The difficulty is, in each case, to extract from the immediate data

that particular ingredient which shall have this very evident relation

to the conclusion. Every phenomenon or so-called 'fact' has an infinity

of aspects or properties, as we have seen, amongst which the fool, or

man with little sagacity, will inevitably go astray. But no matter for

this point now. The first thing is to have seen that every possible

case of reasoning involves the extraction of a particular partial

aspect of the phenomena thought about, and that whilst Empirical

Thought simply associates phenomena in their entirety, Reasoned Thought

couples them by the conscious use of this extract.

* * * * *

2. And, now, to prove the second point: Why are the couplings,

consequences, and implications of extracts more evident and obvious

than those of entire phenomena? For two reasons.

First, the extracted characters are more general than the concretes,

and the connections they may have are, therefore, more familiar to us,

having been more often met in our experience. Think of heat as motion,

and whatever is true of motion will be true of heat; but we have had a

hundred experiences of motion for every one of heat. Think of the rays

passing through this lens as bending towards the perpendicular, and

you substitute for the comparatively unfamiliar lens the very familiar

notion of a particular change in direction of a line, of which notion

every day brings us countless examples.

The other reason why the relations of the extracted characters are

so evident is that their properties are so _few_, compared with the

properties of the whole, from which we derived them. In every concrete

total the characters and their consequences are so inexhaustibly

numerous that we may lose our way among them before noticing the

particular consequence it behooves us to draw. But, if we are lucky

enough to single out the proper character, we take in, as it were,

by a single glance all its possible consequences. Thus the character

of scraping the sill has very few suggestions, prominent among which

is the suggestion that the scraping will cease if we raise the door;

whilst the entire refractory door suggests an enormous number of

notions to the mind.

Take another example. I am sitting in a railroad-car, waiting for

the train to start. It is winter, and the stove fills the car with

pungent smoke. The brakeman enters, and my neighbor asks him to "stop

that stove smoking." He replies that it will stop entirely as soon as

the car begins to move. "Why so?" asks the passenger. "It _always_

does," replies the brakeman. It is evident from this 'always' that the

connection between car moving and smoke stopping was a purely empirical

one in the brakeman's mind, bred of habit. But, if the passenger had

been an acute reasoner, he, with no experience of what that stove

always did, might have anticipated the brakeman's reply, and spared his

own question. Had he singled out of all the numerous points involved

in a stove's not smoking the one special point of smoke pouring freely

out of the stove-pipe's mouth, he would, probably, owing to the few

associations of that idea, have been immediately reminded of the law

that a fluid passes more rapidly out of a pipe's mouth if another fluid

be at the same time streaming over that mouth; and then the rapid

draught of air over the stove-pipe's mouth, which is one of the points

involved in the car's motion, would immediately have occurred to him.

Thus a couple of extracted characters, with a couple of their few

and obvious connections, would have formed the reasoned link in the

passenger's mind between the phenomena, smoke stopping and car moving,

which were only linked as wholes in the brakeman's mind. Such examples

may seem trivial, but they contain the essence of the most refined and

transcendental theorizing. The reason why physics grows more deductive

the more the fundamental properties it assumes are of a mathematical

sort, such as molecular mass or wave-length, is that the immediate

consequences of these notions are so few that we can survey them all at

once, and promptly pick out those which concern us.

_Sagacity; or the Perception of the Essence._

To reason, then, we must be able to extract characters,--not _any_

characters, but the right characters for our conclusion. If we extract

the wrong character, it will not lead to that conclusion. Here,

then, is the difficulty: _How are characters extracted, and why does

it require the advent of a genius in many cases before the fitting

character is brought to light?_ Why cannot anybody reason as well

as anybody else? Why does it need a Newton to notice the law of the

squares, a Darwin to notice the survival of the fittest? To answer

these questions we must begin a new research, and see how our insight

into facts naturally grows.

All our knowledge at first is vague. When we say that a thing is vague,

we mean that it has no subdivisions _ab intra_, nor precise limitations

_ab extra_; but still all the forms of thought may apply to it. It may

have unity, reality, externality, extent, and what not--_thinghood_,

in a word, but thinghood only as a whole.[333] In this vague way,

probably, does the room appear to the babe who first begins to be

conscious of it as something other than his moving nurse. It has no

subdivisions in his mind, unless, perhaps, the window is able to

attract his separate notice. In this vague way, certainly, does every

entirely new experience appear to the adult. A library, a museum, a

machine-shop, are mere confused wholes to the uninstructed, but the

machinist, the antiquary, and the bookworm perhaps hardly notice the

whole at all, so eager are they to pounce upon the details. Familiarity

has in them bred discrimination. Such vague terms as 'grass,' 'mould,'

and 'meat' do not exist for the botanist or the anatomist. They know

too much about grasses, moulds, and muscles. A certain person said to

Charles Kingsley, who was showing him the dissection of a caterpillar,

with its exquisite viscera, "Why, I thought it was nothing but skin

and squash!" A layman present at a shipwreck, a battle, or a fire

is helpless. Discrimination has been so little awakened in him by

experience that his consciousness leaves no single point of the complex

situation accented and standing out for him to begin to act upon.

But the sailor, the fireman, and the general know directly at what

corner to take up the business. They 'see into the situation'--that

is, they analyze it--with their first glance. It is full of delicately

differenced ingredients which their education has little by little

brought to their consciousness, but of which the novice gains no clear

idea.

How this power of analysis was brought about we saw in our chapters on

Discrimination and Attention. We dissociate the elements of originally

vague totals by attending to them or noticing them alternately, of

course. But what determines which element we shall attend to first?

There are two immediate and obvious answers: first, our practical

or instinctive interests; and, second, our æsthetic interests. The

dog singles out of any situation its smells, and the horse its

sounds, because they may reveal facts of practical moment, and are

instinctively exciting to these several creatures. The infant notices

the candle-flame or the window, and ignores the rest of the room,

because those objects give him a vivid pleasure. So, the country boy

dissociates the blackberry, the chestnut, and the wintergreen, from

the vague mass of other shrubs and trees, for their practical uses,

and the savage is delighted with the beads, the bits of looking-glass,

brought by an exploring vessel, and gives no heed to the features of

the vessel itself, which is too much beyond his sphere. These æsthetic

and practical interests, then, are the weightiest factors in making

particular ingredients stand out in high relief. What they lay their

accent on, that we notice; but what they are in themselves, we cannot

say. We must content ourselves here with simply accepting them as

irreducible ultimate factors in determining the way our knowledge grows.

Now, a creature which has few instinctive impulses, or interests,

practical or æsthetic, will dissociate few characters, and will, at

best, have limited reasoning powers; whilst one whose interests are

very varied will reason much better. Man, by his immensely varied

instincts, practical wants, and æsthetic feelings, to which every sense

contributes, would, by dint of these alone, be sure to dissociate

vastly more characters than any other animal; and accordingly we find

that the lowest savages reason incomparably better than the highest

brutes. The diverse interests lead, too, to a diversification of

experiences, whose accumulation becomes a condition for the play of

that _law of dissociation by varying concomitants_ of which I treated

in a former chapter (see Vol I. p. 506).

_The Help given by Association by Similarity._

It is probable, also, that man's _superior association by similarity_

has much to do with those discriminations of character on which his

higher flights of reasoning are based. As this latter is an important

matter, and as little or nothing was said of it in the chapter on

Discrimination, it behooves me to dwell a little upon it here.

What does the reader do when he wishes to see in what the precise

likeness or difference of two objects lies? He transfers his attention

as rapidly as possible, backwards and forwards, from one to the

other. The rapid alteration in consciousness shakes out, as it were,

the points of difference or agreement, which would have slumbered

forever unnoticed if the consciousness of the objects compared had

occurred at widely distant periods of time. What does the scientific

man do who searches for the reason or law embedded in a phenomenon? He

deliberately accumulates all the instances he can find which have any

analogy to that phenomenon; and, by simultaneously filling his mind

with them all, he frequently succeeds in detaching from the collection

the peculiarity which he was unable to formulate in one alone; even

though that one had been preceded in his former experience by all of

those with which he now at once confronts it. These examples show

that the mere general fact of having occurred at some time in one's

experience, with varying concomitants, is not by itself a sufficient

reason for a character to be dissociated now. We need something more;

we need that the varying concomitants should in all their variety be

brought into consciousness _at once_. Not till then will the character

in question escape from its adhesion to each and all of them and stand

alone. This will immediately be recognized by those who have read

Mill's Logic as the ground of Utility in his famous 'four methods of

experimental inquiry,' the methods of agreement, of difference, of

residues, and of concomitant variations. Each of these gives a list of

analogous instances out of the midst of which a sought-for character

may roll and strike the mind.

Now it is obvious that any mind in which association by similarity

is highly developed is a mind which will spontaneously form lists of

instances like this. Take a present case A, with a character _m_ in it.

The mind may fail at first to notice this character _m_ at all. But

if A calls up C, D, E, and F,--these being phenomena which resemble

A in possessing _m_, but which may not have entered for months into

the experience of the animal who now experiences A, why, plainly,

such association performs the part of the reader's deliberately rapid

comparison referred to above, and of the systematic consideration

of like cases by the scientific investigator, and may lead to the

noticing of _m_ in an abstract way. Certainly this is obvious; and

no conclusion is left to us but to assert that, after the few most

powerful practical and æsthetic interests, our chief help towards

noticing those special characters of phenomena, which, when once

possessed and named, are used as reasons, class names, essences, or

middle terms, _is this association by similarity._ Without it, indeed,

the deliberate procedure of the scientific man would be impossible:

he could never collect his analogous instances. But it operates of

itself in highly-gifted minds without any deliberation, spontaneously

collecting analogous instances, uniting in a moment what in nature the

whole breadth of space and time keeps separate, and so permitting a

perception of identical points in the midst of different circumstances,

which minds governed wholly by the law of contiguity could never begin

to attain.

[Illustration: FIG. 80.]

Figure 80 shows this. If _m_, in the present representation A, calls

up B, C, D, and E, which are similar to A in possessing it, and

calls them up in rapid succession, then _m_, being associated almost

simultaneously with such varying concomitants, will 'roll out' and

attract our separate notice.

If so much is clear to the reader, he will be willing to admit that the

mind _in which this mode of association most prevails_ will, from its

better opportunity of extricating characters, be the one most prone to

reasoned thinking; whilst, on the other hand, a mind in which we do not

detect reasoned thinking will probably be one in which association by

contiguity holds almost exclusive sway.

Geniuses are, by common consent, considered to differ from ordinary

minds by an unusual development of association by similarity. One

of Professor Bain's best strokes of work is the exhibition of this

truth.[334] It applies to geniuses in the line of reasoning as well as

in other lines. And as the genius is to the vulgarian, so the vulgar

human mind is to the intelligence of a brute. Compared with men, it

is probable that brutes neither attend to abstract characters, nor

have associations by similarity. Their thoughts probably pass from one

concrete object to its habitual concrete successor far more uniformly

than is the case with us. In other words, their associations of ideas

are almost exclusively by contiguity. It will clear up still farther

our understanding of the reasoning process, if we devote a few pages to

THE INTELLECTUAL CONTRAST BETWEEN BRUTE AND MAN.

I will first try to show, by taking the best stories I can find of

animal sagacity, that the mental process involved may as a rule be

perfectly accounted for by mere contiguous association, based on

experience. Mr. Darwin, in his 'Descent of Man,' instances the Arctic

dogs, described by Dr. Hayes, who scatter, when drawing a sledge,

as soon as the ice begins to crack. This might be called by some an

exercise of reason. The test would be, Would the most intelligent

Eskimo dogs that ever lived act so when placed upon ice for the

first time together? A band of men from the tropics might do so

easily. Recognizing cracking to be a sign of breaking, and seizing

immediately the partial character that the point of rupture is the

point of greatest strain, and that the massing of weight at a given

point concentrates there the strain, a Hindoo might quickly infer that

scattering would stop the cracking, and, by crying out to his comrades

to disperse, save the party from immersion. But in the dog's case we

need only suppose that they have individually experienced wet skins

after cracking, that they have often noticed cracking to begin when

they were huddled together, and that they have observed it to cease

when they scattered. Naturally, therefore, the sound would redintegrate

all these former experiences, including that of scattering, which

latter they would promptly renew. It would be a case of immediate

suggestion or of that 'Logic of Recepts' as Mr. Romanes calls it, of

which we spoke above on p. 327.

