THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
Until the year 1890, when James's _Principles_ were published, the
psychology of Hume reigned absolutely in philosophy.[A] All empiricists
accepted it enthusiastically, as the sum of philosophic wisdom; all
apriorists submitted to it, even in supplementing and modifying it by
'transcendental' and metaphysical additions; in either case it remained
uncontested _as psychology_, and, by propounding an utterly erroneous
analysis of the mind and its experience, entangled philosophy in
inextricable difficulties.
Hume had, as philosophers commonly do, set out from the practically
sufficient analysis of experience which all find ready-made in language.
He accepted, therefore, from common sense the belief that physical
reality is composed of a multitude of separate existences that act on
one another, and tried to conceive mental life strictly on the same
analogy. His theory of experience, therefore, closely parallels the
atomistic theory of matter. Just as the physicist explains bodies as
collections of discrete particles, so Hume reduced all the contents of
the mind to a number of elementary sensations. Whether the mind was
reflecting on its own internal ideas, or whether it was undergoing
impressions which it supposed to come from an external source, all that
was really happening was a succession of detached sensations. It seemed
to Hume indisputable that every distinct perception (or 'impression')
was a distinct existence, and that all 'ideas' were equally distinct,
though fainter, copies of impressions. Beyond impressions and ideas it
was unnecessary to look. Thus to look at a chessboard was to have a
number of sensations of black and white arranged in a certain order, to
listen to a piece of music was to experience a succession of loud and
soft auditory sensations, to handle a stone was to receive a group of
sensations of touch. To suppose that anything beyond these sensory units
was ever really experienced was futile fiction. Experience was a mosaic,
of which the stones were the detached sensations, and their washed-out
copies, the ideas.
If this analysis of the mind were correct--and its correctness was not
disputed for more than a hundred years, for were not the sensations
admitted to be the ultimate analysis of all that was perceived?--the
common-sense belief that knowledge revealed a world outside the thinker
was, of course, erroneous. For common sense could hardly treat 'things'
as merely 'sensations' artificially grouped together in space, each
'thing' being a complex of a number of sensations having relation to
similar complexes. It held rather that the successive appearances of
things were related in time, in such a way that they could be supposed
to reveal a single object able to endure in spite of surface changes,
and to manifest the identity of its sensory 'qualities.' Similarly, the
succession of ideas within the mind was for it supported by the inward
unity of the soul within which they arose. Moreover, Hume's analysis
made havoc of all idea, of 'causation.' If every sensation was a
separate being, how was it to be connected with any other in any regular
or necessary connection? Two events related as 'cause' and 'effect' must
be a myth.
These subversive consequences of his theory Hume did not conceal, though
he did not push his mental 'atomism' to its logical extreme. When he
defined material objects as 'coloured points disposed in a certain
order,' he was in fact admitting space as a relating factor; when he
spoke of the succession of impressions and ideas in experience, he was
tacitly assuming that what was apprehended was not a bare succession of
sensations, but _also_ the fact that they were succeeding one another,
and so allowing a sense of temporal relation. But further than this he
refused to go. The idea of a continuous self was fantastic. There was
nothing beneath the ideas to connect them. The notion of causal
connection was equally chimerical. Each sensation was distinct and
existed in its own right. It could therefore occur alone. There was
nothing to link together the distinct impressions. Hence necessary
connection in events could not be more than a fiction of the mind based
on expectation of customary sequences; how the mind he had described as
non-existent could form an expectation or observe a sequence was calmly
left a mystery.
Hume, then, seemed to leave to his successors in philosophy a task of
synthesis. He had tumbled the soul off her high watch-tower, but how to
combine her shattered fragments again into a working unity he declined
to say. He saw the sceptical implications of his analysis, but professed
himself unable to suggest a remedy.
He had, however, made the embarrassments of the theory of knowledge
sufficiently clear for Kant, his most important successor, to hit upon
the most obvious palliative, and in the _Critique of Pure Reason_ Kant
set himself to patch up Hume's analysis. Experience as it came through
the channels of sense, he admitted Hume had analysed correctly; it was
'a manifold,' a whirl of separate sensations. But these _per se_ could
not yield knowledge. They must be made to cohere, and the way to do this
he had found. The mind on to which they fell was equipped with a
complicated apparatus of faculties which could organize the chaotic
manifold of sense and turn it into the connected world which common
sense and science recognize. First it views the data of sense in the
light of its own 'pure intuitions,' and, lo! they are seen to be in
Space and Time; then it solidifies them with its own 'categories,' which
turn them into 'substances' and 'causes' and endow them with all the
attributes required to sustain that status; finally it refers them all
to a Transcendental Ego, which is not, indeed, a soul, but sufficiently
like one to provide something that can admire the creative synthesis of
'mind as such.'
