the word is commonly used bears the same relation to perceptions or
beliefs that feelings of physical pleasure or pain do to the objective
or intellectual quality of sensations. I am inclined to think it proper
to class all pleasurable and painful feelings together as emotions.
If this view is correct, it would, of course, include those feelings
to which Professor James would confine the term. I should not at all
hesitate to admit that the emotional state of a person who trembles and
turns pale with fear is different from that of one who preserves his
self-possession in the presence of a danger that he realises and dreads.
I think it is true that the voluntary actions prompted by an emotion
have some tendency to intensify it. But, so far as I can analyse my own
feelings, the pleasures and pains of memory and imagination seem to me
just as real as those of sensation, and not at all to be confounded with
them. When I try to subtract all motor reactions and resulting sensations
from the feeling of fear, for instance, there remains not merely the
intellectual perception that the event dreaded is not desirable, but the
perfectly distinct emotional consciousness that I do not desire it.
This view seems to be favored by the analogy between the relations of
sensation to reflex movement on the one hand, and of perception to
voluntary movement on the other, which will, I think, be found to be very
complete. We have reflex acts which are useful, such as breathing, the
beating of the heart, swallowing and coughing; and others, like groaning,
weeping, and trembling, which seem to be useless. In like manner,
emotions of hope or fear may give rise to voluntary acts calculated to
enable the subject of the emotion to secure or avoid its object. If I
burn my fingers, my hand is involuntarily snatched away. Such would not
be the case if the burn caused no pain. If I see that the house is on
fire, I try to escape, either by extinguishing the fire or by getting
out of the house. It seems to me evident that I should not do so if the
thought of being burned were not painful. Such emotions may also occasion
useless acts, more or less similar to those mentioned above. A person who
saw no way of escape from a burning house might tremble, weep, or groan
from fear.
On the evolutionary hypothesis, it seems easy to understand how the
reproduction, by memory or imagination, of certain feelings might bring
about movements like those excited by the original feelings. Professor
James would have us believe that this reproduction is always, in itself,
indifferent, that is, merely intellectual; but that it is, nevertheless,
capable of setting up the movements which, in the case of peripheral
stimuli, are the results of pleasure and pain, and that the consciousness
of these movements is, in such cases, the sole cause of the emotional
condition. Such a reversal of relations seems to me highly improbable.
Each one must decide for himself which view is more in accordance with
the facts of his own consciousness.
W. L. WORCESTER.
FOOTNOTES:
[57] _Two Cases of General Cutaneous and Sensory Anæsthesia, without
Marked Psychical Implication._ By Henry J. Berkley, M. D., Baltimore.
[Brain, Part IV. 1891.]
PROFESSOR ERNST MACH’S TERM SENSATION.
SUPPLEMENTARY TO HIS CONTROVERSY WITH THE EDITOR.
_The Monist_, Vol. I, No. 3, contains a controversy between Prof. Ernst
Mach and myself on some questions of psycho-physics in which Professor
Mach, having reference to an editorial article on “Feeling and Motion,”
regards sensations as the “elements of reality,” “while motion,” he says,
“is a mere mental auxiliary, an artificial expedient.” “Physicists,” we
are told, “have accustomed us to regard the motions of atoms as more real
than the green of trees. In the latter I see a (sensory) fact, in the
former a _Gedankending_, a thing of thought.”
In contradistinction to Professor Mach I maintained that our scientific
terms, although abstract concepts and things of thought, or noumena, are
after all descriptive of actual facts; they are symbols representing
features of reality. Motions, i. e., that which is meant by the term
motion, is a reality, and what the chemist calls atoms is a definite
quality of certain facts of experience. Atoms are not things in
themselves, as the name seems to suggest, but rather proportional
relations conveniently so expressed as if they were ultimate units or
concrete little bodies of a definite mass or weight. What atoms are,
aside from representing the proportions in which elements combine, we do
not know. We may define “atom” as the minimal weight in which an element
enters into chemical combinations, but such atoms have never been an
object of observation. For aught we know, they may as little be discrete
bodies as a curve consists of discrete straight lines, which, as such,
would be unobservable only because infinitesimally small. The infinitely
small straight line into which a curve is analysed by mathematicians is
a fiction, wisely devised for calculating the path of the curve. This
fiction is as Professor Mach says, an artifice only, not a reality, or
as I say, an allegoric expression to characterise not whole concrete
realities, but certain features of reality in their abstractness.
