the opposite view. I do not know how my arm is lifted, he said, when I
wish to raise it. There can be no more than mere succession in time,
since I do not know the nature of the physiological mechanism that
effects the raising. What a strange argument! And how much opposed to
what Hume had promised to furnish as an analysis of pure experience.
When we talk about “the arm” in this connection, we have to deal with
an experienced thing, not with a physical object and its movements in
physical space. Whatever the nature of peripheral innervation may be
in Hume’s case, we are dealing with a definite “wish” and a definite
experienced movement of our arm. The problem is whether this particular
wish is naturally experienced as being as foreign or indifferent to the
arm’s felt movement as it is to the seen color of that cloud or the
brown of the skin. In haste the great philosopher seems to have skipped
over a dangerous point here, unintentionally making use of a simple
logical trick, by which, however, he saved his theory for almost two
centuries.
In order to make the import of these paragraphs more circumscribed, I
shall consider an objection.
One might say after all that those experiences of “depending upon,”
“being the natural outcome of,” “being based upon” or of “sustaining
against” do not prove that a _necessary_ connection exists in the
field. I greatly enjoyed the overture to _Tristan und Isolde_ twenty
years ago and, at that time, I might have given exactly the same
description of my enjoyment as the direct and evident outgrowth of just
that piece of music. What has become of my attitude toward the piece?
I am tired of it. At present, I should be rather inclined to find
aversion the only possible and natural outcome of hearing the overture.
Nor would I doubt for a moment what this aversion refers to or is based
upon. The answer to this objection will consist in our saying that all
this is absolutely true, but that it does not really constitute an
objection. With exactly the same physical situation, or sequence of
sound-waves, the same person will feel “pleasure” _growing out of_ his
sensory experience to-day, and be altogether disgusted by it only a few
days later on. A simple way to achieve that alteration experimentally
would be to give our subject the same sequence of sounds three hundred
times each day.[75] But we have no right to say that after more than a
thousand repetitions the same melodies will be experienced as having
quite the same properties they had to begin with. They have changed,
no doubt; they have become a musical commonplace, sounding empty and
stale. Keep away from these melodies for a few years! Then you may find
something more similar to their original nature again, and if, then,
you enjoy them once more, your enjoyment will be felt to grow out of
them as obviously as when you first listened to them. An attitude is
felt as being the natural outcome of actual experience; the objection
stated above misinterprets this definition, as though it meant a
constant connection between a set of _stimuli_ and the attitude.
For still another reason, music which I enjoyed twenty years ago
may not please me to-day, even without the unfortunate influence of
frequent repetition. What I call my self has changed its properties
considerably in the meantime. Why, then, should the music produce
the same effects upon this changed self? Once more I must point out
that our feeling of something naturally depending upon something else
does not refer to a correlation, or a highly constant “togetherness”
_as such_, stated in terms of the external observation of a great
many cases. It refers rather to an evident dynamical dependence as
experienced _hic et nunc_ in one actual case. As this flower before me
is certainly red, though if I should become color-blind later on, it
would be gray, so such a dependence in the total field is real now,
independently of what the future will make of it.
From this consideration we may learn something more. The way in which a
piece of music affects me now, in contrast to the attitude it produced
twenty years ago, has been determined by some change of my self. I
should hesitate very much to assert that _this_ change of my self was
experienced as the only possible outgrowth of definite conditions,
quite as evidently and directly as, at a given time, my attitude toward
the piece of music is felt to grow out of its actual properties with
natural necessity. Therefore, I did not experience the _way_ in which
one attitude instead of another has become the natural outcome of my
listening to that piece. Certain conditions must have gradually changed
_outside_ the field of my experience; the change in my attitude must
somehow depend upon that change of conditions. But I have never felt
the former change being brought about by the latter change.
It is an old rule in science that nothing makes certain positive
statements more worthy of credit than their author’s frank
acknowledgment of negative cases and his attempt to emphasize the
contrast himself. I shall be the last to deny that in hundreds of cases
we are very far from experiencing how one state of affairs is brought
about by others. Let a subject observe a continuous movement for a
while and then fixate a face or a pattern. His surprise when he sees
the after-image of that movement for the first time in his life will
be sufficient as a proof here that the experience of the after-effect
is necessarily brought about by certain conditions without the subject
being aware of any natural bond between them. Probably, here, the main
conditions remain entirely outside the field of direct experience.
