The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1-2

Eight years later, Lurancy was reported to be married and a mother, and in good health. She had apparently out grown the mediumistic phase of her existence.* On the condition of the sensibility during these inva sions, few observations have been made. I have found the hands of two automatic writers anaesthetic during the act. * My friend Mr. R. Hodgson informs me that he visited Watseka iv April 1890, and cross-examined the principal witnesses of this case. Hi? confidence in the original narrative was strengthened by what he learned ; and various unpublished facts were ascertained, which increased the plau sibility of the spiritualistic interpretation of the phenomenon.

In two others I have found this not to be the case. Auto, matic writing is usually preceded by shooting pains along the arm-nerves and irregular contractions of the armmuscles. I have found one medium's tongue and lips apparently insensible to pin-pricks during her (speaking) trance. If we speculate on the braincondition during all these different perversions of personality, we see that it must be supposed capable of successively changing all its modes of action, and abandoning the use for the time being of whole sets of well-organized association-paths. In no other way can we explain the loss of memory in passing from one alternating condition to another. And not only this, but we must admit that organized systems of paths can be thrown out of gear with others, so that the processes in ono system give rise to one consciousness, and those of another system to another simidtaneously existing consciousness. Thus only can we understand the facts of automatic writing, etc., whilst the patient is out of trance, and the false anaes thesias and amnesias of the hysteric type. But just what sort of dissociation the phrase ' thrown out of gear ' may stand for, we cannot even conjecture ; only I think we ought not to talk of the doubling of the self as if it consisted in the failure to combine on the part of certain systems of ideas which usually do so. It is better to talk of objects usually combined, and which are now divided between the two ' selves,' in the hysteric and automatic cases in ques tion. Each of the selves is due to a system of cerebral paths acting by itself. If the brain acted normally, and the dissociated systems came together again, we should get a new affection of consciousness in the form of a third ' Self different from the other two, but knowing their objects together, as the result. — After all I have said in the last chapter, this hardly needs further remark.

Some peculiarities in the lower automatic performances suggest that the systems thrown out of gear with each other are contained one in the right and the other in the left hemisphere. The subjects, e.g., often write backwards, or they transpose letters, or they write mirror-script. All these are symptoms of agraphic disease. The left hand, if left to its natural impulse, will in most people write mirrorscript more easily than natural script. Mr. F. W. H. Myers has laid stress on these analogies.* He has also called attention to the usual inferior moral tone of ordinary planchette writing. On Hughlings Jackson's principles, the left hemisphere, being the more evolved organ, at ordinary times inhibits the activity of the right one ; but Mr. Myers suggests that during the automatic performances the usual inhibition may be removed and the right hemisphere set free to act all by itself. This is very likely to some extent to be the case. But the crude explanation of ' two ' selves by 'two* hemispheres is of course far from Mr. Myers's thought. The selves may be more than two, and the brainsystems severally used for each must be conceived as inter penetrating each other in very minute ways.

To sum up now this long chapter. The consciousness of Self involves a stream of thought, each part of which as * I ' can 1) remember those which went before, and know the things they knew ; and 2) emphasize and care paramountly for certain ones among them as ' me,' and appropriate to these the rest. The nucleus of the ' me ' is always the bodily existence felt to be present at the time. Whatever remembered-past-feelings resemble this present feeling are deemed to belong to the samo me with it. Whatever other things are perceived to be associated with this feeling are deemed to form part of that me's experience; and of them certain ones (which fluctuate more or less) are reckoned to be themselves constituents of the me in a larger sense, — such are the clothes, the material possessions, the friends, the honors and esteem which the person receives or may re ceive. This me is an empirical aggregate of things object ively known. The / which knows them cannot itself be an

* See his highly important series of articles on Automatic Writing, etc., in the Proceedings of the Soc. for Psych. Research, especially Article II (May 1885). Compare also Dr. Maudsley's instructive article in Mind, vol. xiv. p. 161, and Luys's essay, ' Sur le Dedoublement,' etc.. IB 1'Encephale for 1889. aggregate, neither for psychological purposes need it be considered to be an unchanging metaphysical entity like the Soul, or a principle like the pure Ego, viewed as ' out of time.' It is a Thought, at each moment different from that of the last moment, but appropriative of the latter, together with all that the latter called its own. All the experiential facts find their place in this description, unen cumbered with any hypothesis save that of the existence of passing thoughts or states of mind. The same brain may subserve many conscious selves, either alternate or coexist ing ; but by what modifications in its action, or whether ultra-cerebral conditions may intervene, are questions which cannot now be answered.

