conclusion of our own chapter on Attention, Vol. I. pp. 448-454.
[500] Thus at least I interpret Prof. Lipps's words: "Wir wissen uns
naturgemäss in jedem Streben umsomehr aktiv, je mehr unser _ganzes_ Ich
bei dem Streben beheiligt ist," u. s. w. (p. 601).
[501] Such ejaculations as Mr. Spencer's: "Psychical changes either
conform to law or they do not. If they do not, this work, in common
with all works on the subject, is sheer nonsense: no science of
Psychology is possible" (Principles of Psychology, i. 503),--are
beneath criticism. Mr. Spencer's work, like all the other 'works on
the subject,' treats of those general conditions of _possible_ conduct
within which all our real decisions must fall no matter whether their
effort be small or great. However closely psychical changes may conform
to law, it is safe to say that individual histories and biographies
will never be written in advance no matter how 'evolved' psychology may
become.
[502] _Caricatures_ of the kind of supposition which free will demands
abound in deterministic literature. The following passage from John
Fiske's Cosmic Philosophy (pt. ii. chap. xvii) is an example: "If
volitions arise without cause, it necessarily follows that we cannot
infer from them the character of the antecedent states of feeling.
If, therefore, a murder has been committed, we have _a priori_ no
better reason for suspecting the worst enemy than the best friend of
the murdered man. If we see a man jump from a fourth-story window, we
must beware of too hastily inferring his insanity, since he may be
merely exercising his free-will; the intense love of life implanted
in the human breast being, as it seems, unconnected with attempts at
suicide or at self-preservation. We can thus frame no theory of human
actions whatever. The countless empirical maxims of every-day life, the
embodiment as they are of the inherited and organized sagacity of many
generations, become wholly incompetent to guide us; and nothing which
any one may do ought ever to occasion surprise. The mother may strangle
her first-born child, the miser may cast his long-treasured gold into
the sea, the sculptor may break in pieces his lately-finished statue,
in the presence of no other feelings than those which before led them
to cherish, to hoard, and to create.
"To state these conclusions is to refute their premise. Probably no
defender of the doctrine of free-will could be induced to accept them,
even to save the theorem with which they are inseparably wrapped up.
Yet the dilemma cannot be avoided. Volitions are either caused or they
are not. If they are not caused, an inexorable logic brings us to the
absurdities just mentioned. If they are caused, the free-will doctrine
is annihilated.... In truth, the immediate corollaries of the free-will
doctrine are so shocking, not only to philosophy but to common-sense,
that were not accurate thinking a somewhat rare phenomenon, it would
be inexplicable how any credit should ever have been given to such a
dogma. This is but one of the many instances in which by the force
of words alone men have been held subject to chronic delusion....
Attempting, as the free-will philosophers do, to destroy the science of
history, they are compelled by an inexorable logic to pull down with
it the cardinal principles of ethics, politics, and jurisprudence.
Political economy, if rigidly dealt with on their theory, would fare
little better; and psychology would become chaotic jargon.... The
denial of causation is the affirmation of chance, and 'between the
theory of Chance and the theory of Law there can be no compromise, no
reciprocity, no borrowing and lending.' To write history on any method
furnished by the free-will doctrine would be utterly impossible."--All
this comes from Mr. Fiske's not distinguishing between the possibles
which really tempts man and those which tempt him not at all.
Free-will, like psychology, deals with the former possibles exclusively.
[503] On the education of the Will from a pedagogic point of view, see
an article by G. Stanley Hall in the Princeton Review for November
1882, and some bibliographic references there contained.
[504] See his Emotions and Will, 'The Will,' chap. i. I take the name
of random movements from Sully, Outlines of Psychology, p. 593.
[505] This figure and the following ones are purely schematic, and
must not be supposed to involve any theory about protoplasmatic and
axis-cylinder processes. The latter, according to Golgi and others,
emerge from the base of the cell, and each cell has but one. They alone
form a nervous network. The reader will of course also understand that
none of the hypothetical constructions which I make from now to the end
of the chapter are proposed as definite accounts of what happens. All I
aim at is to make it clear in some more or less symbolic fashion that
the formation of new paths, the learning of habits, etc., is in _some_
mechanical way conceivable. Compare what was said in Vol. I. p. 81,
note.
[506] The Nervous System and the Mind (1888), pp. 75-6.
[507] Compare Vol. I. pp. 137, 142.
[508] That is, the direction towards the motor cells.
[509] This brain-scheme seems oddly enough to give a certain basis of
reality to those hideously fabulous performances of the Herbartian
_Vorstellungen_. Herbart says that when one idea is inhibited by
another it fuses with that other and thereafter helps it to ascend into
consciousness. Inhibition is thus the basis of association in both
schemes, for the 'draining' of which the text speaks is tantamount to
an inhibition of the activity of the cells which are drained, which
inhibition makes the inhibited revive the inhibiter on later occasions.
[510] See the luminous passage in Münsterberg: Die Willenshandlung, pp.
144-5.
[511] L. Lange's and Münsterberg's experiments with 'shortened' or
'muscular' reaction-time (see Vol. I. p. 432) show how potent a fact
dynamically this anticipatory preparation of a whole set of possible
drainage-channels is.
[512] Even as the proofs of these pages are passing through my hands,
I receive Heft 2 of the Zeitschrift für Psychologie u. Physiologie der
Sinnesorgane, in which the irrepressible young Münsterberg publishes
experiments to show that there is no association between successive
ideas, apart from intervening movements. As my explanations have
assumed that an earlier excited _sensory_ cell drains a later one, his
experiments and inferences would, if sound, upset all my hypotheses. I
therefore can (at this late moment) only refer the reader to Herr M.'s
article, hoping to review the subject again myself in another place.
CHAPTER XXVII.
HYPNOTISM.
MODES OF OPERATING, AND SUSCEPTIBILITY.
The 'hypnotic,' 'mesmeric,' or 'magnetic' trance _can be induced in
various ways_, each operator having his pet method. The simplest one
is to leave the subject seated by himself, telling him that if he
close his eyes and relax his muscles and, as far as possible, think
of vacancy, in a few minutes he will 'go off.' On returning in ten
minutes you may find him effectually hypnotized. Braid used to make
his subjects look at a bright button held near their forehead until
their eyes spontaneously closed. The older mesmerists made 'passes'
in a downward direction over the face and body, but without contact.
Stroking the skin of the head, face, arms and hands, especially that
of the region round the brows and eyes, will have the same effect.
Staring into the eyes of the subject until the latter droop, making him
listen to a watch's ticking; or simply making him close his eyes for a
minute whilst you describe to him the feeling of falling into sleep,
'talk sleep' to him, are equally efficacious methods in the hands of
some operators; whilst with trained subjects any method whatever from
which they have been led by previous suggestion to expect results
will be successful.[513] The touching of an object which they are
told has been 'magnetized,' the drinking of 'magnetized' water, the
reception of a letter ordering them to sleep, etc., are means which
have been frequently employed. Recently M. Liégeois has hypnotized some
of his subjects at a distance of 1 1/2 kilometres by giving them an
intimation to that effect through a telephone. With some subjects, if
you tell them in advance that at a certain hour of a certain day they
will become entranced, the prophecy is fulfilled. Certain hysterical
patients are immediately thrown into hypnotic catalepsy by any violent
sensation, such as a blow on a gong or the flashing of an intense
light in their eyes. Pressure on certain parts of the body (called
_zones hypnogènes_ by M. Pitres) rapidly produces hypnotic sleep in
some hysterics. These regions, which differ in different subjects,
are oftenest found on the forehead and about the root of the thumbs.
Finally, persons in ordinary sleep may be transferred into the hypnotic
condition by verbal intimation or contact, performed so gently as not
to wake them up.
* * * * *
Some operators appear to be more successful than others in getting
control of their subjects. I am informed that Mr. Gurney (who made
valuable contributions to the theory of hypnotism) was never able
himself to hypnotize, and had to use for his observations the subjects
of others. On the other hand, Dr. Liébeault claims that he hypnotizes
92% of all comers, and Wetterstrand in Stockholm says that amongst 718
persons there proved to be only 18 whom he failed to influence. Some
of this disparity is unquestionably due to differences in the personal
'authority' of the operator, for the prime condition of success is
that the subject should confidently _expect_ to be entranced. Much
also depends on the operator's tact in interpreting the physiognomy
of his subjects, so as to give the right commands, and 'crowd it on'
to the subject, at just the propitious moments. These conditions
account for the fact that operators grow more successful the more
they operate. Bernheim says that whoever does not hypnotize 80 per
cent of the persons whom he tries has not yet learned to operate
as he should. Whether certain operators have over and above this a
peculiar 'magnetic power' is a question which I leave at present
undecided.[514] Children under three or four, and insane persons,
especially idiots, are unusually hard to hypnotize. This seems due to
the impossibility of getting them to fix their attention continuously
on the idea of the coming trance. All ages above infancy are probably
equally hypnotizable, as are all races and both sexes. A certain
amount of mental training, sufficient to aid concentration of the
attention, seems a favorable condition, and so does a certain momentary
indifference or passivity as to the result. Native strength or weakness
of 'will' have absolutely nothing to do with the matter. Frequent
trances enormously increase the susceptibility of a subject, and many
who resist at first succumb after several trials. Dr. Moll says he has
more than once succeeded after forty fruitless attempts. Some experts
are of the opinion that every one is hypnotizable essentially, the only
difficulty being the more habitual presence in some individuals of
hindering mental preoccupations, which, however, may suddenly at some
moment be removed.
* * * * *
The trance may be dispelled instantaneously by saying in a rousing
voice, 'All right, wake up!' or words of similar purport. At the
Salpétrière they awaken subjects by blowing on their eyelids. Upward
passes have an awakening effect; sprinkling cold water ditto. Anything
will awaken a patient who expects to be awakened by that thing. Tell
him that he will wake after counting five, and he will do so. Tell him
to waken in five minutes, and he is very likely to do so punctually,
even though he interrupt thereby some exciting histrionic performance
which you may have suggested.--As Dr. Moll says, any theory which
pretends to explain the physiology of the hypnotic state must keep
account of the fact that so simple a thing as hearing the word 'wake!'
will end it.
THEORIES ABOUT THE HYPNOTIC STATE.
_The intimate nature of the hypnotic condition,_ when once induced,
can hardly be said to be understood. Without entering into details
of controversy, one may say that three main opinions have been held
concerning it, which we may call respectively the theories of
1. Animal magnetism;
2. of Neurosis; and finally of
3. Suggestion.
According to the _animal-magnetism theory_ there is a direct passage of
force from the operator to the subject, whereby the latter becomes the
former's puppet. This theory is nowadays given up as regards all the
ordinary hypnotic phenomena, and is only held to by some persons as an
explanation of a few effects exceptionally met with.
* * * * *
According to the _neurosis-theory_, the hypnotic state is a peculiar
pathological condition into which certain predisposed patients fall,
and in which special physical agents have the power of provoking
special symptoms, quite apart from the subjects mentally expecting
the effect. Professor Charcot and his colleagues at the Salpétrière
hospital admit that this condition is rarely found in typical form.
They call it then _le grand hypnotisme_, and say that it accompanies
the disease hystero-epilepsy. If a patient subject to this sort
of hypnotism hear a sudden loud noise, or look at a bright light
unexpectedly, she falls into the _cataleptic_ trance. Her limbs and
body offer no resistance to movements communicated to them, but
retain permanently the attitudes impressed. The eyes are staring,
there is insensibility to pain, etc., etc. If the eyelids be forcibly
closed, the cataleptic gives place to the _lethargic_ condition,
characterized by apparent abolition of consciousness, and absolute
muscular relaxation except where the muscles are kneaded or the
tendons struck by the operator's hand, or certain nerve-trunks
are pressed upon. Then the muscles in question, or those supplied
by the same nerve-trunk enter into a more or less steadfast tonic
contraction. Charcot calls this symptom by the name of neuro-muscular
hyperexcitability. The lethargic state may be _primarily_ brought on
by fixedly looking at anything, or by pressure on the closed eyeballs.