Scientific terms are comparable to myths that contain deep religious
truths. The fiction of the myth is only the vehicle of its meaning. The
naked meaning in its abstract purity may be difficult to grasp. Thus
our imagination steps in and completes the picture so as to render it
concrete and easily thinkable.
Now, when several months ago I met Professor Mach at Prague, our
conversation naturally touched upon the problems which had formed the
subject of our discussion. Professor Mach assented to my speaking of
scientific terms as abstracts. That, accordingly, must be considered
as the point of agreement. But when I proposed that the term sensation
also was according to my terminology an abstract term representing one
feature of reality only and excluding other features, Professor Mach took
exception to it, saying that he understands by sensation reality itself.
Very well then, this is the difference; and this difference is after
all a difference of terms only. I understand by sensation the psychical
feature of the data of experience only, to the exclusion of what may be
called its physical aspect. Sensation accordingly, as I use the term, is
not the whole of the given reality but only one of its qualities. If, as
Professor Mach uses the term, sensation is another name for reality, the
main difference between our views appears to be removed.
P. CARUS.
BOOK REVIEWS.
VORLESUNGEN ÜBER DIE MENSCHEN- UND THIERSEELE. By _Wilhelm Wundt_. Zweite
umgearbeitete Auflage. Hamburg and Leipsic: Leopold Voss. 1892.
The new edition of Wundt’s _Menschen- und Thierseele_ is one of the
best existing general introductions to psychology. It preserves nearly
the just mean between the purely introspective and abstract treatment
and the substitution of physiology for psychology with which recent
treatises have familiarised us. The author has completely rewritten
the edition of 1863, which he regards as a youthful indiscretion
(_Jugendsünde_)—retaining only such chapters as could be brought into
harmony with his maturer views and with the developed science of
psycho-physics that has taken the place of the _Zukunftsprogramm_ of
thirty years ago. He has wisely omitted all the superficial and diffuse
chapters on comparative psychology and ethnology which cumbered the
original work; has silently ignored the fantastic speculations as to
the identity of electricity and nerve-force (one of the worst of the
aforesaid youthful sins); and practically abandoned (perhaps as too
esoteric for popular exposition) the elaborate reduction of sensations
and perceptions to unconscious judgments and inferences.
The first thirteen or fourteen chapters offer a very clear and
interesting résumé of the chief doctrines of the _Physiologische
Psychologie_ in regard to sensations generally, their measurements and
qualities, Weber’s and Fechner’s laws, the special sensations of color,
hearing, and the muscular sense, and the problem of space perception.
Following the plan of the original work in these chapters, the author
aims less at completeness of statement than to present clearly the
distinctive doctrines of modern psychology. In the treatment of certain
themes, e. g. Fechner’s law, and the perception of space, he neglects,
for the sake of clearness, qualifications of detail which the special
student must look for in the larger work. The last sixteen chapters deal
with the feelings, the will, consciousness, attention, association and
apperception, conception, abnormal and animal psychology and instinct,
concluding with two notable lectures on the “Freedom of the Will” and
the “Immortality of the Soul.” It is to these chapters that we must look
for Wundt’s general psychological and philosophical system. Profiting
by recent criticisms he has here set forth his characteristic doctrines
in so clear and definite a final statement that further misconception
of them is hardly permissible. The remainder of this notice will be
devoted to what is perhaps the most interesting question thus suggested:
Wundt’s relation to the associationist psychology of Spencer on the one
side, and to the younger German school of experimental psychologists
on the other. Wundt ignores the Spencerian form of the associationist
psychology, and the young psychologists do injustice to Wundt, neither
side apparently condescending to read with attention the writings of
the other. The debate, so far as it is not merely verbal, springs
from two real differences of method: (1) Wundt in his psychological
analysis habitually takes account of the problems of the theory of
knowledge (_Erkenntnisstheorie_), or ultimate metaphysics, which the
young psychologists endeavor (not always with success) systematically
to exclude. (2) Wundt, gifted with superior powers of introspection,
is more aware than the young psychologists of the infinite complexity
and subtlety of mental states. He prefers, therefore, to a schematic
simplification of the phenomena a terminology and descriptive analysis
that reflect in some measure their manifold diversity. And thus while
Wundt finds the pure associationist psychology barren and tautologous,
the young psychologists see in Wundt’s complicated terminology only a
shamefaced reversion to the discarded psychology of a substantial soul
endowed with autonomous “faculties.” But the analysis of our mental
states which Wundt gives by means of this terminology is really only
a subtler restatement of the analysis of Mill, Spencer, and Taine, to
which the new psychology has not been able to add anything of moment.
