examples could be thus stated. When, on a hot day I enjoy a cool drink,
my enjoyment is felt to refer to, or to be based upon, the properties
of the drink and my thirst, but not to the spider on the wall, nor
to the size of a chair, nor to thousands of other things. In the
brain-field, more particularly in that part of it which corresponds to
the self, there is a special process B, felt as thirst in experience.
Now when I begin to drink, another process A, corresponding to
experienced coolness and taste, develops in the same region of the
brain-field (experienced interior of the mouth) where until now there
was only the process of “thirst.” In terms of the theory of insight and
of direct physiological determination, A begins at once to exert an
influence upon B, the influence depending upon the concrete properties
of A and those of the actually existing state B. The change, which is
produced, is felt as pleasure (and, concomitantly, decreasing thirst).
And this change I assume to be determined by A no less directly than
is the rising temperature of a black surface determined by the rays of
light falling upon it or the “attitude” of a dwindling fire by a fresh
supply of oxygen. From our viewpoint we do not have separate bits in
experience where we have a functional context in the physiological
total field, one part of which reacts directly to the definite and
particular properties of another. _Therefore_, in our example, we
cannot experience enjoyment as something apart, among a pattern of
hundreds of other things. Enjoyment has to be felt as “referring to”
and as referring to something definite, the process of which determines
the process of enjoyment.
So far, instead of mystery, the most elementary concepts of physics
are introduced into our view of the total physiological field. There
is not the slightest reason why we should not experience determination
_as such_; nor is there any reason why, in concrete cases, we should
not feel just what our actual state or attitude is based upon; in one
word, there is no reason why _insight_ should not be an essential
characteristic of much experience in the total field. Of course, what
has been said about the determination of the self by parts of the
environment, may be applied to the opposite case at once, in which an
actual attitude of ours is felt directly as producing or as maintaining
a change in our surroundings. Here, the influencing and the influenced
have only changed places, both physiologically and in experience.
Although the layman’s belief is thoroughly justified by such a view,
there is strict contradiction between it and the opinion now prevailing
in scientific psychology. The contrast between machine theory and
dynamical theory becomes clear once more. Neither in the usual scheme
of a reflex, nor in that of a conditioned reflex, nor even in any
attempt to explain association (in the older form of that concept),
will the properties of one particular process determine directly
the nature of another. An influence always remains a matter of some
intermediate “paths of optimal conduction,” the particular properties
of a first process A being something apart, transmission of “nervous
energy” along those paths another separate event, and the effect upon
a later process B, still a third thing, determined by the arrival of
that indifferent “nervous energy.” Therefore, if another path had been
a better conductor, a different realm or process C, instead of B, would
have been changed by the sudden impulse from without; in any case, the
change of B into a B^1 or of C into a C^1 would have been independent
of the concrete properties of A. In terms of such a theory A will
produce B^1 only because there is that one-way street between them. By
some change in nervous connections a thirsty man might be roused into a
fit of anger at the experience of the coolness and the taste of a fresh
drink!
The objection will perhaps be raised that, excluding certain radical
behaviorists, no one has explicitly presented such an absurd theory of
mental life. I shall not give much weight to this historical question,
because one thing is much more important: Why do we not formulate
the positive theory of direct dynamical determination in the total
field? Why do we not expressly acknowledge insight as one of the
most fundamental and common facts of mental life, and, therefore, as
fundamental theoretically? Why do we discuss as many psychological
problems as we possibly can _as though_ the machine concepts were the
only ones available or, at least, the best ones from the viewpoint
of natural science? I do no more than derive quite frankly the
consequences of such a scientific situation. In doing so, I have
but one aim. We must advance from an implicit and almost unwitting
presupposition of insight and direct dynamical determination, which,
expressed in careless psychological terminology, cannot give rise to
concrete consequences, to a clear realization of the essential point.
This I believe to be the contrast between the indirect and indifferent
connections of processes in machine theory and the directly adequate
determination of one process by another in the dynamical theory of the
brain field.
In the last pages it was my original intention to talk about insight as
occurring only in an _established_ total field, in which an actually
existing attitude is felt to be the outcome of some definite fact in
the environment, or vice versa. I have not been able, however, to
restrict the discussion to such a settled case, despite my intentions.
And nothing could be more characteristic of our problem than is this
failure, because, in order to produce a somewhat accurate description,
we must necessarily go beyond the actual state of the total field and
take account of a certain new feature intrinsic to some of our concrete
examples.