Friction on the top of the head will make the patient pass from either
of the two preceding conditions into the _somnambulic_ state, in which
she is alert, talkative, and susceptible to all the suggestions of
the operator. The somnambulic state may also be induced primarily, by
fixedly looking at a small object. In this state the accurately limited
muscular contractions characteristic of lethargy do not follow upon the
above-described manipulations, but instead of them there is a tendency
to rigidity of entire regions of the body, which may upon occasion
develop into general tetanus, and which is brought about by gently
touching the skin or blowing upon it. M. Charcot calls this by the name
of cutaneo-muscular hyperexcitability.
Many other symptoms, supposed by their observers to be independent of
mental expectation, are described, of which I only will mention the
more interesting. Opening the eyes of a patient in lethargy causes her
to pass into catalepsy. If one eye only be opened, the corresponding
half of the body becomes cataleptic, whilst the other half remains
in lethargy. Similarly, rubbing one side of the head may result in a
patient becoming hemilethargic or hemicataleptic and hemisomnambulic.
The approach of a magnet (or certain metals) to the skin causes these
half-states (and many others) to be transferred to the opposite sides.
Automatic repetition of every sound heard ('_echolalia_') is said
to be produced by pressure on the lower cervical vertebræ or on the
epigastrium. _Aphasia_ is brought about by rubbing the head over the
region of the speech-centre. Pressure behind the occiput determines
_movements of imitation_. Heidenhain describes a number of curious
automatic tendencies to movement, which are brought about by stroking
various portions of the vertebral column. Certain other symptoms
have been frequently noticed, such as a flushed face and cold hands,
brilliant and congested eyes, dilated pupils. Dilated retinal vessels
and spasm of the accommodation are also reported.
* * * * *
_The theory of Suggestion_ denies that there is any special hypnotic
_state_ worthy of the name of trance or neurosis. All the symptoms
above described, as well as those to be described hereafter, are
results of that mental susceptibility which we all to some degree
possess, of yielding assent to outward suggestion, of affirming what
we strongly conceive, and of acting in accordance with what we are
made to expect. The bodily symptoms of the Salpétrière patients are
all of them results of expectation and training. The first patients
accidentally did certain things which their doctors thought typical and
caused to be repeated. The subsequent subjects 'caught on' and followed
the established tradition. In proof of this the fact is urged that the
classical three stages and their grouped symptoms have _only_ been
reported as spontaneously occurring, so far, at the Salpétrière, though
they may be superinduced by deliberate suggestion, in patients anywhere
found. The ocular symptoms, the flushed face, accelerated breathing,
etc., are said not to be symptoms of the passage into the hypnotic
state as such, but merely consequences of the strain on the eyes when
the method of looking at a bright object is used. They are absent in
the subjects at Nancy, where simple verbal suggestion is employed. The
various reflex effects (aphasia, echolalia, imitation, etc.) are but
habits induced by the influence of the operator, who unconsciously
urges the subject into the direction in which he would prefer to have
him go. The influence of the magnet, the opposite effects of upward and
downward passes, etc., are similarly explained. Even that sleepy and
inert condition, the advent of which seems to be the prime condition
of farther symptoms being developed, is said to be merely due to the
fact that the mind expects it to come; whilst its influence on the
other symptoms is not physiological, so to speak, but psychical, its
own easy realization by suggestion simply encouraging the subject to
expect that ulterior suggestions will be realized with equal ease.
The radical defenders of the suggestion-theory are thus led to deny
the very existence of the hypnotic state, in the sense of a peculiar
trance-like condition which deprives the patient of spontaneity and
makes him passive to suggestion from without. The trance itself is
only one of the suggestions, and many subjects in fact can be made to
exhibit the other hypnotic phenomena without the preliminary induction
of this one.
* * * * *
The theory of suggestion may be said to be quite triumphant at the
present day over the neurosis-theory as held at the Salpétrière, with
its three states, and its definite symptoms supposed to be produced by
physical agents apart from co-operation of the subject's mind. But it
is one thing to say this, and it is quite another thing to say that
there is no peculiar physiological condition whatever worthy of the
name of hypnotic trance, no peculiar state of nervous equilibrium,
'hypotaxy,' 'dissociation,' or whatever you please to call it, during
which the subject's susceptibility to outward suggestion is greater
than at ordinary times. All the facts seem to prove that, until this
trance-like state is assumed by the patient, suggestion produces very
insignificant results, but that, when it is once assumed, there are no
limits to suggestion's power. The state in question has many affinities
with ordinary sleep. It is probable, in fact, that we all pass through
it transiently whenever we fall asleep; and one might most naturally
describe the usual relation of operator and subject by saying that
the former keeps the latter suspended between waking and sleeping by
talking to him enough to keep his slumber from growing profound, and
yet not in such a way as to wake him up. A hynotized patient, _left
to himself,_ will either fall sound asleep or wake up entirely. The
difficulty in hypnotizing refractory persons is that of catching them
at the right moment of transition and making it permanent. Fixing
the eyes and relaxing the muscles of the body produce the hypnotic
state just as they facilitate the advent of sleep. The first stages
of ordinary sleep are characterized by a peculiar dispersed attitude
of the attention. Images come before consciousness which are entirely
incongruous with our ordinary beliefs and habits of thought. The
latter either vanish altogether or withdraw, as it were, inertly
into the background of the mind, and let the incongruous images reign
alone. These images acquire, moreover, an exceptional vivacity; they
become first 'hypnagogic hallucinations,' and then, as the sleep grows
deeper, dreams. Now the 'mono-ideism,' or else the impotency and
failure to 'rally' on the part of the background-ideas, which thus
characterize somnolescence, are unquestionably the result of a special
physiological change occurring in the brain at that time. Just so
that similar mono-ideism, or dissociation of the reigning fancy from
those other thoughts which might possibly act as its 'reductives,'
which characterize the hypnotic consciousness, must equally be due
to a special cerebral change. The term 'hypnotic trance,' which I
employ, tells us nothing of what the change is, but it marks the fact
that it exists, and is consequently a useful expression. The great
vivacity of the hypnotic images (as gauged by their motor effects), the
oblivion of them when normal life is resumed, the abrupt awakening,
the recollection of them again in subsequent trances, the anæsthesia
and hyperæsthesia which are so frequent, all point away from our
simple waking credulity and 'suggestibility' as the type by which the
phenomena are to be interpreted, and make us look rather towards sleep
and dreaming, or towards those deeper alterations of the personality
known as automatism, double consciousness, or 'second' personality for
the true analogues of the hypnotic trance.[515] Even the best hypnotic
subjects pass through life without any one suspecting them to possess
such a remarkable susceptibility, until by deliberate experiment it is
made manifest. The operator fixes their eyes or their attention a short
time to develop the propitious phase, holds them in it by his talk, and
_the state being there_, makes them the puppets of all his suggestions.
But no ordinary suggestions of waking life ever took such control of
their mind.
_The suggestion-theory may therefore be approved as correct, provided
we grant the trance-state as its prerequisite._ The three states
of Charcot, the strange reflexes of Heidenhain, and all the other
bodily phenomena which have been called direct consequences of the
trance-state itself, are not such. They are products of suggestion,
the trance-state having no particular outward symptoms of its own; but
without the trance-state there, those particular suggestions could
never have been successfully made.[516]
THE SYMPTOMS OF THE TRANCE.
This accounts for the altogether indefinite array of symptoms which
have been gathered together as characteristic of the hypnotic state.
The law of habit dominates hypnotic subjects even more than it does
waking ones. Any sort of personal peculiarity, any trick accidentally
fallen into in the first instance by some one subject, may, by
attracting attention, become stereotyped, serve as a pattern for
imitation, and figure as the type of a school. The first subject trains
the operator, the operator trains the succeeding subjects, all of
them in perfect good faith conspiring together to evolve a perfectly
arbitrary result. With the extraordinary perspicacity and subtlety
of perception which subjects often display for all that concerns the
operator with whom they are _en rapport_, it is hard to keep them
ignorant of anything which he expects. Thus it happens that one easily
verifies on new subjects what one has already seen on old ones, or any
desired symptom of which one may have heard or read.
The symptoms earliest observed by writers were all thought to be
typical. But with the multiplication of observed phenomena, the
importance of most particular symptoms as marks of the state has
diminished. This lightens very much our own immediate task. Proceeding
to enumerate the symptoms of the hypnotic trance, I may confine
myself to those which are intrinsically interesting, or which differ
considerably from the normal functions of man.
* * * * *
First of all comes _amnesia_. In the earlier stages of hypnotism the
patient remembers what has happened, but with successive sittings
he sinks into a deeper condition, which is commonly followed by
complete loss of memory. He may have been led through the liveliest
hallucinations and dramatic performances, and have exhibited the
intensest apparent emotion, but on waking he can recall nothing at all.
The same thing happens on waking from sleep in the midst of a dream--it
quickly eludes recall. But just as we may be _reminded_ of it, or of
parts of it, by meeting persons or objects which figured therein, so
on being adroitly prompted, the hypnotic patient will often remember
what happened in his trance. One cause of the forgetfulness seems to be
the disconnection of the trance performances with the system of waking
ideas. Memory requires a continuous train of association. M. Delbœuf,
reasoning in this way, woke his subjects in the midst of an action
begun during trance (washing the hands, e.g.), and found that they then
remembered the trance. The act in question bridged over the two states.
But one can often make them remember by merely telling them during the
trance that they _shall_ remember. Acts of one trance, moreover, are
usually recalled, either spontaneously or at command, during another
trance, provided that the contents of the two trances be not mutually
incompatible.
_Suggestibility._ The patient believes everything which his hypnotizer
tells him, and does everything which the latter commands. Even results
over which the will has normally no control, such as sneezing,
secretion, reddening and growing pale, alterations of temperature and
heart-beat, menstruation, action of the bowels, etc., may take place
in consequence of the operator's firm assertions during the hypnotic
trance, and the resulting conviction on the part of the subject,
that the effects will occur. Since almost all the phenomena yet to be
described are effects of this heightened suggestibility, I will say no
more under the general head, but proceed to illustrate the peculiarity
in detail.
_Effects on the voluntary muscles_ seem to be those most easily got;
and the ordinary routine of hypnotizing consists in provoking them
first. Tell the patient that he cannot open his eyes or his mouth,
cannot unclasp his hands or lower his raised arm, cannot rise from
his seat, or pick up a certain object from the floor, and he will be
immediately smitten with absolute impotence in these regards. The
effect here is generally due to the _involuntary contraction_ of
antagonizing muscles. But one can equally well suggest _paralysis_, of
an arm for example, in which case it will hang perfectly placid by the
subject's side. Cataleptic and tetanic rigidity are easily produced
by suggestion, aided by handling the parts. One of the favorite shows
at public exhibitions is that of a subject stretched stiff as a board
with his head on one chair and his heels on another. The cataleptic
retention of impressed attitudes differs from voluntary assumption of
the same attitude. An arm voluntarily held out straight will drop from
fatigue after a quarter of an hour at the utmost, and before it falls
the agent's distress will be made manifest by oscillations in the arm,
disturbances in the breathing, etc. But Charcot has shown that an arm
held out in hypnotic catalepsy, though it may as soon descend, yet does
so slowly and with no accompanying vibration, whilst the breathing
remains entirely calm. He rightly points out that this shows a profound
physiological change, and is proof positive against simulation, as far
as this symptom is concerned. A cataleptic attitude, moreover, may be
held for many hours.--Sometimes an expressive attitude, clinching of
the fist, contraction of the brows, will gradually set up a sympathetic
action of the other muscles of the body, so that at last a _tableau
vivant_ of fear, anger, disdain, prayer, or other emotional condition,
is produced with rare perfection. This effect would seem to be due
to the suggestion of the mental state by the first contraction.
