The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2

object as being thought of at different times in non-identical conscious states. This, too, will grow clearer as we proceed. Meanwhile a necessary consequence of the belief in permanent selfidentical psychic facts that absent themselves and recur periodically is the Humian doctrine that our thought is composed of separate independent parts and is not a sen sibly continuous stream. That this doctrine entirely mis represents the natural appearances is what I next shall try to show.

3) Within each personal consciousness, thought is sensibly con tinuous. I can only define ' continuous ' as that which is with out breach, crack, or division. I have already said that the breach from one mind to another is perhaps the greats est breach in nature. The only breaches that can well be conceived to occur within the limits of a single mind would either be interruptions, time-gaps during which the con sciousness went out altogether to come into existence again at a later moment ; or they would be breaks in the quality^ or content, of the thought, so abrupt that the segment that followed had no connection whatever with the one that went before. The proposition that within each personal consciousness thought feels continuous, means two things:

1. That even where there is a time-gap the conscious ness after it feels as if it belonged together with the con sciousness before it, as another part of the same self; 2. That the changes from one moment to another in the quality of the consciousness are never absolutely abrupt. The case of the time-gaps, as the simplest, shall be taken first. And first of all a word about time-gaps of which the consciousness may not be itself aware. On page 200 we saw that such time-gaps existed, and that they might be more numerous than is usually supposed. If the consciousness is not aware of them, it cannot feel them as interruptions. In the unconsciousness produced by nitrous oxide and other anaesthetics, in that of epilepsy and fainting, the broken edges of the sentient life may

meet and merge over the gap, much as the feelings of space of the opposite margins of the ' blind spot ' meet and merge over that objective interruption to the sensitiveness of the eye. Such consciousness as this, whatever it be for the onlooking psyche logist, is for itself unbroken» It feds unbroken ; a waking day of it is sensibly a unit as long as that day lasts, in the sense in which the hours themselves are units, as having all their parts next each other, with no intrusive alien substance between. To expect the con sciousness to feel the interruptions of its objective con tinuity as gaps, would be like expecting the eye to feel a gap of silence because it does not hear, or the ear to feel a gap of darkness because it does not see. So much for the gaps that are unfelt.

With the felt gaps the case is different. On waking from sleep, we usually know that we have been unconscious, and we often have an accurate judgment of how long. The judgment here is certainly an inference from sensible signs, and its ease is due to long practice in the particular field.* The result of it, however, is that the consciousness is, for itself, not what it was in the former case, but interrupted and discontinuous, in the mere sense of the words. But in the other sense of continuity, the sense of the parts being inwardly connected and belonging together because they are parts of a common whole, the consciousness remains sensibly continuous and one. What now is the common whole ? The natural name for it is myself, I, or me.

When Paul and Peter wake up in the same bed, and recognize that they have been asleep, each one of them mentally reaches back and makes connection with but one of the two streams of thought which were broken by the sleeping hours. As the current of an electrode buried in the ground unerringly finds its way to its own similarly buried mate, across no matter how much intervening earth ; so Peter's present instantly finds out Peter's past, and never by mistake knits itself on to that of Paul. Paul's thought in turn is as little liable to go astray. The past thought of Peter is appropriated by the present Peter alone. He may

* The accurate registration of the ' how \ona- ' is still a little mysterious' have a knowledge, and a correct one too, of what Paul's last drowsy states of mind were as he sank into sleep, but it is an entirely different sort of knowledge from that which he has ot his own last states. He remembers his own states, whilst he only conceives Paul's. Remembrance is like direct feeling ; its object is suffused with a warmth and intimacy to which no object of mere conception ever attains. This quality of warmth and intimacy and immediacy is what Peter's present thought also possesses for itself. So sure as this present is me, is mine, it says, so sure is anything else that comes with the same warmth and intimacy and immediacy, me and mine. What the qualities called warmth and intimacy may in themselves be will have to be matter for future consideration. But whatever past feelino-s appear with those qualities must be admitted to re ceive the greeting of the present mental state, to be owned by it, and accepted as belonging together with it in a com mon self. This community of self is what the time-gap cannot break in twain, and is why a present thought, al though not ignorant of the time-gap, can still regard itself as continuous with certain chosen portions of the past.

Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as * chain ' or c train ' do not de scribe it fitly ar; it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. But now there appears, even within the limits of the same self, and between thoughts all of which alike have this same sense of belonging together, a kind of jointing and separateness among the parts, of which this statement seems to take no account. I refer to the breaks that are produced by sudden contrasts in the. quality of the successive segments of the stream of thought If the words < chain ' and ' train ' had no natural fitness in them, how came such words to be used at all ? Does not a loud explosion rend the consciousness upon which it abruptly breaks, in twain ? Does not every sudden shock, appearance of a new object,

or change in a sensation, create a real interruption, sensibly felt as such, which cuts the conscious stream across at the moment at which it appears ? Do not such interruptions smite us every hour of our lives, and have we the right, in their presence, still to call our consciousness a continuous stream ? This objection is based partly on a confusion and partly on a superficial introspective view. The confusion is between the thoughts themselves, taken as subjective facts, and the things of which they are aware. It is natural to make this confusion, but easy to avoid it when once put on one's guard. The things are discrete and discontinuous ; they do pass before us in a train or chain, making often explosive appearances and rending each other in twain. But their comings and goings and contrasts no more break the flow of the thought that thinks them than they break the time and the space in which they lie. A silence may be broken by a thunder-clap, and we may be so stunned and confused for a moment by the shock as to give no instant account to ourselves of what has hap pened. But that very confusion is a mental state, and a state that passes us straight over from the silence to the sound. The transition between the thought of one object and the thought of another is no more a break in the thought than a joint in a bamboo is a break in the wood. It is a part of the consciousness as much as the joint is a part of the bamboo.

The superficial introspective view is the overlooking, even when the things are contrasted with each other moet violently, of the large amount of affinity that may still re main between the thoughts by whose means they are cognized. Into the awareness of the thunder itself the awareness of the previous silence creeps and continues ; for what we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder pure, but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrastingwith-it.* Our feeling of the same objective thunder, com ing in this way, is quite different from what it would be

* Of. Brentano; Psychologic, vol. i. pp. 219-20. Altogether this chapter of Brentano's on the Unity of Consciousness is as good as anything with which I am acquainted. were the thunder a continuation of previous thunder. The thunder itself we believe to abolish and exclude the silence ; but i\\s feeling of the thunder is also a feeling of the silence as just gone ; and it would be difficult to find in the actual concrete consciousness of man a feeling so limited to the present as not to have an inkling of anything that went be fore. Here, again, language works against our perception of the truth. We name our thoughts simply, each after its thing, as if each knew its own thing and nothing else. What each really knows is clearly the thing it is named for, with dimly perhaps a thousand other things. It ought to be named after all of them, but it never is. Some of them are always things known a moment ago more clearly ; others are things to be known more clearly a moment hence. * Our own bodily position, attitude, condition, is one of the things of which some awareness, however inattentive, invariably accompanies the knowledge of whatever else we know. We

* Honor to whom honor is due ! The most explicit acknowledgment I have anywhere found of all this is in a buried and forgotten paper by the Rev. Jas. Wills, on 'Accidental Association/ in the Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, vol xxr. part i (1846). Mr. Wills writes : "At every instant of conscious thought there is a certain sum of per ceptions, or reflections, or both together, present, and together constituting one whole state of apprehension. Of this some definite portion may be far more distinct than all the rest ; and the rest be iu consequence proportionably vague, even to the limit of obliteration. But still, within this limit, the most dim shade of perception enters into, and in some infinites imal degree modifies, the whole existing slate. This state will thus be in some way modified by any sensation or emotion, or act of distinct attention, that may give prominence to any part of it ; so that the actual result is capable of the utmost variation, according to the person or the occasion. ... To any portion of the entire scope here described there may be a special direction of the attention, and this special direction is recognized as strictly what is recognized as the idea present to the mind. This idea is evidently not commensurate with the entire state of apprehension, and much perplexity has arisen from not observing this fact. However deeply we may suppose the attention to be engaged by any thought, any consider able alteration of the surrounding phenomena would still be perceived; the most abstruse demonstration iu this room would not prevent a listener, however absorbed, from noticing the sudden extinction of the lights. Our mental states have always an essential unity, such that each state of appre hension, however variously compounded, is a single whole, of which every component is, therefore, strictly apprehended (so far as it is apprehended) as a part. Such is the elementary basis from which all our intellectual operations commence."

think ; and as we think we feel our bodily selves as the seat of the thinking. If the thinking be our thinking, it must be suffused through all its parts with that peculiar warmth and intimacy that make it come as ours. Whether the warmth and intimacy be anything more than the feeling of the same old body always there, is a matter for the next chapter to decide. Whatever the content of the ego may be, it is habitually felt with everything else by us humans, and must form a liaison between all the things of which we become successively aware. *