A friend of the writer gave as a proof of the almost human intelligence

of his dog that he took him one day down to his boat on the shore,

but found the boat full of dirt and water. He remembered that the

sponge was up at the house, a third of a mile distant; but, disliking

to go back himself, he made various gestures of wiping out the boat

and so forth, saying to his terrier, "Sponge, sponge; go fetch the

sponge." But he had little expectation of a result, since the dog had

never received the slightest training with the boat or the sponge.

Nevertheless, off he trotted to the house, and, to his owner's great

surprise and admiration, brought the sponge in his jaws. Sagacious

as this was, it required nothing but ordinary contiguous association

of ideas. The terrier was only exceptional in the minuteness of his

spontaneous observation. Most terriers would have taken no interest

in the boat-cleaning operation, nor noticed what the sponge was for.

This terrier, in having picked those details out of the crude mass

of his boat-experience distinctly enough to be reminded of them, was

truly enough ahead of his peers on the line which leads to human

reason. But his act was not yet an act of reasoning proper. It might

fairly have been called so if, unable to find the sponge at the house,

he had brought back a dipper or a mop instead. Such a substitution

would have shown that, embedded in the very different appearances of

these articles, he had been able to discriminate the identical partial

attribute of capacity to take up water, and had reflected, "For the

present purpose they are identical." This, which the dog did not do,

any man but the very stupidest could not fail to do.

If the reader will take the trouble to analyze the best dog and

elephant stories he knows, he will find that, in most cases, this

simple contiguous calling up of one whole by another is quite

sufficient to explain the phenomena. Sometimes, it is true, we have

to suppose the recognition of a property or character as such, but

it is then always a character which the peculiar practical interests

of the animal may have singled out. A dog, noticing his master's hat

on its peg, may possibly infer that he has not gone out. Intelligent

dogs recognize by the tone of the master's voice whether the latter

is angry or not. A dog will perceive whether you have kicked him by

accident or by design, and behave accordingly. The character inferred

by him, the particular mental state in you, however it be represented

in his mind--it is represented probably by a 'recept' (p. 327) or

set of practical tendencies, rather than by a definite concept or

idea--is still a partial character extracted from the totality of

your phenomenal being, and is his reason for crouching and skulking,

or playing with you. Dogs, moreover, seem to have the feeling of the

value of their master's personal property, or at least a particular

_interest_ in objects which their master uses. A dog left with his

master's coat will defend it, though never taught to do so. I know

of a dog accustomed to swim after sticks in the water, but who

always refused to dive for stones. Nevertheless, when a fish-basket,

which he had never been trained to carry, but merely knew as his

master's, fell over, he immediately dived after it and brought it

up. Dogs thus discern, at any rate so far as to be able to act, this

partial character of _being valuable_, which lies hidden in certain

things.[335] Stories are told of dogs carrying coppers to pastry-cooks

to get buns, and it is said that a certain dog, if he gave two coppers,

would never leave without two buns. This was probably mere contiguous

association, but it is _possible_ that the animal noticed the character

of duality, and identified it as the same in the coin and the cake.

If so, it is the maximum of canine abstract thinking. Another story

told to the writer is this: a dog was sent to a lumber-camp to fetch a

wedge, with which he was known to be acquainted. After half an hour,

not returning, he was sought and found biting and tugging at the handle

of an axe which was driven deeply into a stump. The wedge could not

be found. The teller of the story thought that the dog must have had

a clear perception of the common character of serving to split which

was involved in both the instruments, and, from their identity in this

respect, inferred their identity for the purposes required.

It cannot be denied that this interpretation is a possible one, but it

seems to me far to transcend the limits of ordinary canine abstraction.

The property in question was not one which had direct personal interest

for the dog, such as that of belonging to his master is in the case of

the coat or the basket. If the dog in the sponge story had returned to

the boat with a dipper it would have been no more remarkable. It seems

more probable, therefore, that this wood-cutter's dog had also been

accustomed to carry the axe, and now, excited by the vain hunt for the

wedge, had discharged his carrying powers upon the former instrument in

a sort of confusion--just as a man may pick up a sieve to carry water

in, in the excitement of putting out a fire.[336]

Thus, then, the characters extracted by animals are very few, and

always related to their immediate interests or emotions. That

dissociation by varying concomitants, which in man is based so largely

on association by similarity, hardly seems to take place at all in

the mind of brutes. One total thought suggests to them another total

thought, and they find themselves acting with propriety, they know not

why. The great, the fundamental, defect of their minds seems to be the

inability of their groups of ideas to break across in unaccustomed

places. They are enslaved to routine, to cut-and-dried thinking; and if

the most prosaic of human beings could be transported into his dog's

mind, he would be appalled at the utter absence of fancy which reigns

there.[337] Thoughts will not be found to call up their similars,

but only their habitual successors. Sunsets will not suggest heroes'

deaths, but supper-time. This is why man is the only metaphysical

animal. To wonder why the universe should be as it is presupposes

the notion of its being different, and a brute, which never reduces

the actual to fluidity by breaking up its literal sequences in his

imagination, can never form such a notion. He takes the world simply

for granted, and never wonders at it at all.

Professor Strümpell quotes a dog-story which is probably a type of

many others. The feat performed looks like abstract reasoning; but an

acquaintance with all the circumstances shows it to have been a random

trick learned by habit. The story is as follows:

"I have two dogs, a small, long-legged pet dog and a rather large

watch-dog. Immediately beyond the house-court is the garden, into

which one enters through a low lattice-gate which is closed by a

latch on the yard-side. This latch is opened by lifting it. Besides

this, moreover, the gate is fastened on the garden-side by a string

nailed to the gate-post. Here, as often as one wished, could the

following sight be observed. If the little dog was shut in the

garden and he wished to get out, he placed himself before the gate

and barked. Immediately the large dog in the court would hasten to

him and raise the latch with his nose while the little dog on the

garden-side leaped up and, catching the string in his teeth, bit it

through; whereupon the big one wedged his snout between the gate and

the post, pushed the gate open, and the little dog slipped through.

Certainly reasoning seems here to prevail. In face of it, however,

and although the dogs arrived of themselves, and without human aid,

at their solution of the gate question, I am able to point out that

the complete action was pieced together out of accidental experiences

which the dogs followed, I might say, unconsciously. While the large

dog was young, he was allowed, like the little one, to go into the

garden, and therefore the gate was usually not latched, but simply

closed. Now if he saw anyone go in, he would follow by thrusting his

snout between gate and post, and so pushing the gate open. When he was

grown I forbade his being taken in, and had the gate kept latched. But

he naturally still tried to follow when anyone entered and tried in

the old fashion to open it, which he could no longer do. Now it fell

out that once, while making the attempt, he raised his nose higher

than usual and hit the latch from below so as to lift it off its hook,

and the gate unclosed. From thenceforth he made the same movement of

the head when trying to open it, and, of course, with the same result.

He now knew how to open the gate when it was latched.

"The little dog had been the large one's teacher in many things,

especially in the chasing of cats and the catching of mice and moles;

so when the little one was heard barking eagerly, the other always

hastened to him. If the barking came from the garden, he opened the

gate to get inside. But meanwhile the little dog, who wanted to get

out the moment the gate opened, slipped out between the big one's

legs, and so the appearance of his having come with the intention of

letting him out arose. And that it was simply an appearance transpired

from the fact that when the little dog did not succeed at once in

getting out, the large one ran in and nosed about the garden, plainly

showing that he had expected to find something there. In order to

stop this opening of the gate I fastened a string on the garden-side

which, tightly drawn, held the gate firm against the post, so that if

the yard dog raised the latch and let go, it would every time fall

back on to the hook. And this device was successful for quite a time,

until it happened one day that on my return from a walk upon which the

little dog had accompanied me I crossed the garden, and in passing

through the gate the dog remained behind, and refused to come to my

whistle. As it was beginning to rain, and I knew how he disliked to

get wet, I closed the gate in order to punish him in this manner. But

I had hardly readied the house ere he was before the gate, whining and

crying most piteously, for the rain was falling faster and faster.

The big dog, to whom the rain was a matter of perfect indifference,

was instantly on hand and tried his utmost to open the gate, but

naturally without success. Almost in despair the little dog bit at the

gate, at the same time springing into the air in the attempt to jump

over it, when he chanced to catch the string in his teeth; it broke,

and the gate flew open. Now he knew the secret and thenceforth bit the

string whenever he wished to get out, so that I was obliged to change

it.

"That the big dog in raising the latch did not in the least _know_

that the latch closed the gate, that the raising of the same opened

it, but that he merely repeated the automatic blow with his snout

which had once had such happy consequences, transpires from the

following: the gate leading to the barn is fastened with a latch

precisely like the one on the garden-gate, only placed a little

higher, still easily within the dog's reach. Here, too, occasionally

the little dog is confined, and when he barks the big one makes every

possible effort to open the gate, but it has never occurred to him

to push the latch up. The brute cannot draw conclusions, that is, he

cannot think."[338]

Other classical _differentiæ_ of man besides that of being the only

reasoning animal, also seem consequences of his unrivalled powers of

similar association. He has, e.g., been called 'the laughing animal.'

But humor has often been defined as the recognition of identities in

things different. When the man in Coriolanus says of that hero that

"there is no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male tiger,"

both the invention of the phrase and its enjoyment by the hearer depend

on a peculiarly perplexing power to associate ideas by similarity.

Man is known again as 'the talking animal'; and language is assuredly

a capital distinction between man and brute. But it may readily be

shown how this distinction merely flows from those we have pointed

out, easy dissociation of a representation into its ingredients, and

association by similarity.

Language is a system of _signs_, different from the things signified,

but able to suggest them.

No doubt brutes have a number of such signs. When a dog yelps in front

of a door, and his master, understanding his desire, opens it, the dog

may, after a certain number of repetitions, get to repeat in cold blood

a yelp which was at first the involuntary interjectional expression

of strong emotion. The same dog may be taught to 'beg' for food, and

afterwards come to do so deliberately when hungry. The dog also learns

to understand the signs of men, and the word 'rat' uttered to a terrier

suggests exciting thoughts of the rat-hunt. If the dog had the varied

impulse to vocal utterance which some other animals have, he would

probably repeat the word 'rat' whenever he spontaneously happened to

think of a rat-hunt--he no doubt does have it as an auditory image,

just as a parrot calls out different words spontaneously from its

repertory, and having learned the name of a given dog will utter it

on the sight of a different dog. In each of these separate cases the

particular sign _may_ be consciously noticed by the animal, as distinct

from the particular thing signified, and will thus, so far as it goes,

be a true manifestation of language. But when we come to man we find

a great difference. _He has a deliberate intention to apply a sign

to everything._ The linguistic impulse is with him generalized and

systematic. For things hitherto unnoticed or unfelt, he _desires_ a

sign before he has one. Even though the dog should possess his 'yelp'

for this thing, his 'beg' for that, and his auditory image 'rat' for

a third thing, the matter with him rests there. If a fourth thing

interests him for which no sign happens already to have been learned,

he remains tranquilly without it and goes no further. But the man

_postulates_ it, its absence irritates him, and he ends by inventing

it. _This_ GENERAL PURPOSE _constitutes, I take it, the peculiarity of

human speech, and explains its prodigious development._

How, then, does the general purpose arise? It arises as soon as the

notion of a _sign as such_, apart from any particular import, is born;

and this notion is born by dissociation from the outstanding portions

of a number of concrete cases of signification. The 'yelp,' the 'beg,'

the 'rat,' differ as to their several imports and natures. They agree

only in so far as they have the same _use_--to _be signs_, to stand for

something more important than themselves. The dog whom this similarity

could strike would have grasped the sign _per se_ as such, and would

probably thereupon become a general sign-maker, or speaker in the

human sense. But how can the similarity strike him? Not without the

juxtaposition of the similars (in virtue of the law we have laid down

(Vol. I. p. 506), that in order to be segregated an experience must be

repeated with varying concomitants)--not unless the 'yelp' of the dog

at the moment it occurs _recalls_ to him his 'beg,' by the delicate

bond of their subtle similarity of use--not till then can this thought

flash through his mind: "Why, yelp and beg, in spite of all their

unlikeness, are yet alike in this: that they are actions, signs, which

lead to important boons. Other boons, _any_ boons, may then be got

by other signs!" This reflection made, the gulf is passed. Animals

probably never make it, because the bond of similarity is not delicate

enough. Each sign is drowned in _its_ import, and never awakens other

signs and other imports in juxtaposition. The rat-hunt idea is too

absorbingly interesting in itself to be interrupted by anything so

uncontiguous to it as the idea of the 'beg for food,' or of 'the

door-open yelp,' nor in their turn do these awaken the rat-hunt idea.