Stammering, aphasia, or inability to utter certain words, pronounce
certain letters, are readily producible by suggestion.
_Hallucinations_ of all the senses and _delusions_ of every conceivable
kind can be easily suggested to good subjects. The emotional
effects are then often so lively, and the pantomimic display so
expressive, that it is hard not to believe in a certain 'psychic
hyper-excitability,' as one of the concomitants of the hypnotic
condition. You can make the subject think that he is freezing or
burning, itching or covered with dirt, or wet; you can make him
eat a potato for a peach, or drink a cup of vinegar for a glass of
champagne;[517] ammonia will smell to him like cologne water; a chair
will be a lion, a broom-stick a beautiful woman, a noise in the
street will be an orchestral music, etc., etc., with no limit except
your powers of invention and the patience of the lookers on.[518]
Illusions and hallucinations form the _pièces de résistance_ at public
exhibitions. The comic effect is at its climax when it is successfully
suggested to the subject that his personality is changed into that of
a baby, of a street boy, of a young lady dressing for a party, of a
stump orator, or of Napoleon the Great. He may even be transformed into
a beast, or an inanimate thing like a chair or a carpet, and in every
case will act out all the details of the part with a sincerity and
intensity seldom seen at the theatre. The excellence of the performance
is in these cases the best reply to the suspicion that the subject
may be shamming--so skilful a shammer must long since have found his
true function in life upon the stage. Hallucinations and histrionic
delusions generally go with a certain depth of the trance, and are
followed by complete forgetfulness. The subject awakens from them at
the command of the operator with a sudden start of surprise, and may
seem for a while a little dazed.
Subjects in this condition will receive and execute suggestions of
crime, and act out a theft, forgery, arson, or murder. A girl will
believe that she is married to her hypnotizer, etc. It is unfair,
however, to say that in these cases the subject is a pure puppet with
no spontaneity. His spontaneity is certainly not in abeyance so far
as things go which are harmoniously associated with the suggestion
given him. He takes the text from his operator; but he may amplify
and develop it enormously as he acts it out. His spontaneity is lost
only for those systems of ideas which _conflict_ with the suggested
delusion. The latter is thus 'systematized'; the rest of consciousness
is shut off, excluded, dissociated from it. In extreme cases the rest
of the mind would seem to be actually abolished and the hypnotic
subject to be literally a changed personality, a being in one of those
'second' states which we studied in Chapter X. But the reign of the
delusion is often not as absolute as this. If the thing suggested
be too intimately repugnant, the subject may strenuously resist and
get nervously excited in consequence, even to the point of having an
hysterical attack. The conflicting ideas slumber in the background
and merely permit those in the foreground to have their way until a
_real_ emergency arises; then they assert their rights. As M. Delbœuf
says, the subject surrenders himself good-naturedly to the performance,
stabs with the pasteboard dagger you give him because he knows what it
is, and fires off the pistol because he knows it has no ball; but for
a real murder he would not be your man. It is undoubtedly true that
subjects are often well aware that they are acting a part. They know
that what they do is absurd. They know that the hallucination which
they see, describe, and act upon, is not really there. They may laugh
at themselves; and they always recognize the abnormality of their state
when asked about it, and call it 'sleep.' One often notices a sort of
mocking smile upon them, as if they were playing a comedy, and they
may even say on 'coming to' that they were shamming all the while.
These facts have misled ultra-skeptical people so far as to make them
doubt the genuineness of any hypnotic phenomena at all. But, save the
consciousness of 'sleep,' they do not occur in the deeper conditions;
and when they do occur they are only a natural consequence of the fact
that the 'monoideism' is incomplete. The background-thoughts still
exist, and have the power of _comment_ on the suggestions, but no power
to inhibit their motor and associative effects. A similar condition is
frequent enough in the waking state, when an impulse carries us away
and our 'will' looks on wonderingly like an impotent spectator. These
'shammers' continue to sham in just the same way, every new time you
hypnotize them, until at last they are forced to admit that if shamming
there be, it is something very different from the free voluntary
shamming of waking hours.
_Real sensations may be abolished_ as well as false ones suggested.
Legs and breasts may be amputated, children born, teeth extracted, in
short the most painful experiences undergone, with no other anæsthetic
than the hypnotizer's assurance that no pain shall be felt. Similarly
morbid pains may be annihilated, neuralgias, toothaches, rheumatisms
cured. The sensation of hunger has thus been abolished, so that a
patient took no nourishment for fourteen days. The most interesting of
these suggested anæsthesias are those limited to certain objects of
perception. Thus a subject may be made blind to a certain person and to
him alone, or deaf to certain words but to no others.[519] In this case
the anæsthesia (or _negative hallucination_, as it has been called) is
apt to become _systematized_. Other things related to the person to
whom one has been made blind may also be shut out of consciousness.
What he says is not heard, his contact is not felt, objects which he
takes from his pocket are not seen, etc. Objects which he screens are
seen as if he were transparent. Facts about him are forgotten, his name
is not recognized when pronounced. Of course there is great variety
in the completeness of this systematic extension of the suggested
anæsthesia, but one may say that some tendency to it always exists.
When one of the subjects' own limbs is made anæsthetic, for example,
memories as well as sensations of its movements often seem to depart.
An interesting degree of the phenomenon is found in the case related
by M. Binet of a subject to whom it was suggested that a certain M. C.
was invisible. She still saw M. C., but saw him as a stranger, having
lost the memory of his name and his existence.--Nothing is easier than
to make subjects forget their own name and condition in life. It is one
of the suggestions which most promptly succeed, even with quite fresh
ones. A systematized amnesia of certain periods of one's life may also
be suggested, the subject placed, for instance, where he was a decade
ago with the intervening years obliterated from his mind.
The mental condition which accompanies these systematized anæsthesias
and amnesias is a very curious one. The anæsthesia is not a genuine
sensorial one, for if you make a real red cross (say) on a sheet of
white paper invisible to an hypnotic subject, and yet cause him to
look fixedly at a dot on the paper on or near the cross, he will, on
transferring his eye to a blank sheet, see a bluish-green after-image
of the cross. This proves that it has impressed his sensibility. He
has _felt_ it, but not _perceived_ it. He had actively ignored it,
refused to recognize it, as it were. Another experiment proves that he
must _distinguish_ it first in order thus to ignore it. Make a stroke
on paper or blackboard, and tell the subject it is not there, and he
will see nothing but the clean paper or board. Next, he not looking,
surround the original stroke with other strokes exactly like it, and
ask him what he sees. He will point out one by one all the new strokes
and omit the original one every time, no matter how numerous the new
strokes may be, or in what order they are arranged. Similarly, if the
original single stroke to which he is blind be _doubled_ by a prism of
sixteen degrees placed before one of his eyes (both being kept open),
he will say that he now sees _one_ stroke, and point in the direction
in which the image seen through the prism lies.
Obviously, then, he is not blind to the _kind_ of stroke in the least.
He is blind only to one individual stroke of that kind in a particular
position on the board or paper,--that is, to a particular complex
object; and, paradoxical as it may seem to say so, he must distinguish
it with great accuracy from others like it, in order to remain blind
to it when the others are brought near. He 'apperceives' it, as a
preliminary to not seeing it at all! How to conceive of this state of
mind is not easy. It would be much simpler to understand the process,
if adding new strokes made the first one visible. There would then be
two different objects apperceived as totals,--paper with one stroke,
paper with two strokes; and, blind to the former, he would see all
that was _in_ the latter, because he would have apperceived it as a
different total in the first instance.
A process of this sort occurs sometimes (not always) when the new
strokes, instead of being mere repetitions of the original one, are
lines which combine with it into a total object, say a human face. The
subject of the trance then may regain his sight of the line to which he
had previously been blind, by seeing it as part of the face.
When by a prism before one eye a previously invisible line has been
made visible to that eye, and the other eye is closed or screened,
_its_ closure makes no difference; the line still remains visible. But
if _then_ the prism is removed, the line will disappear even to the eye
which a moment ago saw it, and both eyes will revert to their original
blind state.
We have, then, to deal in these cases neither with a sensorial
anæsthesia, nor with a mere failure to notice, but with something much
more complex; namely, an active counting out and positive exclusion of
certain objects. It is as when one 'cuts' an acquaintance, 'ignores'
a claim, or 'refuses to be influenced' by a consideration of whose
existence one remains aware. Thus a lover of Nature in America
finds himself able to overlook and ignore entirely the board- and
rail-fences and general roadside raggedness, and revel in the beauty
and picturesqueness of the other elements of the landscape, whilst to
a newly-arrived European the fences are so aggressively present as to
spoil enjoyment.
Messrs. Gurney, Janet, and Binet have shown that the ignored elements
are preserved in a split-off portion of the subjects' consciousness
which can be tapped in certain ways, and made to give an account of
itself (see Vol. I. p. 209).
_Hyperæsthesia of the senses_ is as common a symptom as anæsthesia.
On the skin two points can be discriminated at less than the normal
distance. The sense of touch is so delicate that (as M. Delbœuf
informs me) a subject after simply poising on her finger-tips a
blank card drawn from a pack of similar ones can pick it out from
the pack again by its 'weight.' We approach here the line where, to
many persons, it seems as if something more than the ordinary senses,
however sharpened, were required in explanation. I have seen a coin
from the operator's pocket repeatedly picked out by the subject from a
heap of twenty others,[520] by its greater 'weight' in the subject's
language.--Auditory hyperæsthesia may enable a subject to hear a watch
tick, or his operator speak, in a distant room.--One of the most
extraordinary examples of visual hyperæsthesia is that reported by
Bergson, in which a subject who seemed to be reading through the back
of a book held and looked at by the operator, was really proved to be
reading the image of the page reflected on the latter's cornea. The
same subject was able to discriminate with the naked eye details in a
microscopic preparation. Such cases of 'hyperæsthesia of vision' as
that reported by Taguet and Sauvaire, where subjects could see things
mirrored by non-reflecting bodies, or through opaque pasteboard, would
seem rather to belong to 'psychical research', than to the present
category.--The ordinary test of visual hyperacuteness in hypnotism
is the favorite trick of giving a subject the hallucination of a
picture on a blank sheet of card-board, and then mixing the latter
with a lot of other similar sheets. The subject will always find the
picture on the original sheet again, and recognize infallibly if
it has been turned over, or upside down, although the bystanders
have to resort to artifice to identify it again. The Subject notes
peculiarities on the card, too small for waking observation to
detect.[521] If it be said that the spectators guide him by their
manner, their breathing, etc., that is only another proof of his
hyperæsthesia; for he undoubtedly _is_ conscious of subtler personal
indications (of his operator's mental states especially) than he
could notice in his waking state. Examples of this are found in the
so-called 'magnetic _rapport_.' This is a name for the fact that in
deep trance, or in lighter trance whenever the suggestion is made,
the subject is deaf and blind to everyone but the operator or those
spectators to whom the latter expressly awakens his senses. The most
violent appeals from anyone else are for him as if non-existent,
whilst he obeys the faintest signals on the part of his hypnotizer.