On this gradualness in the changes of our mental con tent the principles of nerve-action can throw some more light. When studying, in Chapter III, the summation of nervous activities, we saw that no state of the brain can be supposed instantly to die away. If a new state comes, the inertia of the old state will still be there and modify the result accordingly. Of course we cannot tell, in our igno rance, what in each instance the modifications ought to be. The commonest modifications in sense-perception are known as the phenomena of contrast. In aesthetics they are the feelings of delight or displeasure which certain particular orders in a series of impressions give. In thought, strictly and narrowly so called, they are unques tionably that consciousness of the whence and the luhither that always accompanies its flows. If recently the braintract a was vividly excited, and then b, and now vividly c, the total present consciousness is not produced simply by c's excitement, but also by the dying vibrations of a and b as well. If we want to represent the brain-process we must write it thus : ^c — three different processes coexist-

ing, and correlated with them a thought which is no one of the three thoughts which they would have produced had each of them occurred alone. But whatever this fourth thought may exactly be, it seems impossible that it should not be something like each of the three other thoughts whose tracts are concerned in its production, though in a fast-waning phase. * Compare the charming passage in Taine on Intelligence (N. Y. ed.), i. 83-4. It all goes back to what we said in another connection only a few pages ago (p. 233). As the total neurosis changes, so does the total psychosis change. But as the changes of neurosis are never absolutely discontinuous, so must the successive psychoses shade gradually into each other, although their rate of change may be much faster at one moment than at the next.

This difference in the rate of change lies at the basis of a difference of subjective states of which we ought immedi ately to speak. When the rate is slow we are aware of the object of our thought in a comparatively restful and stable way. When rapid, we are aware of a passage, a relation, a transition from it, or 'between it and something else. As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stveam of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird's life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings. The rhythm of language expresses this, where every thought is expressed in a sentence, and every sentence closed by a period. The resting-places are usually occupied by sensorial imagina tions of some sort, whose peculiarity is that they can be held before the mind for an indefinite time, and contem plated without changing ; the places of flight are filled with thoughts of relations, static or dynamic, that for the most part obtain between the matters contemplated in the periods of comparative rest.

Let us call the resting-places the l substantive parts,' and the places of flight the ' transitive parts,' of the stream of thought. It then appears that the main end of our thinking is at all times the attainment of some other sub stantive part than the one from which we have just been dislodged. And we may say that the main use of the transitive parts is to lead us from one substantive conclu sion to another. Now it is very difficult, introspectively, to see the tran sitive parts for what they really are. If they are but flights to a conclusion, stopping them to look at them before the conclusion is reached is really annihilating them. Whilst if we wait till the conclusion le reached, it so exceeds them

In vigor and stability fihat it quite eclipses and swallows them up in its glare. Leo anyone try to cut a thought across in the middle and get a look at its section, and he will see how difficult the introspective observation of the transitive tracts is. The rush of the thought is so headlong that it almost always brings us up at the conclusion before we can arrest it. Or if our purpose is nimble enough and we do arrest it, it ceases forthwith to be itself. As a snowflake crystal caught in the warm hand is no longer a crystal but a drop, so, instead of catching tho feeling of relation moving to its term, we find we have caught some substantive thing, usually the last word we were pronouncing, statically taken, and with Its function, tendency, and particular meaning in the sentence quite evaporated. Tho attempt at introspective analysis in these cases is in fact like seiz ing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks. And the challenge to produce these psychoses, which is sure to be thrown by doubting psychologists at anyone who contends for their existence, is as unfair as Zeno's treatment of the advocates of motion, when, asking them to point out in what place an arrow is when it moves, he argues the falsity of their thesis from their inability to make to so preposterous a question an immediate reply.

The results of this introspective difficulty are baleful. If to hold fast and observe the transitive parts of thought's stream be so hard, then the great blunder to which all schools are liable must be the failure to register them, and the undue emphasizing of the more substantive parts of the stream. Were we not ourselves a moment since in danger of ignoring any feeling transitive between the silence and the thunder, and of treating their boundary as a sort of break in the mind ? Now such ignoring as this has histor ically worked in two ways. One set of thinkers have been led by it to Sensationalism. Unable to lay their hands on any coarse feelings corresponding to the innumerable relations and forms of connection between the facts of the world, finding no named subjective modifications mirroring such relations, they have for the most part denied that feelings of relation exist, and many of them, like Hume, have gone

so far as to deny the reality of most relations out of the mind as well as in it. Substantive psychoses, sensations and their copies and derivatives, juxtaposed like dominoes in a game, but really separate, everything else verbal illu sion, — such is the upshot of this view.* The Intellectual ists, on the other hand, unable to give up the reality of relations extra mentem, but equally unable to point to any distinct substantive feelings in which they were known, have made the same admission that the feelings do not exist. But they have drawn an opposite conclusion. The rela tions must be known, they say, in something that is no feeling, no mental modification continuous and consubstantial with the subjective tissue out of which sensations and other substantive states are made. They are known, these relations, by something that lies on an entirely different plane, by an actus purus of Thought, Intellect, or Reason, all written with capitals and considered to mean something unutterably superior to any fact of sensibility whatever.