In the human child, however, these ruptures of contiguous association

are very soon made; far off cases of sign-using arise when we make a

sign now; and soon language is launched. The child in each case makes

the discovery for himself. No one can help him except by furnishing

him with the conditions. But as he is constituted, the conditions will

sooner or later shoot together into the result.[339]

The exceedingly interesting account which Dr. Howe gives of the

education of his various blind-deaf mutes illustrates this point

admirably. He began to teach Laura Bridgman by gumming raised letters

on various familiar articles. The child was taught by mere contiguity

to pick out a certain number of particular articles when made to feel

the letters. But this was merely a collection of particular signs,

out of the mass of which the general purpose of _signification_ had

not yet been extracted by the child's mind. Dr. Howe compares his

situation at this moment to that of one lowering a line to the bottom

of the deep sea in which Laura's soul lay, and waiting until she should

spontaneously take hold of it and be raised into the light. The moment

came, 'accompanied by a radiant flash of intelligence and glow of joy';

she seemed suddenly to become aware of the general purpose imbedded

in the different details of all these signs, and from that moment her

education went on with extreme rapidity.

Another of the great capacities in which man has been said to differ

fundamentally from the animal is that of possessing self-consciousness

or reflective knowledge of himself as a thinker. But this capacity

also flows from our criterion, for (without going into the matter

very deeply) we may say that the brute never reflects on himself as a

thinker, because he has never clearly dissociated, in the full concrete

act of thought, the element of the thing thought of and the operation

by which he thinks it. They remain always fused, conglomerated--just as

the interjectional vocal sign of the brute almost invariably merges in

his mind with the thing signified, and is not independently attended to

_in se_.[340]

Now, the dissociation of these two elements probably occurs first in

the child's mind on the occasion of some error or false expectation

which would make him experience the shock of difference between merely

imagining a thing and getting it. The thought experienced once with the

concomitant reality, and then without it or with opposite concomitants,

reminds the child of other cases in which the same provoking phenomenon

occurred. Thus the general ingredient of error may be dissociated and

noticed _per se_, and from the notion of his error or wrong thought

to that of his thought in general the transition is easy. The brute,

no doubt, has plenty of instances of error and disappointment in his

life, but the similar shock is in him most likely always swallowed up

in the accidents of the actual case. An expectation disappointed may

breed dubiety as to the realization of that particular thing when the

dog next expects it. But that disappointment, that dubiety, while they

are present in the mind, will _not_ call up other cases, in which the

material details were different, but this feature of possible error

was the same. The brute will, therefore, stop short of dissociating the

general notion of error _per se_, and _a fortiori_ will never attain

the conception of Thought itself as such.

* * * * *

We may then, we think, consider it proven that _the most elementary

single difference between the human mind and that of brutes lies

in this deficiency on the brute's part to associate ideas by

similarity_--characters, the abstraction of which depends on this

sort of association, must in the brute always remain drowned, swamped

in the total phenomenon which they help constitute, and never used

to reason from. If a character stands out alone, it is always some

obvious sensible quality like a sound or a smell which is instinctively

exciting and lies in the line of the animal's propensities; or it

is some obvious sign which experience has habitually coupled with a

consequence, such as, for the dog, the sight of his master's hat on and

the master's going out.

DIFFERENT ORDERS OF HUMAN GENIUS.

But, now, since nature never makes a jump, it is evident that we

should find the lowest men occupying in this respect an intermediate

position between the brutes and the highest men. And so we do. Beyond

the analogies which their own minds suggest by breaking up the literal

sequence of their experience, there is a whole world of analogies

which they can appreciate when imparted to them by their betters, but

which they could never excogitate alone. This answers the question why

Darwin and Newton had to be waited for so long. The flash of similarity

between an apple and the moon, between the rivalry for food in nature

and the rivalry for man's selection, was too recondite to have occurred

to any but exceptional minds. _Genius, then,_ as has been already

said, _is identical with the possession of similar association to an

extreme degree._ Professor Bain says: "This I count the leading fact

of genius. I consider it quite impossible to afford any explanation of

intellectual originality except on the supposition of unusual energy on

this point." Alike in the arts, in literature, in practical affairs,

and in science, association by similarity is the prime condition of

success.

But as, according to our view, there are two stages in reasoned

thought, one where similarity merely _operates_ to call up cognate

thoughts, and another farther stage, where the bond of identity between

the cognate thoughts is _noticed_; so _minds of genius may be divided

into two main sorts, those who notice the bond and those who merely

obey it._ The first are the abstract reasoners, properly so called,

the men of science, and philosophers--the analysts, in a word; the

latter are the poets, the critics--the artists, in a word, the men of

intuitions. These judge rightly, classify cases, characterize them

by the most striking analogic epithets, but go no further. At first

sight it might seem that the analytic mind represented simply a higher

intellectual stage, and that the intuitive mind represented an arrested

stage of intellectual development; but the difference is not so simple

as this. Professor Bain has said that a man's advance to the scientific

stage (the stage of noticing and abstracting the bond of similarity)

may often be due to an _absence_ of certain emotional sensibilities.

The sense of color, he says, may no less determine a mind away from

science than it determines it toward painting. There must be a penury

in one's interest in the details of particular forms in order to permit

the forces of the intellect to be concentrated on what is common to

many forms.[341] In other words, supposing a mind fertile in the

suggestion of analogies, but, at the same time, keenly interested in

the particulars of each suggested image, that mind would be far less

apt to single out the particular character which called up the analogy

than one whose interests were less generally lively. A certain richness

of the æsthetic nature may, therefore, easily keep one in the intuitive

stage. All the poets are examples of this. Take Homer:

"Ulysses, too, spied round the house to see if any man were still

alive and hiding, trying to get away from gloomy death. He found them

all fallen in the blood and dirt, and in such number as the fish which

the fishermen to the low shore, out of the foaming sea, drag with

their meshy nets. These all, sick for the ocean water, are strewn

around the sands, while the blazing sun takes their life from them. So

there the suitors lay strewn round on one another." Or again:

"And as when a Mæonian or a Carian woman stains ivory with purple to

be a cheek-piece for horses, and it is kept in the chamber, and many

horsemen have prayed to bear it off; but it is kept a treasure for a

king, both a trapping for his horse and a glory to the driver--in such

wise were thy stout thighs, Menelaos, and legs and fair ankles stained

with blood."[342]

A man in whom all the accidents of an analogy rise up as vividly as

this, may be excused for not attending to the ground of the analogy.

But he need not on that account be deemed intellectually the inferior

of a man of drier mind, in whom the ground is not as liable to be

eclipsed by the general splendor. Barely are both sorts of intellect,

the splendid and the analytic, found in conjunction. Plato among

philosophers, and M. Taine, who cannot quote a child's saying without

describing the '_voix chantante, étonnée, heureuse_' in which it is

uttered, are only exceptions whose strangeness proves the rule.

An often-quoted writer has said that Shakespeare possessed more

_intellectual power_ than any one else that ever lived. If by

this he meant the power to pass from given premises to right or

congruous conclusions, it is no doubt true. The abrupt transitions in

Shakespeare's thought astonish the reader by their unexpectedness no

less than they delight him by their fitness. Why, for instance, does

the death of Othello so stir the spectator's blood and leave him with a

sense of reconcilement? Shakespeare himself could very likely not say

why; for his invention, though rational, was not ratiocinative. Wishing

the curtain to fall upon a reinstated Othello, that speech about the

turbaned Turk suddenly simply flashed across him as the right end of

all that went before. The dry critic who comes after can, however,

point out the subtle bonds of identity that guided Shakespeare's pen

through that speech to the death of the Moor. Othello is sunk in

ignominy, lapsed from his height at the beginning of the play. What

better way to rescue him at last from this abasement than to make him

for an instant identify himself in memory with the old Othello of

better days, and then execute justice on his present disowned body, as

he used then to smite all enemies of the State? But Shakespeare, whose

mind supplied these means, could probably not have told why they were

so effective.

But though this is true, and though it would be absurd in an absolute

way to say that a given analytic mind was superior to any intuitional

one, yet it is none the less true that the former _represents_ the

higher stage. Men, taken historically, reason by analogy long before

they have learned to reason by abstract characters. Association

by similarity and true reasoning may have identical results. If a

philosopher wishes to prove to you why you should do a certain thing,

he may do so by using abstract considerations exclusively; a savage

will prove the same by reminding you of a similar case in which

you notoriously do as he now proposes, and this with no ability to

state the _point_ in which the cases are similar. In all primitive

literature, in all savage oratory, we find persuasion carried on

exclusively by parables and similes, and travellers in savage countries

readily adopt the native custom. Take, for example, Dr. Livingstone's

argument with the negro conjuror. The missionary was trying to dissuade

the savage from his fetichistic ways of invoking rain. "You see," said

he, "that, after all your operations, sometimes it rains and sometimes

it does not, exactly as when you have not operated at all." "But,"

replied the sorcerer, "it is just the same with you doctors; you give

your remedies, and sometimes the patient gets well and sometimes he

dies, just as when you do nothing at all." To that the pious missionary

replied: "The doctor does his duty, after which God performs the cure

if it pleases Him." "Well," rejoined the savage, "it is just so with

me. I do what is necessary to procure rain, after which God sends it or

withholds it according to His pleasure."[343]

This is the stage in which proverbial philosophy reigns supreme. "An

empty sack can't stand straight" will stand for the reason why a man

with debts may lose his honesty; and "a bird in the hand is worth two

in the bush" will serve to back up one's exhortations to prudence.

Or we answer the question: "Why is snow white?" by saying, "For the

same reason that soap-suds or whipped eggs are white"--in other words,

instead of giving the _reason_ for a fact, we give another _example_ of

the same fact. This offering a similar instance, instead of a reason,

has often been criticised as one of the forms of logical depravity in

men. But manifestly it is not a perverse act of thought, but only an

incomplete one. Furnishing parallel cases is the necessary first step

towards abstracting the reason imbedded in them all.

As it is with reasons, so it is with words. The first words are

probably always names of entire things and entire actions, of extensive

coherent groups. A new experience in the primitive man can only be

talked about by him in terms of the old experiences which have received

names. It reminds him of certain ones from among them, but the _points_

in which it agrees with them are neither named nor dissociated.

