The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2

Relation, then, to our topic or interest is constantly felt in the fringe, and particularly the relation of harmony and discord, of furtherance or hindrance of the topic. When the sense of furtherance is there, we are ' all right ; ' with the sense of hindrance we are dissatisfied and perplexed, and cast about us for other thoughts. Now any thought the quality of whose fringe lets us feel ourselves 'all right,' is an acceptable member of our thinking, whatever kind of thought it may otherwise be. Provided we only feel it to have a place in the scheme of relations in which the in-

teresting topic also lies, that is quite sufficient to make of it a relevant and appropriate portion of our train of ideas. For the important thing about a train of thought is its conclusion. That is the meaning, or, as we say, the topic of the thought. That is what abides when all its other mem bers have faded from memory. Usually this conclusion is a word or phrase or particular image, or practical attitude or resolve, whether rising to answer a problem or fill a pre-existing gap that worried us, or whether accidentally stumbled on in revery. In either case it stands out from the other segments of the stream by reason of the peculiar interest attaching to it. This interest arrests it, makes a sort of crisis of it when it comes, induces attention upon it and makes us treat it in a substantive way.

The parts of the stream that precede these substantive conclusions are but the means of the latter's attainment. And, provided the same conclusion be reached, the means may be as mutable as we like, for the ' meaning ' of the stream of thought will be the same. What difference does it make what the means are ? " Qu'importe le flacon, pourvu qu'on ait I'ivresse?" The relative unimportance of the means appears from the fact that when the conclusion is there, we have always forgotten most of the steps preceding its attain ment. When we have uttered a proposition, we are rarely able a moment afterwards to recall our exact words, though we can express it in different words easily enough. The practical upshot of a book we read remains with us, though we may not recall one of its sentences.

The only paradox would seem to lie in supposing that the fringe of felt affinity and discord can be the same in two heterogeneous sets of images. Take a train of words passing through the mind and leading to a certain conclu sion on the one hand, and on the other hand an almost wordless set of tactile, visual and other fancies leading to the same conclusion. Can the halo, fringe, or scheme in which we feel the words to lie be the same as that in which we feel the images to lie ? Does not the discrepancy of terms involve a discrepancy of felt relations among them ?

If the terms be taken qua mere sensations, it assur edly does. For instance, the words may rhyme with each other, — the visual images can have no such affinity as that. But qua thoughts, qua sensations understood, the words have contracted by long association fringes of mutual repugnance or affinity with each other and with the conclusion, which run exactly parallel with like fringes in the visual, tactile and other ideas. The most important element of these fringes is, I repeat, the mere feeling of harmony or discord, of a right or wrong direction in the thought. Dr. Camp bell has, so far as I know, made the best analysis of this fact, and his words, often quoted, deserve to be quoted again. The chapter is entitled "What is the cause that nonsense so often escapes being detected, both by the writer and by the reader ?" The author, in answering this question, makes (inter alia) the following remarks : *

"That connection [he says] or relation which comes gradually to sub sist among the different words of a language, in the minds of those who speak it, ... is merely consequent on this, that those words are employed as signs of connected or related things. It is an axiom in geometry that things equal to the same thing are equal to one another. It may, in like manner, be admitted as an axiom in psychology that ideas associated by the same idea will associate one another. Hence it will happen that if, from experiencing the connection of two things, there results, as infallibly there will result, an association between the ideas or notions annexed to them, as each idea will moreover be asso ciated by its sign, there will likewise be an association between the ideas of the signs. Hence the sounds considered as signs will be conceived to have a connection analogous to that which subsisteth among the things signified; I say, the sounds considered as signs; for this way of consid ering them constantly attends us in speaking, writing, hearing, and reading. When we purposely abstract from it, and regard them merely as sounds, we are instantly sensible that they are quite unconnected, and have no other relation than what ariseth from similitude of tone or accent. But to consider them in this manner commonly results from previous design, and requires a kind of effort which is not exerted in the ordinary use of speech. In ordinary use they are regarded solely as signs, or, rather, they are confounded with the things they signify; the consequence of which is that, in the manner just now explained, we come insensibly to conceive a connection among them of a very different sort from that of which sounds are naturally susceptible.