If anyone urge that I assign no reason why the succes sive passing thoughts should inherit each other's possessions, or why they and the brain-states should be functions (in the mathematical sense) of each other, I reply that the reason, if there be any, must lie where all real reasons lie, in the total sense or meaning of the world. If there be such a meaning, or any approach to it (as we are bound to trust there is), it alone can make clear to us why such finite haman streams of thought are called into existence in such functional dependence upon brains. This is as much as to say that the special natural science of psychology must stop with the mere functional formula. If the passing thought be the directly verifiable existent which no school has hitherto doubted it to be, then that thought is itself the thinker, and psychology need not look beyond. The only pathway that I can discover for bringing in a more transcendental thinker would be to deny that we have any direct knowledge of the thought as such. The latter 's existence would then be reduced to a postulate, an assertion that there must be a knoioer correlative to all this known ; and the problem ivho that knower is would have become a metaphysical problem. With the question once stated in these terms, the spirit ualist and transcendentalist solutions must be considered as prima facie on a par with our own psychological one, and discussed impartially. But that carries us beyond the psychological or naturalistic point of view.

E to say, so patent a fact as the perpetual pres ence of selective attention has received hardly any notice from psychologists of the English empiricist school. The Germans have explicitly treated of it, either as a faculty or as a resultant, but in the pages of such writers as Locke, Hume, Hartley, the Mills, and Spencer the word hardly occurs, or if it does so, it is parenthetically and as if by inad vertence.* The motive of this ignoring of the phenomenon of attention is obvious enough. These writers are bent on showing how the higher faculties of the mind are pure products of ' experience ; ' and experience is supposed to be of something simply given. Attention, implying a degree of reactive spontaneity, would seem to break through the circle of pure receptivity which constitutes ' experience/ and hence must not be spoken of under penalty of inter fering with the smoothness of the tale.

But the moment one thinks of the matter, one sees how false a notion of experience that is which would make it tantamount to the mere presence to the senses of an out ward order. Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my axperience. Why ? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind — without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos. Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground —intelligible perspective, in a word. It varies in every

* Bain mentions attention in the Senses and the Intellect, p. 558, and even gives a theory of it on pp. 370-374 of the Emotions of the Will. .1 shall recur to this theory later on. creature, but without it the consciousness of every creature would be a gray chaotic indiscriminateness, impossible for us even to conceive. Such an empiricist writer as Mr. Spencer, for example, regards the creature as absolutely passive clay, upon which 'experience' rains down. The clay will be impressed most deeply where the drops fall thickest, and so the final shape of the mind is moulded. Give time enough, and all sentient things ought, at this rate, to end by assuming an identical mental constitution — for ' experience,' the sole shaper, is a constant fact, and the order of its items must end by being exactly reflected by the passive mirror which we call the sentient organism. If such an account were true, a race of dogs bred for gen erations, say in the Vatican, with characters of visual shape, sculptured in marble, presented to their eyes, in every va riety of form and combination, ought to discriminate be fore long the finest shades of these peculiar characters. In a word, they ought to become, if time were given, ac complished connoisseurs of sculpture. Anyone may judge of the probability of this consummation. Surely an eternity of experience of the statues would leave the dog as inartistic as he was at first, for the lack of an original interest to knit his discriminations on to. Meanwhile the odors at the bases of the pedestals would have organized themselves in the consciousness of this breed of dogs into a system of ( cor respondences ' to which the most hereditary caste of custodi would never approximate, merely because to them, as human beings, the dog's interest in those smells would for ever be an inscrutable mystery.

