The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2

I cessantly there than any other single element of the mental life, the other elements end by seeming to accrete round it 1 and to belong to it. It become opposed to them as the per manent is opposed to the changing and inconstant. One may, I think, without fear of being upset by any future Galtonian circulars, believe that all men must single out from the rest of what they call themselves some central ( principle of which each would recognize the foregoing to be

( a fair general description,— accurate enough, at any rate, to denote what is meant, and keep it unconfused with other things. The moment, however, they came to closer quarters with it, trying to define more accurately its precise nature, we should find opinions beginning to diverge. Some would say that it is a simple active substance, the soul, of which they are thus conscious ; others, that it is nothing but a fiction, the imaginary being denoted by the pronoun I ; and between these extremes of opinion all sorts of intermediaries would be found.

Later we must ourselves discuss them all, and sufficient to that day will be the evil thereof. Now, let us try to settle for ourselves as definitely as we can, just how this central nucleus of the Self may feel, no matter whether it be a spiritual substance or only a delusive word. For this central part of the Self is felt. It may be all that Transcendentalists say it is, and all tliat Empiricists say it is into the bargain, but it is at any rate no mere ens rationis, Cognized only in an intellectual way, and no mere summation of memories or mere sound of a word in our ears. It is sometiling with which we also have direct sensible acquaintance, and which is as fully present at any moment of conscious ness in which it is present, as in a whole lifetime of such moments. When, just now, it was called an abstraction, that did not mean that, like some general notion, it could not be presented in a particular experience. It only meant that in the stream of consciousness it never was found all alone. But when it is found, it is felt; just as the body is felt, the feeling of which is also an abstraction, because never is the body felt all alone, but always together with other things. Now can we tell more precisely in wliat the feeling of this central active self consists, — not necessarily as yet what the active self is, as a being or principle, but what we feel when we become aware of its existence?

I think I can in my own case ; and as what I say will be likely to meet with opposition if generalized (as indeed it may be in part inapplicable to other individuals), I had better continue in the first person, leaving my description to be accepted by those to whose introspection it may com-j mend itself as true, and confessing my inability to meet the demands of others, if others there be. First of all, I am aware of a constant play of furtherances and Inndrances in my thinking, of checks and releases, ten dencies which run with desire, and tendencies which run the other way. Among the matters I think of, some range them selves on the side of the thought's interests, whilst others play an unfriendly part thereto. The mutual inconsisten cies and agreements, reinforcements and obstructions, which obtain amonst these objective matters reverberate back wards and produce what seem to be incessant reactions of my spontaneity upon them, welcoming or opposing, appro priating or disowning, striving with or against, saying yes or no. This palpitating inward life is, in me, that central nucleus which I just tried to describe in terms that all men might use.

pie with particulars, coming to the closest possible quarters with the facts, it is difficult for me to detect in the activity any purely spiritual dement at all. Whenever my introspective glance succeeds in turning round quickly enough to catch one of these manifestations of spontaneity in the act, all it can ever feel J jj distinctly is some bodily process, for the most part taking place within the head. Omitting for a moment what is obscure in these introspective results, let me try to state those particu lars which to my own consciousness seem indubitable and distinct.

In the first place, the acts of attending, assenting, ne gating, making an effort, are felt as movements of some thing in the head. In many cases it is possible to describe these movements quite exactly. In attending to either an idea or a sensation belonging to a particular sense-sphere, the movement is the adjustment of the sense-organ, felt as it occurs. I cannot think in visual terms, for example, without feeling a fluctuating play of pressures, converg ences, divergences, and accommodations in my eyeballs. The direction in which the object is conceived to lie deter mines the character of these movements, the feeling of which becomes, for my consciousness, identified with the manner in which I make myself ready to receive the visible thing. My brain appears to me as if all shot across with lines of direction, of which I have become conscious as my attention has shifted from one sense-organ to another, in passing to successive outer things, or in following trains of varying sense-ideas.