"Now this conception, habit, or tendency of the mind, call it which you please, is considerably strengthened by the frequent use of language and by the structure of it. Language is the sole channel through which * George Campbell: Philosophy of Rhetoric, book n. chap. vii. we communicate our knowledge and discoveries to others, and through which the knowledge and discoveries of others are communicated to us. By reiterated recourse to this medium, it necessarily happens that when things are related to each other, the words signifying those things are more commonly brought together in discourse. Hence the words and names by themselves, by customary vicinity, contract in the fancy a relation additional to that which they derive purely from being the symbols of related things. Farther, this tendency is strengthened by the structure of language. All languages whatever, even the most barbarous, as far as hath yet appeared, are of a regular and analogical make. The consequence is that similar relations in things will be ex pressed similarly ; that is, by similar inflections, derivations, composi tions, arrangement of words, or juxtaposition of particles, according to the genius or grammatical form of the particular tongue. Now as, by the habitual use of a language (even though it were quite irregular), the signs would insensibly become connected in the imagination wher ever the things signified are connected in nature, so, by the regular structure of a language, this connection among the signs is conceived as analogous to that which subsisteth among their archetypes."

If we know English and French and begin a sentence in French, all the later words that come are French ; we hardly ever drop into English. And this affinity of the French words for each other is not something merely operating me chanically as a brain-law, it is something we feel at the time. Our understanding of a French sentence heard never falls to so low an ebb that we are not aware that the words lin guistically belong together. Our attention can hardly so wander that if an English word be suddenly introduced we shall not start at the change. Such a vague sense as this of the words belonging together is the very minimum of fringe that can accompany them, if 'thought' at all. Usually the vague perception that all the words we hear belong to the same language and to the same special vocab ulary in that language, and that the grammatical sequence is familiar, is practically equivalent to an admission that what we hear is sense. But if an unusual foreign word be introduced, if the grammar trip, or if a term from an incongruous vocabulary suddenly appear, such as ' rattrap ' or * plumber's bill ' in a philosophical discourse, the sentence detonates, as it were, we receive a shock from the incongruity, and the drowsy assent is gone. The feeling of Tationality in these cases seems rather a negative than a

positive thing, being the mere absence of shock, or sense of discord, between the terms of thought. So delicate and incessant is this recognition by the mind of the mere fitness of words to be mentioned together that the slightest misreading, such as ' casualty ' for 'causality,' or 'perpetual' for * perceptual,' will be cor rected by a listener whose attention is so relaxed that he gets no idea of the meaning of the sentence at all. Conversely, if words do belong to the same vocabulary, and if the grammatical structure is correct, sentences with absolutely no meaning may be uttered in good faith and pass unchallenged. Discourses at prayer-meetings, re shuffling the same collection of cant phrases, and the whole genus of penny-a-line-isms and newspaper-reporter's flourishes give illustrations of this. "The birds filled the tree-tops with their morning song, making the air moist, cool, and pleasant," is a sentence I remember reading once in a report of some athletic exercises in Jerome Park. It was probably written unconsciously by the hurried re porter, and read uncritically by many readers. An entire volume of 784 pages lately published in Boston* is com posed of stuff like this passage picked out at random :

" The flow of the efferent fluids of all these vessels from their out lets at the terminal loop of each culminate link on the surface of the nuclear organism is continuous as their respective atmospheric fruitage up to the altitudinal limit of their expansibility, whence, when atmosphered by like but coalescing essences from higher altitudes,— those sensibly expressed as the essential qualities of external forms, — they descend, and become assimilated by the afferents of the nuclear organ ism, "t

* Substantialism or Philosophy of Knowledge, by ' Jean Story' (1879). fM. G. Tarde, quoting (in Delbnmf, Le Sommeil et les Revcs (1885), p. <J26) some nonsense-verses from a dream, says they show how prosodic forms may subsist in a mind from which logical rules are effaced. . . . I was able, in dreaming, to preserve the faculty of rinding two words which rhymed, to appreciate the rhyme, to fill up the verse as it first presented itself with other words which, added, gave the right number of syllables, and yet I was ignorant of the sense of the words. . . . Thus we have the extraordinary fact that the words called each other up, without calling up their sense. . . . Even when awake, it is more difficult to ascend to the meaning of a word than to pass from one word to another ; or to put it otherwise, it is harder to be a thinker than to be a rhetorician, and on the whole nothing is commoner thon trains of -words not understood."

