The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2

" The leading characteristic of algebra is that of operation on rela tions. This also is the leading characteristic of Thought. Algebra can not exist without values, nor Thought without Feelings. The operations are so many blank forms till the values are assigned. Words are va cant sounds, ideas are blank forms, unless they symbolize images and sensations which are their values. Nevertheless it is rigorously true, and of the greatest importance, that analysts carry on very extensive operations with blank forms, never pausing to supply the symbols with values until the calculation is completed; and ordinary men, no less than philosophers, carry on long trains of thought without pausing to translate their ideas (words) into images. . . , Suppose some one from a distance shouts 'a lion!' At once the maii starts in alarm. . . . To the man the word is not only an ... expression of all that he has seen and heard of lions, capable of recalling various experiences, but is also capable of taking its place in a connected series of thoughts without recalling any of those experiences, without reviving an image, however faint, of the lion— simply as a sign of a certain relation Included in the complex so named. Like an algebraic symbol it may be operated on without conveying other significance than an abstract relation : it is a sign of Danger, related to fear with all its motor sequences. Its logical position suffices. . . . Ideas are substitutions which require a secondary process when what is symbolized by them is translated into the images and experiences it replaces; and this secondary process is frequently not performed at all, generally only performed to a very small extent.

Let anyone closely examine what has passed in his mind when he has con structed a chain of reasoning, and he will be surprised at the fewness and faintness of the images which have accompanied the ideas. Sup pose you inform me that ' the blood rushed violently from the man's heart, quickening his pulse at the sight of his enemy.' Of the many la tent images in this phrase, how many were salient in your mind and in mine ? Probably two — the man and his enemy— and these images were faint. Images of blood, heart, violent rushing, pulse, quickening, and sight, were either not revived at all, or were passing shadows. Had any such images arisen, they would have hampered thought, retarding the logical process of judgment by irrelevant connections. The symbols had substituted relations for these values. . . . There are no images of

two things and three things, when I say ' two and three equal five;' there are simply familiar symbols having precise relations. . . . The verbal symbol ' horse,' which stands for all our experiences of horses, serves all the purposes of Thought, without recalling one of the images clustered in the perception of horses, just as the sight of a horse's form serves all the purposes of recognition without recalling the sound of its neighing or its tramp, its qualities as an animal of draught, and so forth.*

It need only be added that as the Algebrist, though the sequence of his terms is fixed by their relations rather than by their several values, must give a real value to the final one he reaches ; so the thinker in words must let his conclud ing word or phrase be translated into its full sensible-imagevalue, under penalty of the thought being left unrealized and pale. This is all I have to say about the sensible continuity and unity of our thought as contrasted with the apparent discreteness of the words, images, and other means by which it seems to be carried on. Between all their sub stantive elements there is ' transitive ' consciousness, and the words and images are ' fringed,' and not as discrete as to a careless view they seem. Let us advance now to the next head in our description of Thought's stream.

4. Human thought appears to deal with objects independent of itself ; that ix, it is cognitive, or possesses the function of knowing. For Absolute Idealism, the infinite Thought and its ob jects are one. The Objects are, through being thought ; the eternal Mind is, through thinking them. Were a human thought alone in the world there would be no reason for any other assumption regarding it. Whatever it might have before it would be its vision, would be there, in its ' there,' or then, in its ' then ' ; and the question would never arise whether an extra-mental duplicate of it existed or not. The reason why we all believe that the objects of our thoughts have a duplicate existence outside, is that there are many human thoughts, each with the same objects, as

* Problems of Life and Mind, 3d Series, Problem iv, chapter 5. Com pare also Victor Eggur : Lu Parole luterieure (Paris, 1881), chap. vi. we cannot help supposing. The judgment that my thought has the same object as his thought is what makes the psychologist call my thought cognitive of an outer reality. The judgment that my own past thought and my own pres ent thought are of the same object is what makes me take the object out of either and project it by a sort of triangulation into an independent position, from which it may appear to both. Sameness in a multiplicity of objective appearances is thus the basis of our belief in realities outside of thought.* In Chapter XII we shall have to take up the judgment of sameness again.

