned ; it had to be inferred from a series of indirect con siderations. There are facts which make us believe that our sensibility is altering all the time, so that the same object cannot easily give us the same sensation over again. The eye's sensibility to light is at its maximum when the eye is first exposed, and blunts itself with surprising rapid ity. A long night's sleep will make it see things twice as brightly on wakening, as simple rest by closure will make it see them later in the day.f We feel things differently ; according as we are sleepy or awake, hungry or full, fresh ; or tired ; differently at night and in the morning, differently in summer and in winter, and above all things differently in childhood, manhood, and old age. Yet we never doubt that our feelings reveal the same world, with the same sensible qualities and the same sensible things occupying it. The difference of the sensibility is shown best by the difference of our emotion about the things from one age to another, or when we are in different organic moods. What was bright and exciting becomes weary, flat, and unprofitable. The bird's song is tedious, the breeze is mournful, the sky is sad.

To these indirect presumptions that our sensations, fol lowing the mutations of our capacity for feeling, are always undergoing an essential change, must be added another presumption, based on what must happen in the brain. \ Every sensation corresponds to some cerebral action. Foi an identical sensation to recur it would have to occur the /second time in an unmodified brain. But as this, strictly speaking, is a physiological impossibility, so is an un modified feeling an impossibility ; for to every brain-modi^ fication, however small, must correspond a change of equal amount in the feeling which the brain subserves.

All this would be true if even sensations came to us pure and single and not combined into ' things.' Even then we should have to confess that, however we might in ordinary conversation speak of getting the same sensation again, we never in strict theoretic accuracy could do so ; and that whatever was true of the river of life, of the river of elemen tary feeling, it would certainly be true to say, like Heraclitus, that we never descend twice into the same stream.

But if the assumption of ' simple ideas of sensation ' recurring in immutable shape is so easily shown to be baseless, how much more baseless is the assumption of immutability in the larger masses of our thought ! For there it is obvious and palpable that our state of mind is never precisely the same. Every thought we have of a given fact is, strictly speaking, unique, and only bears a resemblance of kind with our other thoughts of the same fact. When the identical fact recurs, we must think of it in a fresh manner, see it under a somewhat different angle, apprehend it in different relations from those in which it last appeared. And the thought by which we cognize it is the thought of it-in-those-relations, a thought suffused with the consciousness of all that dim context. Often we are ourselves struck at the strange differences in our suc cessive views of the same thing. We wonder how we ever could have opined as we did last month about a certain matter. We have outgrown the possibility of that state of mind, we know not how. From one year to another we see things in new lights. What was unreal has grown real, and what was exciting is insipid. The friends we used to care the world for are shrunken to shadows ; the women, once so divine, the stars, the woods, and the waters, how now so dull and common ! the young girls that brought an aura of infinity, at present hardly distinguishable exist ences ; the pictures so empty ; and as for the books, what was there to find so mysteriously significant in Goethe, or in John Mill so full of weight? Instead of all this, more

zestful than ever is the work, the work ,- and fuller and deeper the import of common duties and of common goods. But what here strikes us so forcibly on the flagrant scale exists on every scale, down to the imperceptible transition from one hour's outlook to that of the next. Ex perience is remoulding us every moment, and our mental reaction on every given thing is really a resultant of our experience of the whole world up to that date. The analo gies of brain-physiology must again be appealed to to corroborate our view.

Our earlier chapters have taught us to believe that, whilst we think, our brain changes, and that, like the auro ra borealis, its whole internal equilibrium shifts with every pulse of change. The precise nature of the shifting at a given moment is a product of many factors. The acciden tal state of local nutrition or blood-supply may be among them. But just as one of them certainly is the influence of outward objects on the sense-organs during the moment, so is another certainly the very special susceptibility in which the organ has been left at that moment by all it has gone through in the past. Every brain-state is partly determined by the nature of this entire past succession. Alter the latter in any part, and the brain-state must be \ somewhat different. Each present brain-state is a record in which the eye of Omniscience might read all the fore gone history of its owner. It is out of the question, then, that any total brain-state should identically recur. Some thing like it may recur ; but to suppose it to recur would be equivalent to the absurd admission that all the states that had intervened between its two appearances had been pure nonentities, and that the organ after their passage was exactly as it was before. And (to consider shorter periods) just as, in the senses, an impression feels very dif ferently according to what has preceded it ; as one color succeeding another is modified by the contrast, silence sounds delicious after noise, and a note, when the scale is sung up, sounds unlike itself when the scale is sung down ; as the presence of certain lines in a figure changes the ap parent form of the other lines, and as in music the whole aesthetic effect comes from the manner in which one set of