Pure similarity must work before the abstraction can work which is

based upon it. The first adjectives will therefore probably be total

nouns embodying the striking character. The primeval man will say,

not 'the bread is hard,' but 'the bread is stone'; not 'the face is

round,' but 'the face is moon'; not 'the fruit is sweet,' but 'the

fruit is sugar-cane.' The first words are thus neither particular nor

general, but _vaguely_ concrete; just as we speak of an 'oval' face,

a 'velvet' skin, or an 'iron' will, without meaning to connote any

other attributes of the adjective-noun than those in which it _does_

resemble the noun it is used to qualify. After a while certain of these

adjectively-used nouns come only to signify the particular quality

for whose sake they are oftenest used; the _entire thing_ which they

originally meant receives another name, and they become true abstract

and general terms. Oval, for example, with us suggests _only_ shape.

The first abstract qualities thus formed are, no doubt, qualities of

one and the same sense found in different objects--as big, sweet; next

analogies between different senses, as 'sharp' of taste, 'high' of

sound, etc.; then analogies of motor combinations, or form of relation,

as simple, confused, difficult, reciprocal, relative, spontaneous, etc.

The extreme degree of subtlety in analogy is reached in such cases as

when we say certain English art critics' writing reminds us of a close

room in which pastilles have been burning, or that the mind of certain

Frenchmen is like old Roquefort cheese. Here language utterly fails to

hit upon the basis of resemblance.

Over immense departments of our thought we are still, all of us, in

the savage state. Similarity operates in us, but abstraction has not

taken place. We know what the present case is like, we know what it

reminds us of, we have an intuition of the right course to take, if

it be a practical matter. But analytic thought has made no tracks,

and we cannot justify ourselves to others. In ethical, psychological,

and æsthetic matters, to give a clear reason for one's judgment is

universally recognized as a mark of rare genius. The helplessness of

uneducated people to account for their likes and dislikes is often

ludicrous. Ask the first Irish girl why she likes this country better

or worse than her home, and see how much she can tell you. But if you

ask your most educated friend why he prefers Titian to Paul Veronese,

you will hardly get more of a reply; and you will probably get

absolutely none if you inquire why Beethoven reminds him of Michael

Angelo, or how it comes that a bare figure with unduly flexed joints,

by the latter, can so suggest the moral tragedy of life. His thought

obeys a _nexus_, but cannot name it. And so it is with all those

judgments of _experts_, which even though unmotived are so valuable.

Saturated with experience of a particular class of materials, an

expert intuitively feels whether a newly-reported fact is probable or

not, whether a proposed hypothesis is worthless or the reverse. He

instinctively knows that, in a novel case, this and not that will be

the promising course of action. The well-known story of the old judge

advising the new one never to give reasons for his decisions, "the

decisions will probably be right, the reasons will surely be wrong,"

illustrates this. The doctor will feel that the patient is doomed,

the dentist will have a premonition that the tooth will break, though

neither can articulate a reason for his foreboding. The reason lies

imbedded, but not yet laid bare, in all the countless previous cases

dimly suggested by the actual one, all calling up the same conclusion,

which the adept thus finds himself swept on to, he knows not how or why.

* * * * *

_A physiological conclusion remains to be drawn._ If the principles

laid down in Chapter XIV are true, then it follows that the great

cerebral difference between habitual and reasoned thinking must be

this: that in the former an entire system of cells vibrating at any one

moment discharges in its totality into another entire system, and that

the order of the discharges tends to be a constant one in time; whilst

in the latter a part of the prior system still keeps vibrating in the

midst of the subsequent system, and the order--which part this shall

be, and what shall be its concomitants in the subsequent system--has

little tendency to fixedness in time. This physical selection, so to

call it, of one part to vibrate persistently whilst the others rise

and subside, we found, in the chapter in question, to be the basis of

similar association. (See especially Vol. I. pp. 578-81.) It would seem

to be but a minor degree of that still more urgent and importunate

localized vibration which we can easiest conceive to underlie the

mental fact of interest, attention, or dissociation. In terms of the

brain-process, then, all these mental facts resolve themselves into a

single peculiarity: that of indeterminateness of connection between

the different tracts, and tendency of action to focalize itself, so

to speak, in small localities which vary infinitely at different

times, and from which irradiation may proceed in countless shifting

ways. (Compare figure 80, p. 347.) To discover, or (what more befits

the present stage of nerve-physiology) to adumbrate by some possible

guess, on what chemical or molecular-mechanical fact this instable

equilibrium of the human brain may depend, should be the next task

of the physiologist who ponders over the passage from brute to man.

Whatever the physical peculiarity in question may be, _it_ is the cause

why a man, whose brain has it, reasons so much, whilst his horse, whose

brain lacks it, reasons so little. We can but bequeath the problem to

abler hands than our own.

But, meanwhile, this mode of stating the matter suggests a couple

of other inferences. The first is brief. If _focalization_ of

brain-activity be the fundamental fact of reasonable thought, we see

why intense interest or concentrated passion makes us think so much

more truly and profoundly. The persistent _focalization_ of motion in

certain tracts is the cerebral fact corresponding to the persistent

domination in consciousness of the important feature of the subject.

When not 'focalized,' we are scatter-brained; but when thoroughly

impassioned, we never wander from the point. None but congruous and

relevant images arise. When roused by indignation or moral enthusiasm,

how trenchant are our reflections, how smiting are our words! The whole

network of petty scruples and by-considerations which, at ordinary

languid times, surrounded the matter like a cobweb, holding back our

thought, as Gulliver was pinned to the earth by the myriad Lilliputian

threads, are dashed through at a blow, and the subject stands with its

essential and vital lines revealed.

* * * * *

The last point is relative to the theory that what was acquired habit

in the ancestor may become congenital tendency in the offspring. So

vast a superstructure is raised upon this principle that the paucity

of empirical evidence for it has alike been matter of regret to its

adherents, and of triumph to its opponents. In Chapter XXVIII we

shall see what we may call the whole beggarly array of proof. In the

human race, where our opportunities for observation are the most

complete, we seem to have no evidence whatever which would support

the hypothesis, unless it possibly be the law that city-bred children

are more apt to be near-sighted than country children. In the mental

world we certainly do not observe that the children of great travellers

get their geography lessons with unusual ease, or that a baby whose

ancestors have spoken German for thirty generations will, on that

account, learn Italian any the less easily from its Italian nurse.

But if the considerations we have been led to are true, they explain

perfectly well why this law _should not_ be verified in the human

race, and why, therefore, in looking for evidence on the subject, we

should confine ourselves exclusively to lower animals. In them fixed

habit is the essential and characteristic law of nervous action. The

brain grows to the exact modes in which it has been exercised, and the

inheritance of these modes--then called instincts--would have in it

nothing surprising. But in man the negation of all fixed modes is the

essential characteristic. He owes his whole pre-eminence as a reasoner,

his whole human quality of intellect, we may say, to the facility with

which a given mode of thought in him may suddenly be broken up into

elements, which recombine anew. Only at the price of inheriting no

settled instinctive tendencies is he able to settle every novel case

by the fresh discovery by his reason of novel principles. He is, _par

excellence_, the _educable_ animal. If, then, the law that habits are

inherited were found exemplified in him, he would, in so far forth,

fall short of his human perfections; and, when we survey the human

races, we actually do find that those which are most instinctive at the

outset are those which, on the whole, are least educated in the end.

An untutored Italian is, to a great extent, a man of the world; he has

instinctive perceptions, tendencies to behavior, reactions, in a word,

upon his environment, which the untutored German wholly lacks. If the

latter be not drilled, he is apt to be a thoroughly loutish personage;

but, on the other hand, the mere absence in his brain of definite

innate tendencies enables him to advance by the development, through

education, of his purely reasoned thinking, into complex regions of

consciousness that the Italian may probably never approach.

We observe an identical difference between men as a whole and women

as a whole. A young woman of twenty reacts with intuitive promptitude

and security in all the usual circumstances in which she may be

placed.[344] Her likes and dislikes are formed; her opinions, to a

great extent, the same that they will be through life. Her character

is, in fact, finished in its essentials. How inferior to her is a boy

of twenty in all these respects! His character is still gelatinous,

uncertain what shape to assume, 'trying it on' in every direction.

Feeling his power, yet ignorant of the manner in which he shall express

it, he is, when compared with his sister, a being of no definite

contour. But this absence of prompt tendency in his brain to set into

particular modes is the very condition which insures that it shall

ultimately become so much more efficient than the woman's. The very

lack of preappointed trains of thought is the ground on which general

principles and heads of classification grow up; and the masculine brain

deals with new and complex matter indirectly by means of these, in a

manner which the feminine method of direct intuition, admirably and

rapidly as it performs within its limits, can vainly hope to cope with.

* * * * *

In looking back over the subject of reasoning, one feels how intimately

connected it is with conception; and one realizes more than ever the

deep reach of that principle of selection on which so much stress was

laid towards the close of Chapter IX. As the art of reading (after a

certain stage in one's education) is the art of skipping, so the art of

being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook. The first effect on

the mind of growing cultivated is that processes once multiple get to

be performed by a single act. Lazarus has called this the progressive

'condensation' of thought. But in the psychological sense it is less a

condensation than a loss, a genuine dropping out and throwing overboard

of conscious content. Steps really sink from sight. An advanced thinker

sees the relations of his topics in such masses and so instantaneously

that when he comes to explain to younger minds it is often hard to say

which grows the more perplexed, he or the pupil. In every university

there are admirable investigators who are notoriously bad lecturers.

The reason is that they never spontaneously see the subject in the

minute articulate way in which the student needs to have it offered

to his slow reception. They grope for the links, but the links do

not come. Bowditch, who translated and annotated Laplace's Mécanique

Céleste, said that whenever his author prefaced a proposition by the

words 'it is evident,' he knew that many hours of hard study lay before

him.

When two minds of a high order, interested in kindred subjects, come

together, their conversation is chiefly remarkable for the summariness

of its allusions and the rapidity of its transitions. Before one

of them is half through a sentence the other knows his meaning and

replies. Such genial play with such massive materials, such an easy

flashing of light over far perspectives, such careless indifference to

the dust and apparatus that ordinarily surround the subject and seem

to pertain to its essence, make these conversations seem true feasts

for gods to a listener who is educated enough to follow them at all.

His mental lungs breathe more deeply, in an atmosphere more broad and

vast than is their wont. On the other hand, the excessive explicitness

and short-windedness of an ordinary man are as wonderful as they are

tedious to the man of genius. But we need not go as far as the ways

of genius. Ordinary social intercourse will do. There the charm of

conversation is in direct proportion to the possibility of abridgment

and elision, and in inverse ratio to the need of explicit statement.

With old friends a word stands for a whole story or set of opinions.

With new-comers everything must be gone over in detail. Some persons

have a real mania for completeness, they must express every step. They

are the most intolerable of companions, and although their mental

energy may in its way be great, they always strike us as weak and

second-rate. In short, the essence of plebeianism, that which separates

vulgarity from aristocracy, is perhaps less a defect than an excess,

the constant need to animadvert upon matters which for the aristocratic

temperament do not exist. To ignore, to disdain to consider, to

overlook, are the essence of the 'gentleman.' Often most provokingly

so; for the things ignored may be of the deepest moral consequence.

But in the very midst of our indignation with the gentleman, we have

a consciousness that his preposterous inertia and negativeness

in the actual emergency is, somehow or other, _allied_ with his

general superiority to ourselves. It is not only that the gentleman

ignores considerations relative to conduct, sordid suspicions, fears,

calculations, etc., which the vulgarian is fated to entertain; it is

that he is silent where the vulgarian talks; that he gives nothing but

results where the vulgarian is profuse of reasons; that he does not

explain or apologize; that he uses one sentence instead of twenty; and

that, in a word, there is an amount of _interstitial_ thinking, so

to call it, which it is quite impossible to get him to perform, but

which is nearly all that the vulgarian mind performs at all. All this

suppression of the secondary leaves the field _clear_,--for higher

flights, should they choose to come. But even if they never came, what

thoughts there were would still manifest the aristocratic type and

wear the well-bred form. So great is our sense of harmony and ease in

passing from the company of a philistine to that of an aristocratic

temperament, that we are almost tempted to deem the falsest views and

tastes as held by a man of the world, truer than the truest as held by

a common person. In the latter the best ideas are choked, obstructed,

and contaminated by the redundancy of their paltry associates. The

negative conditions, at least, of an atmosphere and a free outlook are

present in the former.

