The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2

The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that 5) It is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the ivhile it thinks. The phenomena of selective attention and of delibera tive will are of course patent examples of this choosing activity. But few of us are aware how incessantly it is at work in operations not ordinarily called by these names. Accentuation and Emphasis are present in every perception we have. We find it quite impossible to disperse our attention impartially over a number of impressions. A monotonous succession of sonorous strokes is broken up into rhythms, now of one sort, now of another, by the dif ferent accent which we place on different strokes. The simplest of these rhythms is the double one, tick-tock, ticktock, tick-tock. Dots dispersed on a surface are perceived in rows and groups. Lines separate into diverse figures. The ubiquity of the distinctions, this and that, here and there, noio and then, in our minds is the result of our laying the same selective emphasis on parts of place and time.

But we do far more than emphasize things, and unite some, and keep others apart. We actually ignore most of the things before us. Let me briefly show how this goes on. To begin at the bottom, what are our very senses them selves but organs of selection ? Out of the infinite chaos of movements, of which physics teaches us that the outer world consists, each sense-organ picks out those which fall within certain limits of velocity. To these it responds, but ignores the rest as completely as if they did not exist. It thus accentuates particular movements in a manner for which objectively there seems no valid ground ; for, as Lange says, there is no reason whatever to think that the gap *in Nature between the highest sound-waves and the lowest heat-waves is an abrupt break like that of our sen sations ; or that the difference between violet and ultra violet rays has anything like the objective importance sub jectively represented by that between light and darkness. Out of what is in itself an undistinguishable, swarming continuum, devoid of distinction or emphasis, our senses make for us, by attending to this motion and ignoring that,

a world full of contrasts, of sharp accents, of abrupt changes, of picturesque light and shade. If the sensations we receive from a given organ have their causes thus picked out for us by the conformation of the organ's termination, Attention, on the other hand, out of all the sensations yielded, picks out certain ones as worthy of its notice and suppresses all the rest. Helmholtz's work on Optics is little more than a study of those visual sensations of which common men never become aware — blind spots, muscce volitantes, after-images, irradia tion, chromatic fringes, marginal changes of color, double images, astigmatism, movements of accommodation and convergence, retinal rivalry, and more besides. We do not even know without special training on which of our e}res an image falls. So habitually ignorant are most men of this that one may be blind for years of a single eye and never know the fact.

Helmholtz says that we notice only those sensations which are signs to us of things. But what are things ? Noth ing, as we shall abundantly see, but special groups of sen sible qualities, which happen practically or aesthetically to interest us, to which we therefore give substantive names, and which we exalt to this exclusive status of independence and dignity. But in itself, apart from my interest, a particular dust-wreath on a windy day is just as much of an individual thing, and just as much or as little deserves an individual name, as my own body does.

And then, among the sensations we get from each sepa rate thing, what happens ? The mind selects again. It chooses certain of the sensations to represent the thing most truly, and considers the rest as its appearances, modi fied by the conditions of the moment. Thus my table-top is named square, after but one of an infinite number of retinal sensations which it yields, the rest of them being sensations of two acute and two obtuse angles ; but I call the latter perspective views, and the four right angles the true form of the table, and erect the attribute squareness into the table's essence, for aesthetic reasons of my own. In like manner, the real form of the circle is deemed to be the sensation it gives when the line of vision is perpendicu-

lar to its centre — all its other sensations are signs of this sensation. The real sound of the cannon is the sensation it makes when the ear is close by. The real color of the brick is the sensation it gives when the eye looks squarely at it from a near point, out of the sunshine and yet not in the gloom ; under other circumstances it gives us other color-sensations which are but signs of this — we then see it looks pinker or blacker than it really is. The reader knows no object which he does not represent to himself by preference as in some typical attitude, of some normal size, at some characteristic distance, of some standard tint, etc., etc. But all these essential characteristics, which to gether form for us the genuine objectivity of the thing and are contrasted with what we call the subjective sensations it may yield us at a given moment, are mere sensations like the latter. The mind chooses to suit itself, and decides what particular sensation shall be held more real and valid than all the rest.