It is true that he proclaims the inadequacy of association, even when
translated into the diagrams of a hypothetical cerebral anatomy, to
“explain” fully our conscious active mental life. But in this he is at
one with Spencer (ultimate scientific ideas), J. S. Mill (Examination of
Hamilton), and Schopenhauer (_Epiphilosophie_). It is gross injustice
to stigmatise as an abandonment of the scientific attitude of mind this
occasional passing recognition of the seeming ultimate inexplicability
of things. In no single concrete instance can it be shown that Wundt now
sacrifices the recognised methods and postulates of modern scientific
investigation to the psychological hypostisations which his opponents
detect in his terminology.
In confirmation of these statements I will give a brief summary of
Wundt’s doctrine of association and apperception with an occasional
indication of its relation to the psychology of Spencer. Wundt
distinguishes the totality of mental states which are perceived from
the presentation at the focus of consciousness which is apperceived. In
this way (substituting everywhere _dunkel bewusst_ for _unbewusst_) he
avoids the metaphysics of the unconscious, while getting the benefit
of the entire analysis of its advocates. I do not think the ultimate
difficulty can be evaded in this way, but will not stop to argue the
point. A further advantage of this distinction is that it makes possible
a dynamic treatment of mental states as “events” in place of the crude
psychology that deals with the conditions of any mental state as so many
ready-made parts externally dovetailed into the completed product. The
active side of consciousness is taken into account from the outset. The
mental state at any moment is described by indicating the presentation
which is then at the focus of consciousness (apperceived) and the
accompanying faintly conscious presentations that qualify its tone and
total effect. The given mental state is “explained” by tracing out the
dynamic readjustments that brought this particular presentation to the
focus, and grouped the faintly conscious presentations about it. Now the
bringing of a presentation to the focus of conscious attention is the
primitive psychical activity, the elementary act of will,[58] and since
Wundt places this at the beginning he rejects all evolution of will or
instinct from reflex action, and thus, it will be said, here at least
puts himself in distinct opposition to advanced scientific thought.
Let us distinguish. So far as we are dealing with the developed minds
we know, Wundt’s distinction is merely the expression of an observed
psychological fact. External volition does go back to internal voluntary
attention and this to a focussing of consciousness for which apperception
is as good a term as another. Such focussing of the attention is for us
now the primary reaction of the “self” on its received impressions. Out
of a given group of presentations I apperceive by preference one and you
another, because at the time my “self,” my mind, differs from yours.
This self may be only a convenient shorthand expression for a passive
product of external forces. The feeling of the reaction of the self may
be an illusion, and its activity may be merely the mechanical action of
a relatively coherent group of presentations when a new presentation is
introduced among them, and the whole process may be explicable in terms
of associations. But the feeling exists, and Wundt has described and
analysed it better than any of his critics.