I may appear to have strayed from psychological analysis into æsthetic

criticism. But the principle of selection is so important that no

illustrations seem redundant which may help to show how great is its

scope. The upshot of what I say simply is that selection implies

rejection as well as choice; and that the function of ignoring, of

_in_attention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function

of attention itself.

* * * * *

[319] The substance of this chapter, and a good many pages of the text,

originally appeared in an article entitled 'Brute and Human Intellect,'

in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy for July 1878 (vol. xii. p.

236).

[320] I see no need of assuming more than two terms in this sort of

reasoning--first, the sign, and second, the thing inferred from it.

Either may be complex, but essentially it is but A calling up B, and no

middle term is involved. M. Binet, in his most intelligent little book,

La Psychologie du Raisonnement, maintains that there are three terms.

The present sensation or sign must, according to him, first evoke from

the past an image which resembles it and fuses with it, and the things

suggested or inferred are always the contiguous associates of this

intermediate image, and not of the immediate sensation. The reader of

Chapter XIX will see why I do not believe in the 'image' in question

as a distinct psychic fact.

[321] Mental Evolution in Man (1889), chapters iii and iv. See

especially pp. 68-80, and later 353, 396.

[322] _Loc. cit._ p. 50.

[323] P. 52.

[324] _Loc. cit._ p. 74.

[325] J. Locke, Essay conc. Hum. Understanding, bk. iv. chap. ii. § 3.

[326] To be sagacious is to be a good observer. J. S. Mill has a

passage which is so much in the spirit of the text that I cannot

forbear to quote it. "The observer is not he who merely sees the

thing which is before his eyes, but he who sees what parts that thing

is composed of. To do this well is a rare talent. One person, from

inattention, or attending only in the wrong place, overlooks half of

what he sees; another sets down much more than he sees, confounding it

with what he imagines, or with what he infers; another takes note of

the _kind_ of all the circumstances, but being inexpert in estimating

their degree, leaves the quantity of each vague and uncertain; another

sees indeed the whole, but makes such an awkward division of it into

parts, throwing things into one mass which require to be separated,

and separating others which might more conveniently be considered as

one, that the result is much the same, sometimes even worse, than

if no analysis had been attempted at all. It would be possible to

point out what qualities of mind, and modes of mental culture, fit a

person for being a good observer: that, however, is a question not

of Logic, but of the Theory of Education, in the most enlarged sense

of the term. There is not properly an Art of Observing. There may be

rules for observing. But these, like rules for inventing, are properly

instructions for the preparation of one's own mind; for putting it into

the state in which it will be most fitted to observe, or most likely

to invent. They are, therefore, essentially rules of self-education,

which is a different thing from Logic. They do not teach how to do

the thing, but how to make ourselves capable of doing it. They are an

art of strengthening the limbs, not an art of using them. The extent

and minuteness of observation which may be requisite, and the degree

of decomposition to which it may be necessary to carry the mental

analysis, depend on the particular purpose in view. To ascertain the

state of the whole universe at any particular moment is impossible, but

would also be useless. In making chemical experiments, we do not think

it necessary to note the position of the planets; because experience

has shown, as a very superficial experience is sufficient to show, that

in such cases that circumstance is not material to the result: and

accordingly, in the ages when man believed in the occult influences

of the heavenly bodies, it might have been unphilosophical to omit

ascertaining the precise condition of those bodies at the moment of the

experiment." (Logic, bk. iii. chap. vii. § 1. Cf. also bk. iv. chap.

ii.)

[327] Readers brought up on Popular Science may think that the

molecular structure of things is their real essence in an absolute

sense, and that water is H-O-H more deeply and truly than it is a

solvent of sugar or a slaker of thirst. Not a whit! It is _all_ of

these things with equal reality, and the only reason why _for the

chemist_ it is H-O-H primarily, and only secondarily the other things,

is that _for his purpose of deduction and compendious definition_, the

H-O-H aspect of it is the more useful one to bear in mind.

[328] "We find that we take for granted irresistibly that each kind [of

thing] has some character which distinguishes it from other classes....

What is the foundation of this postulate? What is the ground of this

assumption that there must exist a definition which we have never seen,

and which perhaps no one has seen in a satisfactory form?... I reply

that our conviction that there must needs be characteristic marks by

which things can be defined in words is founded upon the assumption

of _the necessary possibility of reasoning_." (W. Whewell: Hist. of

Scientific Ideas, bk. viii. chap. i, § 9.)

[329] I may quote a passage from an article entitled 'The Sentiment

of Rationality,' published in vol. iv of Mind, 1879: "What is a

_conception_? It is a _teleological instrument_. It is a partial aspect

of a thing which _for our purpose_ we regard as its essential aspect,

as the representative of the entire thing. In comparison with this

aspect, whatever other properties and qualities the thing may have

are unimportant accidents which we may without blame ignore. But the

essence, the ground of conception, varies with the end we have in view.

A substance like oil has as many different essences as it has uses to

different individuals. One man conceives it as a combustible, another

as a lubricator, another as a food; the chemist thinks of it as a

hydrocarbon; the furniture-maker as a darkener of wood; the speculator

as a commodity whose market-price to-day is this and to-morrow that.

The soap-boiler, the physicist, the clothes-scourer severally ascribe

to it other essences in relation to their needs. Ueberweg's doctrine

that the essential quality of a thing is the quality of most _worth_ is

strictly true; but Ueberweg has failed to note that the worth is wholly

relative to the temporary interests of the conceiver. And, even, when

his interest is distinctly defined in his own mind, the discrimination

of the quality in the object which has the closest connection with it

is a thing which no rules can teach. The only _a priori_ advice that

can be given to a man embarking on life with a certain purpose is the

somewhat barren counsel: Be sure that in the circumstances that meet

you, you attend to the _right_ ones for your purpose. To pick out the

right ones is the measure of the man. 'Millions,' says Hartmann, 'stare

at the phenomenon before a _genialer Kopf_ pounces on the concept.' The

genius is simply he to whom, when he opens his eyes upon the world, the

'right' characters are the prominent ones. The fool is he who, with the

same purposes as the genius, infallibly gets his attention tangled amid

the accidents."

[330] Only if one of our purposes were itself truer than another,

could one of our conceptions become the truer conception. To be

a truer purpose, however, our purpose must conform more to some

absolute standard of purpose in things to which our purposes ought to

conform. This shows that the whole doctrine of essential characters

is intimately bound up with a teleological view of the world.

Materialism becomes self-contradictory when it denies teleology, and

yet in the same breath calls atoms, etc., the _essential_ facts.

The world contains consciousness as well as atoms--and the one must

be written down as just as essential as the other, in the absence

of any declared purpose regarding them on the creator's part, or in

the absence of any creator. As far as we ourselves go, the atoms are

worth more for purposes of deduction, the consciousness for purposes

of inspiration. We may fairly write the Universe in either way, thus:

ATOMS-producing-consciousness; or CONSCIOUSNESS-produced-by-atoms.

Atoms alone, or consciousness alone, are precisely equal mutilations of

the truth. If, without believing in a God, I still continue to talk of

what the world 'essentially is,' I am just as much entitled to define

it as a place in which my nose itches, or as a place where at a certain

corner I can get a mess of oysters for twenty cents, as to call it an

evolving nebula differentiating and integrating itself. It is hard to

say which of the three abstractions is the more rotten or miserable

substitute for the world's concrete fulness. To conceive it merely as

'God's work' would be a similar mutilation of it, so long as we said

not what God, or what kind of work. The only real truth about the

world, apart from particular purposes, is the _total_ truth.

[331] Compare Lotze, Metaphysik, §§ 58, 67, for some instructive

remarks on ways in which the world's constitution might differ from

what it actually is. Compare also Chapter XXVIII.

[332] Sometimes, it must be confessed, the conceiver's purpose falls

short of reasoning and the only conclusion he cares to reach is the

bare naming of the datum. "What is that?" is our first question

relative to any unknown thing. And the ease with which our curiosity

is quenched as soon as we are supplied with any sort of a name to call

the object by, is ridiculous enough. To quote from an unpublished

essay by a former student of mine, Mr. R. W. Black: "The simplest end

which a thing's predicate can serve is the satisfaction of the desire

for unity itself, the mere desire that the thing shall be the same

with _something_ else. Why, the other day, when I mistook a portrait

of Shakespeare for one of Hawthorne, was I not, on psychological

principles, as right as if I had correctly named it?--the two pictures

had a common essence, bald forehead, mustache, flowing hair. Simply

because the only end that could possibly be served by naming it

Hawthorne was my desire to have it so. With reference to any other

end that classification of it would not serve. And every unity, every

identity, every classification is rightly called fanciful unless

it serves some other end than the mere satisfaction, emotion, or

inspiration caught by momentarily believing in it."

[333] See above, p. 8.

[334] See his Study of Character, chap. xv; also Senses and Intellect,

'Intellect,' chap. ii, the latter half.

[335] Whether the dog has the notion of your being angry or of your

property being valuable in any such abstract way as _we_ have these

notions is more than doubtful. The conduct is more likely an impulsive

result of a conspiracy of outward stimuli; the beast _feels like_

acting so when these stimuli are present, though conscious of no

definite reason why. The distinction of recept and concept is useful

here. Some breeds of dogs, e.g. collies, seem instinctively to defend

their master's property. The case is similar to that of a dog's barking

at people after dark, at whom he would not bark in daylight. I have

heard this quoted as evidence of the dog's reasoning power. It is only,

as Chapter III has shown us, the impulsive result of a summation of

stimuli, and has no connection with reasoning.

In certain stages of the hypnotic trance the subject seems to lapse

into the non-analytic state. If a sheet of ruled foolscap paper, or a

paper with a fine monotonous ornamental pattern printed on it, be shown

to the subject, and _one_ of the ruled lines or elements of the pattern

be pointed to for an instant, and the paper immediately removed, he

will then almost always, when after a short interval the paper is

presented to him again, pick out the indicated line or element with

infallible correctness. The operator, meanwhile, has either to keep

his eye fixed upon it, or to make sure of its position by counting,

in order not to lose its place. Just so we may remember a friend's

house in a street by the single character of its number rather than by

its general look. The trance-subject would seem, in these instances,

to surrender himself to the general look. He disperses his attention

impartially over the sheet. The place of the particular line touched is

part of a 'total effect' which he gets in its entirety, and which would

be distorted if another line were touched instead. This total effect

is lost upon the normal looker-on, bent as he is on concentration,

analysis, and emphasis. What wonder, then, that, under these

experimental conditions, the trance-subject excels him in touching

the right line again? If he has time given him to count the line, he

will excel the trance-subject; but if the time be too short to count,

he will best succeed by following the trance-method, abstaining from

analysis, and being guided by the 'general look' of the line's place

on the sheet. One is surprised at one's success in this the moment one

gives up one's habitually analytic state of mind.

Is it too much to say that we have in this dispersion of the attention

and subjection to the 'general effect' something like a relapse into

the state of mind of brutes? The trance-subject never gives any other

reason for his optical discriminations, save that 'it looks so.' So a

man, on a road once traversed inattentively before, takes a certain

turn for no reason except that _he feels_ as if it must be right. He

is guided by a sum of impressions, not one of which is emphatic or

distinguished from the rest, not one of which is essential, not one

of which is _conceived_, but all of which together drive him to a

conclusion to which nothing but _that_ sum-total leads. Are not some

of the wonderful discriminations of animals explicable in the same

way? The cow finds her own stanchions in the long stable, the horse

stops at the house he has once stopped at in the monotonous street,

because no other stanchions, no other house, yield impartially _all_

the impressions of the previous experience. The man, however, by

seeking to make some one impression characteristic and essential,

prevents the rest from having their effect. So that, if the (for him)

essential feature be forgotten or changed, he is too apt to be thrown

off altogether, and then the brute or the trance-subject may seem to

outstrip him in sagacity.