When I try to remember or reflect, the movements in question, instead of being directed towards the periphery, seem to come from the periphery inwards and feel like a sort of withdrawal from the outer world. As far as I can detect, these feelings are clue to an actual rolling outwards and upwards of the eyeballs, such as I believe occurs in , j me in sleep, and is the exact opposite of their action in fix ating a physical thing. In reasoning, I find that I am apt to have a kind of vaguely localized diagram in my mind, with the various fractional objects of the thought disposed at particular points thereof ; and the oscillations of my at tention from one of them to another are most distinctly felt

as alternations of direction in movements occurring inside the head.* In consenting and negating, and in making a mental effort, the movements seem more complex, and I find them harder to describe. The opening and closing of the glottis play a great part in these operations, and, less distinctly, the movements of the soft palate, etc., shutting off the pos terior nares from the mouth. My glottis is like a sensitive valve, intercepting my breath instantaneously at every mental hesitation or felt aversion to the objects of my thought, and as quickly opening, to let the air pass through my throat and nose, the moment the repugnance is over come. The feeling of the movement of this air is, in me, one strong ingredient of the feeling of assent. The move ments of the muscles of the brow and eyelids also respond very sensitively to every fluctuation in the agreeableness or disagreeableness of what comes before my mind.

In effort of any sort, contractions of the jaw-muscles and of those of respiration are added to those of the brow and glottis, and thus the feeling passes out of the head proper ly so called. It passes out of the head whenever the wel coming or rejecting of the object is strongly felt. Then a set of feelings pour in from many bodily parts, all ' expres sive ' of my emotion, and the head-feelings proper are swallowed up in this larger mass. In a sense, then, it may be truly said that, in one per son at least, the ' Self of selves,' ivhen carefully examined, is found to consist mainly of the collection of these peculiar motions in the head or between the head and throat. I do not for a moment say that this is all it consists of, for I fully realize how desperately hard is introspection in this field. But I feel quite sure that these cephalic motions are the portions of my innermost activity of which I am most distinctly aware. If the dim portions which I cannot yet define should prove to be like unto these distinct portions in me, and I like other men, it would follow that our entire feeling of spiritual activity, or what commonly passes by that

* For some farther remarks on these feelings of movement see the next chapter. name, is really a feeling of bodily activities whose exact nature is by most men overlooked. Now, without pledging ourselves in any way to adopt this hypothesis, let us dally with it for a while to see to what consequences it might lead if it were true. In the first place, the nuclear part of the Self, inter mediary between ideas and overt acts, would be a collection of activities physiologically in no essential way different from the overt acts themselves. If we divide all possible physiological acts into adjustments and executions, the nuclear self would be the adjustments collectively consid ered ; and the less intimate, more shifting self, so far as it was active, would be the executions. But both adjust ments and executions would obey the reflex type. Both would be the result of sensorial and ideational processes discharging either into each other within the brain, or into muscles and other parts oiitside. The peculiarity of the adjustments would be that they are minimal reflexes, few in number, incessantly repeated, constant amid great fluc tuations in the rest of the mind's content, and entirely unimportant and uninteresting except through their uses in furthering or inhibiting the presence of various things, and actions before consciousness. These characters would naturally keep us from introspectively paying much atten tion to them in detail, whilst they would at the same time make us aware of them as a coherent group of processes, strongly contrasted with all the other things consciousness contained, — even with the other constituents of the ' Self/ material, social, or spiritual, as the case might be. They are reactions, and they are primary reactions. Everything arouses them ; for objects which have no other effects will for a moment contract the brow and make the glottis close. It is as if all that visited the mind had to stand an entrance-examination, and just show its face so as to be either approved or sent back. These primary reactions are like the opening or the closing of the door.