These writers have, then, utterly ignored the glaring fact that subjective inter est may, by laying its weighty index-finger on particular items of experience, so accent them as to give to the least frequent associations far more power to shape our thought than the most frequent ones possess. The interest itself, though its genesis is doubtless perfectly natural, makes ex perience more than it is made by it. Every one knows what attention is. It is the taking pos session by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains

of thought. localization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatter brained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German. We all know this latter state, even in its extreme degree. Most people probably fall several times a day into a fit of something like this : The eyes are fixed on vacancy, the sounds of the world melt into confused unity, the attention is dispersed so that the whole body is felt, as it were, at once, and the foreground of consciousness is filled, if by anything, by a sort of solemn sense of surrender to the empty passing of time. In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing : get ting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us, trying to make the next step in our reason ing. But somehow we cannot start ; the pensee de derriere la tete fails to pierce the shell of lethargy that wraps our state about. Every moment we expect the spell to break, for we know no reason why it should continue. But it does con tinue, pulse after pulse, and we float with it, until — also without reason that we can discover — an energy is given, something — we know not what — enables us to gather our selves together, we wink our eyes, we shake our heads, the background-ideas become effective, and the wheels of life go round again.

This curious state of inhibition can for a few moments be produced at will by fixing the eyes on vacancy. Some per sons can voluntarily empty their minds and ' think of noth ing.' With many, as Professor Exner remarks of himself, this is the most efficacious means of falling asleep. It is difficult not to suppose something like this scattered con dition of mind to be the usual state of brutes when not actively engaged in some pursuit. Fatigue, monotonous mechanical occupations that end by being automatically carried on, tend to produce it in men. It is not sleep ; and yet when aroused from such a state, a person will often hardly be able to say what he has been thinking about Subjects of the hypnotic trance seem to lapse into it whe*>

left to themselves ; asked what they are thinking of, they reply, ' of nothing particular ' ! * The abolition of this condition is what we call the awak ening of the attention. One principal object comes then into the focus of consciousness, others are temporarily sup pressed. The awakening may come about either by reason of a stimulus from without, or in consequence of some unknown inner alteration ; and the change it brings with it amounts to a concentration upon one single object with exclusion of aught besides, or to a condition anywhere be tween this and the completely dispersed state.

The question of the ' span1 of consciousness has often been asked and answered — sometimes a priori, sometimes by ex periment. This seems the proper place for us to touch upon it ; and our answer, according to the principles laid down in Chapter IX, will not be difficult. The number of things we may attend to is altogether indefinite, depending on the power of the individual intellect, on the form of the apprehension, and on what the things are. When appre hended conceptually as a connected system, their number may be very large. But however numerous the things, they can only be known in a single pulse of consciousness for which they form one complex 'object' (p. 276 ff.), so tha^ properly speaking there is before the mind at no time a plurality of ideas, properly so called.

* "The first and most important, but also the most difficult, task at the outset of an education is to overcome gradually the inattentive dispersion of mind which shows itself wherever the organic life preponderates over the intellectual. The training of animals . . . must be in the first in stance based on the awakening of attention (cf . Adrian Leonard, Essai wr I'Education des Animaux, Lille, 1842) , that is to say, we must seek to make them gradually perceive separately things M'hich, if left to themselves, would not be attended to, because they would, fuse with a great sum of other sensorial stimuli to a confused total impression of which each separate item only darkens and interferes with the rest. Similarly at first with the human child. The enormous difficulties of deaf-mute- and especially of idiot-instruction is principally due to the slow and painful manner in which we succeed in bringing out from the general confusion of perception single items with sufficient sharpness." (Waitz, Lehrb. d. Psychol., p. 632.)

philosophers, who also believed in the distinct atomic na ture of 'ideas,' to preclude the presence to it of more than one objective fact, manifested in one idea, at a time. Even Dugald Stuart opines that every minimum visibile of a pic tured figure " constitutes just as distinct an object of attention to the mind as if it were separated by an interval of empty space from the rest. ... It is impossible for the mind to attend to more than one of these points at once ; and as the perception of the figure implies a knowledge of the relative situation of the different points with respect to each other, we must conclude that the perception of figure by the eye is the result of a number of different acts of attention. These acts of attention, how ever, are performed with such rapidity, that the effect, with respect to us, is the same as if the perception were instantaneous." *

Such glaringly artificial views can only come from fan tastic metaphysics or from the ambiguity of the word 'idea,' which, standing sometimes for mental state and sometimes for thing known, leads men to ascribe to the thing, not only the unity which belongs to the mental state, but even the simplicity which is thought to reside in the Soul. When the things are apprehended by the senses, the number of them that can be attended to at once is small, "Pluribus intentus, minor est ad singida sensus."

