The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2

On the whole, a defensible interpretation of Kant's view would take somewhat the following shape. Like our selves he believes in a Reality outside the mind of which he writes, but the critic who vouches for that reality does so on grounds of faith, for it is not a verifiable phenomenal thing. Neither is it manifold. The ' Manifold ' which the intellectual functions combine is a mental manifold alto gether, which thus stands betiueen the Ego of Appercep tion and the outer Reality, but still stands inside the mind. In the function of knowing there is a multiplicity to be con nected, and Kant brings this multiplicity inside the mind. The Reality becomes a mere empty locus, or unknowable, the so-called Noumenon ; the manifold phenomenon is in the mind. We, on the contrary, put the Multiplicity with the Reality outside, and leave the mind simple. Both of us deal with the same elements — thought and object — the only question is in which of them the multiplicity shall be lodged. Wherever it is lodged it must be * synthetized ' when it comes to be thought. And that particular way of lodging it will be the better, which, in addition to describ ing the facts naturally, makes the ' mystery of synthesis ' least hard to understand.

Well, Kant's way of describing the facts is mythological. The notion of our thought being this sort of an elaborate internal machine-shop stands condemned by all we said in favor of its simplicity on pages 276 ff. Our Thought is not composed of parts, however so composed its objects may be. There is no originally chaotic manifold in it to be re duced to order. There is something almost shocking in the notion of so chaste a function carrying this Kantian hurlyburly in her womb. If we are to have a dualism of Thought and Reality at all, the multiplicity should be lodged in the latter and not in the former member of the couple of related terms. The parts and their relations surely belong less to the knower than to what is known.

But even were all the mythology true, the process ol synthesis would in no whit be explained by calling the inside of the mind its seat. No mystery would be made lighter by such means. It is just as much a puzzle how the * Ego ' can amploy the productive Imagination to make the Understand ing uss the categories to combine the data which Recognition, Association, and Apprehension receive from sensible Intui tion, as how the Thought can combine the objective facts. Phrase it as one may, the difficulty is always the same : the Many known by the One. Or does one seriously think he understands better how the knower ' connects ' its objects, when one calls the former a transcendental Ego and the latter a * Manifold of Intuition' than when one calls them Thought and Things respectively ? Knowing must have a vehicle. Call the vehicle Ego, or call it Thought, Psycho sis, Soul, Intelligence, Consciousness, Mind, Reason, Feel ing, — what you like — it must knoiv. The best grammatical subject for the verb knoiv would, if possible, be one from whose other properties the knowing could be deduced. And if there be no such subject, the best one would be that with the fewest ambiguities and the least pretentious name. By Kant's confession, the transcendental Ego has no properties, and from it nothing can be deduced. Its name is pretentious, and, as we shall presently see, has its mean ing ambiguously mixed up with that of the substantial soul. So on every possible account we are excused from using it instead of our own term of the present passing ' Thought,' as the principle by which the Many is simul taneously known.

The ambiguity referred to in the meaning of the tran scendental Ego is as to whether Kant signified by it an Agent, and by the Experience it helps to constitute, an operation; or whether the experience is an event prod need in an unassigned way, and the Ego a mere indwelling ele~ ment therein contained. If an operation be meant, then Ego and Manifold must both be existent prior to that col lision which results in the experience of one by the other. If a mere analysis is meant, there is no such prior exist ence, and the elements only are in so far as they are in union. Now Kant's tone and language are everywhere the very

words of one who is talking of operations and the agents by which they are performed.* And yet there is reason to think that at bottom he may have had nothing of the sort in mind.f In this uncertainty we need again do no more than decide what to think of his transcendental Ego if it be an agent. Well, if it be so, Transcendentalism is only Substantialism grown shame-faced, and the Ego only a ' cheap and nasty ' edition of the soul. All our reasons for preferring the * Thought : to the * Soul ' apply with redoubled force when the Soul is shrunk to this estate. The Soul truly ex plained nothing ; the ' syntheses,' which she performed, were simply taken ready-made and clapped on to her as expressions of her nature taken after the fact ; but at least she had some semblance of nobility and outlook. She was called active ; might select ; was responsible, and per manent in her way. The Ego is simply not 'king : as in effectual and windy an abortion as Philosophy can show. It would indeed be one of Reason's tragedies if the good Kant, with all his honesty and strenuous pains, should have deemed this conception an important outbirth of his thought.