Again, after fixating the center of Fig. 8 for a while, many subjects
will be greatly surprised when suddenly another, quite different,
shape appears before them. We do not directly feel _why_ just this
transformation should occur after continuous fixation. We feel it
so little that once a physicist, who had been shown such a figure
consisting of bright lines in an otherwise dark room, afterwards asked
me how, from my position twelve yards off, I had been able to put
another figure in the place of the first, so quickly and surprisingly!
He did not even suspect that something in his own organism was
producing the transformation.
Eventually there cannot be a doubt that even certain emotional
attitudes may occur without our feeling their _raison d’être_ directly.
As sometimes we suddenly feel that we have caught a cold without
knowing where and when, thus some morning we may feel the way an
ominous cloud looks, i.e., with a silent anger which does not seem to
have an obvious basis in the present field of our experience. Such a
cloud of anger, it is often true, will easily find something upon which
to discharge itself, and, then, that external something will appear as
an adequate object of the anger. Before that time, we cannot do more
than _guess_ about the hidden first cause of our angry mood. It may be
some unknown climatological condition working upon our organism, or it
may be disturbed digestion. However, we do not directly “feel” any of
these causes. This example may be regarded as particularly interesting,
since it seems to teach us two different lessons: It corroborates the
view that, as well as instances in which dynamical context _as such_ is
experienced directly and actually, there are other instances in which
effects are conspicuous in experience, although experience is blind and
deaf as to their determination. The second lesson is that both sorts
of determination may be united in one single event, because when, in
the attitude of a threatening cloud, we discover something upon which
to release the tension, that something will appear and probably _be_
appropriate to the production of an angry reaction. But that we should
react so vehemently will be the result of those hidden conditions
which had transformed us into an ominous cloud before there was this
opportunity for “justified” anger.
I do not see, however, that the fact of hidden determination as
observed in some cases is an argument against experienced determination
in others. In the case of cholera and plague, germs are found to be the
decisive condition of disease. In diabetes this is not the case. Who
would deduce an argument against bacteriology from such a “negative”
case? Therefore we may accept the same duplicity in our case, too.
But is it not evident that, in spite of our examples, so-called
“experienced determination,” in a great many instances, may be a simple
product of learning? When, in my mail, the address on one envelope is
in a certain handwriting, I feel happy over the discovery; whereas with
the finding of some other handwritings, just the contrary is true. We
may neglect the graphological and esthetic sides of our reaction, since
we know that it is chiefly our acquaintance with the writers which
makes one handwriting very pleasant and the other disagreeable. In
either case we seem to feel that our attitude is “the natural outcome”
of the aspect of the handwriting. Nevertheless, our reaction seems to
be one which we have had to learn. The same words and letters would
not be felt as “being the natural basis of our reaction,” if we had
not become “conditioned” to them. What, then, about that mysterious
feeling of natural determination? The answer is simple enough. Those
words and letters have become imbued with all the friendly experiences
we have had with one person or with all the animosity connected with
another. As these persons themselves, when present, directly arouse
the corresponding attitude, their handwritings do so now; not because
this _attitude_ has become gradually “connected” with the handwriting,
but because, saturated with the specific character of those past
experiences, the handwriting represents a _natural_ basis for just
this attitude, indeed. There is no reason why this determination of
attitude by the now apparent properties of something before us, should
not occur and be felt directly.
With respect to this question another remark will be to the point.
When I am thirsty, I am inclined to think of refreshing drinks.
What I am thus directed to is brought into my actual experience by
reproduction. That does not matter very much in our present problem.
However reproduction may have occurred, once the so-called “idea” of
the drink is in the actual field, it is felt to be the natural basis of
longing _for_ it, and the craving is experienced as being determined
directly by just that sort of “idea” in the present state of the self.
The mere circumstance that something has come into our actual field
by reproduction does not at all decide what kind of context it may
be experienced in when it is there. It will be wise to remember that
well, because the overwhelming importance of learning, of habit, of
reproduction, has been so constantly emphasized in psychology, that we
will almost stop thinking and considering any further problems with
respect to a situation in which _some_ influence or participation of
past events and of reproduction has been shown. But even if all “parts”
of a given situation should be found to owe their actual presence to
reproduction, there would still be one problem before us: In what
degree do they belong dynamically to each other here and now, in the
manner we are discussing in this chapter?
We have come back to what has been called above the layman’s belief.