To show that the question of reality being extra-mental or not is not likely to arise in the absence of repeated ex periences of the same, take the example of an altogether unprecedented experience, such as a new taste in the throat. Is it a subjective qiiality of feeling, or an objective quality felt ? You do not even ask the question at this point. It is simply that taste. But if a doctor hears you describe it, and says : " Ha ! Now you know what heartburn is," then it becomes a quality already existent extra mentem tuam, which you in turn have come upon and learned. The first spaces, times, things, qualities, experienced by the child probably appear, like the first heartburn, in this absolute way, as simple beings, neither in nor out of thought. But later, by having other thoughts than this present one, and making repeated judgments of sameness among their ob jects, he corroborates in himself the notion of realities, past and distant as well as present, which realities no one single thought either possesses or engenders, but which all may contemplate and know. This, as was stated in the last chapter, is the psychological point of view, the relatively uncritical non-idealistic point of view of all natural science, beyond which this book cannot go. A mind which has become conscious of its own cognitive function, plays what we have called ' the psychologist ' upon itself. It not only knows the things that appear before it ; it knows that it

*If but one person sees an apparition we consider it his private halluci nation. If more than one. we begin to think it may be a real external presence. knows them. This stage of reflective condition is, more 01 less explicitly, our habitual adult state of mind. It cannot, however, be regarded as primitive. The con sciousness of objects must come first. We seem to lapse into this primordial condition when consciousness is re duced to a minimum by the inhalation of anaesthetics or during a faint. Many persons testify that at a certain stage of the anaesthetic process objects are still cognized whilst the thought of self is lost. Professor Herzeu says : *

" During the syncope there is absolute psychic annihilation, the ab sence of all consciousness ; then at the beginning of coming to, one has at a certain moment a vague, limitless, infinite feeling— a sense of exist ence in general without the least trace of distinction between the me and the not-me." Dr. Shoemaker of Philadelphia describes during the deepest conscious stage of ether-intoxication a vision of " two endless parallel lines in swift longitudinal motion . . . on a uni form misty background . . . together with a constant sound or whirr, not loud but distinct . . . which seemed to be connected with the paral lel lines. . . . These phenomena occupied the whole field. There were present no dreams or visions in any way connected with human affairs, no ideas or impressions akin to anything in past experience, no emo tions, of course no idea of personality. There was no conception as to what being it was that was regarding the two lines, or that there existed any such thing as such a being ; the lines and waves were all." t

Similarly a friend of Mr. Herbert Spencer, quoted by him in 'Mind' (vol in. p. 556), speaks of " an undisturbed empty quiet everywhere except that a stupid presence lay like a heavy intrusion somewhere — a blotch on the calm." This sense of objectivity and lapse of subjectivity, even when the object is almost indefinable, is, it seems to me, a somewhat familiar phase in chloroformization, though in my own case it is too deep a phase for any articulate aftermemory to remain. I only know that as it vanishes I seem to wake to a sense of my own existence as something additional to what had previously been there.J

f Quoted from the Therapeutic Gazette, by the N. Y. Semi-weekly Evening Post for Nov. 2, 1886. Jin lialf-stunned states self -consciousness may lapse. A frieud writes me : " We were driving back from in a wagonette. The door flew Many philosophers, however, hold that the reflective consciousness of the self is essential to the cognitive func tion of thought. They hold that a thought, in order to know a thing at all, must expressly distinguish between the thing and its own self.* This is a perfectly wanton assumption, and not the faintest shadow of reason exists for supposing it true. As well might I contend that I cannot dream without dreaming that I dream, swear without swearing that I swear, deny without denying that I deny, as main tain that I cannot know without knowing that I know. 1 may have either acquaintance-with, or knowledge-about, an object O without think about myself at all. It suffices for this that I think O, and that it exist. If, in addition to thinking O, I also think that I exist and that I know O, well and good ; I then know one more thing, a fact about O, of which I previously was unmindful. That, however, does not prevent me from having already known O a good deal. O per se, or O plus P, are as good objects of knowledge as O plus me is. The philosophers in question simply substi tute one particular object for all others, and call it the ob ject par excellence. It is a case of the psychologist's fal lacy ' (see p. 197). They know the object to be one thing