But we have seen that Kant deemed if: of next to no im portance at all. It was reserved for his Eiclitean and He gelian successors to call it the first Principle of Philosophy, to spell its name in capitals and pronounce it with adora tion, to act, in short, as if they were going up in a balloon, whenever the notion of it crossed their mind. Here again, however, I am uncertain of the facts of history, and know that I may not read my authors aright. The whole lesson of Kantian and post-Kantian speculation is, it seems to me, the lesson of simplicity. With Kant, complication both of thought and statement was an inborn infirmity, enhanced

* "As regards the soul, now, or the ' I,' the ' thinker,' the whole drift of Kant's advance upon Hume and sensational psychology is towards the demonstration that the subject of knowledge is an Agent." (G. B. Morris, Kant's Critique, etc. (Chicago, 1882), p. 224.) f "In Kant's Prolegomena," says II. Cohen,— I do not myself find the passage,— "it is expressly said that the problem is not to show how expe rience arises (ensteht), but of what it consists (beeteM)." (Kant's Theorie d. Erfahrung (1871), p. 138.)

by the musty academicism of his Konigsberg existence, With Hegel it was a raging fever. Terribly, therefore, do the sour grapes which these fathers of philosophy have eaten set our teeth on edge. We have in England and America, however, a contemporary continuation of Hegelism from which, fortunately, somewhat simpler deliverances come ; and, unable to find any definite psychology in what Hegel, Kosenkranz, or Erdmann tells us of the Ego, I turn to Caird and Green.

The great difference, practically, between these authors and Kant is their complete abstraction from the onlooking Psychologist and from the Reality he thinks he knows ; or rather it is the absorption of both of these outlying terms into the proper topic of Psychology, viz., the mental ex perience of the mind under observation. The Eeality coalesces with the connected Manifold, the Psychologist with the Ego, knowing becomes 'connecting,' and there results no longer a finite or criticisable, but an ' absolute ' Experience, of which the Object and the Subject are always the same. Our finite ' Thought ' is virtually and potentially this eternal (or rather this ' timeless '), absolute Ego, arid only provisionally and speciously the limited thing which it seems primd facie to be. The later ' sections ' of our * Stream,' which come and appropriate the earlier ones, are those earlier ones, just as in substantialism the Soul is throughout all time the same.* This ' solipsistic ' char-

* The contrast between the Monism thus reached and our own psycho logical point of view can be exhibited schematically thus, the terms in squares standing for what, for us, are the ultimate irreducible data of psychological science, and the vincula above it symbolizing the reductions which post-Kantian idealism performs : These reductions account for the ubiquitousness of the ' psychologist's fallacy ' (bk. ir. ch. i. D. 32) in the modern monistic writings. For us it is

acter of an Experience conceived as absolute really annihi lates psychology as a distinct body of science. Psychology is a natural science, an account of particu lar finite streams of thought, coexisting and succeeding in time. It is of course conceivable (though far from clearly so) that in the last metaphysical resort all these streams of thought may be thought by one universal All-thinker. But in this metaphysical notion there is no profit for psy chology ; for grant that one Thinker does think in all of us, still what He thinks in me and what in you can never be de duced from the bare idea of Him. The idea of Him seems even to exert a positively paralyzing effect on the mind. The existence of finite thoughts is suppressed altogether. Thought's characteristics, as Professor Green says, are

"not to be sought in the incidents of individual lives which last but for a day. ... No knowledge, nor any mental act involved in knowledge, can properly be called a ' phenomenon of consciousness.' . . . For a phenomenon is a sensible event, related in the way of antecedence or consequence to other sensible events, but the conscious ness which constitutes a knowledge ... is not an event so related nor made up of such events." "we examine the constituents of any perceived object, ... we shall find alike that it is only for consciousness that they can exist, and that the consciousness for which they thus exist cannot be merely a series of phenomena or a succession of states. . . . It then becomes clear that there is a function of consciousness, as exercised in the most rudi mentary experience [namely, the function of synthesis] which is incom patible with the definition of consciousness as any sort of succession of any sort of phenomena.'" *