In the midst of psychic change they are the permanent core of turnings-towards and turnings-from, of yieldings and arrests, which naturally seem central and interior in comparison with the foreign matters, apropos to which they occur, and hold a sort of arbitrating, decisive position, qnite unlike that held by any of the other constituents of the Me. It would not be surprising, then, if we were to feel them as the birthplace of conclusions and the starting point of acts, or if they came to appear as what we called a while back the ' sanctuary within the citadel ' of our personal life.*

* Wundt's account of Self-consciousness deserves to be compared with this. What I have called ' adjustments ' he calls processes of ' Appercep tion. ' ' ' In this development (of consciousness) one particular group of per cepts claims a prominent significance, namely, those of which the spring lies in ourselves. The images of feelings we get from our own body, and the representations of our own movements distinguish themselves from all others by forming a permanent group. As there are always some muscles in a state either of tension or of activity it follows that we never lack a sense, either dim or clear, of the positions or movements of our body. . . . This permanent sense, moreover, has this peculiarity, that we are aware of our power at any moment voluntarily to arouse any one of its ingredients. We excite the sensations of movement immediately by such impulses of the will as shall arouse the movements themselves; and we excite the visual and tactile feelings of our body by the voluntary movement of our orgaui of sense. So we come to conceive this permanent mass of feeling as immediately or remotely subject to our will, and call it the consciousness oj ourself. This self-consciousness is, at the outset, thoroughly sensational, . . . only gradually the second-named of its characters, its subjection to «>ur will, attains predominance. In proportion as the apperception of all our mental objects appears to us as an inward exercise of will, does our self -consciousness begin both to widen itself and to narrow itself at the same time. It widens itself in that every mental act whatever comes to stand in relation to our will; and it narrows itself in that it concentrates Itself more and more upon the inner activity of apperception, over against which our own body and all the representations connected with it appear as external objects, different from our proper self.

This consciousness, contracted down to the process of apperception, we call our Ego ; and the apperception of mental objects in general, may thus, after Leibnitz, be designated as the raising of them into our self-consciousness. Thus the natural development of self-consciousness implicitly involves the most abstract forms in which this faculty has been described in philosophy; only philosophy is fond of placing the abstract ego at the outset, and so revers ing the process of development. Nor should we overlook the fact that the completely abstract ego [as pure activity], although suggested by the natural development of our consciousness, is never actually found therein. The most speculative of philosophers is incapable of disjoining his ego from those bodily feelings and images which form the incessant back ground of his awareness of himself. The notion of his ego as such is, like every notion, derived from sensibility, for the process of apperception itself comes to our knowledge chiefly through those feelings of tension [what I have above called inward adjustments] which accompany it." (Physiologische Psychologic, 2te Autl. Bd. n. pp. 217-19.)

If they really were the innermost sanctuary, the mate one of all the selves whose being we can ever directly experience, it would follow that all that is experienced is, strictly considered, objective; that this Objective falls asun der into two contrasted parts, one realized as ' Self,' the other as ' not-Self ;' and that over and above these parts there is nothing save the fact that they are known, the fact of the stream of thought being there as the indispensable subjective condition of their being experienced at all. But this condition of the experience is not one of the things ex perienced at the moment ; this knowing is not immediately knoivn. It is only known in subsequent reflection. Instead, then, of the stream of thought being one of ccw-sciousness, " thinking its own existence along with whatever else it thinks," (as Ferrier says) it might be better called a stream of Sciousness pure and simple, thinking objects of some of which it makes what it calls a ' Me,' and only aware of its 1 pure ' Self in an abstract, hypothetic or conceptual way. Each ' section ' of the stream would then be a bit of sciousness or knowledge of this sort, including and contemplat ing its * me ' and its ' not-me ' as objects which work out their drama together, but not yet including or contemplating its own subjective being. The sciousness in question would be the Thinker, and the existence of this thinker would be given to us rather as a logical postulate than as that direct inner perception of spiritual activity which we naturally believe ourselves to have. ' Matter,' as something behind physical phenomena, is a postulate of this sort. Between the postu lated Matter and the postulated Thinker, the sheet of phe nomena would then swing, some of them (the ' realities ') pertaining more to the matter, others (the fictions, opinions, and errors) pertaining more to the Thinker.