On the other hand, if the question is of the hypothetical origin of
mind, we are at once brought face to face with an ultimate metaphysical
problem which the new psychology impatiently ignores, which Spencer
grudgingly acknowledges, but which Wundt and Kantians like Riehl find
confronting them at every stage of their analysis. Conscious mind cannot
conceive of its own origin, and therefore all psychological theories of
development must postulate in some form the elements of consciousness
and will. Nothing that I could add to the dialectics of this question
would influence those who feel no difficulty here. They require a long
course of Kantian criticism or its equivalent. At any rate it is not fair
polemic to class a thinker as unscientific merely because he recognises
this difficulty and gives it expression in his psychology, instead of
contemptuously relegating it to metaphysics.
After thus laying the foundations in the doctrine of apperception for the
psychology both of cognition and of the will, Wundt proceeds to restate
the associationist analysis of Mill and Spencer in a more elaborate
terminology but in substantial agreement with Spencer till he reaches
the “concept,” when the introduction of apperception gives rise to a
seeming difference. Spencer distinguishes simultaneous from successive
association as carefully as Wundt. What Wundt, after Herbart calls
“complications,” namely the joint reference to one object of a number
of disparate presentations of sense, is clearly described by Spencer
(“Principles of Psychology,” §§ 315-355); and Wundt’s “assimilations” do
not differ appreciably from Spencer’s “still less conscious” processes
of “organic classification” (“Principles of Psychology,” § 320). Into
the metaphysics of the ultimate relations of contiguity and similarity
as laws of association I cannot enter here. Similarity will always be
recognised as ultimate by those who, like Spencer, approach the problem
first from the psychical side, while a purely materialistic treatment in
terms of nervous currents, such as we find in James, will endeavor to
do away altogether with similarity, which simply cannot be expressed in
terms of nerve-structure without reasoning in a circle. Wundt retains
similarity but endeavors to coördinate it with contiguity. The problem is
really identical with the final question of the relations of “mind” and
“body,” and cannot be profitably discussed apart from that question.
Coming now to the concept and the judgment, we find Wundt affirming
that the different forms of simultaneous and successive association (as
he has defined them) are not an exhaustive classification of mental
processes—that they do not include the concept. Well, he is at liberty
to define his own terms, and before we accuse him of hypostasising a
new faculty to account for the concept, let us scrutinise his meaning.
We shall find that he merely repeats, in a subtler terminology of his
own, the analysis of Berkeley, Mill, Taine, Spencer, and Romanes.
These writers treat the concept as a complicated associational group
held together by the word. Now Wundt, while conceding the theoretic
admissibility of this form of statement, holds that such groups present
so many distinct characteristics that all delicacy of psychological
discrimination is sacrificed by confounding them under one denomination
with other associational complexes. He does not, like Professor James,
bid introspective psychology “throw up the sponge” here, but wishes
to carry his analysis into recesses which the instruments of the
associationists are too clumsy to explore. In the interests of this
analysis he limits the term association to combinations mediated by a
limited number of elements. The (apperceived) concept, on the other
hand, is the product of the reaction of the total mind. This distinction
(whatever we may think of its absolute validity) expresses a finely
observed psychological truth. The distinctive quality of a concept
consists, Wundt says, “_in dem begleitenden Bewusstsein, dass die
einzelne Vorstellung einen bloss stellvertretenden Werth besitze_.”
This feeling he calls the _Begriffsgefühl_, meaning thereby exactly
what Professor James means when he says that “the thoughts by which we
know that we mean the same thing are apt to be very different indeed
from each other,” and that “a polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a
feeling of ‘Hollo! thingumbob again!’ ever flitted through its mind.”
Only, instead of “throwing up the sponge,” Wundt goes on to give a very
interesting account of this feeling in its various degrees of clearness
between the conceptual polyp and the conceiving man. Apperception is
invoked only to name and emphasise the feeling of activity of the self
that enters into the _Begriffsgefühl_, distinguishing it as a reaction of
the total consciousness from the relatively passive associations of what
Romanes would call “recepts.” Psychologists, however, will continue their
fruitless debates on questions of terminology and will still imagine that
Wundt is a belated reactionist.
PAUL SHOREY.