sounds alters our feeling of another ; so, in thought, we must admit that those portions of the brain that have just been maximally excited retain a kind of soreness which is a condition of our present consciousness, a codetenninant of how and what we now shall feel.* Ever some tracts are waning in tension, some waxing, whilst others actively discharge. The states of tension have as positive an influence as any in determining the total condition, and in deciding what the psychosis shall be. All we know of submaximal nerve-irritations, and of the summation of apparently ineffective stimuli, tends to show that TIO changes in the brain are physiologically ineffective, and that presumably none are bare of psychological result. But as the brain-tension shifts from one relative state of equilibrium to another, like the gyrations of a kaleido-

I scope, now rapid and now slow, is it likely that its faithful psychic concomitant is heavier-footed than itself, and that it cannot match each one of the organ's irradiations by a shifting inward iridescence of its own ? But if it can do this, its inward iridescences must be infinite, for the brainredistributions are in infinite variety. If so coarse a thing as a telephone-plate can be made to thrill for years and never reduplicate its inward condition, how much more must this be the case with the infinitely delicate brain ?

I am sure that this concrete and total manner of regard ing the mind's changes is the only true manner, difficult as it may be to carry it out in detail. If anything seems ob scure about it, it will grow clearer as we advance. Mean while, if it be true, it is certainly also true that no two ' ideas ' are ever exactly the same, which is the proposition we started to prove. The proposition is more important theoretically than it at first sight seems. For it makes it

*It need of course not follow, because a total brain-state does not re cur, that no point of the brain can ever be twice in the same condition. That would be as improbable a consequence as that in the sea a wave-crest should never come twice at the same point of space. What can hardly come twice is an identical combination of wave-forms all with their crests/ 1. and hollows reoccupying identical places. For such a total combina-' tionasthis is the analogue of the brain-state to which our actual conscious ness at any moment is due.

already impossible for us to follow obediently in the foot prints of eitlier the Lockian or the Herbartian school, schools which have had almost unlimited influence in Ger many and among ourselves. No doubt it is often con venient to formulate the mental facts in an atomistic sort of way, and to treat the higher states of consciousness as if they were all built out of unchanging simple ideas. It is convenient often to treat curves as if they were composed of small straight lines, and electricity and nerve-force as if they were fluids. But in the one case as in the other we must never forget that we are talking symbolically, and that there is nothing in nature to answer to our words. A permanently existing ' idea ' or * Vorstellung ' which makes its i appearance before the footlights of consciousness at periodical ' intervals, is as mythological an entity as the Jack of Spades.

What makes it convenient to use the mythological for mulas is the whole organization of speech, which, as was remarked a while ago, was not made by psychologists, but by men who were as a rule only interested in the facts their mental states revealed. They only spoke of their states as ideas of this or of that thing. "What wonder, then, that the thought is most easily conceived under the law of the thing whose name it bears ! If the thing is composed of parts, then we suppose that the thought of the thing must be composed of the thoughts of the parts. If one part of the thing have appeared in the same thing or in other things on former occasions, why then we must be having even now the very same ' idea ' of that part which was there on those occa sion s. If the thing is simple, its thought is simple. If it is multitudinous, it must require a multitude of thoughts to think it. If a succession, only a succession of thoughts can know it. If permanent, its thought is permanent. And so on ad libitum. What after all is so natural as to assume that one object, called by one name, should be known by one affection of the mind ? But, if language must thus in fluence us, the agglutinative languages, and even Greek and Latin with their declensions, would be the better guides. Names did not appear in them inalterable, but changed their shape to suit the context in which they lay. It must have been easier then than now to conceive of the same