Thus perception involves a twofold choice. Out of all present sensations, we notice mainly such as are significant of absent ones ; and out of all the absent associates which these suggest, we again pick out a very few to stand for the objective reality par excellence. We could have no more exquisite example of selective industry. That industry goes on to deal with the things thus given in perception. A man's empirical thought depends on the things he has experienced, but what these shall be is to a large extent determined by his habits of attention. A thing may be present to him a thousand times, but if he persist ently fails to notice it, it cannot be said to enter into his ex perience. We are all seeing flies, moths, and beetles by the thousand, but to whom, save an entomologist, do they say anything distinct ? On the other hand, a thing met only once in a lifetime may leave an indelible experience in the mem ory. Let four men make a tour in Europe. One will bring home only picturesque impressions — costumes and colors, parks and views and works of architecture, pictures and stat ues. To another all this will be non-existent ; and distances and prices, populations and drainage-arrangements, door- and window-fastenings, and other useful statistics will take

their place. A third will give a rich account of the theatres, restaurants, and public balls, and naught beside ; whilst the fourth will perhaps have been so wrapped in his own subjective broodings as to tell little more than a few names of places through which he passed. Each has selected, out of the same mass of presented objects, those which suited his private interest and has made his experience thereby. If, now, leaving the empirical combination of objects, we ask how the mind proceeds rationally to connect them, we find selection again to be omnipotent. In a future chapter we shall see that all lieasoning depends on the ability of the mind to break up the totality of the phe nomenon reasoned about, into parts, and to pick out from among these the particular one which, in our given emer gency, may lead to the proper conclusion. Another pre dicament will need another conclusion, and require another element to be picked out. The man of genius is he who will always stick in his bill at the right point, and bring it out with the right element— 'reason ' if the emergency be theoretical, ' means ' if it be practical — transfixed upon it. I here confine myself to this brief statement, but it may suffice to show that Eeasoning is but another form of the selective activity of the mind.

If now we pass to its aesthetic department, our law is still more obvious. The artist notoriously selects his items, rejecting all tones, colors, shapes, which do not harmonize with each other and with the main purpose of his work. That unity, harmony, 'convergence of characters,' as M. Taine calls it, which gives to works of art their superiority over works of nature, is wholly due to elimination. Any natural subject will do, if the artist has wit enough to pounce upon some one feature of it as characteristic, and suppress all merely accidental items which do not harmon ize with this.

Ascending still higher, we reach the plane of Ethics, where choice reigns notoriously supreme. An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible. To sustain the arguments for the good course and keep them ever before us, to stifle our longing for more flowery ways, to keep the foot unflinch ingly on the arduous path, these are characteristic ethical energies. But more than these ; for these but deal with the means of compassing interests already felt by the man to be supreme. The ethical energy par excellence has to go farther and choose which interest out of several, equally coercive, shall become supreme. The issue here is of the utmost pregnancy, for it decides a man's entire career. When he debates, Shall I commit this crime? choose that profession ? accept that office, or marry this fortune ? — his choice really lies between one of several equally possible I future Characters. What he shall become is fixed by the conduct of this moment. Schopenhauer, who enforces his determinism by the argument that with a given fixed charac ter only one reaction is possible under given circumstances, forgets that, in these critical ethical moments, what con sciously seems to be in question is the complexion of the character itself. The problem with the man is less what act he shall now choose to do, than what being he shall now resolve to become.

Looking back, then, over this review, we see that the mind is at every stage a theatre of simultaneous possibilities. Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each other, the selection of some, and the suppression of the rest by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention. The highest and most elaborated mental products are filtered from the data chosen by the faculty next beneath, out of the mass offered by the faculty below that, which mass in turn was sifted from a still larger amount of yet simpler material, and so on. The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest. Just so the world of each of us, howsoever different our several views of it may be, all lay embedded in the primordial chaos of sensations, which gave the mere matter to the thought of all of us indifferently. We may, if we like, by our reasonings unwind things back to that

black and jointless continuity of space and moving clouds of swarming atoms which science calls the only real world. But all the while the world ice feel and live in will be that which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative strokes of choice, have extricated out of this, like sculptors, by simply rejecting certain portions of the given stuff. Other sculptors, other statues from the same stone ! Other minds, other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpressive chaos ! My world is but one in a million alike embedded, alike real to those who may abstract them. How different must be the worlds in the consciousness of ant, cuttle-fish, or crab !