BEITRÄGE ZUR EXPERIMENTELLEN PSYCHOLOGIE. By _Hugo Münsterberg_. Heft 4.
Freiburg i. B. 1892.
Münsterberg’s fourth _Heft_ begins with studies in association. If _a_
and _b_ have been independently associated with _m_, can _a_ call up
_b_ without the appearance in consciousness of _m_? The affirmative
answer of common experience was confirmed by Scripture’s experiments.
Associating five Japanese symbols with two series of five German words,
he found that a word of one series tended (without conscious recollection
of the Japanese symbol) to revive the particular word in the other
series that had been associated with the same symbol. Münsterberg, after
repeating and varying the experiment in a number of fields, denies that
any such relation can be observed. He may very well be right on the
question of facts. It is _a priori_ improbable that a transitory and
arbitrary association of a meaningless symbol could modify appreciably
the independent and accidental associative attractions of familiar
words and presentations. The philosophic interpretation is another
question. For our real knowledge it is a matter of indifference whether
we fill out “missing links” with “_dunkel bewusst_,” “_unbewusst_,” or
“cerebral processes that have no psychical correlates.” And yet how much
of contemporary psychologising is a logomachy raging around just this
question.
Münsterberg’s second series of experiments show clearly the part played
by such missing links in perception. A word is called out just before a
complicated picture is exhibited to the subject. He will usually perceive
first in the picture some object naturally associated with the word, even
though the word has aroused no conscious associations.
Similarly (III) a hastily seen misprinted word will be interpreted
variously according to the associations of another word called out to the
subject in advance.
Another series of experiments has for result that even the most commonly
associated word-couples, as table and chair, have no fixed, unconditional
associative attraction for each other in the same or in different minds,
but that the unit of attraction is the “associative constellation.”
This is only common sense, and artificial experiments will never reveal
anything in this field that we cannot learn quite as well in the class
room. “Table” will suggest “logarithm” if the boy is fresh from the class
in trigonometry.
“The difference between men is in their principle of association” said
Emerson long ago. Münsterberg, who has in his archives records of
fifty thousand experiments in verbal associations, presents a table of
the comparative frequency with which substantives are associated with
superior (more general) or inferior class names, with adjectives or with
verbs to which they stand in the relation of subject or of object. His
chief result is that minds which associate a noun with its higher class
name (_Ueberordner_) think of it as the subject of a verb and do not
associate it with an adjective. The _Unterordner_ thinks of the noun as
object of a verb and associates it with an adjective. The adjective,
then, is not the higher class to which the substantive belongs, but a
limitation of the substantive. The French, if they please, may use this
conclusion to refute Spencer’s contention that “white horse” is a more
natural order than _cheval blanc_.
The first topic in “memory studies” is the persistence in the
psycho-physical mechanism of the disposition to an acquired automatic
movement, even after the memory of the nerve has been seemingly displaced
by the habit of its contrary. The experiments were trivial, such as
shifting the position of an inkstand from right to left in alternate
months, or wearing a watch alternately in the right or left fob. The
result, a progressive diminution of the mistakes made after every change,
may plausibly be explained by the stimulated attention and consequent
care of the experimenter. The second topic treats of the effect of a time
interval on the exactness of our memory of sensations of movement in eyes
and limbs. The section on “chain reactions” is a methodological study of
the various applications of this experimental method. “The influence of
nervous stimulants on psychic activities” is rather interesting reading,
but yields no important results. Alcohol depresses, tea and coffee
heighten the powers of memory and perception for an hour or two after
absorption. But the harmful effect of the alcohol sometimes passes away
after the first hour. _Grössenschätzung_ is a study of our estimates
of distances on a surface, made by passing the hand over it at arm’s
length, at half arm’s length, etc. From experiments as to the estimate
of absolute tone-distances (as distinguished from musical intervals)
Münsterberg concludes that pure measurements are not possible with three
tones only. Experiments with four tones do not, he says, confirm the law
that distances corresponding to equal differences of vibration are felt
as equal.