" By Charles Bonnet the Mind is allowed to have a distinct notion of six objects at once ; by Abraham Tucker the number is limited to four ; while Destutt Tracy again amplifies it to six. The opinion of the first and last of these philosophers" [continues Sir Wm. Hamilton] "seems to me correct. You can easily make the experiments for yourselves, but you must beware of grouping the objects into classes. If you throw a handful of marbles on the floor, you will find it difficult to view at once more than six, or seven at most, without confusion ; but if ^you group them into twos, or threes, or fives, you can comprehend as many groups as you can units ; because the mind considers these groups only as units — it views them as wholes, and throws their parts out of consideration." f

Professor Jevons, repeating this observation, by count ing instantaneously beans thrown into a box, found that the number 6 was guessed correctly 120 times out of 147, 5 correctly 102 times out of 107, and 4 and 3 always right. J It is obvious that such observations decide nothing at all about our attention, properly so called. They rather meas ure in part the distinctness of our vision — especially of the primary-memory-image* — in part the amount of association in the individual between seen arrangements and the names of numbers, f

Each number-name is a way of grasping the beans as one total object. In such a total object, all the parts con verge harmoniously to the one resultant concept ; no sin gle bean has special discrepant associations of its own ; and so, with practice, they may grow quite numerous ere we fail to estimate them aright. But where the ' object ' be- * If a lot of dots or strokes on a piece of paper be exhibited for a mo ment to a person in normal condition, with the request that he say how many are there, he will find that they break into groups in his mind's eye, and that whilst he is analyzing and counting one group in his memory the others dissolve. In short, the impression made by the dots changes rapidly into something else. In the trance-subject, on the contrary, it seems to stick; I find that persons in the hypnotic state easily count the dots in the mind's eye so long as they do not much exceed twenty in number.

f Mr. Cattell made Jevons's experiment in a much more precise way (Philosophische Studien, nr 121 if.). Cards were ruled with short lines, varying in number from four to fifteen, and exposed to the eye for a hun dredth of a second. When the number was but four or five, no mistakes as a rule were made. For higher numbers the tendency was to uuderrather than to over-estimate. Similar experiments were tried with letters and figures, and gave the same result. When the letters formed familiar words, three times as many of them could be named as when their com bination was meaningless. If the words formed a sentence, twice as many of them could be caught as when they had no connection. " The sentence was then apprehended as a whole. If not apprehended thus, almost noth ing is apprehended of the several words; but if the sentence as a whole is apprehended, then the words appear very distinct." — Wundt and his pupil Dietze had tried similar experiments on rapidly repeated strokes of sound. Wundt made them follow each other in groups, and found that groups of twelve strokes at most could be recognized and identified when they suc ceeded each other at the most favorable rate, namely, from three to five tenths of a second (Phys. Psych., ir. 215). Dietze found that by mentally subdividing the groups into sub-groups as one listened, as many as forty strokes could be identified as a whole. They were then grasped as eight sub-groups of five, or as five of eight strokes each. (Philosophische Studien, II. 362.) — Later in Wundt's Laboratory, Bechterew made observations on two simultaneously elapsing series of metronome strokes, of which one con tained one stroke more than the other. The most favorable rate of succes sion was 0.3 sec., and he then discriminated a group of 18 from one of 18 -f- 1, apparently. (Neurologiscb.es Centralblatt, 1889, 272.)

fore us breaks into parts disconnected with each other, and forming each as it were a separate object or system, not conceivable in union with the rest, it becomes harder to apprehend all these parts at once, and the mind tends to let go of one whilst it attends to another. Still, within limits this can be done. M. Paulhan has experimented carefully on the matter by declaiming one poem aloud whilst he repeated a different one mentally, or by writing one sentence whilst speaking another, or by performing calculations on paper whilst reciting poetry.* He found that