open and X., alias ' Baldy,' fell out on the road. We pulled up at once, and then he said, ' Did anybody fall out?' or 'Who fell out?'— I don't exactly remember the words. When told that Baldy fell out, he said, ' Did Baldy fall out ? Poor Baldy ! " ' * Kant originated this view. I subjoin a few English statements of it. J. Ferrier, Institutes of Metaphysic, Proposition i : " Along with what ever any intelligence knows it must, as the ground or condition of its knowledge, have some knowledge of itself." Sir Wm. Hamilton, Discussions, p. 47: " We know, and we know that we know,— these propositions, logically distinct, are really identical ; each implies the other. ... So true is the scholastic brocard : non sentimus nisi sentiamus nos sentire." H. L. Mansel, Metaphysics, p. 58: "Whatever variety of materials may exist within reach of my mind, I can become conscious of them only by recog nizing them as mine. . . . Relation to the conscious self is thus the perma nent and universal feature which every state of consciousness as such must exhibit." T. H. Green, Introduction to Hume, p. 12: "A consciousness by the man ... of himself, in negative relation to the thing that is his object, and this consciousness must be taken to go along with the percep tive act itself. Not less than this indeed can be involved in any act that is to be the beginning of knowledge at all. It is the minimum of possible thought or intelligence."

and the thought another; and they forthwith foist their own knowledge into that of the thought of which they pre tend to give a true account. To conclude, then, thought may, but need not, in knoiving, discriminate between its object and itself. We have been using the word Object. Something must now be said about the proper use of the term Object in Psy chology. In popular parlance the word object is commonly taken without reference to the act of knowledge, and treated as synonymous with individual subject of existence. Thus if anyone ask what is the mind's object when you say ' Columbus discovered America in 1492,' most people will reply ' Columbus,' or ' America,' or, at most, ' the discovery of America.' They will name a substantive kernel or nu cleus of the consciousness, and say the thought is ' about ' that, — as indeed it is, — and they will call that your thought's * object.' Really that is usually only the grammatical object, or more likely the grammatical subject, of your sen tence. It is at most your ' fractional object ; ' or you may call it the * topic ' of your thought, or the ' subject of your dis course.' But the Object of your thought is really its entire content or deliverance, neither more nor less. It is a vicious use of speech to take out a substantive kernel from its con tent and call that its object ; and it is an equally vicious use of speech to add a substantive kernel not articulately in cluded in its content, and to call that its object. Yet either one of these two sins we commit, whenever we content our selves with saying that a given thought is simply ' about ' a certain topic, or that that topic is its * object.' The object of my thought in the previous sentence, for example, is strictly speaking neither Columbus, nor America, nor its discovery. It is nothing short of the entire sentence, ' Columbus-dis co vered-Ainerica-in-1492.' And if we wish to speak of it substantively, we must make a substantive of it by writing it out thus with hyphens between all its words. Nothing but this can possibly name its delicate idiosyncrasy. And if we wish to feel that idiosyncrasy we must reproduce the thought as it was uttered, with every word fringed nud the

whole sentence bathed in that original halo of obscure rela tions, which, like an horizon, then spread about its meaning. Our psychological duty is to cling as closely as possible to the actual constitution of the thought we are studying. We may err as much by excess as by defect. If the kernel or 'topic,' Columbus, is in one way less than the thought's object, so in another wa}r it may be more. That is, when named by the psychologist, it may mean much more than actually is present to the thought of which he is reporter. Thus, for example, suppose you should go on to think : * He was a daring genius ! ' An ordinary psychologist would not hesitate to say that the object of your thought was still ' Columbus.' True, your thought is about Columbus. It ' terminates ' in Columbus, leads from and to the direct idea of Columbus. But for the moment it is not fully and immediately Columbus, it is only ' he,' or rather ' he-was- a-daring-genius ;' which, though it may be an unimportant difference for conversational purposes, is, for introspective psychology, as great a difference as there can be.