Without knowing anything about the fundamental weight of his conviction
he takes it as the simplest matter in the world, that he has such a
feeling now “because of” a certain aspect of his actual situation, and
that he feels the “because,” too; also, that he lifts his arm with an
effort felt as “directed against” a heavy weight and “in spite” of it.
I agree with the layman. In the organization of the total field and
in thousands of cases, we do experience the live dynamical context
determining one state this way and that change another way. Moreover,
we feel where they come from and where they go to, in those instances.
Above all, we may experience _why_, issuing from just such an event,
thing or attitude, a given effect should be just the one we find
growing out of it.
Surprisingly enough, in modern science and most of all in psychology,
there is a tendency not only to neglect this simple truth, but even
to persecute it, as though it could not be acknowledged from the
scientific viewpoint. David Hume has been thought of as the father
of all the energetic fight against it. But probably in this great
figure of history we should rather see the exponent, the most eminent
representative and the best enunciator of an intellectual current which
took its origin in Greece or even before, thousands of years ago,
arising from some deep need of mankind for clearness.[76]
There is one sort of clearness and simplicity into which our statements
and the layman’s belief do not fit very well. That ideal of clarity
would be achieved, if the world could be conceived as an enormous
number of equal and unequal pieces, related indifferently as neighbors
in space and successors in time. That this is a true picture of
_experience_, at least, is silently presupposed at the very outset in
Hume’s famous work, so that he does not prove subsequently more than
he has already implicitly treated as a settled affair. Since we have
noticed that, in a great many cases, we really do not at all feel _how_
something is determined by something else, he had no difficulty in
gathering examples appropriate to his point of view; and since he did
not see the other cases, or disposed of them as quickly and incorrectly
as I have described above, he seemed to have demonstrated the truth of
his view beyond all argumentation.
Being neighbors and following each other, indifferent bits of
experience will show all possible mutual relations as to space and
time, which, however, do not prevent them from being an indifferent
aggregate. In addition, there will be an indefinite number of other
relations referring to quality, intensity, and so forth. These,
however, would also form an indifferent network throughout experience,
merely visible to something like a logical eye, but unreal from the
viewpoint of experience itself. Laws about natural coexistence and
sequence of events? No direct grasp of them is possible in such a world
_à la Hume_! He is said to have been the greatest empiricist of them
all. But if he constructs such a world, the plan of which is determined
by his need for a special type of intellectual clarity, he might quite
as justifiably be called a rationalist.
In his _radical empiricism_ William James laid great stress upon
the fact that “the relations between things, conjunctive as well as
disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience,
neither more so nor less so, than the things themselves.”[77] This view
is an obstacle in our way rather than an aid; neither do we receive any
help from James, when he, though attacking atomism in the treatment
of experience, clearly fails to recognize natural segregations in the
sensory field (Chap. V). “Relations” might be found indifferently
between all parts, fractions, or bits of the field, if we search for
them. In this respect, and unless more is said, relations will be
entirely unfit to make us understand why some definite and particular
attitude is experienced as arising “because of” some definite and
particular event or thing in the field. The field is by no means
experienced as being everywhere full of those dynamical bonds. There
are _relations_, nevertheless, between that same attitude and all the
rest of the field.
In some places, it is true, James attacks our problem from another
side, as when he writes about our “sustaining a felt purpose against
felt obstacles, and overcoming or being overcome”;[78] also where in
his description “the experiencer feels the tendency, the obstacle, the
will, the strain, the triumph, or the passive giving up, just as he
feels the time, the space, the swiftness or intensity, the movement,
the weight and color, the pain and pleasure, the complexity, or
whatever remaining characters the situation may involve.”[79] This is
something quite unlike an indifferent network of relations throughout
the field. The stress is not placed precisely where I have tried to
place it, largely because for James “activity” _as such_ was of chief
importance, whereas our description centers around the experience
of a great many different attitudes as they arise naturally out of
the properties of an event before us, or vice versa. Still there is
some agreement, at least, about our experiencing directly certain
determinations in the total field.[80]
A great deal of purely sensory organization may be called “silent”
because, though we experience the _result_ of it as segregated wholes
with specific properties, we do not usually feel _how_ this result is
dynamically brought about and maintained. In this respect the total
field is different; it tells us more about its innermost nature. Here,
not only the result is experienced, but also very much of its “why” and
“how” is felt in just the actual context. Wherever this is the case
we apply the term _insight_. When I used this term in my treatment
of intelligent behavior in apes, I ran the risk of an unfortunate
misinterpretation. Since that behavior comprised extraordinarily
conspicuous accomplishments which we did not expect to find in
animals, insight would be readily misinterpreted as some special and
supranatural faculty producing admirable and otherwise inexplicable
results. As I used and intended the term, nothing of that sort should
be implied in it. To avoid a similar misunderstanding this time, I
have introduced the concept here in application to very common and
simple facts. It does not mean more than our experience of definite
determination in a context, an event or a development of the total
field; and in the actual cases there need be nothing like an invention,
or a new intelligent achievement, or so forth. A total field would
be experienced _without_ insight, if all its several states, wholes,
attitudes, etc., were simply given as a pattern, in which none was felt
directly to depend upon any other and none to determine any other.