Were we to follow these remarks, we should have to abandon our notion of the ' Thought ' (perennially renewed in time, but always cognitive thereof), and to espouse instead of an unpardonable logical sin, when talking of a thought's knowledge (eithet of an object or of itself), to change the terms without warning, and, sub stituting the psychologist's knowledge therefor, still make as if we were continuing to talk of the same thing. For monistic idealism, this is the very enfranchisement of philosophy, and of course cannot be too much in dulged in.

it an entity copied from thought in all essential respects, t>ut differing from it in being ' out of time.' What psychology can gain by this barter .would be hard to divine. More over this resemblance of the timeless Ego to the Soul is completed by other resemblances still. The monism of the post-Kantian idealists seems always lapsing into a regular old-fashioned spiritualistic dualism. They inces santly talk as if, like the Soul, their All-thinker were an Agent, operating on detached materials of sense. This may come from the accidental fact that the English writings of the school have been more polemic than constructive, and that a reader may often take for a positive profession a statement ad hominem meant as part of a reduction to the absurd, or mistake the analysis of a bit of knowledge into elements for a dramatic myth about its creation. But I think the matter has profounder roots. Professor Green constantly talks of the ' activity ' of Self as a ' condition ' of knowledge taking place. Facts are said to become incor porated with other facts only through the ' action of a com bining self-consciousness upon data of sensation.'

"Every object we perceive . . . requires, in order to its presen tation, the action of a principle of consciousness, not itself subject to conditions of time, upon successive appearances, such action as may hold the appearances together, without fusion, in an apprehended fact." * It is needless to repeat that the connection of things in our knowledge is in no whit explained by making it the deed of an agent whose essence is self-identity and who is out of time. The agency of phenomenal thought coming and going in time is just as easy to understand. And when it is furthermore said that the agent that combines is the same ' self-distinguishing subject ' which ' in another mode of its activity ' presents the manifold object to itself, the unintelligibilities become quite paroxysmal, and we are forced to confess that the entire school of thought in ques tion, in spite of occasional glimpses of something more re fined, still dwells habitually in that mythological stage of thought where phenomena are explained as results of

dramas enacted by entities which but reduplicate the char acters of the phenomena themselves. The self must not only know its object, — that is too bald and dead a relation to be written down and left in its static state. The know ing must be painted as a ' famous victory ' in which the object's distinctness is in some way ' overcome.' " The self exists as one self only as it opposes itself, as object, tc itself as subject, and immediately denies and transcends that opposi tion. Only because it is such a concrete unity, which has in itself a resolved contradiction, can the intelligence cope with all the manifoldness and division of the mighty universe, and hope to master its secrets. As the lightning sleeps in the dew-drop, so in the simple and trans parent unity of self-consciousness there is held in equilibrium that vital antagonism of opposites which . . . seems to rend the world asunder. The intelligence is able to understand the world, or, in other words, to break down the barrier between itself and things and find itself in them, just because its own existence is implicitly the solution of all the division and conflict of things." *

This dynamic (I had almost written dynamitic) way of representing knowledge has the merit of not being tame. To turn from it to our own psychological formulation is like turning from the fireworks, trap-doors, and transformations of the pantomime into the insipidity of the midnight, where " ghastly through the drizzling rain, On the bald street breaks the blank day ! "f And yet turn we must, with the confession that our 'Thought' — a cognitive phenomenal event in time — is, if it exist at all, itself the only Thinker which the facts require. The only service that transcendental egoism has done to psychology has been by its protests against Hume's ' bundle '-

f One is almost tempted to believe that the pantomime-state of mind and that of the Hegelian dialectics are, emotionally considered, one and the same thing. Iii the pantomime all common things are represented to happen in impossible ways, people jump down each other's tnroats, houses turn inside out, old women become young men, everything 'passes into its opposite ' with inconceivable celerity and skill; and this, so far from producing perplexity, brings rapture to the beholder's mind. And so in the Hegelian logic, relations elsewhere recognized under the insipid name of distinctions (such as that between knower and object, many and one) must first be translated into impossibilities and contradictions, then 'tran scended ' and identified by miracle, ere the proper temper is induced for thoroughly enjoying the spectacle they show.