But wlio the Thinker would be, or how many distinct Thinkers we ought to suppose in the universe, would all be subjects for an ulterior metaphysical inquiry. Speculations like this traverse common-sense; and not only do they traverse common sense (which in philosophy is no insuperable objection) but they contradict the funda mental assumption of every philosophic school. Spiri tualists, transcendentalists, and empiricists alike admit in us a continual direct perception of the thinking activity in the concrete. However they may otherwise disagree, they vie with each other in the cordiality of their recognition of our thoughts as the one sort of existent which skepticism cannot touch. * I will therefore treat the last few pages as a parenthetical digression, and from now to the end of the volume revert to the path of common-sense again. I mean by this that I will continue to assume (as I have assumed all along, especially in the last chapter) a direct awareness of the process of our thinking as such, simply insisting on the fact that it is an even more inward and subtle phenome non than most of us suppose. At the conclusion of the volume, however, I may permit myself to revert again to the doubts here provisionally mooted, and will indulge in some metaphysical reflections suggested by them.

At present, then, the only conclusion I come to is the following : That (in some persons at least) the part of the innermost Self which is most vividly felt turns out to con sist for the most part of a collection of cephalic move ments of ' adjustments ' which, for want of attention and reflection, usually fail to be perceived and classed as what they are ; that over and above these there is an obscurer feeling of something more ; but whether it be of fainte" physiological processes, or of nothing objective at all, but rather of subjectivity as such, of thought become ' its own object/ must at present remain an open question, — like the question whether it be an indivisible active soul-substance, or the question whether it be a personification of the pronoun I, or any other of the guesses as to what its nature may be.

Farther than this we cannot as yet go clearly in our analysis of the Self's constituents. So let us proceed to the emotions of Self which they arouse. These are primarily self-complacency and self-aissatis- f action. Of what is called ' self-love,' I will treat a little *The only exception I know of is M. J. Souriau, in his important article in the Revue Philosophique, vol. xxn. p. 449. M. Souriau's con clusion is ' que la conscience u'existe pas ' 'p. 472).

farther on. Language has synonyms enough for both pri mary feelings. Thus pride, conceit, vanity, self-esteem, arrogance, vainglory, on the one hand; and on the other modesty, humility, confusion, diffidence, shame, mortifica tion, contrition, the sense of obloquy and personal despair. These two opposite classes of affection seem to be direct and elementary endowments of our nature. Associationists would have it that they are, on the other hand, secondary phenomena arising from a rapid computation of the sensi ble pleasures or pains to which our prosperous or debased personal predicament is likely to lead, the sum of the repre sented pleasures forming the self-satisfaction, and the sum of the represented pains forming the opposite feeling of shame. No doubt, when we are self-satisfied, we do fondly rehearse all possible rewards for our desert, and when in a fit of self-despair we forebode evil. But the mere expecta tion of reward is not the self-satisfaction, and the mere apprehension of the evil is not the self-despair, for there is a certain average tone of self-feeling which each one of us carries about with him, and which is independent of the objective reasons we may have for satisfaction or discontent. That is, a very meanly-conditioned man may abound in unfaltering conceit, and one whose success in life is secure and who is esteemed by all may remain diffident of his powers to the end.

One may say, however, that the normal provocative of self-feeling is one's actual success or failure, and the good or bad actual position one holds in the world. " He put in his thumb and pulled out a plum, and said what a good boy am I." A Eian with a broadly extended empirical Ego, with powers that have uniformly brought him success, with place and wealth and friends and fame, is not likely to be visited by the morbid diffidences and doubts about himself which he had when he was a boy. " Is not this great Babylon, which I have planted ?" * Whereas he who has made one blunder after another, and still lies in middle life among the failures at the foot of the hill, is liable to grow