I have repeated several times that, from the viewpoint of common and
unsophisticated experience, nothing can be more obvious than just that
direct determination. So much so, that in natural life scarcely a
single actual total field would be said to lack that characteristic.
With respect to this conviction of the layman we have not added more
than truisms, indeed. Among learned psychologists, however, there will
only be a minority at present who, fully realizing the theoretical
importance of this point, are quite ready to accept it. There is a
second group, much larger than the first, comprising psychologists,
who time and again will talk in a manner involving, presupposing and
implying insight as a characteristic of their subjects’ or their own
experience. This is done, however, without their being aware of it,
and consequently one does not find trace of it in the list of their
theoretical concepts. To participate, practically, in the naïve and
sound procedure of the layman is not the same thing as to realize what
one is doing from a theoretical viewpoint. The less so, since the
well-established and socially acknowledged concepts of experimental
psychology belong almost completely to the theoretical world of Hume.
In a third and last group of psychologists all those scientists may
be counted, to whom the creed of Hume or the scientific epoch of
the nineteenth century seems to be _the_ final stage of theoretical
advance, any essential change or development thereof being forbidden.
What has been described in the last paragraphs is mysticism in their
eyes. They would probably find no difficulty in asserting that,
riding in a bus, we might refer actual anger to the friendly face
of a beautiful girl before us just as well as to the man who has at
that moment chosen our feet as a basis for the considerable weight of
his whole body. Or, more correctly, they would not acknowledge _any_
experience of natural reference at all, since what “connections” there
are, are all due to indirect learning or conditioning. Consequently,
they never mean an actual “reference to”; they mean merely a “coming
together” or a “following each other.” There is no doubt that true
behaviorists belong to this third class. But usually they decline to
enlist in any of the parties; because our problem still seems to remain
entirely in the field of direct experience, of which they refuse to
take any account.
The problem can be readily transformed, however, into a matter of brain
physiology. At the very outset (Chap. II) it was proposed to use direct
experience as an indicator of those physiological processes which,
occurring between the realm of outer conditions and the overt behavior
of the organism, are not directly observable at the present time.
In that field of the brain the processes of which underlie our
experienced field, the context of states and events was said to
be a true picture of direct experience. To the actual order of the
experienced field there corresponds the actual order of nervous
processes, in each case. When one thing appears as a segregated whole
in experience, a corresponding, detached whole exists in nervous
process, and so forth. Mere continuity and consistency of theory
has obliged us to acknowledge then, that, in some part of the same
physiological field those processes must occur which, whether they
be sensory or not, underlie the self, its actual states, properties
and attitudes. As in experience I am surrounded by the things and
events of my environment, so the processes corresponding to my self
will be in the midst of a corresponding environment, consisting of
sensory processes and so forth, in the brain field. If, now, there is
experience not only of things and events, of my states and attitudes,
all occurring indifferently by themselves, but also of _this actual
attitude being the direct outcome of that feature of the environment_,
or of _this state in my surroundings being determined by that actual
attitude of mine_, there seems to be only one way to conceive the
underlying physiological context. Where, in dynamical determination,
the properties of one part of a field depend directly upon the
actual nature of some other particular part, those properties do not
exist indifferently as such; they originate and they are maintained
by the stress of just those particular forces which issue from the
determining part, according to its actual nature. Assuming that the
same is true in the brain field which is true in a physical field, the
properties of the actual physiological self[81] will change and may be
kept changed a while, under the stress of some particular process in
the same field, corresponding to an essential thing or event in the
experienced environment. The changed state of the self does not exist
independently; it is produced and maintained by something definite,
the actual nature of which expresses itself in just this dynamical
influence. If, therefore, this particular dynamical context is taken
to be the physiological fact underlying our experience of direct
determination of attitude, no mystery remains in our description of
common experience.