The object of every thought, then, is neither more nor less than all that the thought thinks, exactly as the thought thinks it, however complicated the matter, and however symbolic the manner of the thinking may be. It is need less to say that memory can seldom accurately reproduce such an object, when once it has passed from before the mind. It either makes too little or too much of it. Its best plan is to repeat the verbal sentence, if there was one, in which the object was expressed. But for inarticu late thoughts there is not even this resource, and intro spection must confess that the task exceeds her powers. The mass of our thinking vanishes for ever, beyond hope of recovery, and psychology only gathers up a few of the crumbs that fall from the feast.

The next point to make clear is that, hoiuever complex the object may be, the, thought of it is one undivided state of con sciousness. As Thomas Brown says : * " I have already spoken too often to require again to caution you against the mistake into which, I confess, that the terms which the poverty of our language obliges us to use might of themselves very naturally lead you ; the mistake of supposing that the most complex states of mind are not truly, in their very essence, as much one and indivisible as those which we term simple — the complexity and seem ing coexistence which they involve being relative to our feeling * only, not to their own absolute nature. I trust I need not repeat to you that, in itself, every notion, however seemingly complex, is, and must be, truly simple — being one state or affection, of one simple substance, mind. Our conception of a whole army, for example, is as truly this one mind existing in this one state, as our conception of any of the individuals that compose an army. Our notion of the abstract num bers, eight, four, two, is as truly one feeling of the mind as our notion of simple unity."

The ordinary associationist-psychology supposes, in contrast with this, that whenever an object of thought con tains many elements, the thought itself must be made up of just as many ideas, one idea for each element, and all fused together in appearance, but really separate. f The enemies of this psychology find (as we have already seen) little trouble in showing that such a bundle of separate ideas would never form one thought at all, and they con tend that an Ego must be added to the bundle to give it unity, and bring the various ideas into relation with each other.J We will not discuss the ego just yet, but it is ob vious that if things are to be thought in relation, they must be thought together, and in one something, be that something ego, psychosis, state of consciousness, or whatever you please. If not thought with each other, things are not thought in relation at all. Now most believers in the ego make the same mistake as the associationists and sensationists whom they oppose. Both agree that the elements of the subjective stream are discrete and separate and con stitute what Kant calls a 'manifold.' But while the asso-

* Instead of saying to our feeling only, lie should have said, to the object only. f "There can be no difficulty in admitting that association does form the ideas of an indefinite number of individuals into one complex idea; because it is an acknowledged fact. Have we not the idea of an army? And is not that precisely the ideas of an indefinite number of men formed into one idea?" (Jas. Mill's Analysis of the Human Mind (J. S. Mill's Edition), vol. i. p. 264.)

ciationists think that a 'manifold ' can form a single knowl edge, the egoists deny this, and say that the knowledge comes only when the manifold is subjected to the synthetizing activity of an ego. Both make an identical initial hypothesis ; but the egoist, finding it won't express the facts, adds another hypothesis to correct it. Now I do not wish just yet to ' commit myself ' about the existence or nonexistence of the ego, but I do contend that we need not invoke it for this particular reason — namely, because tk<j manifold of ideas has to be reduced to unity. There is no manifold of coexisting ideas ; the notion of such a thing is a chimera. Whatever things are thought in relation are thought from the outset in a unity, in a single pulse of *ubjectivity, a single psychosis, feeling, or state of mind.

The reason why this fact is so strangely garbled ^n the books seems to be what on an earlier page (see p. 196 ff.) I called the psychologist's fallacy. We have the inveterate habit, whenever we try introspectively to describe o\ie of our thoughts, of dropping the thought as it is in itseK and talking of something else. We describe the things that appear to the thought, and we describe other thoughts about those things — as if these and the original thought were the same. If, for example, the thought be ' the pack of cards is on the table,' we say, " Well, isn't it a thought of the pack of cards ? Isn't it of the cards as included in the pack ? Isn't it of the table ? And of the legs of the table as well ? The table has legs — how can you think the table without virtually thinking its legs? Hasn't our thought then, all these parts — one part for the pack and another for the table ? And within the pack-part a part for each card, as within the table-part a part for each leg ? And isn't each of these parts an idea ? And can our thought, then, be anything but an assemblage or pack of ideas, each answering to some element of what it knows?"