Had Hume lived to read Kant's _Critique_, he would probably have jeered
at the vain complications of Kant's transcendental machinery, and made
it clear that between the primary manifold of sensation and the first
constructions of the intellect there still yawns a gulf which Kant's
laboured explanations nowhere bridge.
Why does the chaotic 'matter' of sensations submit itself so tamely to
the forming of the mind? How can the _a priori_ necessities of thought,
which are the 'presuppositions' of the complexities Kant loved, operate
upon so alien a stuff as the sensations are assumed to be? And, after
all, was not Kant a bit premature in proclaiming the _finality_ of his
analysis and of his refutation of empiricism for all time? The searching
question, Why should the future resemble the past? had received no
answer, and so might not the mind itself, with all its categories, be
susceptible to change? Was it certain that the miracle whereby the data
presented to our faculties conformed to them would be a standing one?
Had not Kant himself as good as admitted that our faculties might
distort reality instead of making it intelligible?
The truth is that at this point Kant is open to a charge against which
the assumptions he shared with Hume admit of no defence. Hume had been
the first to discover that we are in the habit of trying to rationalize
our sense-data by putting ideal constructions upon them, though he had
abstained from sanctifying the practice by a hideous jargon of technical
terminology. But this way of eking out the facts only seemed to him to
_falsify_ them. Truth in his view was to be reached by accepting with
docility the sensations given from without. To set to work to 'imagine'
connections between them, and to claim for them a higher truth, had
seemed to him an outrage. What right, then, had Kant to legitimate the
mind's impudence in tampering with sensations? Was not every _a priori_
form an 'imagination,' and a vain one at that?
To these objections the Kantian school have never found an answer. They
have simply repeated Kant's phrases about the necessary
'presuppositions' which were to be added to Hume's data. The English
psychologists (the Mills, Bain, etc.) exhibited a similar fidelity. They
never accepted the _a priori_, but relied on 'the association of ideas'
to build up a mind out of isolated sensations. But was this expedient
really thinkable? For if all 'sensations' or qualities are separate
entities, how can the addition of more 'distinct existences' of the same
sort really bind them together? If in 'the cat is upon the wall,' 'upon'
is a distinct entity which has to relate 'cat' and 'wall,' what is to
connect 'cat' with 'upon' and 'upon' with 'wall'? The atomizing method
carried to its logical extreme demands that not only 'sensations' but
also 'thoughts' should be essentially disconnected, and then, of course,
_no_ thinking can cohere.
Psychology, then, had worked itself to a breakdown by accepting the
'sensationalistic' analysis offered by Hume, and dragged philosophy with
it. Yet the escape was as easy as the egg of Columbus to the insight of
genius. William James had merely to invert the problem. Instead of
assuming with Hume that because some experiences seemed to attest the
presence of distinct objects, all connections were illusory and all
experience must ultimately consist of psychical atoms, James had merely
to maintain that this separation was secondary and artificial, and that
experience was initially a continuum. Once this is pointed out, the fact
is obvious. The stream of experience no doubt contains what it is
afterwards possible to single out as 'sensations,' but it presents them
also as connected by 'relations.' Moreover, the 'sensations' or
'qualities' and their 'relations' exhibit the immediate indiscerptible
unity of a fluid rather than a succession of flashes. Temporal and
spatial relations with all the connections they sustain are perceived
just as directly as what we come to distinguish as the 'things' in them.
'Consciousness,' James insists, 'does not appear to itself chopped up in
bits,' and 'we ought to say a feeling of _and_, a feeling of _if_, a
feeling of _but_, and a feeling of _by_, quite as readily as we say a
feeling of _blue_ or a feeling of _cold_. All things in experience
naturally 'compenetrate,' to use a phrase of Bergson's; they are
distinct and they are united at the same time.