If in catalepsy, his limbs will retain their attitude only when the
operator moves them; when others move them they fall down, etc. A more
remarkable fact still is that the patient will often answer anyone
whom his operator touches, or at whom he even points his finger, in
however concealed a manner. All which is rationally explicable by
expectation and suggestion, if only it be farther admitted that his
senses are acutely sharpened for all the operator's movements.[522]
He often shows great anxiety and restlessness if the latter is out
of the room. A favorite experiment of Mr. E. Gurney's was to put the
subject's hands through an opaque screen, and cause the operator
to point at one finger. _That_ finger presently grew insensible or
rigid. A bystander pointing simultaneously at another finger, never
made that insensible or rigid. Of course the elective _rapport_ with
their operator had been developed in these trained subjects during
the hypnotic state, but the phenomenon then occurred in some of them
during the waking state, even when their consciousness was absorbed in
animated conversation with a fourth party.[523] I confess that when I
saw these experiments I was impressed with the necessity for admitting
between the _emanations_ from different people differences for which
we have no name, and a discriminative sensibility for them of the
nature of which we can form no clear conception, but which seems to be
developed in certain subjects by the hypnotic trance.--The enigmatic
reports of the effect of magnets and metals, even if they be due, as
many contend, to unintentional suggestion on the operator's part,
certainly involve hyperæsthetic perception, for the operator seeks as
well as possible to conceal the moment when the magnet is brought into
play, and yet the subject not only finds it out that moment in a way
difficult to understand, but may develop effects which (in the first
instance certainly) the operator did not expect to find. Unilateral
contractures, movements, paralyses, hallucinations, etc., are made to
pass to the other side of the body, hallucinations to disappear, or
to change to the complementary color, suggested emotions to pass into
their opposites, etc. Many Italian observations agree with the French
ones, and the upshot is that if unconscious suggestion lie at the
bottom of this matter, the patients show an enormously exalted power
of divining what it is they are expected to do. This hyperæsthetic
perception is what concerns us now.[524] Its _modus_ cannot yet be said
to be defined.
_Changes in the nutrition of the tissues_ may be produced by
suggestion. These effects lead into therapeutics--a subject which
I do not propose to treat of here. But I may say that there seems
no reasonable ground for doubting that in certain chosen subjects
the suggestion of a congestion, a burn, a blister, a raised papule,
or a bleeding from the nose or skin, may produce the effect.
Messrs. Beaunis, Berjon, Bernheim, Bourru, Burot, Charcot, Delbœuf,
Dumontpallier, Focachon, Forel, Jendrássik, Krafft-Ebing, Liébeault,
Liégeois, Lipp, Mabille, and others have recently vouched for one or
other of these effects. Messrs. Delbœuf and Liégeois have annulled by
suggestion, one the effects of a burn, the other of a blister. Delbœuf
was led to his experiments after seeing a burn on the skin produced
by suggestion, at the Salpétrière, by reasoning that if the idea of
a pain could produce inflammation it must be because pain was itself
an inflammatory irritant, and that the abolition of it from a real
burn ought therefore to entail the absence of inflammation. He applied
the actual cautery (as well as vesicants) to symmetrical places on
the skin, affirming that no pain should be felt on one of the sides.
The result was a dry scorch on that side, with (as he assures me) no
after-mark, but on the other side a regular blister with suppuration
and a subsequent scar. This explains the innocuity of certain assaults
made on subjects during trance. To test simulation, recourse is often
had to sticking pins under their finger-nails or through their tongue,
to inhalations of strong ammonia, and the like. These irritations, when
not felt by the subject, seem to leave no after-consequences. One is
reminded of the reported non-inflammatory character of the wounds made
on themselves by dervishes in their pious orgies. On the other hand,
the reddenings and bleedings of the skin along certain lines, suggested
by tracing lines or pressing objects thereupon, put the accounts handed
down to us of the stigmata of the cross appearing on the hands, feet,
sides, and forehead of certain Catholic mystics in a new light. As so
often happens, a fact is denied until a welcome interpretation comes
with it. Then it is admitted readily enough; and evidence judged quite
insufficient to back a claim, so long as the church had an interest
in making it, proves to be quite sufficient for modern scientific
enlightenment, the moment it appears that a reputed saint can thereby
be classed as 'a case of hystero-epilepsy.'
* * * * *
There remain two other topics, viz., post-hypnotic effects of
suggestion, and effects of suggestion in the waking state.
_Post-hypnotic, or deferred, suggestions_ are such as are given to
the patients during trance, to take effect after waking. They succeed
with a certain number of patients even when the execution is named
for a remote period--months or even a year, in one case reported by
M. Liégeois. In this way one can make the patient feel a pain, or
be paralyzed, or be hungry or thirsty, or have an hallucination,
positive or negative, or perform some fantastic action after emerging
from his trance. The effect in question may be ordered to take place
not immediately, but after an interval of time has elapsed, and the
interval may be left to the subject to measure, or may be marked by
a certain signal. The moment the signal occurs, or the time is run
out, the subject, who until then seems in a perfectly normal waking
condition, will experience the suggested effect. In many instances,
whilst thus obedient to the suggestion, he seems to fall into the
hypnotic condition again. This is proved by the fact that the moment
the hallucination or suggested performance is over he forgets it,
denies all knowledge of it, and so forth; and by the further fact
that he is 'suggestible' during its performance, that is, will
receive new hallucinations, etc., at command. A moment later and this
suggestibility has disappeared. It cannot be said, however, that
relapse into the trance is an absolutely necessary condition for the
post-hypnotic carrying out of commands, for the subject may be neither
suggestible nor amnesic, and may struggle with all the strength of his
will against the absurdity of this impulse which he feels rising in
him, he knows not why. In these cases, as in most cases, he forgets the
circumstance of the impulse having been suggested to him in a previous
trance; regards it as arising within himself; and often improvises, as
he yields to it, some more or less plausible or ingenious motive by
which to justify it to the lookers-on. He acts, in short, with his
usual sense of personal spontaneity and freedom; and the disbelievers
in the freedom of the will have naturally made much of these cases in
their attempts to show it to be an illusion.
The only really mysterious feature of these deferred suggestions is
the patient's absolute ignorance during the interval preceding their
execution that they have been deposited in his mind. They will often
surge up at the preappointed time, even though you have vainly tried a
while before to make him recall the circumstances of their production.
The most important class of post-hypnotic suggestions are, of course,
those relative to the patient's health--bowels, sleep, and other bodily
functions. Among the most _interesting_ (apart from the hallucinations)
are those relative to future trances. One can determine the hour and
minute, or the signal, at which the patient will of his own accord
lapse into trance again. One can make him susceptible in future to
another operator who may have been unsuccessful with him in the past.
Or more important still in certain cases, one can, by suggesting that
certain persons shall never be able hereafter to put him to sleep,
remove him for all future time from hypnotic influences which might
be dangerous. This, indeed, is the simple and natural safeguard
against those 'dangers of hypnotism' of which uninstructed persons
talk so vaguely. A subject who knows himself to be ultra-susceptible
should never allow himself to be entranced by an operator in whose
moral delicacy he lacks complete confidence; and he can use a trusted
operator's suggestions to protect himself against liberties which
others, knowing his weakness, might be tempted to take with him.
The mechanism by which the command is retained until the moment for
its execution arrives is a mystery which has given rise to much
discussion. The experiments of Gurney and the observations of M.
Pierre Janet and others on certain hysterical somnabulists seem to
prove that it is stored up in consciousness; not simply organically
registered, but that _the consciousness which thus retains it is split
off, dissociated from the rest of the subject's mind._ We have here,
in short, an experimental production of one of those 'second' states
of the personality of which we have spoken so often. Only here the
second state coexists as well as alternates with the first. Gurney had
the brilliant idea of _tapping_ this second consciousness by means of
the planchette. He found that certain persons, who were both hypnotic
subjects and automatic writers, would if their hands were placed on
a planchette (after being wakened from a trance in which they had
received the suggestion of something to be done at a later time) write
out unconsciously the order, or something connected with it. This shows
that something inside of them, which could express itself through
the hand alone, was continuing to think of the order, and possibly
of it alone. These researches have opened a new vista of possible
experimental investigations into the so-called 'second' states of the
personality.
Some subjects seem almost as obedient to suggestion in the waking state
as in sleep, or even more so, according to certain observers. Not only
muscular phenomena, but changes of personality and hallucinations are
recorded as the result of simple affirmation on the operator's part,
without the previous ceremony of 'magnetizing' or putting into the
'mesmeric sleep.' These are all trained subjects, however, so far as I
know, and the affirmation must apparently be accompanied by the patient
concentrating his attention and gazing, however briefly, into the eyes
of the operator. It is probable therefore that an extremely rapidly
induced condition of trance is a prerequisite for success in these
experiments.
* * * * *
I have now made mention of all the more important phenomena of the
hypnotic trance. Of their therapeutic or forensic bearings this is
not the proper place to speak. The recent literature of the subject
is quite voluminous, but much of it consists in repetition. The best
compendious work on the subject is 'Der Hypnotismus,' by Dr. A. Moll
(Berlin, 1889; and just translated into English, N. Y., 1890), which
is extraordinarily complete and judicious. The other writings most
recommendable are subjoined in the note.[525] Most of them contain a
historical sketch and much bibliography. A complete bibliography has
been published by M. Dessoir (Berlin, 1888).
* * * * *
[513] It should be said that the methods of leaving the patient to
himself, and that of the simple verbal suggestion of sleep (the
so-called Nancy method introduced by Liébeault of that place), seem,
wherever applicable, to be the best, as they entail none of the
after-inconveniences which occasionally follow upon straining his eyes.
A new patient should not be put through a great variety of different
suggestions in immediate succession. He should be waked up from time to
time, and then rehypnotized to avoid mental confusion and excitement.
Before finally waking a subject you should _undo_ whatever delusive
suggestions you may have implanted in him, by telling him that they
are all gone, etc., and that you are now going to restore him to his
natural state. Headache, languor, etc., which sometimes follow the
first trance or two, must be banished at the outset, by the operator
strongly assuring the subject that such things _never_ come from
hypnotism, that the subject _must not_ have them, etc.
[514] Certain facts would seem to point that way. Cf., e.g., the
case of the man described by P. Despine, Étude Scientifique sur le
Somnambulisme, p. 286 ff.
[515] The state is not _identical_ with sleep, however analogous in
certain respects. The lighter stages of it, particularly, differ
from sleep and dreaming, inasmuch as they are characterized almost
exclusively by _muscular_ inabilities and compulsions, which are not
noted in ordinary somnolescence, and the _mind_, which is confused in
somnolescence, may be quite clearly conscious, in the lighter state of
trance, of all that is going on.
[516] The word 'suggestion' has been bandied about too much as if it
explained all mysteries: When the subject obeys it is by reason of the
'operator's suggestion'; when he proves refractory it is in consequence
of an 'auto-suggestion' which he has made to himself, etc., etc. What
explains everything explains nothing; and it must be remembered that
what _needs_ explanation here is the fact that in a certain condition
of the subject suggestions operate as they do _at no other time_; that
through them functions are affected which ordinarily elude the action
of the waking will; and that usually all this happens in a condition of
which no after-memory remains.
[517] A complete fit of drunkenness may be the consequence of the
suggested champagne. It is even said that real drunkenness has been
cured by suggestion.
[518] The suggested hallucination may be followed by a negative
after-image, just as if it were a real object. This can be very easily
verified with the suggested hallucination of a colored cross on a sheet
of white paper. The subject, on turning to another sheet of paper, will
see a cross of the complementary color. Hallucinations have been shown
by MM. Binet and Féré to be doubled by a prism or mirror, magnified by
a lens, and in many other ways to behave optically like real objects.
These points have been discussed already on p. 138 ff.
[519] M. Liégeois explains the common exhibition-trick of making the
subject unable to get his arms into his coat-sleeves again after he has
taken his coat off, by an anæsthesia to the necessary parts of the coat.
[520] Precautions being taken against differences of temperature and
other grounds of suggestion.
[521] It should be said, however, that the bystander's ability to
discriminate unmarked cards and sheets of paper from each other is much
greater than one would naturally suppose.