But in my mind and your mind the rejected portions and the selected portions of the original world-stuff are to a great extent the same. The human race as a whole largely agrees as to what it shall notice and name, and what not. And among the noticed parts we select in much the same way for accentuation and preference or subordination and dislike. There is, however, one entirely extraordinary case in which no two men ever are known to choose alike. One great splitting of the whole universe into two halves is made by each of us ; and for each of us almost all of the interest attaches to one of the halves ; but we all draw the line of division between them in a different place. When I say that we all call the two halves by the same names, and that those names are ' me ' and ' not-me ' re spectively, it will at once be seen what I mean. The alto gether unique kind of interest which each human mind feels in those parts of creation which it can call me or mine may be a moral riddle, but it is a fundamental psychologi cal fact. No mind can take the same interest in his neigh bor's me as in his own. The neighbor's me falls togethei with all the rest of things in one foreign mass, against which his own me stands out in startling relief. Even the trodden worm, as Lotze somewhere says, contrasts his own suffer ing self with the whole remaining universe, though he have no clear conception either of himself or of what the uni verse may be. He is for me a mere part of the world ;

for him it is I who am the mere part. Each of us dichoto mizes the Kosmos in a different place. Descending now to finer work than this first general sketch, let us in the next chapter try to trace the psy chology of this fact of self-consciousness to which we have thus once more been led. LET us begin with the Self in its widest acceptation, and follow it up to its most delicate and subtle form, ad vancing from the study of the empirical, as the Germans call it, to that of the pure, Ego.

The Empirical Self of each of us is all that he is tempted to call by the name of me. But it is clear that between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves. Our fame, our children, the work of our hands, may be as dear to us as our bodies are, and arouse the same feelings and the same acts of reprisal if attacked. And our bodies themselves, are they simply ours, or are they us ? Certainly men have been ready to disown their very bodies and to regard them as mere vestures, or even as prisons of clay from which they should some day be glad to escape.

We see then that we are dealing with a fluctuating material. The same object being sometimes treated as a part of me, at other times as simply mine, and then agaiL as if I had nothing to do with it at all. In its ividesi possible sense, however, a man's Self is the sum fatal of all that he CAN call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account. All these things* give him the same emotions. If they wax and prosper, h# feels triumphant ; if they dwindle and die away, he feels* cast down, — not necessarily in the same degree for each

thing, but in much the same way for all. Understanding 5 the Self in this widest sense, we may begin by dividing the ' history of it into three parts, relating respectively to — 2. The feelings and emotions they arouse, — Self -feelings ; 3. The actions to which they prompt, — Self -seeking and Self-preservation. 1. The constituents of the Self may be divided into two classes, those which make up respectively — (a) The body is the innermost part of the material Self in each of us ; and certain parts of the body seem more intimately ours than the rest. The clothes come next. The old saying that the human person is composed of three parts— soul, body and clothes — is more than a joke. We so appropriate our clothes and identify ourselves with them that there are few of us who, if asked to choose between having a beautiful body clad in raiment perpetu ally shabby and unclean, and having an ugly and blemished form always spotlessly attired, would not hesitate a moment before making a decisive reply. * Next, our immediate family is a part of ourselves. Our father and mother, our wife and babes, are bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. When they die, a part of our very selves is gone. If they do anything wrong, it is our shame. If they are insulted, our anger flashes forth as readily as if we stood in their place. Our home comes next. Its scenes are part of our life ; its aspects awaken the tenderest feelings of affection ; and we do not easily forgive the stranger who, ; in visiting it, finds fault with its arrangements or treats it ' with contempt. All these different things are the objects of instinctive preferences coupled with the most impor tant practical interests of life. We all have a blind im pulse to watch over our body, to deck it with clothing of

* See, for a charming passage on the Philosophy of Dress, H. Lotze's Microcosmus, Eng. tr. vol. i. p. 592 ff. an ornamental sort, to cherish parents, wife and babes, and to find for ourselves a home of our own which we may live in and 'improve.' An equally instinctive impulse drives us to collect prop erty ; and the collections thus made become, with different degrees of intimacy, parts of our empirical selves. The parts of our wealth most intimately ours are those which are saturated with our labor. There are few men who would not feel personally annihilated if a life-long con struction of their hands or brains — say an entomological collection or an extensive work in manuscript — were / suddenly swept away. The miser feels similarly towards his gold, and although it is true that a part of our depres sion at the loss of possessions is due to our feeling that we must now go without certain goods that we expected the possessions to bring in their train, yet in every case there remains, over and above this, a sense of the shrinkage of our personality, a partial conversion of ourselves to nothingness, which is a psychological phenomenon by itself. We are all at once assimilated to the tramps and poor devils whom we so despise, and at the same time re moved farther than ever away from the happy sons ot earth who lord it over land and sea and men in the full blown lustihood that wealth and power can give, and before whom, stiffen ourselves as we will by appealing to | anti-snobbish first principles, we cannot escape an emo- 1 tion, open or sneaking, of respect and dread.