theory of mind. But this service has been ill-performed ; for the Egoists themselves, let them say what they will, believe in the bundle, and in their own system merely tie it up, with their special transcendental string, invented for that use alone. Besides, they talk as if, with this miraculous tying or 'relating,' the Ego's duties were done. Of its far more important duty of choosing some of the things it ties and appropriating them, to the exclusion of the rest, they tell us never a word. To sum up, then, my own opinion of the transcendentalist school, it is (whatever ulterior meta physical truth it may divine) a school in which psychology at least has naught to learn, and whose deliverances about the Ego in particular in no wise oblige us to revise our own formulation of the Stream of Thought.*

With this, all possible rival formulations have been dis cussed. The literature of the Self is large, but all its * The reader will please understand that I arn quite willing to leave the hypothesis of the transcendental Ego as a substitute for the passing Thought open to discussion on general speculative grounds. Only in this booK I prefer to stick by the common sense assumption that we have suc cessive conscious states, because all psychologists make it, and because one does not see how there can be a Psychology written which does not postulate such thoughts as its ultimate data. The data of all natural sciences be come in turn subjects of a critical treatment more refined than that which the sciences themselves accord; and so it may fare in the end with our passing Thought. We have ourselves seen (pp. 299-805) that the sensible certainty of its existence is less strong than is usually assumed. My quarrel with the transcendental Egoists is mainly about their grounds for their belief. Did they consistently propose it as a substitute for the passing Thought, did they consistently deny the latter's existence, I should respect their position more. But so far as I can understand them, they habitually believe in the passing Thought also. They seem even to believe in the Lockian stream of separate ideas, for the chief glory of the Ego in their pages is always its power to 'overcome' this separatcness and unite the naturally disunited, ' synthetizing ,' ' connecting,' or ' relating ' th,e ideas together being used as synonyms, by transcendeutalist writers, for knowing various objects at once. Not the being conscious at all, but the being con* scious of many things together is held to be the difficult thing, in our psychic life, which only the wonder-working Ego can perform.

But on what slippery ground does one get the moment one changes the definite notion of knowing an object into the altogether vague one of uniting or synthetizing the ideas of its various parts 1 — In the chapter on Sensation we shall come upon all this again. authors may be classed as radical or mitigated representa tives of tlie three schools we have named, substantialismv associationism, or transcendentalism. Our own opinion must be classed apart, although it incorporates essential elements from all three schools. There need never have been a quarrel between associationism and its rivals if the former had admitted the indecomposable unity of every pulse of thought, and the latter been ivilling to allow that ' perishing ' pulses oj thought might recollect and know.

We m&/y sum up by saying that personality implies the incessant presence of tAvo elements, an objective person, known by a passing subjective Thought and recognized as continuing in time. Hereafter let us use the ivords ME and I for the empirical person and the judging Thought. In the first place, although its changes are gradual, they become in time great. The central part of the me is the feeling of the body and of the adjustments in the head ; and in the feeling of the body should be included that of the general emotional tones and tendencies, for at bottom these are but the habits in which organic activities and sen sibilities run. Well, from infancy to old age, this assem blage of feelings, most constant of all, is yet a prey to slow mutation. Our powers, bodily and mental, change at least as fast.* Our possessions notoriously are perishable facts.

*" When we compare the listless inactivity of the infant, slumbering from the moment at which he takes his milky food to the moment at which he wakes to require it again, with the restless energies of that mighty being which he is to become in his maturer years, pouring truth after truth, in rapid and dazzling profusion, upon the world, or grasping in his single hand the destiny of empires, how few are the circumstances of resemblance which we can trace, of all that intelligence which is afterwards to be dis played; how little more is seen than what serves to give feeble motion to the mere machinery of life 1 ... Every age, if we may speak of many ages in the few years of human life, seems to be marked with a distinct character. Each has its peculiar objects which excite lively affections; and in each, exertion is excited by affections, which in other periods terminate without inducing active desire. The boy finds a world in less space than that which bounds his visible horizon; he wanders over his range of field and exhausts his strength in the pursuit of objects which, in the years that