[522] I must repeat, however, that we are here on the verge of possibly
unknown forces and modes of communication. Hypnotization at a distance,
with no grounds for expectation on the subject's part that it was to be
tried, seems pretty well established in certain very rare cases. See in
general, for information on these matters, the Proceedings of the Soc.
for Psych. Research, _passim_.
[523] Here again the perception in question must take place below the
threshold of ordinary consciousness, possibly in one of those split-off
selves or 'second' states whose existence we have so often to recognize.
[524] I myself verified many of the above effects of the magnet on a
blindfolded subject on whom I was trying them for the first time, and
whom I believe to have never heard of them before. The moment, however,
an opaque screen was added to the blindfolding, the effects ceased to
coincide with the approximation of the magnet, so that it looks as if
visual perception had been instrumental in producing them. The subject
passed from my observation, so that I never could clear up the mystery.
Of course I gave him consciously no hint of what I was looking for.
[525] Binet and Féré, 'Animal Magnetism,' in the International
Scientific Series; A. Bernheim. 'Suggestive Therapeutics' (N. Y.,
1889); J. Liégeois, 'De la Suggestion' (1889); E. Gurney, two articles
in Mind, vol. ix.--In the recent revival of interest in the history
of this subject, it seems a pity that the admirably critical and
scientific work of Dr. John Kearsley Mitchell of Philadelphia should
remain relatively so unknown. It is quite worthy to rank with Braid's
investigations. See "Five Essays" by the above author, edited by S.
Weir Mitchell, Philadelphia, 1859, pp. 141-274.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
NECESSARY TRUTHS AND THE EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE.
In this final chapter I shall treat of what has sometimes been called
_psychogenesis_, and try to ascertain just how far the connections
of things in the outward environment can account for our tendency to
think of, and to react upon, certain things in certain ways and in no
others, even though personally we have had of the things in question
no experience, or almost no experience, at all. It is a familiar truth
that some propositions are _necessary_. We _must_ attach the predicate
'equal' to the subject 'opposite sides of a parallelogram' if we think
those terms together at all, whereas we need not in any such way attach
the predicate 'rainy,' for example, to the subject 'to-morrow.' The
dubious sort of coupling of terms is universally admitted to be due to
'experience'; the certain sort is ascribed to the 'organic structure'
of the mind. This structure is in turn supposed by the so-called
_apriorists_ to be of transcendental origin, or at any rate not to
be explicable by experience; whilst by evolutionary empiricists it
is supposed to be also due to experience, only not to the experience
of the individual, but to that of his ancestors as far back as one
may please to go. Our emotional and instinctive tendencies, our
irresistible impulses to couple certain movements with the perception
or thought of certain things, are also features of our connate mental
structure, and like the necessary judgments, are interpreted by the
apriorists and the empiricists in the same warring ways.
I shall try in the course of the chapter to make plain three things:
1) That, taking the word experience as it is universally understood,
the experience of the race can no more account for our necessary or _a
priori_ judgments than the experience of the individual can;
2) That there is no good evidence for the belief that our instinctive
reactions are fruits of our ancestors' education in the midst of the
same environment, transmitted to us at birth.
3) That the features of our organic mental structure cannot be
explained at all by our conscious intercourse with the outer
environment, but must rather be understood as congenital variations,
'accidental'[526] in the first instance, but then transmitted as fixed
features of the race.
On the whole, then, the account which the apriorists give of the
_facts_ is that which I defend; although I should contend (as will
hereafter appear) for a naturalistic view of their _cause_.
* * * * *
The first thing I have to say is that all schools (however they
otherwise differ) must allow that the _elementary qualities_ of cold,
heat, pleasure, pain, red, blue, sound, silence, etc., are original,
innate, or _a priori_ properties of our subjective nature, even though
they should require the touch of experience to waken them into actual
consciousness, and should slumber, to all eternity, without it.
This is so on either of the two hypotheses we may make concerning the
relation of the feelings to the realities at whose touch they become
alive. For in the first place, if a feeling do _not_ mirror the reality
which wakens it and to which we say it corresponds, if it mirror no
reality whatever outside of the mind, it of course is a purely mental
product. By its very definition it can be nothing else. But in the
second place, even if it _do_ mirror the reality exactly, still it _is_
not that reality itself, it is a duplication of it, the result of a
mental reaction. And that the mind should have the power of reacting in
just that duplicate way can only be stated as a _harmony_ between its
nature and the nature of the truth outside of it, a harmony whereby it
follows that the qualities of both parties match.
The originality of these _elements_ is not, then, a question for
dispute. _The warfare of philosophers is exclusively relative to
their_ FORMS OF COMBINATION. The empiricist maintains that these forms
can only follow the order of combination in which the elements were
originally awakened by the impressions of the external world; the
apriorists insist, on the contrary, that _some_ modes of combination,
at any rate, follow from the natures of the elements themselves, and
that no amount of experience can modify this result.
WHAT IS MEANT BY EXPERIENCE?
The phrase 'organic mental structure' names the matter in dispute. Has
the mind such a structure or not? Are its contents _arranged_ from
the start, or is the arrangement they may possess simply due to the
shuffling of them by experience in an absolutely plastic bed? Now the
first thing to make sure of is that when we talk of 'experience,' we
attach a definite meaning to the word. _Experience means experience
of something foreign supposed to impress us,_ whether spontaneously
or in consequence of our own exertions and acts. Impressions, as we
well know, affect certain orders of sequence and coexistence, and the
mind's habits copy the habits of the impressions, so that our images
of things assume a time- and space-arrangement which resembles the
time- and space-arrangements outside. To uniform outer coexistences
and sequences correspond constant conjunctions of ideas, to fortuitous
coexistences and sequences casual conjunctions of ideas. We are sure
that fire will burn and water wet us, less sure that thunder will come
after lightning, not at all sure whether a strange dog will bark at
us or let us go by. In these ways experience moulds us every hour,
and makes of our minds a mirror of the time- and space-connections
between the things in the world. The principle of habit within us so
_fixes_ the copy at last that we find it difficult even to imagine how
the outward order could possibly be different from what it is, and we
continually divine from the present what the future is to be. These
habits of transition, from one thought to another, are features of
mental structure which were lacking in us at birth; we can see their
growth under experience's moulding finger, and we can see how often
experience undoes her own work, and for an earlier order substitutes
a new one. '_The order of experience_,' in this matter of the time-
and space-conjunctions of things, is thus an indisputably _vera causa_
of our forms of thought. It is our educator, our sovereign helper and
friend; and its name, standing for something with so real and definite
a use, ought to be kept sacred and encumbered with no vaguer meaning.
If _all_ the connections among ideas in the mind could be interpreted
as so many combinations of sense-data wrought into fixity in this way
from without, then experience in the common and legitimate sense of the
word would be the sole fashioner of the mind.
The empirical school in psychology has in the main contended that they
can be so interpreted. Before our generation, it was the experience
of the individual only which was meant. But when one nowadays says
that the human mind owes its present shape to experience, he means the
experience of ancestors as well. Mr. Spencer's statement of this is the
earliest emphatic one, and deserves quotation in full:[527]
"The supposition that the inner cohesions are adjusted to the outer
persistences by _accumulated_ experience of those outer persistences
is in harmony with all our actual knowledge of mental phenomena.
Though in so far as reflex actions and instincts are concerned,
the experience-hypothesis seems insufficient; yet its seeming
insufficiency occurs only where the evidence is beyond our reach.
Nay, even here such few facts as we can get point to the conclusion
that automatic psychical connections result from the registration of
_experiences continued for numberless generations_.
"In brief, the case stands thus: It is agreed that all psychical
relations, save the absolutely indissoluble, are determined by
experiences. Their various strengths are admitted, other things equal,
to be proportionate to the _multiplication of experiences_. It is an
unavoidable corollary that an _infinity of experiences_ will produce
a psychical relation that is indissoluble. Though such infinity of
experiences cannot be received by a single individual, yet it may be
received by the succession of individuals forming a race. And if there
is a transmission of induced tendencies in the nervous system, it is
inferrible that _all psychical relations whatever_, from the necessary
to the fortuitous, result from the experiences of the corresponding
external relations; and are so brought into harmony with them.
"Thus, the experience-hypothesis furnishes an adequate solution. The
genesis of instinct, the development of memory and reason out of
it, and the consolidation of rational actions and inferences into
instinctive ones, are alike explicable on the _single principle_
that the cohesion between psychical states is proportionate to the
_frequency_ with which the relation between the answering external
phenomena has been _repeated in experience_.
"The _universal law_ that, other things equal, the cohesion of
psychical states is proportionate to the _frequency_ with which they
have followed one another in experience, supplies an explanation of
the so-called 'forms of thought,' as soon as it is supplemented by
the law that _habitual_ psychical successions entail some hereditary
tendency to such successions, which, under persistent conditions,
will become cumulative in generation after generation. We saw that
the establishment of those compound reflex actions called instincts
is comprehensible on the principle that inner relations are, _by
perpetual repetition,_ organized into correspondence with outer
relations. We have now to observe that the establishment of those
consolidated, those indissoluble, those instinctive mental relations
constituting our ideas of Space and Time is comprehensible on the
same principle. For if even to external relations that are _often_
experienced during the life of a single organism, answering internal
relations are established that become next to automatic--if such a
combination of psychical changes as that which guides a savage in
hitting a bird with an arrow becomes, by constant repetition, so
organized as to be performed almost without thought of the processes
of adjustment gone through--and if skill of this kind is so far
transmissible that particular races of men become characterized by
particular aptitudes, which are nothing else than partially-organized
psychical connections; then, if there exist certain external relations
which are experienced by all organisms at all instants of their
waking lives--relations which are absolutely constant, absolutely
universal--there will be established answering internal relations
that are absolutely constant, absolutely universal. Such relations
we have in those of Space and Time. The organization of subjective
relations adjusted to these objective relations has been cumulative,
not in each race of creatures only, but throughout successive races of
creatures; and such subjective relations have, therefore, become more
consolidated than all others. Being experienced in every perception
and every action of each creature, these connections among outer
existences must, for this reason too, be responded to by connections
among inner feelings, that are, above all others, indissoluble. As
the substrata of all other relations in the _non-ego_, they must
be responded to by conceptions that are the substrata of all other
relations in the _ego_. Being the _constant and infinitely-repeated_
elements of thought, they must become the automatic elements of
thought--the elements of thought which it is impossible to get rid
of--the 'forms of intuition.'
"Such, it seems to me, is the only possible reconciliation between the
experience-hypothesis and the hypothesis of the transcendentalists;
neither of which is tenable by itself. Insurmountable difficulties
are presented by the Kantian doctrine (as we shall hereafter see);
and the antagonist doctrine, taken alone, presents difficulties
that are equally insurmountable. To rest with the unqualified
assertion that, antecedent to experience, the mind is a blank,
is to ignore the questions--whence comes the power of organizing
experiences? whence arise the different degrees of that power
possessed by different races of organisms, and different individuals
of the same race? If, at birth, there exists nothing but a passive
receptivity of impressions, why is not a horse as educable as a man?
Should it be said that language makes the difference, then why do
not the cat and the dog, reared in the same household, arrive at
equal degrees and kinds of intelligence? Understood in its current
form, the experience-hypothesis implies that the presence of a
definitely-organized nervous system is a circumstance of no moment--a
fact not needing to be taken into account! Yet it is the all-important
fact--the fact to which, in one sense, the criticisms of Leibnitz and
others pointed--the fact without which an assimilation of experiences
is inexplicable. Throughout the animal kingdom in general, the actions
are dependent on the nervous structure. The physiologist shows us
that each reflex movement implies the agency of certain nerves and
ganglia; that a development of complicated instincts is accompanied by
complication of the nervous centres and their commissural connections;
that the same creature in different stages, as larva and imago for
example, changes its instincts as its nervous structure changes; and
that as we advance to creatures of high intelligence, a vast increase
in the size and in the complexity of the nervous system takes place.