Now not one of these assumptions is true. The thought taken as an example is, in the first place, not of ' a pack of cards.' It is of 'the-pack-of-cards-is-on-the-table,' an en tirely different subjective phenomenon, whose Object implies the pack, and every one of the cards in it, but whose conscious Constitution bears very little resemblance to that of the thought of the pack per se. What a thought is, and what it may be developed into, or explained to stand for, and be equivalent to, are two things, not one.*

An analysis of what passes through the mind as we utter the phrase the pack of cards is on the table will, I hope, make this clear, and may at the same time condense into a con crete example a good deal of what has gone before. It takes time to utter the phrase. Let the horizontal line in Fig. 29 represent time. Every part of it will then stand for a fraction, every point for an instant, of the time. Of course the thought has time-parts. The part 2-3 of it, though continuous with 1-2, is yet a different part from 1-2. Now I say of these time-parts that we cannot take any one of them so short that it will not after some fashion or other be a thought of the whole object 'the pack of cards is on the table.' They melt into each other like dissolving views, and no two of them feel the object just alike, but each feels the total object in a unitary undivided way. This is what I mean by denying that in the thought any parts can be found corresponding to the object's parts. Time-parts are not such parts.

* I know there are readers whom nothing can convince that the thought of a complex object has not as many parts as are discriminated in the ob ject itself. Well, then, let the word parts pass. Only observe that these parts are not the separate 'ideas' of traditional psychology. No one of them can live out of that particular thought, any more than my bead can live off of my particular shoulders. In a sense a soap-bubble has parts; it is a sum of juxtaposed spherical triangles. But these triangles are not sepa rate realities; neither are the ' parts' of the thought separate realities. Touch the bubble and the triangles are no more. Dismiss the thought and out go its parts. You can no more make a new thought out of ' ideas' that have once served than you can make a new bubble out of old triangles Bach bubble, each thought, is a fresh organic unity, sui generis

Now let the vertical dimensions of the figure stand for the objects or contents of the thoughts. A line vertical to any point of the horizontal, as 1-1', will then symbolize the object in the mind at the instant 1 ; a space above the hori zontal, as 1-1'— 2'— 2, will symbolize all that passes through the mind during the time 1-2 whose line it covers. The entire diagram from 0 to 0' represents a finite length of thought's stream. Can we now define the psychic constitution of each ver tical section of this segment ? We can, though in a very rough way. Immediately after 0, even before we have opened our mouths to speak, the entire thought is present to our mind in the form of an intention to utter that sentence. This intention, though it has no simple name, and though it is a transitive state immediately displaced by the first word, is yet a perfectly determinate phase of thought, unlike anything else (see p. 253). Again, immediately before 0', after the last word of the sentence is spoken, all will admit that we again think its entire content as we inwardly realize its completed deliverance. All vertical sections made through any other parts of the diagram will be respectively filled with other ways of feeling the sen tence's meaning. Through 2, for example, the cards will be the part of the object most emphatically present to the mind ; through 4, the table. The stream is made higher in the drawing at its end than at its beginning, because the final way of feeling the content is fuller and richer than the initial way. As Joubert says, " we only know just what we meant to say, after we have said it." And as M. V. Eggef remarks, " before speaking, one barely knows what one in tends to say, but afterwards one is filled with admiration and surprise at having said and thought it so well."

This latter author seems to me to have kept at much closer quarters with the facts than any other analyst of con sciousness.* But even he does not quite hit the mark, for, as I understand him, he thinks that each word as it occu pies the mind displaces the rest of the thought's content. He distinguishes the 'idea' (what I have called the total * In his work, La Parole luterieure (Paris, 1881), especially chapters vi and vii. object or meaning) from the consciousness of the words, calling the former a very feeble state, and contrasting it with the liveliness of the words, even when these are only silently rehearsed. " The feeling," he says, " of the words makes ten or twenty times more noise in our consciousness than the sense of the phrase, which for consciousness is a very slight matter." * And having distinguished these two things, he goes on to separate them in time, saying that the idea may either precede or follow the words, but that it is a 'pure illusion 'to suppose them simultaneous. f Now I believe that in all cases where the words are understood, the total idea may be and usually is present not only before and after the phrase has been spoken, but also whilst each separate word is uttered. :f It is the overtone, halo, or fringe of the word, as spoken in that sentence. It is never absent ; no word in an understood sentence comes to consciousness as a mere noise. We feel its meaning as it passes ; and although our object differs from one moment to another as to its verbal kernel or nucleus, yet it is similar throughout the entire segment of the stream. The same object is known everywhere, now from the point of view, if we may so call it, of this word, now from the point of view of that. And in our feeling of each word there chimes an echo or foretaste of every other. The consciousness of the ' Idea '