Dr. Romanes's already quoted distinction between 'receptual' and

'conceptual' thought (published since the body of my text and my note

were written) connotes conveniently the difference which I seek to

point out. See also his Mental Evolution in Man, p. 197 ff., for proofs

of the fact that in a receptual way brutes cognize the mental states of

other brutes and men.

[336] This matter of confusion is important and interesting. Since

confusion is mistaking the wrong part of the phenomenon for the

whole, whilst reasoning is, according to our definition, based on the

substitution of the right part for the whole, it might be said that

confusion and reasoning are generically the same process. I believe

that they are so, and that the only difference between a muddle-head

and a genius is that between extracting wrong characters and right

ones. In other words, a muddle-headed person is a genius spoiled in the

making. I think it will be admitted that all _eminently_ muddle-headed

persons have the temperament of genius. They are constantly breaking

away from the usual consecutions of concretes. A common associator by

contiguity is too closely tied to routine to get muddle-headed.

[337] The horse is a densely stupid animal, as far as everything goes

except contiguous association. We reckon him intelligent, partly

because he looks so handsome, partly because he has such a wonderful

faculty of contiguous association and can be so quickly moulded into a

mass of set habits. Had he anything of reasoning intelligence, he would

be a less faithful slave than he is.

[338] Th. Schumann: Journal Daheim, No. 19, 1878. Quoted by Strümpell:

Die Geisteskräfte der Menschen verglicken mit denen der Thiere

(Leipzig, 1878), p. 39. Cats are notorious for the skill with which

they will open latches, locks, etc. Their feats are usually ascribed to

their reasoning powers. But Dr. Romanes well remarks (Mental Evolution,

etc., p. 351, note) that we ought first to be sure that the actions

are not due to mere association. A cat is constantly playing with

things with her paws; a trick accidentally hit upon may be retained.

Romanes notes the fact that the animals most skilled in this way need

not be the most generally intelligent, but those which have the best

corporeal members for handling things, cat's paws, horse's lips,

elephant's trunk, cow's horns. The monkey has both the corporeal and

the intellectual superiority. And my deprecatory remarks on animal

reasoning in the text apply far less to the quadrumana than to

quadrupeds.--On the possible fallacies in interpreting animals' minds,

compare C. L. Morgan in Mind, xi. 174 (1886).

[339] There are two other conditions of language in the human being,

additional to association by similarity, that assist its action,

or rather pave the way for it. These are: first, the great natural

loquacity; and, second, the great imitativeness of man. The first

produces the original reflex interjectional sign; the second (as

Bleek has well shown) fixes it, stamps it, and ends by multiplying

the number of determinate specific signs which are a requisite

preliminary to the general conscious purpose of sign-making, which

I have called the characteristic human element in language. The way

in which imitativeness fixes the meaning of signs is this: When a

primeval man has a given emotion, he utters his natural interjection;

or when (to avoid supposing that the reflex sounds are exceedingly

determinate by nature) a group of such men experience a common emotion,

and one takes the lead in the cry, the others cry like him from

sympathy or imitativeness. Now, let one of the group hear another,

who is in presence of the experience, utter the cry; he, even without

the experience, will repeat the cry from pure imitativeness. But,

as he repeats the sign, he will be reminded by it of his own former

experience. Thus, first, he has the sign with the emotion; then,

without it; then, with it again. It is "dissociated by change of

concomitants"; he feels it as a separate entity and yet as having a

connection with the emotion. Immediately it becomes possible for him

to couple it deliberately with the emotion, in cases where the latter

would either have provoked no interjectional cry or not the same one.

In a word, his mental procedure tends to _fix_ this cry on _that_

emotion; and when this occurs, in many instances, he is provided with

a stock of signs, like the yelp, beg, rat of the dog, each of which

suggests a determinate image. On this stock, then, similarity works in

the way above explained.

[340] See the 'Evolution of Self-consciousness' in 'Philosophical

Discussions,' by Chauncey Wright (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1877).

Dr. Romanes, in the book from which I have already quoted, seeks to

show that the 'consciousness of truth as truth' and the deliberate

intention to predicate (which are the characteristics of higher human

reasoning) presuppose a consciousness of ideas as such, as things

distinct from their objects; and that this consciousness depends on our

having made signs for them by language. My text seems to me to include

Dr. Romanes's facts, and formulates them in what to me is a more

elementary way, though the reader who wishes to understand the matter

better should go to his clear and patient exposition also.

[341] Study of Character, p. 317.

[342] Translated by my colleague, Professor G. H. Palmer.

[343] Quoted by Renouvier, Critique Philosophique, October 19, 1879.

[344] Social and domestic circumstances, that is, not material ones.

Perceptions of social relations seem very keen in persons whose

dealings with the material world are confined to knowing a few useful

objects, principally animals, plants, and weapons. Savages and boors

are often as tactful and astute socially as trained diplomatists. In

general, it is probable that the consciousness of how one stands with

other people occupies a relatively larger and larger part of the mind,

the lower one goes in the scale of culture. Woman's intuitions, so fine

in the sphere of personal relations, are seldom first-rate in the way

of mechanics. All boys teach themselves how a clock goes: few girls.

Hence Dr. Whately's jest, "Woman is the unreasoning animal, and pokes

the fire from on top."

CHAPTER XXIII.

THE PRODUCTION OF MOVEMENT.

The reader will not have forgotten, in the jungle of purely inward

processes and products through which the last chapters have borne him,

that the final result of them all must be some form of bodily activity

due to the escape of the central excitement through outgoing nerves.

The whole neural organism, it will be remembered, is, physiologically

considered, but a machine for converting stimuli into reactions; and

the intellectual part of our life is knit up with but the middle or

'central' portion of the machine's operations. Let us now turn to

consider the final or emergent operations, the bodily activities, and

the forms of consciousness connected therewithal.

Every impression which impinges on the incoming nerves produces some

discharge down the outgoing ones, whether we be aware of it or not.

Using sweeping terms and ignoring exceptions, _we might say that every

possible feeling produces a movement, and that the movement is a

movement of the entire organism, and of each and all its parts._ What

happens patently when an explosion or a flash of lightning startles

us, or when we are tickled, happens latently with every sensation

which we receive. The only reason why we do not feel the startle or

tickle in the case of insignificant sensations is partly its very small

amount, partly our obtuseness. Professor Bain many years ago gave the

name of the Law of Diffusion to this phenomenon of general discharge,

and expressed it thus: "According as an impression is accompanied

with Feeling, the aroused currents diffuse themselves over the brain,

leading to a general agitation of the moving organs, as well as

affecting the viscera."

In cases where the feeling is strong the law is too familiar to require

proof. As Prof. Bain says:

"Each of us knows in our own experience that a sudden shock of feeling

is accompanied with movements of the body generally, and with other

effects. When no emotion is present, we are quiescent; a slight

feeling is accompanied with slight manifestations; a more intense

shock has a more intense outburst. Every pleasure and every pain,

and every mode of emotion, has a definite wave of effects, which our

observation makes known to us; and we apply the knowledge to infer

other men's feelings from their outward display.... The organs first

and prominently affected, in the diffused wave of nervous influence,

are the moving members, and of these, by preference, the features

of the face (with the ears in animals), whose movements constitute

the _expression_ of the countenance. But the influence extends to

all the parts of the moving system, voluntary and involuntary;

while an important series of effects are produced on the glands and

viscera--the stomach, lungs, heart, kidneys, skin, together with the

sexual and mammary organs.... The circumstance is seemingly universal,

the proof of it does not require a citation of instances in detail; on

the objectors is thrown the burden of adducing unequivocal exceptions

to the law."[345]

There are probably no exceptions to the diffusion of every impression

through the _nerve-centres_. The _effect_ of the wave through the

centres may, however, often be to interfere with processes, and to

diminish tensions already existing there; and the outward consequences

of such inhibitions may be the arrest of discharges from the inhibited

regions and the checking of bodily activities already in process of

occurrence. When this happens it probably is like the draining or

siphoning of certain channels by currents flowing through others. When,

in walking, we suddenly stand still because a sound, sight, smell, or

thought catches our attention, something like this occurs. But there

are cases of arrest of peripheral activity which depend, not on central

inhibition, but on stimulation of centres which discharge outgoing

currents of an inhibitory sort. Whenever we are startled, for example,

our heart momentarily stops or slows its beating, and then palpitates

with accelerated speed. The brief arrest is due to an outgoing current

down the pneumogastric nerve. This nerve, when stimulated, stops or

slows the heart-beats, and this particular effect of startling fails

to occur if the nerve be cut.

In general, however, the stimulating effects of a sense-impression

preponderate over the inhibiting effects, so that we may roughly say,

as we began by saying, that the wave of discharge produces an activity

in all parts of the body. The task of tracing out _all_ the effects of

any one incoming sensation has not yet been performed by physiologists.

Recent years have, however, begun to enlarge our information; and

although I must refer to special treatises for the full details, I can

briefly string together here a number of separate observations which

prove the truth of the law of diffusion.

[Illustration: FIG. 81.]

First take _effects upon the circulation_. Those upon the heart we

have just seen. Haller long ago recorded that the blood from an open

vein flowed out faster at the beat of a drum.[346] In Chapter III.

(Vol. I. p. 98) we learned how instantaneously, according to Mosso, the

circulation in the brain is altered by changes of sensation and of the

course of thought. The effect of objects of fear, shame, and anger upon

the blood-supply of the skin, especially the skin of the face, are too

well known to need remark. Sensations of the higher senses produce,

according to Couty and Charpentier, the most varied effects upon

the pulse-rate and blood-pressure in dogs. Fig. 81, a pulse-tracing

from these authors, shows the tumultuous effect on a dog's heart of

hearing the screams of another dog. The changes of blood-pressure still

occurred when the pneumogastric nerves were cut, showing the vaso-motor

effect to be direct and not dependent on the heart. When Mosso invented

that simple instrument, the _plethysmograph_, for recording the

fluctuations in volume of the members of the body, what most astonished

him, he says, "in the first experiments which he made in Italy, was

the extreme unrest of the blood-vessels of the hand, which at every

smallest emotion, whether during waking or during sleep, changed their

volume in surprising fashion."[347] Figure 82 (from Féré[348])

shows the way in which the pulse of one subject was modified by the

exhibition of a red light lasting from the moment marked _a_ to that

marked _b_.

[Illustration: FIG. 82.]

[Illustration: FIG. 83.--Respiratory curve of B: _a_, with eyes open;

_b_, with eyes closed.]

_The effects upon respiration_ of sudden sensory stimuli are also

too well known to need elaborate comment. We 'catch our breath' at

every sudden sound. We 'hold our breath' whenever our attention and

expectation are strongly engaged, and we sigh when the tension of the

situation is relieved. When a fearful object is before us we pant and

cannot deeply inspire; when the object makes us angry it is, on the

contrary, the act of expiration which is hard. I subjoin a couple of

figures from Féré which explain themselves. They show the effects of

light upon the breathing of two of his hysteric patients.[349]

[Illustration: FIG. 84. Respiratory curve of L: _a_, with yellow light;

_b_ with green light; _c_, with red light. The red has the strongest

effect.]

_On the sweat-glands,_ similar consequences of sensorial stimuli are

observed. Tarchanoff, testing the condition of the sweat-glands by

the power of the skin to start a galvanic current through electrodes

applied to its surface, found that "nearly every kind of nervous

activity, from the simplest sensations and impressions, to voluntary

motions and the highest forms of mental exertion, is accompanied by

an increased activity in the glands of the skin."[350] _On the pupil_

observations are recorded by Sanders which show that a transitory

dilatation follows every sensorial stimulus applied _during sleep_,

even if the stimulus be not strong enough to wake the subject up. At

the moment of awaking there is a dilatation, even if strong light falls

on the eye.[351] The pupil of children can easily be observed to dilate

enormously under the influence of _fear_. It is said to dilate in pain

and fatigue; and to contract, on the contrary, in rage.