What is the obvious inference? It is that the ability to co-ordinate
impressions and to perform the appropriate actions always implies
the pre-existence of certain nerves arranged in a certain way. What
is the meaning of the human brain? It is that the many _established_
relations among its parts stand for so many _established_ relations
among the psychical changes. Each of the constant connections
among the fibres of the cerebral masses answers to some _constant
connection_ of phenomena in the experiences of the race. Just as
the organized arrangement subsisting between the sensory nerves of
the nostrils and the motor nerves of the respiratory muscles not
only makes possible a sneeze, but also, in the newly-born infant,
implies sneezings to be hereafter performed; so, all the organized
arrangements subsisting among the nerves of the infant's brain not
only make possible certain combinations of impressions, but also imply
that such combinations will hereafter be made--imply that there are
answering combinations in the outer world--imply a preparedness to
cognize these combinations--imply faculties of comprehending them.
It is true that the resulting compound psychical changes do not take
place with the same readiness and automatic precision as the simple
reflex action instanced--it is true that some individual experiences
seem required to establish them. But while this is partly due to the
fact that these combinations are highly involved, extremely varied in
their modes of occurrence, made up therefore of psychical relations
less completely coherent, and hence need further repetitions to
perfect them; it is in a much greater degree due to the fact that at
birth the organization of the brain is incomplete, and does not cease
its spontaneous progress for twenty or thirty years afterwards. Those
who contend that knowledge results wholly from the experiences of the
individual, ignoring as they do the mental evolution which accompanies
the autogenous development of the nervous system, fall into an error
as great as if they were to ascribe all bodily growth and structure
to exercise, forgetting the innate tendency to assume the adult form.
Were the infant born with a full-sized and completely-constructed
brain, their position would be less untenable. But, as the case
stands, the gradually-increasing intelligence displayed throughout
childhood and youth is more attributable to the completion of the
cerebral organization than to the individual experiences--a truth
proved by the fact that in adult life there is sometimes displayed
a high endowment of some faculty which, during education, was never
brought into play. Doubtless, experiences received by the individual
furnish the concrete materials for all thought. Doubtless, the
organized and semi-organized arrangements existing among the cerebral
nerves can give no knowledge until there has been a presentation of
the external relations to which they correspond. And doubtless the
child's daily observations and reasonings aid the formation of those
involved nervous connections that are in process of spontaneous
evolution; just as its daily gambols aid the development of its
limbs. But saying this is quite a different thing from saying that
its intelligence is wholly _produced_ by its experiences. That is an
utterly inadmissible doctrine--a doctrine which makes the presence of
a brain meaningless--a doctrine which makes idiotcy unaccountable.
"In the sense, then, that there exist in the nervous system certain
pre-established relations answering to relations in the environment,
there is truth in the doctrine of 'forms of intuition'--not the truth
which its defenders suppose, but a parallel truth. Corresponding to
absolute external relations, there are established in the structure
of the nervous system absolute internal relations--relations that
are potentially present before birth in the shape of definite
nervous connections; that are antecedent to, and independent of,
individual experiences; and that are automatically disclosed along
with the first cognitions. And, as here understood, it is not only
these fundamental relations which are thus predetermined, but also
hosts of other relations of a more or less constant kind, which are
congenitally represented by more or less complete nervous connections.
But these predetermined internal relations, though independent of the
experiences of the individual, are not independent of experiences in
general: they have been determined by the experiences of preceding
organisms. The corollary here drawn from the general argument is that
the human brain is an organized register of _infinitely-numerous_
experiences received during the evolution of life, or rather during
the evolution of that series of organisms through which the human
organism has been reached. The effects of the most _uniform and
frequent_ of these experiences have been successively bequeathed,
principal and interest; and have slowly amounted to that high
intelligence which lies latent in the brain of the infant--which the
infant in after-life exercises and perhaps strengthens or further
complicates--and which, with minute additions, it bequeaths to future
generations. And thus it happens that the European inherits from
twenty to thirty cubic inches more brain than the Papuan. Thus it
happens that faculties, as of music, which scarcely exist in some
inferior human races, become congenital in superior ones. Thus it
happens that out of savages unable to count up to the number of their
fingers, and speaking a language containing only nouns and verbs,
arise at length our Newtons and Shakspeares."
This is a brilliant and seductive statement, and it doubtless includes
a good deal of truth. Unfortunately it fails to go into details; and
when the details are scrutinized, as they soon must be by us, many
of them will be seen to be inexplicable in this simple way, and the
choice will then remain to us either of denying the experiential origin
of certain of our judgments, or of enlarging the meaning of the word
experience so as to include these cases among its effects.
TWO MODES OF ORIGIN OF BRAIN STRUCTURE.
If we adopt the former course we meet with a controversial difficulty.
The 'experience-philosophy' has from time immemorial been the
opponent of theological modes of thought. The word experience has
a halo of anti-supernaturalism about it; so that if anyone express
dissatisfaction with any function claimed for it, he is liable to be
treated as if he could only be animated by loyalty to the catechism,
or in some way have the interests of obscurantism at heart. I am
entirely certain that, on this ground alone, what I have erelong to
say will make this a sealed chapter to many of my readers. "He denies
experience!" they will exclaim, "denies science; believes the mind
created by miracle; is a regular old partisan of innate ideas! That is
enough! we'll listen to such antediluvian twaddle no more." Regrettable
as is the loss of readers capable of such wholesale discipleship, I
feel that a definite meaning for the word experience is even more
important than their company. 'Experience' does not mean every natural,
as opposed to every supernatural, cause. It means a particular sort
of natural agency, alongside of which other more recondite natural
agencies may perfectly well exist. With the scientific animus of
anti-supernaturalism we ought to agree, but we ought to free ourselves
from its verbal idols and bugbears.
* * * * *
Nature has many methods of producing the same effect. She may make a
'born' draughtsman or singer by tipping in a certain direction at an
opportune moment the molecules of some human ovum; or she may bring
forth a child ungifted and make him spend laborious but successful
years at school. She may make our ears ring by the sound of a bell,
or by a dose of quinine; make us see yellow by spreading a field of
buttercups before our eyes, or by mixing a little santonine powder with
our food; fill us with terror of certain surroundings by making them
really dangerous, or by a blow which produces a pathological alteration
of our brain. It is obvious that we need two words to designate these
two modes of operating. _In the one case the natural agents produce
perceptions which take cognizance of the agents themselves; in the
other case, they produce perceptions which take cognizance of something
else._ What is taught to the mind by the 'experience,' in the first
case, is the _order of the experience itself_--the 'inner relation' (in
Spencer's phrase) 'corresponds' to the 'outer relation' which produced
it, by remembering and knowing the latter. But in the case of the
_other_ sort of natural agency, what is taught to the mind has nothing
to do with the agency itself, but with some different outer relation
altogether. A diagram will express the alternatives. B stands for our
human brain in the midst of the world. All the little _o_'s with arrows
proceeding from them are natural objects (like sunsets, etc.), which
impress it through the senses, and in the strict sense of the word give
it _experience_, teaching it by habit and association what is the order
of their ways. All the little _x_'s inside the brain and all the little
_x's_ outside of it are other natural objects and processes (in the
ovum, in the blood, etc.), which equally modify the brain, but mould
it to no cognition of _themselves_. The _tinnitus aurium_ discloses no
properties of the quinine; the musical endowment teaches no embryology;
the morbid dread (of solitude, perhaps) no brain-pathology; but the way
in which a dirty sunset and a rainy morrow hang together in the mind
copies and teaches the sequences of sunsets and rainfall in the outer
world.
[Illustration: FIG. 94.]
In zoological evolution we have two modes in which an animal race may
grow to be a better match for its environment.
First, the so-called way of 'adaptation,' in which the environment may
itself modify its inhabitant by exercising, hardening, and habituating
him to certain sequences, and these habits may, it is often maintained,
become hereditary.
Second, the way of 'accidental variation,' as Mr. Darwin termed it,
in which certain young are born with peculiarities that help them and
their progeny to survive. That variations of _this_ sort tend to become
hereditary, no one doubts.
The first mode is called by Mr. Spencer direct, the second indirect,
equilibration. Both equilibrations must of course be natural and
physical processes, but they belong to entirely different physical
spheres. The direct influences are obvious and accessible things. The
causes of variation in the young are, on the other hand, molecular
and hidden. The direct influences are the animal's 'experiences,' in
the widest sense of the term. Where what is influenced by them is the
_mental_ organism, they are _conscious_ experiences, and become the
_objects_ as well as the causes of their effects. That is, the effect
consists in a tendency of the experience itself to be remembered, or
to have its elements thereafter coupled in imagination just as they
were coupled in the experience. In the diagram these experiences
are represented by the _o_'s exclusively. The _x_'s, on the other
hand, stand for the indirect causes of mental modification--causes
of which we are not immediately conscious as such, and which are not
the direct _objects_ of the effects they produce. Some of them are
molecular accidents before birth; some of them are collateral and
remote combinations, unintended combinations, one might say, of more
direct effects wrought in the unstable and intricate brain-tissue. Such
a result is unquestionably the susceptibility to music, which some
individuals possess at the present day. It has no zoological utility;
it corresponds to no object in the natural environment; it is a pure
_incident_ of having a hearing organ, an incident depending on such
instable and inessential conditions that one brother may have it and
another brother not. Just so with the susceptibility to sea-sickness,
which, so far from being engendered by long experience of its 'object'
(if a heaving deck can be called its object) is erelong annulled
thereby. Our higher æsthetic, moral, and intellectual life seems made
up of affections of this collateral and incidental sort, which have
entered the mind by the back stairs, as it were, or rather have not
entered the mind at all, but got surreptitiously born in the house. No
one can successfully treat of psychogenesis, or the factors of mental
evolution, without distinguishing between these two ways in which the
mind is assailed. The way of 'experience' proper is the front door,
the door of the five senses. The agents which affect the brain in this
way immediately become the mind's _objects_. The other agents do not.
It would be simply silly to say of two men with perhaps equal effective
skill in drawing, one an untaught natural genius, the other a mere
obstinate plodder in the studio, that both alike owe their skill to
their 'experience.' The reasons of their several skills lie in wholly
disparate natural cycles of causation.[528]
_I will then,_ with the reader's permission, _restrict the
word 'experience' to processes which influence the mind by the
front-door-way of simple habits and association._ What the
back-door-effects may be will probably grow clearer as we proceed; so
I will pass right on to a scrutiny of the actual mental structure which
we find.
THE GENESIS OF THE ELEMENTARY MENTAL CATEGORIES.
We find: 1. Elementary sorts of sensation, and feelings of personal
activity;
2. Emotions; desires; instincts; ideas of worth; æsthetic ideas;
3. Ideas of time and space and number;
4. Ideas of difference and resemblance, and of their degrees.
5. Ideas of causal dependence among events; of end and means; of
subject and attribute.
6. Judgments affirming, denying, doubting, supposing any of the above
ideas.
7. Judgments that the former judgments logically involve, exclude, or
are indifferent to, each other.