In more than one example it was not so much an existing state of the
self which we felt to be determined directly by the properties of a
given fact before us, but a _change_ of the self as growing out of
something particular, just appearing in the field. Sudden fright at
an unexpected event of a certain sort is an instance of this sort of
dynamical determination. Again, when in climbing a mountain we reach a
dangerous place, fear may quickly grow out of the observation of the
lie of the land where we must take the next three steps. After these
steps have been successfully accomplished, a feeling of relief will
develop out of the situation, no less directly.
Nevertheless there will sometimes be more of a _development_ in such
a dynamical state of the total field. When I described my feeling
in a restaurant, full of smoke and full of talk, “nervousness,” or
uneasiness, was not the only thing I had to report about myself. I
had to add that I felt very eager _to go_. This means that, beside my
experiencing uneasiness as the natural effect directly determined by
the environment, I felt a tendency in my self _to move away from it_.
Again, this tendency was not experienced as something arising, _as
such_, without reference to definite other parts of the total field;
on the contrary it was felt to grow directly out of certain properties
of the situation and my uneasiness. As a layman I would say that I
wanted to go _because of_ my uneasiness in this particular situation,
and as a psychologist I shall admit that the layman’s expression is
absolutely correct, because it corresponds once more to the fact that
there is insight into the direct determination of that tendency toward
a definite sort of activity.
Our life is full of trivial instances of this kind and, occasionally,
the most important and decisive impulses toward definite forms of
conduct arise directly out of given conditions in the same way. And
generally we experience the _how_ and the _why_ of such experience.
I am sitting in full sunlight quite contentedly. After a while I
feel too hot; at the same time a tendency to move away from where
I am sitting, arises. A shadowy place near by seems pleasant; the
impulse away from the sunlight becomes at once a tendency toward the
shadow, and as at first the properties of one place made me inclined
to move away from it, the properties of another now arouse an impulse
of approach. In both cases there is insight, since we feel _how_ in
the first case one tendency grows directly out of the nature of one
situation, and in the second _how_ some other part of the field, due to
its properties, quite as naturally determines another impulse. From an
earlier remark the reader will remember that it does not at all matter
for our present problem whether the relevant properties of the seen
shadow are known to us by previous learning or some other way.[82]
The same description may usually be given of fright. When a sudden
event is felt as producing fright in me, I shall have to add at once,
in a correct description, that with the fright there arose a vehement
impulse to move away from the locus of that event. Again, this tendency
immediately to increase the distance between that place and myself is
experienced as being the direct outcome of the startling occurrence
quite as much as the fright itself is felt as its direct result. We
noticed before how, in Watson’s description of a child’s behavior, the
overt behavior of withdrawing from the uncanny object may be regarded
in the sensory experience of the onlooker, as a visible picture of the
child’s own total field. Does any one believe that the child feels a
fear of the object, on the one hand, and an impulse to move away, on
the other, as independent experiences? Or that the child might just as
well feel a tendency toward embracing or swallowing the object, during
his fear? As Watson has shown in this case, the object has become
“dangerous” through previous learning. This does not prove, however,
that between the danger itself, the fear and the withdrawal, there is
not more than indirect connections.
As an impulse of withdrawal arises directly out of certain given
situations, so the opposite tendency belongs as naturally to other
situations. I have mentioned above the case of a shadow attracting,
as it were, a person who has had more than enough of the sun. We
all know that similar instances are more frequent in our life than
trees in a wood. The child, observed objectively as reaching for an
animal’s head in Watson’s experiment, feels attracted towards that
interesting object, if we are willing to grant him any experience at
all. From our own total field we are well acquainted with the fact
that such a tendency appears to us as being a natural characteristic
of exactly such a situation and of a great many similar ones. In
Spain, after a particularly brilliant achievement of the toreador,
the admiration of the crowd often drives them so intensely in their
hero’s direction, that, unable to enter the arena themselves, they
hang over the balustrades, reaching toward him as far as possible; the
stress will sometimes be so great that hats, handkerchiefs, and so on,
are thrown down in the direction of the dominating impulse. Did these
people learn gradually by some process of conditioning to connect an
approach-tendency with admiration, as though a tendency toward frowning
or shaking the left leg might have been, if conditioned, equally well
“connected” with admiration? I cannot help thinking sometimes that
whether we are introspectionists, behaviorists or whatever else, the
chief dividing line among contemporary psychologists would separate
those who acknowledge obvious, direct determination as it appears in
common experience from those who can only admit indirect “connections.”