* See the excellent remarks by Prof. Bain on the 'Emotion of Power' in his ' Emotions and the Will. ' all sicklied o'er with self-distrust, and to shrink from trials with which his powers can really cope. The emotions themselves of self-satisfaction and abase ment are of a unique sort, each as worthy to be classed as a primitive emotional species as are, for example, rage or pain. Each has its own peculiar physiognomical expres sion. In self-satisfaction the extensor muscles are inner vated, the eye is strong and glorious, the gait rolling and elastic, the nostril dilated, and a peculiar smile plays upon the lips. This whole complex of symptoms is seen in an exquisite way in lunatic asylums, which always contain some patients who are literally mad with conceit, and whose fatuous expression and absurdly strutting or swag gering gait is in tragic contrast with their lack of any valuable personal quality. It is in these same castles of despair that we find the strongest examples of the opposite physiognomy, in good people who think they have com mitted ' the unpardonable sin ' and are lost forever, who crouch and cringe and slink from notice, and are unable to speak aloud or look us in the eye. Like fear and like anger, in similar morbid conditions, these opposite feelings of Self may be aroused with no adequate exciting cause. And in fact we ourselves know how the barometer of our self-esteem and confidence rises and falls from one day to another through causes that seem to be visceral and organic rather than rational, and which certainly answer to no cor responding variations in the esteem in which we are held by our friends. Of the origin of these emotions in the race, we can speak better when we have treated of —

These words cover a large number of our fundamental instinctive impulses. We have those of bodily self-seeldng, those of social self-seeking, and those of spiritual self-seeking. All the ordinary useful reflex actions and movements of alimentation and defence are acts of bodily self-preser vation. Fear and anger prompt to acts that are useful in the same way. Whilst if by self-seeking we mean the providing for the future as distinguished from main taining the present, we must class both anger and fear

with the hunting, the acquisitive, the home-constructing and the tool-constructing instincts, as impulses to selfseeking of the bodily kind. Keally, however, these latter instincts, with amativeness, parental fondness, curiosity and emulation, seek not only the development of the bodily Self, but that of the material Self in the widest pos sible sense of the word. Our social self-seeking, in turn, is carried on directly through our amativeness and friendliness, our desire to please and attract notice and admiration, our emulation and jealousy, our love of glory, influence, and power, and indirectly through whichever of the material selfseeking impulses prove serviceable as means to social ends. That the direct social self-seeking impulses are probably pure instincts is easily seen. The noteworthy thing about the desire to be ' recognized ' by others is that its strength has so little to do with the worth of the recog nition computed in sensational or rational terms. We are crazy to get a visiting-list which shall be large, to be able to say when any one is mentioned, " Oh ! I know him well," and to be bowed to in the street by half the people we meet. Of course distinguished friends and admiring recognition are the most desirable — Thackeray somewhere asks his readers to confess whether it would not give each of them an exquisite pleasure to be met walking down Pall Mall with a duke on either arm. But in default of dukes and envious salutations almost anything will do for some of us ; and there is a whole race of beings to-day whose passion is to keep their names in the newspapers, no matter under what heading, ' arrivals and departures,' ' personal paragraphs,' ' interviews,' — gossip, even scandal, will suit them if nothing better is to be had. Guiteau, Garfield's assassin, is an example of the extremity to which this sort of craving for the notoriety of print may go in a pathological case. The newspapers bounded his mental horizon ; and in the poor wretch's prayer on the scaffold, one of the most heartfelt expressions was : " The newspaper press of this land has a big bill to settle with thee, O Lord !'*

Not only the people but the places and things 1 know enlarge my Self in a sort of metaphoric social way. *£7a me connait,' as the French workman says of tlie implement he can use well. So that it comes about that persons for whose opinion we care nothing are nevertheless persons whose notice we woo ; and that many a man truly great, many a woman truly fastidious in most respects, will take a deal of trouble to dazzle some insignificant cad whose whole personality they heartily despise.

Under the head of spiritual self-seeking ought to be included every impulse towards psychic progress, whether intellectual, moral, or spiritual in the narrow sense of the term. It must be admitted, however, that much that com monly passes for spiritual self-seeking in this narrow sense is only material and social self-seeking beyond the grave. In the Mohammedan desire for paradise and the Christian aspiration not to be damned in hell, the materiality of the goods sought is undisguised. In the more positive and refined view of heaven many of its goods, the fellowship of the saints and of our dead ones, and the presence of God, are but social goods of the most exalted kind. It is only the search of the redeemed inward nature, the spotlessness from sin, whether here or hereafter, that can count as spiritual self-seeking pure and undefiled.