There are every year works published whose contents show them to be by real lunatics. To the reader, the book quoted from seems pure nonsense from beginning to end. It is impossible to divine, in such a case, just what sort of feeling of rational relation between the words may have appeared to the author's mind. The border line between objective sense and nonsense is hard to draw ; that between subjective sense and nonsense, impossible. Subjectively, any collocation of words may make sense — even the wildest words in a dream — if one only does not doubt their belonging together. Take the obscurer pas sages in Hegel : it is a fair question whether the rationality included in them be anything more than the fact that the words all belong to a common vocabulary, and are strung together on a scheme of predication and relation, — imme diacy, self-relation, and what not, — which has habitually recurred. Yet there seems no reason to doubt that the subjective feeling of the rationality of these sentences was strong in the writer as he penned them, or even that some readers by straining may have reproduced it in themselves.

To sum up, certain kinds of verbal associate, certain grammatical expectations fulfilled, stand for a good part ol our impression that a sentence has a meaning and is dominated by the Unity of one Thought. Nonsense in grammatical form sounds half rational ; sense with gram matical sequence upset sounds nonsensical ; e.g., " Elba the Napoleon English faith had banished broken to he Saint because Helena at." Finally, there is about each word the psychic ' overtone ' of feeling that it brings us nearer to a forefelt conclusion. Suffuse all the words of a sentence, as they pass, with these three fringes or haloes of relation, let the conclusion seem worth arriving at, and all will admit the sentence to be an expression of thoroughly continuous, unified, and rational thought.*

* We think it odd that young children should listen with such rapt attention to the reading of stories expressed in words half of which they do not understand, and of none of which they ask the meaning. But their thinking is in form just what ours is when it is rapid. Both of us make flying leaps over large portions of the sentences uttered and we give Each word, in such a sentence, is felt, not only as a word, but as having a meaning. The ' meaning ' of a word taken thus dynamically in a sentence may be quite differ ent from its meaning when taken statically or without con text. The dynamic meaning is usually reduced to the bare fringe we have described, of felt suitability or unfitness to the context and conclusion. The static meaning, when the word is concrete, as ' table,' ' Boston,' consists of sensory images awakened ; when it is abstract, as ' criminal legisla tion,' ' fallacy,' the meaning consists of other words aroused, forming the so-called ' definition.'

Hegel's celebrated dictum that pure being is identical with pure nothing results from his taking the words stati cally, or without the fringe they wear in a context. Taken in isolation, they agree in the single point of awakening no sensorial images. But taken dynamically, or as significant, — as thought, — their fringes of relation, their affinities and repugnances, their function and meaning, are felt and understood to be absolutely opposed. Such considerations as these remove all appearance of paradox from those cases of extremely deficient visual im agery of whose existence Mr. Galton has made us aware (see below). An exceptionally intelligent friend informs me that he can frame no image whatever of the appearance of his breakfast-table. When asked how he then remembers it at all, he says he simple ' knows ' that it seated four people, and was covered with a white cloth on which were a butter dish, a coffee-pot, radishes, and so forth. The mind-stuff of which this ' knowing' is made seems to be verbal images exclusively. But if the words ' coffee,' ' bacon,' * muffins,' and ' eggs ' lead a man to speak to his cook, to pay his bills, and to take measures for the morrow's meal exactly as visual and gustatory memories would, why are they not,

attention only to substantive starting points, turning points, and conclu sions here and there. All the rest, ' substantive ' and separately intelligible, as it may potentially be, actually serves only as so much transitive material. It is internodal consciousness, giving us the sense of continuity, but having no significance apart from its mere gap-filling function. The children probably feel no gap when through a lot of unintelligible words they arc swiftly carried to a familiar and intelligible terminus.

for all practical intents and purposes, as good a kind of material in which to think ? In fact, we may suspect them to be for most purposes better than terms with a richer imaginative coloring. The scheme of relationship and the conclusion being the essential things in thinking, that kind of mind-stuff which is handiest will be the best for the purpose. Now words, uttered or unexpressed, are the handiest mental elements we have. Not only are they very rapidly revivable, but they are revivable as actual sen sations more easily than any other items of our ex perience. Did they not possess some such advantage as this, it would hardly be the case that the older men are and the more effective as thinkers, the more, as a rule, they have lost their visualizing power and depend on words. This was ascertained by Mr. Galton to be the case with members of the Royal Society. The present writer ob serves it in his own person most distinctly.