The identity which the /discovers, as it surveys this long procession, can only be a relative identity, that of a slow shifting in which there is always some common ingredient retained.* The commonest element of all, the most uni form, is the possession of the same memories. However different the man may be from the youth, both look back on the same childhood, and call it their own. Thus the identity found by the / in its me is only a loosely construed thing, an identity ' on the whole,' just like that which any outside observer might find in the same

follow, are seen only to be neglected; while to him the objects that are afterwards to absorb his whole soul are as indifferent as the objects of his present passions are destined then to appear. . . . How many opportuni ties must every one have had of witnessing the progress of intellectual decay, and the coldness that steals upon the once benevolent heart! We quit our country, perhaps at an early period of life, and after an absence of many years we return with all the remembrances of past pleasure which grow more tender as they approach their objects. We eagerly seek him to whose paternal voice we have been accustomed to listen with the same rev erence as if its predictions had possessed oracular certainty, — who first led us into knowledge, ^nd whose image has been constantly joined in our miml with all that veneration which does not forbid love. We find him sunk, perhaps, in the imbecility of idiotism, unable to recognize us,— igno rant alike of the past and of the future, and living only in the sensibility of animal gratification. We seek the favorite companion of our childhood, whose tenderness of heart, etc. . . . We find him hardened into a man, meeting us scarcely with the cold hypocrisy of dissembled friendship— in his general relations to the world careless of the misery lie is not to feel. . . . When we observe all this, ... do we use only a metaphor of little meaning when we say of him that he is become a different person, and that his mind and character are changed? In what does the identity consist? . . . The supposed test of identity, when applied to the mind in these cases, completely fails. It neither affects, nor is affected, in the same man ner in the same circumstances. It therefore, if the test be a just one, is not the same identical mind." (T. Brown: Lectures on the Philosophy" of the Human Mind, 'on Mental Identity. '>

* " Sir John Cutler had a pair of black worsted stockings, which his maid darned so often with silk that they became at last a pair of silk stockings. Now, supposing these stockings of Sir John's endued with some degree of consciousness at every particular darning, they would have been sensible that they were the same individual pair of stockings both be fore and after the darning; and this sensation would have continued in them through all the succession of darnings; and yet after the last of all there was not perhaps one thread left of the first pair of stockings : but they were grown to be silk stockings, as was said before." (Pope's Mar tiuus Scriblerus. quoted by Brown, ibid.}

assemblage of facts. We often say of a man ' lie is so changed one would not know him '; and so does a man, less often, speak of himself. These changes in the me, recognized by the I, or by outside observers, may be grave or slight. They deserve some notice here. 1. Alterations of memory are either losses or false recol lections. In either case the me is changed. Should a man be punished for what he did in his childhood and no longer remembers ? Should he be punished for crimes enacted in post-epileptic unconsciousness, somnambulism, or in any involuntarily induced state of which no recollection is re tained ? Law, in accord with common-sense, says : " No ; he is not the same person forensically now which he was then." These losses of memory are a normal incident of extreme old age, and the person's me shrinks in the ratio of the facts that have disappeared.

In dreams we forget our waking experiences ; they are as if they were not. And the converse is also true. As a rule, no memory is retained during the waking state of what has happened during mesmeric trance, although when again entranced the person may remember it distinctly, and may then forget facts belonging to the waking state. We thus have, within the bounds of healthy mental life, an approach to an alternation of me's. False ni Nmories are by no means rare occurrences in most of us, and, whenever they occur, they distort the con sciousness of the me. Most people, probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to their past. They may have seen them, may have said them, done them, or they may only have dreamed or imagined thoy did so. The content of a dream will oftentimes insert itself into the stream of real life in a most perplexing way. The most frequent source of false memory is the accounts we give to 9thers of our experiences. Such accounts we almost ai

ways make both more simple and more interesting than the truth. "We quote what we should have said or done, rather than what we really said or did ; and in the first telling we may be fully aware of the distinction. But ere long the fiction expels the reality from memory and reigns in its stead alone. This is one great source, of the fallibil ity of testimony meant to be quite honest. Especially where the marvellous is concerned, the story takes a tilt that way, and the memory follows the story. Dr. Carpen ter quotes from Miss Cobbe the following, as an instance of a very common sort :

" It happened once to the Writer to hear a most scrupulously con scientious friend narrate an incident of table-turning, to which she appended an assurance that the table rapped when nobody was within a yard of it. The writer being confounded by this latter fact, the lady, though fully satisfied of the accuracy of her statement, promised to look at the note she had made ten years previously of the transac tion. The note was examined, and was found to contain the distinct statement that the table rapped when the hands of six persons rested on it ! The lady's memory as to all other points proved to be strictly correct ; and in this point she had erred in entire good faith."*