As a last example I choose a simple, practical event: for some purpose
I wish to break a wooden board. I press against it and, feeling my
effort directed against the felt resistance of the board, I see and
feel the board yielding in the same direction. Is it true that, as Hume
would have us say, this yielding of the board in my experience does
not develop more naturally out of the direction of my effort than
would, for instance, a change of the board’s color or a darkening of
the sun, under the same circumstances? Personally, I feel the board
yielding just in the direction of my effort and not otherwise, almost
as naturally as I feel myself yielding in a definite direction, if a
friend of mine and I measure our strength by pressing hard against each
other’s shoulders, and I lose the battle. However that may be, if once
the board begins to yield to my effort, I immediately feel a tendency
toward going on or, rather, increasing the pressure as a direct outcome
of that change in the board’s resistance. And, indeed, I really do
increase my effort.
What is the common content of these examples? That there is more
than mere succession in the development of our attitudes as they
refer to actual objects in our field! Things _might_ occur in human
experience in this way: First, I feel uneasy near a hot radiator,
for instance; then, as something apart and as an altogether separate
bit of experience, I feel an impulse away from the radiator, and,
eventually, as a third independent feeling, I find myself moving in
some direction which, _geometrically_, would increase the distance
between that object and me. It is almost impossible to talk about these
three experiences in a manner which would exclude any natural context
between them as radically as, in terms of the viewpoint I wish here to
exhibit, it ought to be excluded. As we read the words, the context of
insight is built up at once, spontaneously. What is meant will become
more apparent if again I say that, from such a viewpoint, any event
whatsoever might follow the first instead of the second, and similarly
with the relation between the second and the third. In experience
the real development is supposed to have no better “connection,”
originally, than any other sequence would have. The first experience
does not _require_ the second, nor the second the third!
Again we return to machine theory. Normally, one might say, the
development will consist of just those three events, indeed. Feeling
hot, feeling a tendency toward moving and moving in a direction
which, geometrically, coincides with the direction of that tendency.
Why do just that second and that third event follow the first? One
possibility: because there is something like an original reflex, a
well-established path in the nervous system conducting from the place
of the first process to the place of the second, and a number of
similar paths leading from this second place to the centers controlling
the particular movement of our feet in the certain direction. In such
a theory of the sequence, the result would be practical enough from
the viewpoint of an observer, and even the subject himself might feel
satisfied at the _end_ of the series, but that would be all. If, in the
same situation (heat), pinching his left thumb between the fingers of
the right hand occurred, followed by his moving in a certain direction
and, then, by his feeling well, the subject would understand the
sequence quite as much as or, better, quite as little as, when he sees
a natural context in the _real_ development. Mere connections between
parts of the nervous system enforce the sequence, the _properties_ of
A _as such_ do not take part in the determination of B, and those of
B are altogether innocent of C’s succession. Such a production of the
sequence cannot produce in experience more than a series of feelings
indifferent to each other. There cannot be insight.
Suppose that no reflexes are provided in this case; what theoretical
explanation can we give, then, of the right succession? The second
possibility is learning or habit. Many different things originally
happened in my experience when I felt very hot. Among them,
occasionally, there were impulses toward moving. Again, among these
now and then there was one accidental impulse, the direction of which
was away from the radiator, _geometrically_. (Not for the subject,
however, who might just as well define this direction as northwest,
for instance!) After these few occasions another series of events
followed in a haphazard fashion, all of them equally indifferent to
the foregoing. But sometimes real _motion_ in the stated direction,
and the experience of it, would be the next events and, finally, an
experience of feeling satisfied. However it came to pass in the first
instance, this one sequence, after it has fortunately happened to
occur frequently enough, becomes a well-established chain of events,
in short, a habit. Thereafter it operates as soon as our subject feels
hot enough. But its operation is no more immediate or natural than
all those other possible combinations _as such_ would have been. The
subject feels satisfied at the end of the sequence. But if, after the
feeling of heat, counting from one to twenty-six had brought about this
same feeling of relief, and if this sequence had been well associated,
he would not experience a less natural or satisfying development
than he really does in the case of the habit of withdrawal. No one
development is more natural than any other; without exception all
sequences are _merely_ sequences, and nothing else. It is only by some
fortunate mechanism that those sequences are “stamped in” as a habit,
the end of which is _practical success_. The subject cannot feel in
experience more than an indifferent series of events since, in the
associated series, the properties of heat do not have any influence
upon the “right” tendency as the next event, and the experience of
the “right” movement will be the third event, independently of the
nature of that tendency. Synapses have become less resistant between
the localities of those processes; the connecting fibers have become
more readily conductive. But the connections in the nervous system
have had nothing to do with the properties of the heat or with the
direction of that tendency away from the radiator or with the direction
of the movement itself. The neural factors were merely frequency of
repetition, recency, and success in a purely external sense of the
word, or any other principle independent of the concrete properties of
heat, tendency and movement in their mutual relations with one another.