As regards _effects on the abdominal viscera_, they unquestionably

exist, but very few accurate observations have been made.[352]

The bladder, bowels, and uterus respond to sensations, even indifferent

ones. Mosso and Pellicani, in their plethysmographic investigations

on the bladder of dogs, found all sorts of sensorial stimuli to

produce reflex contractions of this organ, independent of those of the

abdominal walls. They call the bladder 'as good an æsthesiometer as the

iris,' and refer to the not uncommon reflex effects of psychic stimuli

in the human female upon this organ.[353] M. Féré has registered the

contractions of the sphincter ani which even indifferent sensations

will produce. In some pregnant women the fœtus is felt to move after

almost every sensorial excitement received by the mother. The only

natural explanation is that it is stimulated at such moments by

reflex contractions of the womb.[354] That the glands are affected

in emotion is patent enough in the case of the tears of grief, the

dry mouth, moist skin, or diarrhœa of fear, the biliary disturbances

which sometimes follow upon rage, etc. The watering of the mouth at

the sight of succulent food is well known. It is difficult to follow

the smaller degrees of all these reflex changes, but it can hardly be

doubted that they exist in some degree, even where they cease to be

traceable, and that all our sensations have some visceral effects. The

sneezing produced by sunshine, the roughening of the skin (goose-flesh)

which certain strokings, contacts, and sounds, musical or non-musical,

provoke, are facts of the same order as the shuddering and standing up

of the hair in fear, only of less degree.

_Effects on Voluntary Muscles._ Every sensorial stimulus not only

sends a special discharge into certain particular muscles dependent on

the special nature of the stimulus in question--some of these special

discharges we have studied in Chapter XI, others we shall examine

under the heads of Instinct and Emotion--but it innervates the muscles

generally. M. Féré has given very curious experimental proofs of

this. The strength of contraction of the subject's hand was measured

by a self-registering dynamometer. Ordinarily the maximum strength,

under simple experimental conditions, remains the same from day to

day. But if simultaneously with the contraction the subject received

a sensorial impression, the contraction was sometimes weakened, but

more often increased. This reinforcing effect has received the name of

_dynamogeny_. The dynamogenic value of simple _musical notes_ seems

to be proportional to their loudness and height. Where the notes are

compounded into sad strains, the muscular strength diminishes. If the

strains are gay, it is increased.--The dynamogenic value of _colored

lights_ varies with the color. In a subject[355] whose normal strength

was expressed by 23, it became 24 when a blue light was thrown on the

eyes, 28 for green, 30 for yellow, 35 for orange, and 42 for red. Red

is thus the most exciting color. Among _tastes_, sweet has the lowest

value, next comes salt, then bitter, and finally sour, though, as M.

Féré remarks, such a sour as acetic acid excites the nerves of pain and

smell as well as of taste. The stimulating effects of tobacco-smoke,

alcohol, beef-extract (which is innutritious), etc., etc., may be

partly due to a dynamogenic action of this sort.--Of _odors_, that of

musk seems to have a peculiar dynamogenic power. Fig. 85 is a copy of

one of M. Féré's dynamographic tracings, which explains itself. The

smaller contractions are those without stimulus; the stronger ones are

due to the influence of red rays of light.

[Illustration: FIG. 85.]

Everyone is familiar with the _patellar reflex_, or jerk upwards of

the foot, which is produced by smartly tapping the tendon below the

knee-pan when the leg hangs over the other knee. Drs. Weir Mitchell and

Lombard have found that when other sensations come in simultaneously

with the tap, the jerk is increased.[356] Heat, cold, pricking,

itching, or faradic stimulation of the skin, sometimes strong optical

impressions, music, all have this dynamogenic effect, which also

results whenever voluntary movements are set up in other parts of the

body, simultaneously with the tap.[357]

These 'dynamogenic' effects, in which one stimulation simply

reinforces another already under way, must not be confounded with

reflex acts properly so called, in which new activities are originated

by the stimulus. All instinctive performances and manifestations

of emotion are reflex acts. But underneath those of which we are

conscious there seem to go on continually others smaller in amount,

which probably in most persons might be called fluctuations of muscular

_tone_, but which in certain neurotic subjects can be demonstrated

ocularly. M. Féré figures some of them in the article to which I have

already referred.[358]

* * * * *

Looking back over all these facts, it is hard to doubt the truth of the

law of diffusion, even where verification is beyond reach. _A process

set up anywhere in the centres reverberates everywhere, and in some

way or other affects the organism throughout, making its activities

either greater or less._ We are brought again to the assimilation which

was expressed on a previous page of the nerve-central mass to a good

conductor charged with electricity, of which the tension cannot be

changed anywhere without changing it everywhere.

* * * * *

Herr Schneider has tried to show, by an ingenious and suggestive

zoological review,[359] that all the _special_ movements which highly

evolved animals make are differentiated from the two originally simple

movements, of contraction and expansion, in which the entire body of

simple organisms takes part. The tendency to contract is the source

of all the self-protective impulses and reactions which are later

developed, including that of flight. The tendency to expand splits up,

on the contrary, into the impulses and instincts of an aggressive kind,

feeding, fighting, sexual intercourse, etc. Schneider's articles are

well worth reading, if only for the careful observations on animals

which they embody. I cite them here as a sort of evolutionary reason

to add to the mechanical _a priori_ reason why there _ought_ to be the

diffusive wave which our _a posteriori_ instances have shown to exist.

I will now proceed to a detailed study of the more important classes

of movement consequent upon cerebro-mental change. They may be

enumerated as--

1) Instinctive or Impulsive Performances;

2) Expressions of Emotion; and

3) Voluntary Deeds;

and each shall have a chapter to itself.

* * * * *

[345] Emotions and Will, pp. 4, 5.

[346] Cf. Féré. Sensation et Mouvement (1887), p. 56.

[347] La Paura (1884), p. 117. Compare Féré: Sensation et Mouvement,

chap. xvii.

[348] Revue Philosophique, xxiv. 570.

[349] Revue Phil., xxiv. pp. 566-7.--For further information about the

relations between the brain and respiration, see Danilewsky's Essay in

the Biologisches Centralblatt, ii. 690.

[350] Quoted from the report of Tarchanoff's paper (in Pflüger's

Archiv, xlvi. 46) in the American Journal of Psych., ii. 652.

[351] Archiv f. Psychiatrie, vii. 652; ix. 129.

[352] Sensation et Mouvement, 57-8.

[353] R. Accad. dei Lincei (1881-2). I follow the report in Hofmann

Schwalbe's Jahresbericht, x. ii. 93.

[354] Cf. Féré, Sensation et Mouvement, chap. xiv.

[355] The figures given are from an hysterical subject, and the

differences are greater than normal. M. Féré considers that the

unstable nervous system of the hysteric ('ces grenouilles de la

psychologie') shows the law on a quantitatively exaggerated scale,

without altering the qualitative relations. The effects remind us a

little of the influence of sensations upon minimal sensations of other

orders discovered by Urbantschitsch, and reported on page 29 of this

volume.

[356] Mitchell in (Philadelphia) Medical News (Feb. 13 and 20, 1886);

Lombard in American Journal of Psychology (Oct. 1887).

[357] Prof. H. P. Bowditch has made the interesting discovery that

if the reinforcing movement be as much as 0.4 of a second late, the

reinforcement fails to occur, and is transformed into a positive

inhibition of the knee-jerk for retardations of between 0.4' and 1.7'.

The knee-jerk fails to be modified at all by voluntary movements made

later than 1.7' after the patellar ligament is tapped (see Boston Med.

and Surg. Journ., May 31, 1888).

[358] Revue Phil., xxiv. 572 ff.

[359] In the Vierteljahrschrift für wiss. Philos., iii. 294.

CHAPTER XXIV.[360]

INSTINCT.

_Instinct is usually defined as the faculty of acting in such a

way as to produce certain ends, without foresight of the ends, and

without previous education in the performance._ That instincts, as

thus defined, exist on an enormous scale in the animal kingdom needs

no proof. They are the functional correlatives of structure. With the

presence of a certain organ goes, one may say, almost always a native

aptitude for its use.

"Has the bird a gland for the secretion of oil? She knows

instinctively how to press the oil from the gland, and apply it to the

feather. Has the rattlesnake the grooved tooth and gland of poison?

He knows without instruction how to make both structure and function

most effective against his enemies. Has the silk-worm the function

of secreting the fluid silk? At the proper time she winds the cocoon

such as she has never seen, as thousands before have done; and thus

without instruction, pattern, or experience, forms a safe abode for

herself in the period of transformation. Has the hawk talons? She

knows by instinct how to wield them effectively against the helpless

quarry."[361]

A very common way of talking about these admirably definite tendencies

to act is by naming abstractly the purpose they subserve, such as

self-preservation, or defence, or care for eggs and young--and saying

the animal has an instinctive fear of death or love of life, or that

she has an instinct of self-preservation, or an instinct of maternity

and the like. But this represents the animal as obeying abstractions

which not once in a million cases is it possible it can have framed.

The strict physiological way of interpreting the facts leads to far

clearer results. _The actions we call instinctive all conform to the

general reflex type;_ they are called forth by determinate sensory

stimuli in contact with the animal's body, or at a distance in his

environment. The cat runs after the mouse, runs or shows fight before

the dog, avoids falling from walls and trees, shuns fire and water,

etc., not because he has any notion either of life or of death, or

of self, or of preservation. He has probably attained to no one of

these conceptions in such a way as to react definitely upon it. He

acts in each case separately, and simply because he cannot help it;

being so framed that when that particular running thing called a

mouse appears in his field of vision he _must_ pursue; that when that

particular barking and obstreperous thing called a dog appears there

he _must_ retire, if at a distance, and scratch if close by; that he

_must_ withdraw his feet from water and his face from flame, etc. His

nervous system is to a great extent a preorganized bundle of such

reactions--they are as fatal as sneezing, and as exactly correlated to

their special excitants as it is to its own. Although the naturalist

may, for his own convenience, class these reactions under general

heads, he must not forget that in the animal it is a particular

sensation or perception, or image which calls them forth.

At first this view astounds us by the enormous number of special

adjustments it supposes animals to possess ready-made in anticipation

of the outer things among which they are to dwell. _Can_ mutual

dependence be so intricate and go so far? Is each thing born fitted to

particular other things, and to them exclusively, as locks are fitted

to their keys? Undoubtedly this must be believed to be so. Each nook

and cranny of creation, down to our very skin and entrails, has its

living inhabitants, with organs suited to the place, to devour and

digest the food it harbors and to meet the dangers it conceals; and the

minuteness of adaptation thus shown in the way of _structure_ knows no

bounds. Even so are there no bounds to the minuteness of adaptation in

the way of _conduct_ which the several inhabitants display.

The older writings on instinct are ineffectual wastes of words, because

their authors never came down to this definite and simple point of

view, but smothered everything in vague wonder at the clairvoyant and

prophetic power of the animals--so superior to anything in man--and

at the beneficence of God in endowing them with such a gift. But

God's beneficence endows them, first of all, with a nervous system;

and, turning our attention to this, makes instinct immediately appear

neither more nor less wonderful than all the other facts of life.

* * * * *

_Every instinct is an impulse._ Whether we shall call such impulses

as blushing, sneezing, coughing, smiling, or dodging, or keeping

time to music, instincts or not, is a mere matter of terminology.