Now we may postulate at the outset that all these forms of thought have
a _natural_ origin, if we could only get at it. That assumption must
be made at the outset of every scientific investigation, or there is
no temptation to proceed. But the first account of their origin which
we are likely to hit upon is a snare. All these mental affections are
ways of knowing objects. Most psychologists nowadays believe that the
objects first, in some natural way, engendered a brain from out of
their midst, and then imprinted these various cognitive affections
upon it. But how? The ordinary evolutionist answer to this question
is exceedingly simple-minded. The idea of most speculators seems to
be that, since it suffices _now_ for us to become acquainted with a
complex object, that it should be simply _present_ to us often enough,
so it must be fair to assume universally that, with time enough
given, the _mere presence_ of the various objects and relations to
be known must end by bringing about the latter's cognition, and that
in this way all mental structure was from first to last evolved. Any
ordinary Spencerite will tell you that just as the experience of blue
objects wrought into our mind the color blue, and hard objects got it
to feel hardness, so the presence of large and small objects in the
world gave it the notion of size, moving objects made it aware of
motion, and objective successions taught it time. Similarly in a world
with different impressing things, the mind had to acquire a sense of
difference, whilst the like parts of the world as they fell upon it
kindled in it the perception of similarity. Outward sequences which
sometimes held good, and sometimes failed, naturally engendered in it
doubtful and uncertain forms of expectation, and ultimately gave rise
to the disjunctive forms of judgment; whilst the hypothetic form, 'if
_a_, then _b_,' was sure to ensue from sequences that were invariable
in the outer world. On this view, if the outer order suddenly were
to change its elements and modes, we should have no faculties to
cognize the new order by. At most we should feel a sort of frustration
and confusion. But little by little the new presence would work on
us as the old one did; and in course of time another set of psychic
categories would arise, fitted to take cognizance of the altered world.
This notion of the outer world inevitably building up a sort of mental
duplicate of itself if we only give it time, is so easy and natural in
its vagueness that one hardly knows how to start to criticise it. One
thing, however, is obvious, namely that _the manner in which we now
become acquainted with complex objects need not in the least resemble
the manner in which the original elements of our consciousness grew
up._ Now, it is true, a new sort of animal need only be present to me,
to impress its image permanently on my mind; but this is because I am
already in possession of categories for knowing each and all of its
several attributes, and of a memory for retracing the order of their
conjunction. I now have preformed categories for all possible objects.
The objects need only awaken these from their slumber. But it is a very
different matter to account for the categories themselves. I think we
must admit that the origin of the various elementary feelings is a
recondite history, even after some sort of neural tissue is there for
the outer world to begin its work on. The mere existence of things
to be known is even now not, as a rule, sufficient to bring about a
knowledge of them. Our abstract and general discoveries usually come
to us as lucky fancies: and it is only _après coup_ that we find that
they correspond to some reality. What immediately produced them were
previous thoughts, with which, and with the brain-processes of which,
that reality had naught to do.
Why may it not have been so of the original elements of consciousness,
sensation, time, space, resemblance, difference, and other relations?
Why may they not have come into being by the back-door method, by such
physical processes as lie more in the sphere of morphological accident,
of inward summation of effects, than in that of the 'sensible presence'
of objects? Why may they not, in short, be pure _idiosyncrasies_,
spontaneous variations, fitted by good luck (those of them which have
survived) to take cognizance of objects (that is, to steer us in our
active dealings with them), without being in any intelligible sense
immediate derivatives from them? I think we shall find this view gain
more and more plausibility as we proceed.[529]
All these elements are subjective duplicates of outer objects. They
_are_ not the outer objects. The secondary qualities among them are
not supposed by any educated person even to resemble the objects.
Their _nature_ depends more on the reacting brain than on the stimuli
which touch it off. This is even more palpably true of the natures of
pleasure and pain, effort, desire and aversion, and of such feelings
as those of cause and substance, of denial and of doubt. Here then is
a native wealth of inner forms whose origin is shrouded in mystery,
and which at any rate were not simply 'impressed' from without, in any
intelligible sense of the verb 'to impress.'
* * * * *
Their _time- and space-relations_, however, _are_ impressed from
without--for two outer things at least the evolutionary psychologist
must believe to resemble our thoughts of them, these are the time and
space in which the objects lie. _The time- and space-relations between
things do stamp copies of themselves within._ Things juxtaposed in
space impress us, continue to be thought of _as_ thus juxtaposed.
Things sequent in time impress their sequence on our memory. And thus,
through experience in the legitimate sense of the word there can be
truly explained an immense number of our mental habitudes, many of
our abstract beliefs, and all our ideas of concrete things, and of
their ways of behavior. Such truths as that fire burns and water
wets, that glass refracts, heat melts snow, fishes live in water and
die on land, and the like, form no small part of the most refined
education, and are the all-in-all of education amongst the brutes and
lowest men. Here the mind is passive and tributary, a servile copy,
fatally and unresistingly fashioned from without. It is the merit of
the associationist school to have seen the wide scope of these effects
of neighborhood in time and space; and their exaggerated applications
of the principle of mere neighborhood ought not to blind us to the
excellent service it has done to Psychology in their hands. As far
as a large part of our thinking goes, then, it can intelligibly be
formulated as a mere lot of _habits_ impressed upon us from without.
The degree of cohesion of our inner relations, is, in this part of
our thinking, proportionate, in Mr. Spencer's phrase, to the degree
of cohesion of the outer relations; the causes and the objects of our
thought are one; and we are, in so far forth, what the materialistic
evolutionists would have us altogether, mere offshoots and creatures of
our environment, and naught besides.[530]
But now the plot thickens, for the images impressed upon our memory
by the outer stimuli are not restricted to the mere time- and
space-relations, in which they originally came, but revive in various
manners (dependent on the intricacy of the brain-paths and the
instability of the tissue thereof), and form secondary combinations
such as the _forms of judgment_, which, taken _per se_, are not
congruent either with the forms in which reality exists or in those in
which experiences befall us, but which may nevertheless be explained
by the way in which experiences befall in a mind gifted with memory,
expectation, and the possibility of feeling doubt, curiosity, belief,
and denial. The conjunctions of experience befall more or less
invariably, variably, or never. The idea of one term will then engender
a fixed, a wavering, or a negative expectation of another, giving
affirmative, the hypothetical, disjunctive, interrogative, and negative
judgments, and judgments of actuality and possibility about certain
things. The separation of attribute from subject in all judgments
(which violates the way in which nature exists) may be similarly
explained by the piecemeal order in which our perceptions come to us,
a vague nucleus growing gradually more detailed as we attend to it
more and more. These particular secondary mental forms have had ample
justice done them by associationists from Hume downwards.
Associationists have also sought to account for discrimination,
abstraction, and generalization by the rates of frequency in which
attributes come to us conjoined. With much less success, I think. In
the chapter on Discrimination, I have, under the "law of dissociation
by varying concomitants," sought to explain as much as possible by the
passive order of experience. But the reader saw how much was left for
active interest and unknown forces to do. In the chapter on Imagination
I have similarly striven to do justice to the 'blended image' theory of
generalization and abstraction. So I need say no more of these matters
here.
THE GENESIS OF THE NATURAL SCIENCES.
Our 'scientific' ways of thinking the outer reality are highly abstract
ways. The essence of things for science is not to be what they seem,
but to be atoms and molecules moving to and from each other according
to strange laws. Nowhere does the account of inner relations produced
by outer ones in proportion to the frequency with which the latter have
been met, more egregiously break down than in the case of scientific
conceptions. The order of scientific thought is quite incongruent
either with the way in which reality exists or with the way in which
it comes before us. Scientific thought goes by selection and emphasis
exclusively. We break the solid plenitude of fact into separate
essences, conceive generally what only exists particularly, and by
our classifications leave nothing in its natural neighborhood, but
separate the contiguous, and join what the poles divorce. The reality
_exists_ as a _plenum_. All its parts are contemporaneous, each is as
real as any other, and each as essential for making the whole just what
it is and nothing else. But we can neither experience nor think this
_plenum_. What we experience, what _comes before us_, is a chaos of
fragmentary impressions interrupting each other;[531] what we _think_
is an abstract system of hypothetical data and laws.[532]
This sort of scientific algebra, little as it immediately resembles
the reality given to us, turns out (strangely enough) applicable
to it. That is, it yields expressions which, at given places and
times, can be translated into real values, or interpreted as definite
portions of the chaos that falls upon our sense. It becomes thus a
practical guide to our expectations as well as a theoretic delight.
But I do not see how any one with a sense for the facts can possibly
call our systems immediate results of 'experience' in the ordinary
sense. Every scientific conception is in the first instance a
'spontaneous variation' in some one's brain.[533] For one that proves
useful and applicable there are a thousand that perish through their
worthlessness. Their genesis is strictly akin to that of the flashes
of poetry and sallies of wit to which the instable brain-paths equally
give rise. But whereas the poetry and wit (like the science of the
ancients) are their 'own excuse for being,' and have to run the
gauntlet of no farther test, the 'scientific' conceptions must prove
their worth by being 'verified.' This test, however, is the cause of
their _preservation_, not that of their production; and one might as
well account for the origin of Artemus Ward's jokes by the 'cohesion'
of subjects with predicates in proportion to the 'persistence of the
outer relations' to which they 'correspond' as to treat the genesis of
scientific conceptions in the same ponderously unreal way.
The most persistent outer relations which science believes in are never
matters of experience at all, but have to be disengaged from under
experience by a process of elimination, that is, by ignoring conditions
which are always present. The _elementary_ laws of mechanics, physics,
and chemistry are all of this sort. The principle of uniformity in
nature is of this sort; it has to be _sought_ under and in spite of
the most rebellious appearances; and our conviction of its truth is
far more like a religious faith than like assent to a demonstration.
The only cohesions which experience in the literal sense of the
word produces in our mind are, as we contended some time back, the
proximate laws of nature, and habitudes of concrete things, that heat
melts ice, that salt preserves meat, that fish die out of water, and
the like.[534] Such 'empirical truths' as these we admitted to form
an enormous part of human wisdom. The 'scientific' truths have to
harmonize with these truths, or be given up as useless; but they arise
in the mind in no such passive associative way as that in which the
simpler truths arise. Even those experiences which are used to prove a
scientific truth are for the most part artificial experiences of the
laboratory gained after the truth itself has been conjectured. Instead
of experiences engendering the 'inner relations,' the inner relations
are what engender the experiences here.
What happens in the brain after experience has done its utmost is what
happens in every material mass which has been fashioned by an outward
force,--in every pudding or mortar, for example, which I may make
with my hands. The fashioning from without brings the elements into
collocations which set new internal forces free to exert their effects
in turn. And the random irradiations and resettlements of our ideas,
which _supervene upon experience_, and constitute our free mental
play, are due entirely to these secondary internal processes, which
vary enormously from brain to brain, even though the brains be exposed
to exactly the same 'outer relations.' The higher thought-processes
owe their being to causes which correspond far more to the sourings
and fermentations of dough, the setting of mortar, or the subsidence
of sediments in mixtures, than to the manipulations by which these
physical aggregates came to be compounded. Our study of similar
association and reasoning taught us that the whole superiority of man
depended on the facility with which in his brain the paths worn by the
most frequent outer cohesions could be ruptured. The causes of the
instability, the reasons why now this point and now that become in him
the seat of rupture, we saw to be entirely obscure. (Vol. I. p. 580;
Vol. II. p. 364.) The only clear thing about the peculiarity seems to
be its interstitial character, and the certainty that no mere appeal to
man's 'experience' suffices to explain it.
When we pass from scientific to æsthetic and ethical systems, every one
readily admits that, although the elements are matters of experience,
the peculiar forms of relation into which they are woven are
incongruent with the order of passively received experience. The world
of æsthetics and ethics is an ideal world, a Utopia, a world which the
outer relations persist in contradicting, but which we as stubbornly
persist in striving to make actual. Why do we thus invincibly crave
to alter the given order of nature? Simply because other relations
among things are far more interesting to us and more charming than
the mere rates of frequency of their time- and space-conjunctions.
These other relations are all secondary and brain-born, 'spontaneous
variations' most of them, of our sensibility, whereby certain elements
of experience, and certain arrangements in time and space, have
acquired an agreeableness which otherwise would not have been felt.
It is true that habitual arrangements may also become agreeable. But
this agreeableness of the merely habitual is felt to be a mere ape and
counterfeit of real inward fitness; and one sign of intelligence is
never to mistake the one for the other.