f Page 218. To prove this point, M. Egger appeals to the fact that we often hear some one speak whilst our mind is preoccupied, but do not under stand him until some moments afterwards, when we suddenly ' realize ' what he meant. Also to our digging out the meaning of a sentence in an unfamiliar tongue, where the words are present to us long before the idea is taken in. In these special cases the word does indeed precede the idea. The idea, on the contrary, precedes the word whenever we try to express ourselves with effort, as in a foreign tongue, or in an unusual Held of intel lectual invention. Both sets of cases, however, are exceptional, and M. Egger would probably himself admit, on reflection, that in the former class there is some sort of a verbal suffusion, however evanescent, of the idea, when it is grasped— we hear the echo of the words as we catch their mean ing. And he would probably admit that in the second class of cases the idea persists after the words that came with so much effort are found. In normal cases the simultaneity, as he admits, is obviously there.

\ A good way to get the words and the sense separately is to inwardly articulate word for word the discourse of another. One then finds thai the meaning will often come to the mind in pulses, after clauses or sen tences are finished. and that of the words are thus consubstantial. They are made of the same 'mind-stuff,' and form an un broken stream. Annihilate a mind at any instant, cut its thought through whilst yet uncompleted, and examine the object present to the cross-section thus suddenly made ; you will find, not the bald word in process of ut terance, but that word suffused with the whole idea. The word may be so loud, as M. Egger would say, that we cannot tell just how its suffusion, as such, feels, or how it differs from the suffusion of the next word. But it does differ ; and we may be sure that, could we see into the brain, we should find the same processes active through the entire sentence in different degrees, each one in turn becoming maximally excited and then yielding the momentary verbal * kernel,' to the thought's content, at other times being only sub-excited, and then combining with the other sub-excited processes to give the overtone or fringe.*

We may illustrate this by a farther development of the diagram on p. 279. Let the objective content of any ver tical section through the stream be represented no longer by a line, but by a plane figure, highest opposite whatever part of the object is most prominent in consciousness at the moment when the section is made. This part, in verbal thought, will usually be some word. A series of sections 1-1', taken at the moments 1, 2, 3, would then look like this:

The horizontal breadth stands for the entire object in each of the figures ; the height of the curve above each part of that object marks the relative prominence of that part in the thought. At the moment symbol ized by the first figure pack is the prominent part ; in the third figure it is table, etc. * The nearest approach (with which I am acquainted) tolhe doctrine set forth here is in O. Liebmann'a Zur Analysis der Wirklichkeit PD We can easily add all these plane sections together to make a solid, one of whose solid dimensions will represent time, whilst a cut across this at right angles will give the thought's content at the moment when the cut is made.

Let it be the thought, ' I am the same I that I was yesterday.1 If at the fourth moment of time we annihilate the thinker and examine how the last pulsation of his consciousness was n. ade, we find that it was an awareness of the whole content with same most prominent, and the other parts of the thing known relatively less distinct. With each prolongation of the scheme in the time-direction, the summit of the curve of section would come further towards the end of the sen tence. If we make a solid wooden frame with the sentence written on its front, and the time-scale on one of its sides, if we spread flatly a sheet of India rubber over its top, on which rectangular co-ordinates are painted, and slide a smooth ball under the rubber in the direction from 0 to ' yesterday,' the bulging of the membrane along this diagonal at successive moments will symbolize the changing of the thought's content in a way plain enough, after what has been said, to call for no more explanation. Or to express it in cerebral terms, it will show the relative intensities, at successive moments, of the several nerve-processes to which the various parts of the thought-object correspond.