On the other hand, a deaf and dumb man can weave his tactile and visual images into a system of thought quite as effective and rational as that of a word-user. The question whether thought is possible without language has been a favorite topic of discussion among philosophers. Some interesting reminiscences of his childhood by Mr. Ballard, a deaf-mute instructor in the National College at Washington, show it to be perfectly possible. A few paragraphs may be quoted here.

" In consequence of the loss of my hearing in infancy, I was de barred from enjoying the advantages which children in the full pos session of their senses derive from the exercises of the common primary school, from the every-day talk of their school-fellows and playmates, and from the conversation of their parents and other grown-up persons. " I could convey my thoughts and feelings to my parents and brothers by natural signs or pantomime, and I could understand what they said to me by the same medium; our intercourse being, however, confined to the daily routine of home affairs and hardly going beyond the cirele of my own observation. . . .

"My father adopted a course which he thought would, in some measure, compensate me for the loss of my hearing. It was that of taking me with him when business required him to ride abroad ; and he took me more frequently than he did my brothers ; giving, as the reason for his apparent partiality, that they could acquire information through the ear, while I depended solely upon my eye for acquaintance with affairs of the outside world. . . . ' ' I have a vivid recollection of the delight I felt in watching the different scenes we passed through, observing the various phases of nature, both animate and inanimate ; though we did not, owing to my infirmity, engage in conversation. It was during those delightful rides, some two or three years before my initiation into the rudiments of written language, that I began to ask myself the question : How came the world into being ? When this question occurred to my mind, I set myself to thinking it over a long time. My curiosity was awakened as to what was the origin of human life in its first appearance upon the earth, and of vegetable life as well, and also the cause of the existence of the earth, sun, moon, and stars.

" I remember at one time when my eye fell upon a very large old stump which we happened to pass in one of our rides, I asked myself, ' Is it possible that the first man that ever came into the world rose out of that stump ? But that stump is only a remnant of a once noble mag nificent tree, and how came that tree ? Why, it came only by beginning to grow out of the ground just like those little trees now coming up.' And I dismissed from my mind, as an absurd idea, the connection between the origin of man and a decaying old stump. . . .

" I have no recollection of what it was that first suggested to me the question as to the origin of things. I had before this time gained ideas of the descent from parent to child, of the propagation of animals, arid of the production of plants from seeds. The question that occurred to my mind was : whence came the first man, the first animal, and the first plant, at the remotest distance of time, before which there was no man, no animal, no plant ; since I knew they all had a beginning and an end.

"It is impossible to state the exact order in which these different questions arose, i.e., about men, animals, plants, the earth, sun, moon, etc. The lower animals did not receive so much thought as was bestowed upon man and the earth ; perhaps because I put man and beast in the same class, since I believed that man would be annihilated and there was no resurrection beyond the grave, — though I am told by my mother that, in answer to my question, in the case of a deceased uncle who looked to me like a person in sleep, she had tried to make me understand that he would awake in the far future. It was my belief that man and beast derived their being from the same source, and were to be laid down in the dust in a state of annihilation. Considering the brute animal as of secondary importance, and allied to man on a lower level, man and the earth were the two things on which my mind dwelled most.

" I think I was five years old, when I began to understand the de scent from parent to child and the propagation of animals. I was nearly eleven years old, when I entered the Institution where I was educated ; and I remember distinctly that it was at least two years before this time that I began to ask myself the question as to the origin of the universe. My age was then about eight, not over nine years. "Of the form of the earth, I had no idea in my childhood, except that, from a look at a map of the hemispheres, I inferred there were two immense disks of matter lying near each other. I also believed the sun and moon to be round, flat plates of illuminating matter ; and forthose luminaries I entertained a sort of reverence on account of their power of lighting and heating the earth. I thought from their coming up and going down, travelling across the sky in so regular a manner that there must be a certain something having power to govern their course. I believed the sun went into a hole at the west and came out of another at the east, travelling through a great tube in the earth, de scribing the same curve as it seemed to describe in the sky. The stars seemed to me to be tiny lights studded in the sky.