But from our point of view both Intellectualists and Sen sationalists are wrong. If there be such things as feelings at all, then so surely as relations between objects exist in rerum naturd, so surely, and more surely, do feelings exist to which these relations are known. There is not a conjunction or a preposition, and hardly an adverbial phrase, syntactic form, or inflection of voice, in human speech, that does not express some shading or other of relation which we at some mo ment actually feel to exist between the larger objects of our thought. If we speak objectively, it is the real relations that appear revealed ; if we speak subjectively, it is the stream of consciousness that matches each of them by an inward coloring of its own. In either case the relations are numberless, and no existing language is capable of do ing justice to all their shades.

We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feel- *E.g. : "The stream of thought is not a continuous current, but a series of distinct ideas, more or less rapid in their succession ; the rapidity being measurable by the number that pass through the mind in a given time." (Bain : E. and W., p. 29.) ing of Uue or a feeling of cold. Yet we do not : so invetei\ ate lias our habit become of recognizing the existence of the substantive parts alone, that language almost refuses to lend itself to any other use. The Empiricists have al ways dwelt on its influence in making us suppose that where we have a separate name, a separate thing must needs be there to correspond with it ; and they have right ly denied the existence of the mob of abstract entities, principles, and forces, in whose favor no other evidence than this could be brought up. But they have said noth ing of that obverse error, of which we said a word in Chap ter VII, (see p. 195), of supposing that where there is no name no entity can exist. All dumb or anonymous psychic states have, owing to this error, been coolly suppressed; or, if recognized at all, have been named after the substantive perception they led to, as thoughts ' about ' this object or * about ' that, the stolid word about engulfing all their del icate idiosyncrasies in its monotonous sound. Thus the greater and greater accentuation and isolation of the sub stantive parts have continually gone on.

Once more take a look at the brain. We believe the brain to be an organ whose internal equilibrium is always in a state of change, — the change affecting every part. The pulses of change are doubtless more violent in one place than in another, their rhythm more rapid at this time than at that. As in a kaleidoscope revolving at a uniform rate, al though the figures are always rearranging themselves, there are instants during which the transformation seems minute and interstitial and almost absent, followed by others when it shoots with magical rapidity, relatively stable forms thus alternating with forms we should not distinguish if seen again ; so in the brain the perpetual rearrangement must result in some forms of tension lingering relatively long, ivhilst others simply come and pass. But if consciousness corresponds to the fact of rearrangement itself, why, if the rearrangement stop not, should the consciousness ever cease ? And if a lingering rearrangement brings with it one kind of consciousness, why should not a swift rearrange ment bring another kind of consciousness as peculiar as the rearrangement itself? The lingering consciousnesses,

if of simple objects, we call 'sensations' or 'images,' ac cording as they are vivid or faint ; if of complex objects, we call them ' percepts ' when vivid, ' concepts ' or ' thoughts ' when faint. For the swift consciousnesses we have only those names of ' transitive states,' or ' feelings of relation,' which we have used.* As the brain-changes * Few writers have admitted that we cognize relations through feeling. The intellectualists have explicitly denied the possibility of such a thing— e.g., Prof. T. H. Green ('Mind,' vol. vn. p. 28): "No feeling, as such or as felt, is [of ?] a relation. . . . Even a relation between feelings is not itself a feeling or felt." On the other hand, the sensatiouists have either smuggled in the cognition without giving any account of it, or have denied the relations to be cognized, or even to exist, at all. A few honorable ex ceptions, however, deserve to be named among the sensatiouists. Dcstutt de Tracy, Laromiguiere, Cardaillac, Brown, and finally Spencer, have ex plicitly contended for feelings of relation, COD substantial with our feelings or thoughts of the terms ' between ' which they obtain. Thus Destutt de Tracy says (Elements dTdeologie, T. ler, chap, iv); " The faculty of judgment is itself a sort of sensibility, for it is the faculty of feeling the relations among our ideas; and to feel relations is to feel." Laromiguiere writes (Le9ons de Philosophic, lime Partie, 3me Le9ou):