(b) A mans Social Self is the recognition which he gets from his mates. We are not only gregarious animals, liking to be in sight of our fellows, but we have an innate propen sity to get ourselves noticed, and noticed favorably, by our kind. No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof. If no one turned round when we entered, answered when we spoke, or minded what we did, but if every person we met * cut us dead,' and acted as if we were non-existing things, a kind of rage and impotent despair would ere long well up in us, from which the

cruellest bodily tortures would be a relief ; for these would make us feel that, however bad might be our plight, we had : not sunk to such a depth as to be unworthy of attention at all. Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals ivho recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind. To wound any one of these his images is to wound him.* But as the individuals who carry the images fall naturally into classes, we may practi cally say that he has as many different social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares. He generally shows a different side of himself to each of these different groups. Many a youth who is demure enough before his parents and teachers, swears and swaggers like a pirate among his ' tough ' young friends. We do not show ourselves to our children as to our clubcompanions, to our customers as to the laborers we em ploy, to our own masters and employers as to our intimate friends. From this there results what practically is a

I division of the man into several selves; and this may be a • discordant splitting, as where one is afraid to let one set of his acquaintances know him as he is elsewhere ; or it may be a perfectly harmonious division of labor, as where one tender to his children is stern to the soldiers or prisoners under his command. The most peculiar social self which one is apt to have is in the mind of the person one is in love with. The good or bad fortunes of this self cause the most intense elation and dejection — unreasonable enough as measured

j by every other standard than that of the organic feeling of j the individual. To his own consciousness he is not, so long as this particular social self fails to get recognition, and when it is recognized his contentment passes all bounds. A man's fame, good or bad, and his honor or dishonor, are names for one of his social selves. The particular social self of a man called his honor is usually the result of one of those splittings of which we have spoken. It is his image in the eyes of his own ' set,' which exalts or con-

demns him as he conforms or not to certain requirements that may not be made of one in another walk of life. Thus a layman may abandon a city infected with cholera ; but a priest or a doctor would think such an act incompatible with his honor. A soldier's honor requires him to fight or to die under circumstances where another man can apolo- \ gize or run away with no stain upon his social self. A judge, a statesman, are in like manner debarred by the honor of their cloth from entering into pecuniary relations perfectly honorable to persons in private life. Nothing is commoner than to hear people discriminate between their different selves of this sort : "As a man I pity you, but as an official I must show you no mercy ; as a politician I regard him as an ally, but as a moralist I loathe him ;" etc., etc. What may be called ' club-opinion ' is one of the very strongest forces in life.* The thief must not steal from other thieves ; the gambler must pay his gambling-debts, though he pay 110 other debts in the world. The code of honor of fashionable society has throughout history been full of permissions as well as of vetoes, the only reason for following either of which is that so we best serve one of

* " He who imagines commendation and disgrace not to be strong motives on men . . . seems little skilled in the nature and history of man kind; the greatest part whereof he shall find to govern themselves chiefly, if not solely, by this law of fashion ; and so they do that which keeps them in reputation with their company, little regard the laws of God or the magistrate. The penalties that attend the breach of God's laws some, nay, most, men seldom seriously reflect on; and amongst those that do, many, whilst they break the laws, entertain thoughts of future reconciliation, and making their peace for such breaches : and as tc the punishments due from the laws of the commonwealth, they frequently flatter themselves with the hope of impunity. But no man escapes the punishment of their censure and dislike who offends against the fashion and opinion of the company he keeps, and would recommend himself to. Nor is there one in ten thousand who is stiff and insensible enough to bear up under the constant dislike and condemnation of his own club. He must be of a strange and unusual constitution who can content himself to live in con stant disgrace and disrepute with his own particular society. Solitude many men have sought and been reconciled to; but nobody that has the least thought or sense of a man about him can live in society under the constant dislike and ill opinion of his familiars and those he converses with. This is a burden too heavy for human sufferance: and he must be made up of irreconcilable contradictions who can take pleasure in com pany and yet be insensible of contempt and disgrace from his companions. " (Jjocke's Essay, book n. ch. xxvin. § 12.)