"the most favorable condition for the doubling of the mind was its sinultaneous application to two easy and heterogeneous operations. Two operations of the same sort, two multiplications, two recitations, or the reciting one poem and writing another, render the process more uncertain and difficult." The attention often, but not always, oscillates during these performances ; and sometimes a word from one part of the task slips into another. I myself find when I try to simultaneously recite one thing and write another that the beginning of each word or segment of a phrase is what re quires the attention. Once started, my pen runs on for a word or two as if by its own momentum. M. Paulhan compared the time occupied by the same two operations done simultaneously or in succession, and found that there was often a considerable gain of time from doing them simultaneously. For instance :

"I write the first four verses of Athalie, whilst reciting eleven of Musset. The whole performance occupies 40 seconds. But reciting alpne takes 22 and writing alone 31, or 53 altogether, so that there is a difference in favor of the simultaneous operations." "I multiply 421 312 212 by 2; the operation takes 6 seconds; the recitation of 4 verses also takes 6 seconds. But the two operations done at once only take 6 seconds, so that there is no loss of time from combining them."

Of course these time-measurements lack precision. With three systems of object (writing with each hand whilst reciting) the operation became much more difficult. If, then, by the original question, how many ideas or things can we attend to at once, be meant how many entirely disconnected systems or processes of conception can go on simultaneously, the answer is, not easily more than one, unless the processes are very habitual ; but then two, or even three, without very much oscillation of the attention. Where, however, the processes are less automatic, as in the story of Julius Caesar dictating four letters whilst he writes a fifth,* there must be a rapid oscillation of the mind from one to the next, and no consequent gain of time. Within any one of the systems the parts may be numberless, but we attend to them collectively when we conceive the whole which they form.

When the things to be attended to are small sensations, and when the effort is to be exact in noting them, it is found that attention to one interferes a good deal with the perception of the other. A good deal of fine work has been done in this field, of which I must give some account. It has long been noticed, when expectant attention is concentrated upon one of two sensations, that the other one is apt to be displaced from consciousness for a moment and to appear subsequent ; although in reality the two may have been contemporaneous events. Thus, to use the stock example of the books, the surgeon would sometimes see the blood flow from the arm of the patient whom he was bleeding, before he saw the instrument penetrate the skin. Similarly the smith may see the sparks fly before he sees the hammer smite the iron, etc. There is thus a certain difficulty in perceiving the exact date of two impressions when they do not interest our attention equally, and when they are of a disparate sort.

Professor Exner, whose experiments on the minimal per ceptible succession in time of two sensations we shall have to quote in another chapter, makes some noteworthy remarks about the way in which the attention must be set to catch the interval and the right order of the sensations, when the time is exceeding small. The point was to tell whether * Of. Chr. Wolff: Psychologia Empirica, § 245. Wolff's account of the phenomena of attention is iu general excellent.

two signals were simultaneous or successive ; and, if succes sive, which one of them came first. The first way of attending which he found himself to fall into, was when the signals did not differ greatly — when, e.g., they were similar sounds heard each by a different ear. Here he lay in wait for the first signal, whichever it might be, and identified it the next moment in memory. The second, which could then always be known by default, was often not clearly distinguished in itself. When the time was too short, the first could not be isolated from the second at all.

The second way was to accommodate the attention for a certain sort of signal, and the next moment to become aware in memory of whether it came before or after its mate. "This way brings great uncertainty with it. The impression not prepared for comes to us in the memory more weak than the other, obscure as it were, badly fixed in time. We tend to take the subjec tively stronger stimulus, that which we were intent upon, for the first, just as we are apt to take an objectively stronger stimulus to be the first. Still, it may happen otherwise. In the experiments from touch to sight it often seemed to me as if the impression for which the atten tion was not prepared were there already when the other came."

Exner found himself employing this method oftenest when the impressions differed strongly.* In such observations (which must not be confounded with those where the two signals were identical and their successiveness known as mere doubleness, without distinc tion of which came first), it is obvious that each signal must combine stably in our perception with a different instant of time. It is the simplest possible case of two discrepant concepts simultaneously occupying the mind. Now the case of the signals being simultaneous seems of a different sort. We must turn to Wundt for observations fit to cast a nearer light thereon.