" There is no one whose intelligence does not embrace simultaneously many ideas, more or less distinct, more or less confused. Now, when we have many ideas at once, a peculiar feeling arises in us : we feel, among these ideas, resemblances, differences, relations. Let us call this mode of feeling, common to us all, the feeling of relation, or relation-feeling (sentiment-rapport). One sees immediately that these relation-feelings, re sulting from the propinquity of ideas, must be infinitely more numerous than the sensation-feelings (sentiments-sensations] or the feelings we have of the action of our faculties. The slightest knowledge of the mathemat ical theory of combinations will prove this. . . . Ideas of relation origi nate in feelings of relation. They are the effect of our comparing them and reasoning about them."

Similarly, de Cardaillac (Etudes Eleineutaires de Philosophic, Section I. chap, vn ): " By a natural consequence, we are led to suppose that at the same time that we have several sensations or several ideas in the mind, we feel the rela tions which exist between these sensations, and the relations which exist be tween these ideas. ... If the feeling of relations exists in us, ... it is necessarily the most varied and the most fertile of all human feelings: 1° the most varied, because, relations being more numerous than beings, the feelings of relation must be in the same proportion more numerous than the sensations whose presence gives rise to their formation; 2°, the most fertile, for the relative ideas of which the feeling-of-relation is the source . . . are more important than absolute ideas, if such exist. ... If we interrogate common speech, we find the feeling of relation expressed there in a thousand different ways. If it is easy to seize a relation, we saj;

are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream. that it is sensible, to distinguish it from one which, because its terms are too remote, cannot be as quickly perceived. A sensible difference, or re semblance. . . . What is taste in the arts, in intellectual productions r What but the feeling of those relations among the parts which constitutes their merit ? . . . Did we not feel relations we should never attain to true knowledge, . . . for almost all our knowledge is of relations. . . . We never have an isolated sensation ; ... we are therefore never without the feeling of relation. ... An object strikes our senses ; we see in it only a sensation. . . . The relative is so near the absolute, the relation-feeling so near the sensationfeeling, the two are so intimately fused in the composi tion of the object, that the relation appears to us as part of the sensation itself. It is doubtless to this sort of fusion between sensations and feelings of relation that the silence of metaphysicians as to the latter is due; and it is for the same reason that they have obstinately persisted in asking from sensation alone those ideas of relation which it was powerless to give."

Dr. Thomas Brown writes (Lectures, XLV. init.): " There is an exten sive order of our feelings which involve this notion of relation, and which consist indeed in the mere perception of a relation of some sort. . . . Whether the relation be of two or of many external objects, or of two or many affections of the mind, the feeling of this relation ... is what I term a relative suggestion; that phrase being the simplest which it is possible to employ, for expressing, without any theory, the mere fact of the rise of certain feelings of relation, after certain other feelings which precede them; and therefore, as involving no particular theory, and simply ex pressive of an undoubted fact That the feelings of relation are states

of the mind essentially different from our simple perceptions, or concep tions of the objects, . . . that they are not what Condillac terms trans formed sensations, I proved in a former lecture, when I combated the ex cessive simplification of that ingenious but not very accurate philosopher. There is an original tendency or susceptibility of the mind, by which, on perceiving together different objects, we are instantly, without the inter vention of any other mental process, sensible of their relation in certain respects, as truly as there is an original tendency or susceptibility by which, when external objects are present and have produced a certain affection of our sensorial organ, we are instantly affected with the primary elementary feelings of perception; and, I may add, that as our sensations or percep tions are of various species, so are there various species of relations;— the number of relations, indeed, even of external things, being almost infinite, while the number of perceptions is, necessarily, limited by that of the ob jects which have the power of producing some affection of our organs of sensation. . . . Without that susceptibility of the mind by which it has the feeling of relation, our consciousness would be as truly limited to a single point, as our body would become, were it possible to fetter it to a single atom."

Mr. Spencer is even more explicit. His philosophy is crude in that he So much for the transitive states. But there are other unnamed states or qualities of states that are just as iniseems to suppose that it is only in transitive states that outward relations are known ; whereas in truth space-relations, relations of contrast, etc. , are felt along with their terms, in substantive states as well as in transitive states, as we shall abundantly see. Nevertheless Mr. Spencer's passage is so clear that it also deserves to be quoted in full (Principles of Psychology,