our social selves. You must not lie in general, but you may lie as much as you please if asked about your relations with a lady ; you must accept a challenge from an equal, but if challenged by an inferior you may laugh him to scorn : these are examples of what is meant. (c) By the Spiritual Self, so far as it belongs to the Empirical Me, I mean a man's inner or subjective being, his psychic faculties or dispositions, taken concretely ; not the bare principle of personal Unity, or ' pure ' Ego, which remains still to be discussed. These psychic dispositions are the most enduring and intimate part of the self, that which we most verily seem to be. We take a purer selfsatisfaction when we think of our ability to argue and dis criminate, of our moral sensibility and conscience, of our indomitable will, than when we survey any of our other possessions. Only when these are altered is a man said to be alienatus a se.

Now this spiritual self may be considered in various ways. We may divide it into faculties, as just instanced, isolating them one from another, and identifying ourselves with either in turn. This is an abstract way of dealing with consciousness, in which, as it actually presents itself, a plurality of such faculties are always to be simultaneously found ; or we may insist on a concrete view, and then the 1 spiritual self in us will be either the entire stream of our ) personal consciousness, or the present ' segment ' or ' sec tion ' * of that stream, according as we take a broader or a narrower view — both the stream and the section being con crete existences in time, and each being a unity after its own peculiar kind. But whether we take it abstractly or concretely, our considering the spiritual self at all is a reflective process, is the result of our abandoning the out ward-looking point of view, and of our having become able to think of subjectivity as such, to think ourselves as thinkers.

This attention to thought as such, and the identification of ourselves with it rather than with any of the objects which it reveals, is a momentous and in some respects a rather mysterious operation, of which we need here only say that as a matter of fact it exists ; and that in everyone, at an early age, the distinction between thought as such, and what it is ' of ' or ' about/ has become familiar to the mind. The deeper grounds for this discrimination may possibly be hard to find ; but superficial grounds are plenty and near at hand. Almost anyone will tell us that thought is a different sort of existence from things, because many sorts of thought are of no things — e.g., pleasures, pains, and emotions ; others are of non-existent things— errors and fictions ; others again of existent things, but in a form that is symbolic and does not resemble them — abstract y ideas and concepts ; whilst in the thoughts that do resem- ' ble the things they are ' of ' (percepts, sensations), we can feel, alongside of the thing known, the thought of it going on as an altogether separate act and operation in the mind.

Now this subjective life of ours, distinguished as such so clearly from the objects known by its means, may, as aforesaid, be taken by us in a concrete or in an abstract way. Of the concrete way I will say nothing just now, ex cept that the actual ' section ' of the stream will ere long, in our discussion of the nature of the principle of unity in consciousness, play a very important part. The abstract way claims our attention first. If the stream as a whole is identified with the Self far more than any outward thing, a certain portion of the stream abstracted from the rest is so , identified in an altogether peculiar degree, and is felt by all | men as a sort of innermost centre within the circle, of sanc tuary within the citadel, constituted by the subjective life as a whole. Compared with this element of the stream, the other parts, even of the subjective life, seem transient external possessions, of which each in turn can be disowned, whilst that which disowns them remains. Now, ivhat is this self of all the other selves ?

Probably all men would describe it in much the same way up to a certain point. They would call it the active element in all consciousness ; saying that whatever quali ties a man's feelings may possess, or whatever content his thought may include, there is a spiritual something in him which seems to go out to meet these qualities and contents, whilst they seem to come in to be received by it. It is what welcomes or rejects. It presides over the per ception of sensations, and by giving or withholding its

assent it influences the movements they tend to arouse. It is the home of interest, — not the pleasant or the painful, not even pleasure or pain, as such, but that within us to which pleasure and pain, the pleasant and the painful, speak. I It is the source of effort and attention, and the place from which appear to emanate the fiats of the will. A physiol ogist who should reflect upon it in his own person could hardly help, I should think, connecting it more or less vaguely with the process by which ideas or incoming sensa tions are ' reflected ' or pass over into outward acts. Not necessarily that it should be this process or the mere feel ing of this process, but that it should be in some close way related to this process ; for it plays a part analogous to it in the psychic life, being a sort of junction at which sensory ideas terminate and from which motor ideas proceed, and forming a kind of link between the two. Being more in-