_There are then ideal and inward relations amongst the objects of our
thought which can in no intelligible sense whatever be interpreted
as reproductions of the order of outer experience._ In the æsthetic
and ethical realms they conflict with its order--the early Christian
with his kingdom of heaven, and the contemporary anarchist with his
abstract dream of justice, will tell you that the existing order
must perish, root and branch, ere the true order can come. Now the
peculiarity of those relations among the objects of our thought which
are dubbed 'scientific' is this, that although they no more are inward
_reproductions_ of the outer order than the ethical and æsthetic
relations are, yet they do not conflict with that order, but, once
having sprung up by the play of the inward forces, are found--some
of them at least, namely the only ones which have survived long
enough to be matters of record--to be _congruent_ with the time- and
space-relations which our impressions affect.
In other words, though nature's materials lend themselves slowly and
discouragingly to our translation of them into ethical forms, but more
readily into æsthetic forms; to translation into scientific forms they
lend themselves with relative ease and completeness. The translation,
it is true, will probably never be ended. The perceptive order does
not give way, nor the right conceptive substitute for it arise, at our
bare word of command.[535] It is often a deadly fight; and many a man
of science can say, like Johannes Müller, after an investigation, '_Es
klebt Blut an der Arbeit_.' But victory after victory makes us sure
that the essential doom of our enemy is defeat.[536]
THE GENESIS OF THE PURE SCIENCES.
I have now stated in general terms the relation of the natural sciences
to experience strictly so called, and shall complete what I have to say
by reverting to the subject on a later page. At present I will pass to
the so-called _pure_ or _a priori sciences_ of Classification, Logic,
and Mathematics. My thesis concerning these is that they are even less
than the natural sciences effects of the order of the world as it comes
to our experience. THE PURE SCIENCES EXPRESS RESULTS OF COMPARISON
_exclusively; comparison is not a conceivable effect of the order in
which outer impressions are experienced--it is one of the house-born_
(p. 627) _portions of our mental structure; therefore the pure
sciences form a body of propositions with whose genesis experience has
nothing to do._
* * * * *
First, consider the nature of comparison. _The relations of resemblance
and difference among things have nothing to do with the time- and
space-order in which we may experience the latter._ Suppose a hundred
beings created by God and gifted with the faculties of memory and
comparison. Suppose that upon each of them the same lot of sensations
are imprinted, but in different orders. Let some of them have no
single sensation more than once. Let some have this one and others
that one repeated. Let every conceivable permutation prevail. And then
let the magic-lantern show die out, and keep the creatures in a void
eternity, with naught but their memories to muse upon. Inevitably in
their long leisure they will begin to play with the items of their
experience and rearrange them, make classificatory series of them,
place gray between white and black, orange between red and yellow, and
trace all other degrees of resemblance and difference. And this new
construction will be absolutely identical in all the hundred creatures,
the diversity of the sequence of the original experiences having no
effect as regards this rearrangement. Any and every form of sequence
will give the same result, because the result expresses the relation
between the _inward natures_ of the sensations; and to that the
question of their outward succession is quite irrelevant. Black will
differ from white just as much in a world in which they always come
close together as in one in which they always come far apart; just as
much in one in which they appear rarely as in one in which they appear
all the time.
* * * * *
But the advocate of 'persistent outer relations' may still return to
the charge: These _are_ what make us so sure that white and black
differ, he may say; for in a world where sometimes black resembled
white and sometimes differed from it, we could never be so sure. It
is because in this world black and white have _always_ differed that
the sense of their difference has become a necessary form of thought.
The pair of colors on the one hand and the sense of difference on
the other, inseparably experienced, not only by ourselves but by
our ancestors, have become inseparably connected in the mind. Not
through any essential structure of the mind, which made difference
the only possible feeling which they could arouse; no, but because
they simply _did_ differ so often that at last they begat in us an
impotency to imagine them doing anything else, and made us accept such
a fabulous account as that just presented, of creatures to whom a
single experience would suffice to make us feel the necessity of this
relation.
I know not whether Mr. Spencer would subscribe to this or not;--nor do
I care, for there are mysteries which press more for solution than the
meaning of this vague writer's words. But to me such an explanation of
our difference-judgment is absolutely unintelligible. We now find black
and white different, the explanation says, _because we have always have
so found them._ But why should we always have so found them? Why should
difference have popped into our heads so invariably with the thought of
them? There must have been either a subjective or an objective reason.
The subjective reason can only be that our minds were so constructed
that a sense of difference was the only sort of conscious transition
possible between black and white; the objective reason can only be
that difference was always there, with these colors, outside the mind
as an objective fact. The subjective reason explains outer frequency
by inward structure, not inward structure by outer frequency; and so
surrenders the experience-theory. The objective reason simply says that
if an outer difference is there the mind must needs know it--which is
no explanation at all, but a mere appeal to the fact that somehow the
mind does know what is there.
The only clear thing to do is to give up the sham of a pretended
explanation, and to fall back on the fact that the sense of difference
_has_ arisen, in some natural manner doubtless, but in a manner which
we do not understand. It was by the back-stairs way, at all events;
and, from the very first, happened to be the only mode of reaction
by which consciousness could feel the transition from one term to
another of what (in _consequence_ of this very reaction) we now call a
contrasted pair.
* * * * *
In noticing the differences and resemblances of things, and their
degrees, the mind feels its own activity, and has given the name
of _comparison_ thereto. It need not compare its materials, but if
once roused to do so, it can compare them with but one result, and
this a fixed consequence of the nature of the materials themselves.
Difference and resemblance are thus relations between ideal objects, or
conceptions as such. To learn whether black and white differ, I need
not consult the world of experience at all; the mere ideas suffice.
_What I mean_ by black differs from _what I mean_ by white, whether
such colors exist _extra mentem meam_ or not. If they ever do so exist,
they _will_ differ. White things may blacken, but the black of them
will differ from the white of them, so long as I mean anything definite
by these three words.[537]
* * * * *
_I shall now in what follows call all propositions which express time-
and space-relations empirical propositions; and I shall give the name
of rational propositions to all propositions which express the results
of a comparison._ The latter denomination is in a sense arbitrary, for
resemblance and difference are not usually held to be the only rational
relations between things. I will next proceed to show, however, how
many other rational relations commonly supposed distinct can be
resolved into these, so that my definition of rational propositions
will end, I trust, by proving less arbitrary than it now appears to be.
SERIES OF EVEN DIFFERENCE AND MEDIATE COMPARISON.
In Chapter XII we saw that the mind can at successive moments _mean
the same_, and that it gradually comes into possession of a stock of
permanent and fixed meanings, ideal objects, or conceptions, some of
which are universal qualities, like the black and white of our example,
and some, individual things. We now see that not only are the objects
permanent mental possessions, but the results of their comparison are
permanent too. The objects and their differences together form an
immutable system. _The same objects, compared in the same way, always
give the same results;_ if the result be not the same, then the
objects are not those originally meant.
This last principle, which we may call the _axiom of constant result_,
holds good throughout all our mental operations, not only when we
compare, but when we add, divide, class, or infer a given matter in
any conceivable way. Its most general expression would be "_the Same
operated on in the same way gives the Same_." In mathematics it takes
the form of "equals added to, or subtracted from, equals give equals,"
and the like. We shall meet with it again.
The next thing which we observe is that _the operation of comparing may
be repeated on its own results_; in other words, that we can think of
the various resemblances and differences which we find and compare them
with each other, making differences and resemblances of a higher order.
_The mind thus becomes aware of sets of similar differences, and forms
series of terms with the same kind and amount of difference between
them, terms which, as they succeed each other, maintain a constant
direction of serial increase._ This sense of constant direction in a
series of operations we saw in Chapter XIII (p. 490) to be a cardinal
mental fact. "A differs from B differs from C differs from D, etc.,"
makes a _series_ only when the differences are in the same direction.
In any such difference-series all terms differ in just the same way
from their predecessors. The numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,... the notes of the
chromatic scale in music, are familiar examples. As soon as the mind
grasps such a series as a whole, it perceives that _two terms taken far
apart differ more than two terms taken near together_, and that any one
term differs more from a remote than from a near successor, and this no
matter what the terms may be, or what the sort of difference may be,
provided it is always the same sort.
This PRINCIPLE OF MEDIATE COMPARISON might be briefly (though
obscurely) expressed by the formula "_more than the more is more than
the less_"--the words _more_ and _less_ standing simply for degrees
of increase along a constant direction of differences. Such a formula
would cover all possible cases, as, earlier than early is earlier than
late, worse than bad is worse than good, east of east is east of west;
etc., etc., _ad libitum_.[538] Symbolically, we might write it as _a_
< _b_ < _c_ < _d_.... and say that any number of intermediaries may be
expunged without obliging us to alter anything in what remains written.
The principle of mediate comparison is only one form of a law which
holds in many series of homogeneously related terms, the law that
_skipping intermediary terms leaves relations the same_. This AXIOM
OF SKIPPED INTERMEDIARIES or of TRANSFERRED RELATIONS occurs, as we
soon shall see, in logic as the fundamental principle of inference,
in arithmetic as the fundamental property of the number-series, in
geometry as that of the straight line, the plane and the parallel. _It
seems to be on the whole the broadest and deepest law of man's thought._
In certain lists of terms the result of comparison may be to find
no-difference, or equality in place of difference. Here also
intermediaries may be skipped, and mediate comparison be carried on
with the general result expressed by the _axiom of mediate equality_,
"equals of equals are equal," which is the great principle of the
mathematical sciences. This too as a result of the mind's mere
acuteness, and in utter independence of the order in which experiences
come associated together. Symbolically, again: _a = b = c = d...,_ with
the same consequence as regards expunging terms which we saw before.
CLASSIFICATORY SERIES.
Thus we have a rather intricate system of necessary and immutable
_ideal truths of comparison_, a system applicable to terms
_experienced_ in any order of sequence or frequency, or even to
terms never experienced or to be experienced, such as the mind's
imaginary constructions would be. These truths of comparison result in
_Classifications_. It is, for some unknown reason, a great æsthetic
delight for the mind to break the order of experience, and class its
materials in serial orders, proceeding from step to step of difference,
and to contemplate untiringly the crossings and inosculations of the
series among themselves. The first steps in most of the sciences are
purely classificatory. Where facts fall easily into rich and intricate
series (as plants and animals and chemical compounds do), the mere
sight of the series fills the mind with a satisfaction _sui generis_;
and a world whose _real_ materials naturally lend themselves to serial
classification is _pro tanto_ a more rational world, a world with which
the mind will feel more intimate, than with a world in which they do
not. By the pre-evolutionary naturalists, whose generation has hardly
passed away, classifications were supposed to be ultimate insights
into God's mind, filling us with adoration of his ways. The fact that
Nature lets us make them was a proof of the presence of his Thought
in her bosom. So far as the facts of experience can _not_ be serially
classified, therefore, so far experience fails to be rational in _one_
of the ways, at least, which we crave.
THE LOGIC-SERIES.
Closely akin to the function of comparison is that of _judging,
predicating, or subsuming_. In fact, these elementary intellectual
functions run into each other so, that it is often only a question of
practical convenience whether we shall call a given mental operation
by the name of one or of the other. Comparisons result in groups of
like things; and presently (through discrimination and abstraction)
in conceptions of the _respects_ in which the likenesses obtain. The
groups are _genera_ or _classes_, the respects are _characters_ or
_attributes_. The attributes again may be compared, forming genera of
higher orders, and their characters singled out; so that we have a new
sort of series, _that of predication, or of kind including kind_. Thus
horses are quadrupeds, quadrupeds animals, animals machines, machines
liable to wear out, etc. In such a series as this the several couplings
of terms may have been made out originally at widely different times
and under different circumstances. But memory may bring them together
afterwards; and whenever it does so, our faculty of apprehending serial
increase makes us conscious of them as a single system of successive
terms united by the same relation.[539]