The great crux in Hume is thus seen to be illusory. Immediate experience
does not require 'synthesis': it calls for 'analysis.' It is not a
jigsaw puzzle, to be pieced together without glue: it is a confused
whole which has to be divided and set in order for clear thinking.
Hume's mistake was to have started from experience _as partly analysed_
by common sense, and not from the flux _as given_. His 'sensations' were
the qualities already analysed out of the flux; he took these selections
for the whole and neglected the other less obvious features in it--viz.,
the relations which floated them.
Thus the puzzle 'How do "relations" relate?' received its solution in
this new account of experience. Philosophers are puzzled by this
question because they confuse percepts with concepts. Percepts are
_given_ in relation; but concepts, being ideal dissections of the
perceptual flux, are discontinuous terms which have to be related by an
act of thought, because they were made for this very purpose of
distinction. Thus the eye sees cats sitting upon walls, as parts of a
rural landscape, and without the sharp distinctions which exist between
the concepts 'cat,' 'upon,' 'wall.' These ideas were _meant_ to
disconnect 'the cat' in thought from the site it sat upon. Thought,
then, has _made_ the 'atomism' it professed to find. It has only to
unmake it, and to allow the distinctions it held apart to merge again
into the stream of change.
All Hume's problems, therefore, are unreal, and those of his apriorist
critics are doubly removed from reality. The whole conception of
philosophy as aiming at uniting disjointed data in a higher synthesis
runs counter to the real movement, which aims at the analysis of a given
whole. The real question about causation is not how events can be
connected causally, but why are certain antecedents preferred and
dissected out and entitled 'causes.' So the 'self' is not one
(undiscoverable) item imagined to keep in order a host of other such
items. Any given moment of a consciousness is just the mass of its
'sensations,' but these are consciously the heirs of its history and
connected with a past which is remembered. No Transcendental Ego could
do more to support the process of experience than is achieved by 'a
stream of consciousness which carries its own past along.' Here, then,
is the straight way James desiderated, a critical philosophy which goes,
not 'through' the complexities of Kantism, but leaves them on one side
as superfluous 'curios.'
But there remains an even more important deduction from the new
psychology. Hume had been convicted of error in selecting those elements
of the flux which served his purpose and neglecting the rest. But this
mistake might reveal the important fact that all analysis was a choice,
and inspired by volitions. A mind that analyses cannot but be _active_
in handling its experience. It manipulates it to serve its ends. It
emphasizes only those portions of the flux which seem to it important.
In a better and fairer analysis than Hume's these features will persist.
It, too, would be a product of selection, of a selection depending on
its maker's preferences. As James showed, the distinction between
'dreams' and 'realities,' between 'things' and 'illusions,' results only
from the differential values we attach to the parts of the flux
according as they seem important or interesting to us or not. The
volitional contribution is all-pervasive in our thinking. And once this
volitional interference with 'pure perception' is shown to be
indispensable, it must be allowed to be legitimate. Nor can this
approval of our interference be restricted to selections. It must be
extended to _additions_. Just as we can select factors from 'the given'
to construct 'reality,' we can add hypotheses to it to make it
'intelligible.' We can claim the right of causal analysis, and assume
that our dissections have laid bare the inner springs of the connection
of events. Moreover, to the 'real world which our choice has built out
of the chaos of 'appearances' we may hypothetically add 'infernal' and
'heavenly' regions.[B] Both are transformations of 'the given' by the
will, but, like the postulate of causal series, experience _may_ confirm
them. Kant's _a priori_ activity of the mind may thus in a sense supply
an answer to Hume--but only in a voluntaristic philosophy which would
probably have seemed too bold both to him and to Hume.
There can be no doubt that we do not approach the data of perception in
an attitude of quiescent resignation. Our desires and needs equip us
with assumptions and 'first principles,' which originate from within,
not from without. But how precisely should this mental contribution to
knowledge be conceived? In the last chapter of his _Psychology_ James
suggested that the mind's organization is essentially biological. It has
evolved according to sound Darwinian principles, and in so doing the
fittest of its 'variations' have survived. But were these variations
quite fortuitous? May they not have been purposive responses to the
stimulation of environment? Can logic have been invented like saws and
ships for purposes of human service? These are some of the stimulating
questions which James's work in _Psychology_ has suggested.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote A: Not in Bradley's "Logic."]
[Footnote B: This is the substance of the doctrine of 'The Will to
Believe.']