And instinct? I know only two ways to give this term a somewhat
concrete meaning as an explanation of real development in experience
and in behavior. Often the concept means the same thing as “a chain
of reflexes,” with or without some adornments in the guise of habit
formation. In this case what has already been said about machine
theory, about habit or conditioning as the building up of a secondary
machine, applies immediately to instinct. Two machine theories of
development, knit together in one application, can lead only to a more
complicated theory of essentially the same type. Instinct is sometimes
regarded as a supranatural process, accomplishing those practically
adequate sequences of behavior which we are not able to explain
otherwise in a sensible manner. In this form the concept is so little
suited to my scientific taste that I should like to be excused from
further discussion of it.
And then? Surprisingly enough, apart from these explanations of
behavior, we do not seem to recognize other than merely “random”
sequences in psychology. Where neither an inherited nor an
acquired machine determines the sequence of events, our theoretical
formulations, not accustomed to dynamical considerations, will regard
chance as ruling whatever may happen to occur. So much we have already
seen in Chapter IV. But a third possibility of orderly determination
was found there, which we shall now discuss in its application to the
total field.
After what has been said about the states of the self as depending
upon the properties of its environment, felt uneasiness (felt as
resulting from too much heat on one side of the body) will have a
corresponding process in the underlying brain-field, which will be
determined directly by that other process underlying the experience of
an excess of heat on one side. But the tendency to move away from the
heat is felt as developing in this situation, just as directly as the
uneasiness is. Consequently we must again draw the same physiological
conclusion: if some process underlying a certain sensory experience
directly causes another process underlying dislike and uneasiness in
the self, a tendency toward increasing the distance between the place
of the first and the place of the self must develop just as directly
at the same time. As the tendency is felt to grow out of the nature
of that sensory experience, and of the experience of uneasiness, the
tendency must be physiologically determined by the concrete properties
of the corresponding processes. In dynamics such a tendency toward
increasing the distance between two things or events is called a field
of force. We may say, then, that there is in the brain-field a field
of force tending to increase the distance between the place of the
radiator and the place of the self. If, now, the subject overtly moves
in that direction, what happens in the brain-field? As the distance is
enlarged objectively, exactly the same occurs in the brain-field,--the
process corresponding to the self moving away from the processes of
the radiator and of the heat. The subject will feel himself moving
in precisely the same direction which was felt one moment before as
the direction of a tendency to movement; and, physiologically, the
increase of distance in the brain-field will correspond exactly to the
stress which, as a field of force, was tending in that same direction.
Therefore, physiologically, as well as in experience, what happens will
be no more than the natural consequence, the real development, or the
evolution of something which, in germ, was already implicitly contained
in the tendency.
So we are led to a more complete application of the theory of direct
dynamical determination. There is no mere sequence of indifferent
events, connected indirectly. Each phase of what happens grows out
of its predecessors, depending upon their concrete nature. And the
subject, whose experiences are an expression of this one developing
context in the brain-field, will experience the development, along
with its “referring to,” “depending upon,” “away from” and so
forth--that is, with _insight_.
One remark is needed here with regard to the overt movement of the
organism in its relation to a field of force, existing between the
self and some part of its environment, in the brain-field. We know
that during the first months a child is not able to move his hands,
in accordance with the interest which an object has aroused in his
sensory field. This fact may be interpreted in two different ways:
(1) Either there is no natural determination of overt movement by
definite fields of force in the brain. In this case all “connections”
between the two would have to be learned. (2) Or the hand does not
yet move in the direction of actual interest for some other reason,
whereas when that unknown obstacle is removed a little later by organic
development, the general direction of the clumsy movements depends
directly upon actual fields of force in the brain. The astonishingly
early coördination of eye-movements would make me inclined to consider
the second hypothesis no less seriously than the first. However, the
theory of direct determination does not depend upon this choice. Even
if learning should be the only way in which movements of the hand or of
any other parts of the body become connected with the distribution of
forces in the brain-field, the _right_ movement will still be marked
out by more than the final success it achieves. As soon as, partially
or entirely, the direction of an overt movement coincides with the
actually existing nervous field of force, there will be a relaxation
of tension or stress. Therefore, any beginning in the right direction
will be felt as being in the right line. Later on, when coördination of
movement is complete, familiar overt movements will always go in the
right direction; and they will be felt as fitting into the dynamics of
the situation, because, in the brain-field, they produce the release of
previously existing tension.
* * * * *
In order to show how the fundamental motors of behavior can bring about
more complicated conduct through direct determination, I shall conclude
with the analysis of an observation made on an ape several years ago.