The process is the same throughout. In his delightfully fresh and

interesting work, Der Thierische Wille, Herr G. H. Schneider subdivides

impulses (_Triebe_) into sensation-impulses, perception-impulses, and

idea-impulses. To crouch from cold is a sensation-impulse; to turn and

follow, if we see people running one way, is a perception-impulse;

to cast about for cover, if it begins to blow and rain, is an

imagination-impulse. A single complex instinctive action may involve

successively the awakening of impulses of all three classes. Thus

a hungry lion starts to _seek_ prey by the awakening in him of

imagination coupled with desire; he begins to _stalk_ it when, on eye,

ear, or nostril, he gets an impression of its presence at a certain

distance; he _springs_ upon it, either when the booty takes alarm and

flees, or when the distance is sufficiently reduced; he proceeds to

_tear_ and _devour_ it the moment he gets a sensation of its contact

with his claws and fangs. Seeking, stalking, springing, and devouring

are just so many different kinds of muscular contraction, and neither

kind is called forth by the stimulus appropriate to the other.

Schneider says of the hamster, which stores corn in its hole:

"If we analyze the propensity of storing, we find that it consists of

three impulses: First, an impulse to _pick up_ the nutritious object,

due to perception; second, an impulse to _carry it off_ into the

dwelling-place, due to the idea of this latter; and third, an impulse

to _lay it down_ there, due to the sight of the place. It lies in the

nature of the hamster that it should never see a full ear of corn

without feeling a desire to strip it; it lies in its nature to feel,

as soon as its cheek-pouches are filled, an irresistible desire to

hurry to its home; and finally, it lies in its nature that the sight

of the storehouse should awaken the impulse to empty the cheeks" (p.

208).

In certain animals of a low order the feeling of having executed one

impulsive step is such an indispensable part of the stimulus of the

next one, that the animal cannot make any variation in the order of its

performance.

* * * * *

_Now, why do the various animals do what seem to us such strange

things,_ in the presence of such outlandish stimuli? Why does the

hen, for example, submit herself to the tedium of incubating such a

fearfully uninteresting set of objects as a nestful of eggs, unless

she have some sort of a prophetic inkling of the result? The only

answer is _ad hominem_. We can only interpret the instincts of brutes

by what we know of instincts in ourselves. Why do men always lie

down, when they can, on soft beds rather than on hard floors? Why do

they sit round the stove on a cold day? Why, in a room, do they place

themselves, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, with their faces

towards its middle rather than to the wall? Why do they prefer saddle

of mutton and champagne to hard-tack and ditch-water? Why does the

maiden interest the youth so that everything about her seems more

important and significant than anything else in the world? Nothing more

can be said than that these are human ways, and that every creature

_likes_ its own ways, and takes to the following them as a matter of

course. Science may come and consider these ways, and find that most

of them are useful. But it is not for the sake of their utility that

they are followed, but because at the moment of following them we feel

that that is the only appropriate and natural thing to do. Not one man

in a billion, when taking his dinner, ever thinks of utility. He eats

because the food tastes good and makes him want more. If you ask him

_why_ he should want to eat more of what tastes like that, instead of

revering you as a philosopher he will probably laugh at you for a fool.

The connection between the savory sensation and the act it awakens is

for him absolute and _selbstverständlich_, an '_a priori_ synthesis'

of the most perfect sort, needing no proof but its own evidence. It

takes, in short, what Berkeley calls a mind debauched by learning to

carry the process of making the natural seem strange, so far as to

ask for the _why_ of any instinctive human act. To the metaphysician

alone can such questions occur as: Why do we smile, when pleased, and

not scowl? Why are we unable to talk to a crowd as we talk to a single

friend? Why does a particular maiden turn our wits so upside-down?

The common man can only say, "_Of course_ we smile, _of course_ our

heart palpitates at the sight of the crowd, _of course_ we love the

maiden, that beautiful soul clad in that perfect form, so palpably and

flagrantly made from all eternity to be loved!"

And so, probably, does each animal feel about the particular things

it tends to do in presence of particular objects. They, too, are _a

priori_ syntheses. To the lion it is the lioness which is made to be

loved; to the bear, the she-bear. To the broody hen the notion would

probably seem monstrous that there should be a creature in the world to

whom a nestful of eggs was not the utterly fascinating and precious and

never-to-be-too-much-sat-upon object which it is to her.[362]

Thus we may be sure that, however mysterious some animals' instincts

may appear to us, our instincts will appear no less mysterious to them.

And we may conclude that, to the animal which obeys it, every impulse

and every step of every instinct shines with its own sufficient light,

and seems at the moment the only eternally right and proper thing to

do. It is done for its own sake exclusively. What voluptuous thrill

may not shake a fly, when she at last discovers the one particular

leaf, or carrion, or bit of dung, that out of all the world can

stimulate her ovipositor to its discharge? Does not the discharge then

seem to her the only fitting thing? And need she care or know anything

about the future maggot and its food?

* * * * *

Since the _egg-laying instincts_ are simple examples to consider, a few

quotations about them from Schneider may be serviceable:

"The phenomenon so often talked about, so variously interpreted,

so surrounded with mystification, that an insect should always lay

her eggs in a spot appropriate to the nourishment of her young,

is no more marvellous than the phenomenon that every animal pairs

with a mate capable of bearing posterity, or feeds on materials

capable of affording him nourishment.... Not only the choice of a

place for laying the eggs, but all the various acts for depositing

and protecting them, are occasioned by the perception of the proper

object, and the relation of this perception to the various stages of

maternal impulse. When the burying beetle perceives a carrion, she is

not only impelled to approach it and lodge her eggs in it, but also

to go through the movements requisite for burying it; just us a bird

who sees his hen-bird is impelled to caress her, to strut around her,

dance before her, or in some other way to woo her; just as a tiger,

when he sees an antelope, is impelled to stalk it, to pounce upon it,

and to strangle it. When the tailor-bee cuts out pieces of rose-leaf,

bends them, carries them into a caterpillar- or mouse-hole in trees or

in the earth, covers their seams again with other pieces, and so makes

a thimble-shaped case--when she fills this with honey and lays an egg

in it, all these various appropriate expressions of her will are to be

explained by supposing that at the time when the eggs are ripe within

her, the appearance of a suitable caterpillar- or mouse-hole and the

perception of rose-leaves are so correlated in the insect with the

several impulses in question, that the performances follow as a matter

of course when the perceptions take place....

"The perception of the empty nest, or of a single egg, seems in birds

to stand in such a close relation to the physiological functions of

oviparation, that it serves as a direct stimulus to these functions,

while the perception of a sufficient number of eggs has just the

opposite effect. It is well known that hens and ducks lay more eggs if

we keep removing them than if we leave them in the nest. The impulse

to sit arises, as a rule, when a bird sees a certain number of eggs

in her nest. If this number is not yet to be seen there, the ducks

continue to lay, although they perhaps have laid twice as many eggs as

they are accustomed to sit upon.... That sitting, also, is independent

of any idea of purpose and is a pure perception-impulse is evident,

among other things, from the fact that many birds, e.g. wild ducks,

steal eggs from each other.... The bodily disposition to sit is, it

is true, one condition [since broody hens will sit where there are no

eggs], but the perception of the eggs is the other condition of the

activity of the incubating impulse. The propensity of the cuckoo and

of the cow-bird to lay their eggs in the nests of other species must

also be interpreted as a pure perception-impulse. These birds have no

bodily disposition to become broody, and there is therefore in them

no connection between the perception of an egg and the impulse to sit

upon it. Eggs ripen, however, in their oviducts, and the body tends to

get rid of them. And since the two birds just named do not drop their

eggs anywhere on the ground, but in nests, which are the only places

where they may preserve the species, it might easily appear that such

preservation of the species was what they had in view, and that they

acted with full consciousness of the purpose. But this is not so....

The cuckoo is simply excited by the perception of quite determinate

sorts of nest, which already contain eggs, to drop her own into them,

and throw the others out, because this perception is a direct stimulus

to these acts. It is impossible that she should have any notion of the

other bird coming and sitting on her egg."[363]

INSTINCTS NOT ALWAYS BLIND OR INVARIABLE.

Remember that nothing is said yet of the origin of instincts, but only

of the constitution of those that exist fully formed. How stands it

with the instincts of mankind?

Nothing is commoner than the remark that Man differs from lower

creatures by the almost total absence of instincts, and the assumption

of their work in him by 'reason.' A fruitless discussion might be waged

on this point by two theorizers who were careful not to define their

terms. 'Reason' might be used, as it often has been, since Kant, not

as the mere power of 'inferring,' but also as a name for the _tendency

to obey impulses_ of a certain lofty sort, such as duty, or universal

ends. And 'instinct' might have its significance so broadened as to

cover all impulses whatever, even the impulse to act from the idea of a

distant fact, as well as the impulse to act from a present sensation.

Were the word instinct used in this broad way, it would of course be

impossible to restrict it, as we began by doing, to actions done with

no prevision of an end. We must of course avoid a quarrel about words,

and the facts of the case are really tolerably plain. Man has a far

greater variety of _impulses_ than any lower animal; and any one of

these impulses, taken in itself, is as 'blind' as the lowest instinct

can be; but, owing to man's memory, power of reflection, and power of

inference, they come each one to be felt by him, after he has once

yielded to them and experienced their results, in connection with

a _foresight_ of those results. In this condition an impulse acted

out may be said to be acted out, in part at least, _for the sake_ of

its results. It is obvious that _every instinctive act, in an animal

with memory, must cease to be 'blind' after being once repeated,_

and must be accompanied with foresight of its 'end' just so far as

that end may have fallen under the animal's cognizance. An insect

that lays her eggs in a place where she never sees them hatched must

always do so 'blindly;' but a hen who has already hatched a brood

can hardly be assumed to sit with perfect 'blindness' on her second

nest. Some expectation of consequences must in every case like this be

aroused; and this expectation, according as it is that of something

desired or of something disliked, must necessarily either re-enforce

or inhibit the mere impulse. The hen's idea of the chickens would

probably encourage her to sit; a rat's memory, on the other hand, of

a former escape from a trap would neutralize his impulse to take bait

from anything that reminded him of that trap. If a boy sees a fat

hopping-toad, he probably has incontinently an impulse (especially if

with other boys) to smash the creature with a stone, which impulse we

may suppose him blindly to obey. But something in the expression of

the dying toad's clasped hands suggests the meanness of the act, or

reminds him of sayings he has heard about the sufferings of animals

being like his own; so that, when next he is tempted by a toad, an

idea arises which, far from spurring him again to the torment, prompts

kindly actions, and may even make him the toad's champion against less

reflecting boys.

It is plain, then, that, _no matter how well endowed an animal may

originally be in the way of instincts, his resultant actions will

be much modified if the instincts combine with experience,_ if in

addition to impulses he have memories, associations, inferences, and

expectations, on any considerable scale. An object O, on which he

has an instinctive impulse to react in the manner A, would _directly_

provoke him to that reaction. But O has meantime become for him a

_sign_ of the nearness of P, on which he has an equally strong impulse

to react in the manner B, quite unlike A. So that when he meets O the

immediate impulse A and the remote impulse B struggle in his breast

for the mastery. The fatality and uniformity said to be characteristic

of instinctive actions will be so little manifest that one might be

tempted to deny to him altogether the possession of any instinct about

the object O. Yet how false this judgment would be! The instinct about

O is there; only by the complication of the associative machinery it

has come into conflict with another instinct about P.

Here we immediately reap the good fruits of our simple physiological

conception of what an instinct is. If it be a mere excito-motor

impulse, due to the pre-existence of a certain 'reflex arc' in the

nerve-centres of the creature, of course it must follow the law of

all such reflex arcs. One liability of such arcs is to have their

activity 'inhibited,' by other processes going on at the same time. It

makes no difference whether the arc be organized at birth, or ripen

spontaneously later, or be due to acquired habit, it must take its

chances with all the other arcs, and sometimes succeed, and sometimes

fail, in drafting off the currents through itself. The mystical view

of an instinct would make it invariable. The physiological view would

require it to show occasional irregularities in any animal in whom the

number of separate instincts, and the possible entrance of the same

stimulus into several of them, were great. And such irregularities are

what every superior animal's instincts do show in abundance.[364]