" The source from which the universe came was the question about which my mind revolved in a vain struggle to grasp it, or rather to fight the way up to attain to a satisfactory answer. When I had occupied myself with this subject a considerable time, I perceived that it was a matter much greater than my mind could comprehend ; and I remem ber well that I became so appalled at its mystery and so bewildered at my inability to grapple with it that I laid the subject aside and out of my mind, glad to escape being, as it were, drawn into a vortex of inex tricable confusion. Though I felt relieved at this escape, yet I could not resist the desire to know the truth ; and I returned to the subject ; but as before, I left it, after thinking it over for some time. In this state of perplexity, I hoped all the time to get at the truth, still believing that the more I gave thought to the subject, the more my mind would pene trate the mystery. Thus I was tossed like a shuttlecock, returning to the subject and recoiling from it, till I came to school.

" I remember that my mother once told me about a being up above, pointing her finger towards the sky and with a solemn look on her coun tenance. I do not recall the circumstance which led to this communica tion. When she mentioned the mysterious being up in the sky, I was eager to take hold of the subject, and plied her with questions concern ing the form and appearance of this unknown being, asking if it was the sun, moon, or one of the stars. I knew she meant that there was a living one somewhere up in the sky ; but when I realized that she could not answer my questions, I gave it up in despair, feeling sorrowful that I could not obtain a definite idea of the mysterious living one up in the sky.

' ' One day, while we were haying in a field, there was a series of heavy thunder-claps. I asked one of my brothers where they came from. He pointed to the sky and made a zigzag motion with his finger, signifying lightning. I imagined there was a great man somewhere in the blue vault, who made a loud noise with his voice out of it ; and each time I heard * a thunder-clap I was frightened, and looked up at the sky, fear ing he was speaking a threatening word." t

Here we may pause. The reader sees by this time that it makes little or no difference in what sort of mindstuff, in what quality of imagery, his thinking goes on. The only images intrinsically important are the halting-places, the substantive conclusions, provisional or final, of the thought. Throughout all the rest of the stream, the feelings of rela tion are everything, and the terms related almost naught. These feelings of relation, these psychic overtones, halos, suffusions, or fringes about the terms, may be the same in very different systems of imagery. A diagram may help to accentuate this indifference of the mental means where the end is the same. Let A be some experience from which a number of thinkers start. Let Z be the practical conclusion rationally inferrible from it. One gets to the conclusion by one line, another by another ; one follows a course of English, another of German, verbal imagery. "With one, visual images pre dominate ; with another, tac tile. Some trains are tinged with emotions, others not; some are very abridged, syn thetic and rapid, others, hesi- FIG. 28. tating and broken into many steps. But when the penul timate terms of all the trains, however differing inter sc, finally shoot into the same conclusion, we say and rightly say, that all the thinkers have had substantially the same thought. It would probably astound each of them beyond

* Not literally heard, of course. Deaf mutes are quick to perceive shocks and jars that can be felt, even when so slight as to be unnoticed by those who can hear. t Quoted by Samuel Porter : 'Is Thought possible without Language?' in Princeton Review, 57th year, pp. 108-12 (Jan. 1881 ?). Of. also W. W. Ireland : The Blot upon the Brain (1886), Paper X, part IT ; G. J. Romanes : Mental Evolution in Man, pp. 81-83, and references therein made. Prof. Max Miiller gives a very complete history of this controversy in pp. 30 -64 of his ' Science of Thought ' (1887). His own view is that Thought and Speech are inseparable ; but under speech he includes any conceivable sort of sym bolism or even mental imagery, and he makes no allowance for the word less summary glimpses which we have of systems of relation and direction.

measure to be let ato his neighbor's mind and to find now different the scene y there was from that in his own. Thought is in fact a kind of Algebra, as Berkeley long ago said, "in which, though a particular quantity be marked by each letter, yet to proceed right, it is not requisite that in every step each letter suggest to your thoughts that par ticular quantity it was appointed to stand for." Mr. Lewes has developed this algebra-analogy so well that I must quote his words :