But this broad external review of the facts of the life 01 the Self will be incomplete without some account of the With most objects of desire, physical nature restricts our choice to but one of many represented goods, and even so it is here. I am often confronted by the necessity of stand ing by one of my empirical selves and relinquishing the rest. Not that I would not, if I could, be both handsome and fat and well dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million a year, be a wit, a bon-vivant, and a lady-killer, as well as a philosopher ; a philanthropist, statesman, warrior, and African explorer, as well as a ' tone-poet ' and saint. But the thing is simply impossible. The millionaire's work would run counter to the saint's ; the bon-vivant and the philanthropist would trip each other up ; the philosopher and the lady-killer could not well keep house in the same

tenement of clay. Such different characters may conceiv ably at the outset of life be alike possible to a man. But to make any one of them actual, the rest must more or less be suppressed. So the seeker of his truest, strongest, deepest self must review the list carefully, and pick out the one on which to stake his salvation. All other selves thereupon become unreal, but the fortunes of this self are real. Its failures are real failures, its triumphs real tri umphs, carrying shame and gladness with them. This is as strong an example as there is of that selective industry of the mind on which I insisted some pages back (p. 284 if.). Our thought, incessantly deciding, among many things of a kind, which ones for it shall be realities, here chooses one of many possible selves or characters, and forthwith reckons it no shame to fail in any of those not adopted expressly as its own.

II, who for the time have staked my all on being a psychologist, am mortified if others know much more / psychology than I. But I am contented to wallow in the grossest ignorance of Greek. My deficiencies there give me no sense of personal humiliation at all. Had I ' pretensions' to be a linguist, it would have been just the reverse. So we have the paradox of a man shamed to death because he is only the second pugilist or the second oarsman in the world. That he is able to beat the whole population of the globe minus one is nothing ; he has ' pitted ' himself to beat that one ; and as long as he doesn't do that nothing else counts. He is to his own regard as if he were not, in deed he is not.

Yonder puny fellow, however, whom every one can beat, suffers no chagrin about it, for he has long ago abandoned the attempt to ' carry that line,' as the merchants say, of self at all. With no attempt there can be no failure ; with no failure no humiliation. So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do. It is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our sup posed potentialities ; a fraction of which our pretensions are the denominator and the numerator our success : thus,

as well by diminishing the denominator as by increasing the numerator.* To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief a^ to get them gratified ; and where disappointment is incessant , and the struggle unending, this is what men will always do. The history of evangelical theology, with its conviction of sin, its self-despair, and its abandonment of salvation by works, is the deepest of possible examples, but we meet others in every walk of life. There is the strangest light ness about the heart when one's nothingness in a particular line is once accepted in good faith. All is not bitterness in the lot of the lover sent away by the final inexorable ' No.' Many Bostonians, crede experto (and inhabitants of other cities, too, I fear), would be happier women and men to-day, if they could once for all abandon the notion of keeping up a Musical Self, and without shame let people hear them call a symphony a nuisance. How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young, — or slender ! Thank God ! we say, those illusions are gone. Everything added to the Self is a burden as well as a pride. A certain man who lost every penny during our civil war went and actually rolled in the dust, saying he had not felt so free and happy since he was born.

Once more, then, our self-feeling is in our power. As Carlyle says : " Make thy claim of wages a zero, then hast j thou the world under thy feet. Well did the wisest of our time write, it is only with renunciation that life, properly speaking, can be said to begin." Neither threats nor pleadings can move a man unless they touch some one of his potential or actual selves. Only thus can we, as a rule, get a * purchase ' on another's will. The first care of diplomatists and mouarchs and all who wish to rule or influence is, accordingly, to find out their victim's strongest principle of self-regard, so as to make that the