THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS.
=The order of our study must be analytic.= We are now prepared to begin
the introspective study of the adult consciousness itself. Most books
adopt the so-called synthetic method. Starting with 'simple ideas of
sensation,' and regarding these as so many atoms, they proceed to build
up the higher states of mind out of their 'association,' 'integration,'
or 'fusion,' as houses are built by the agglutination of bricks. This
has the didactic advantages which the synthetic method usually has. But
it commits one beforehand to the very questionable theory that our
higher states of consciousness are compounds of units; and instead of
starting with what the reader directly knows, namely his total concrete
states of mind, it starts with a set of supposed 'simple ideas' with
which he has no immediate acquaintance at all, and concerning whose
alleged interactions he is much at the mercy of any plausible phrase. On
every ground, then, the method of advancing from the simple to the
compound exposes us to illusion. All pedants and abstractionists will
naturally hate to abandon it. But a student who loves the fulness of
human nature will prefer to follow the 'analytic' method, and to begin
with the most concrete facts, those with which he has a daily
acquaintance in his own inner life. The analytic method will discover in
due time the elementary parts, if such exist, without danger of
precipitate assumption. The reader will bear in mind that our own
chapters on sensation have dealt mainly with the physiological
conditions thereof. They were put first as a mere matter of convenience,
because incoming currents come first. _Psychologically_ they might
better have come last. Pure sensations were described on page 12 as
processes which in adult life are well-nigh unknown, and nothing was
said which could for a moment lead the reader to suppose that they were
the _elements of composition_ of the higher states of mind.
=The Fundamental Fact.=--The first and foremost concrete fact which every
one will affirm to belong to his inner experience is the fact that
_consciousness of some sort goes on. 'States of mind' succeed each other
in him._ If we could say in English 'it thinks,' as we say 'it rains' or
'it blows,' we should be stating the fact most simply and with the
minimum of assumption. As we cannot, we must simply say that _thought
goes on_.
=Four Characters in Consciousness.=--How does it go on? We notice
immediately four important characters in the process, of which it shall
be the duty of the present chapter to treat in a general way:
1) Every 'state' tends to be part of a personal consciousness.
2) Within each personal consciousness states are always changing.
3) Each personal consciousness is sensibly continuous.
4) It is interested in some parts of its object to the exclusion of
others, and welcomes or rejects--_chooses_ from among them, in a
word--all the while.
In considering these four points successively, we shall have to plunge
_in medias res_ as regards our nomenclature and use psychological terms
which can only be adequately defined in later chapters of the book. But
every one knows what the terms mean in a rough way; and it is only in a
rough way that we are now to take them. This chapter is like a painter's
first charcoal sketch upon his canvas, in which no niceties appear.
When I say _every 'state' or 'thought' is part of a personal
consciousness_, 'personal consciousness' is one of the terms in
question. Its meaning we know so long as no one asks us to define it,
but to give an accurate account of it is the most difficult of
philosophic tasks. This task we must confront in the next chapter; here
a preliminary word will suffice.
In this room--this lecture-room, say--there are a multitude of thoughts,
yours and mine, some of which cohere mutually, and some not. They are as
little each-for-itself and reciprocally independent as they are
all-belonging-together. They are neither: no one of them is separate,
but each belongs with certain others and with none beside. My thought
belongs with _my_ other thoughts, and your thought with _your_ other
thoughts. Whether anywhere in the room there be a _mere_ thought, which
is nobody's thought, we have no means of ascertaining, for we have no
experience of its like. The only states of consciousness that we
naturally deal with are found in personal consciousnesses, minds,
selves, concrete particular I's and you's.
Each of these minds keeps its own thoughts to itself. There is no giving
or bartering between them. No thought even comes into direct _sight_ of
a thought in another personal consciousness than its own. Absolute
insulation, irreducible pluralism, is the law. It seems as if the
elementary psychic fact were not _thought_ or _this thought_ or _that
thought_, but _my thought_, every thought being _owned_. Neither
contemporaneity, nor proximity in space, nor similarity of quality and
content are able to fuse thoughts together which are sundered by this
barrier of belonging to different personal minds. The breaches between
such thoughts are the most absolute breaches in nature. Every one will
recognize this to be true, so long as the existence of _something_
corresponding to the term 'personal mind' is all that is insisted on,
without any particular view of its nature being implied. On these terms
the personal self rather than the thought might be treated as the
immediate datum in psychology. The universal conscious fact is not
'feelings and thoughts exist,' but 'I think' and 'I feel.' No
psychology, at any rate, can question the _existence_ of personal
selves. Thoughts connected as we feel them to be connected are _what we
mean_ by personal selves. The worst a psychology can do is so to
interpret the nature of these selves as to rob them of their _worth_.
=Consciousness is in constant change.= I do not mean by this to say that
no one state of mind has any duration--even if true, that would be hard
to establish. What I wish to lay stress on is this, that _no state once
gone can recur and be identical with what it was before_. Now we are
seeing, now hearing; now reasoning, now willing; now recollecting, now
expecting; now loving, now hating; and in a hundred other ways we know
our minds to be alternately engaged. But all these are complex states,
it may be said, produced by combination of simpler ones;--do not the
simpler ones follow a different law? Are not the _sensations_ which we
get from the same object, for example, always the same? Does not the
same piano-key, struck with the same force, make us hear in the same
way? Does not the same grass give us the same feeling of green, the same
sky the same feeling of blue, and do we not get the same olfactory
sensation no matter how many times we put our nose to the same flask of
cologne? It seems a piece of metaphysical sophistry to suggest that we
do not; and yet a close attention to the matter shows that _there is no
proof that an incoming current ever gives us just the same bodily
sensation twice_.
_What is got twice is the same_ OBJECT. We hear the same _note_ over and
over again; we see the same _quality_ of green, or smell the same
objective perfume, or experience the same _species_ of pain. The
realities, concrete and abstract, physical and ideal, whose permanent
existence we believe in, seem to be constantly coming up again before
our thought, and lead us, in our carelessness, to suppose that our
'ideas' of them are the same ideas. When we come, some time later, to
the chapter on Perception, we shall see how inveterate is our habit of
simply using our sensible impressions as stepping-stones to pass over to
the recognition of the realities whose presence they reveal. The grass
out of the window now looks to me of the same green in the sun as in the
shade, and yet a painter would have to paint one part of it dark brown,
another part bright yellow, to give its real sensational effect. We take
no heed, as a rule, of the different way in which the same things look
and sound and smell at different distances and under different
circumstances. The sameness of the _things_ is what we are concerned to
ascertain; and any sensations that assure us of that will probably be
considered in a rough way to be the same with each other. This is what
makes off-hand testimony about the subjective identity of different
sensations well-nigh worthless as a proof of the fact. The entire
history of what is called Sensation is a commentary on our inability to
tell whether two sensible qualities received apart are exactly alike.
What appeals to our attention far more than the absolute quality of an
impression is its _ratio_ to whatever other impressions we may have at
the same time. When everything is dark a somewhat less dark sensation
makes us see an object white. Helmholtz calculates that the white marble
painted in a picture representing an architectural view by moonlight is,
when seen by daylight, from ten to twenty thousand times brighter than
the real moonlit marble would be.
Such a difference as this could never have been _sensibly_ learned; it
had to be inferred from a series of indirect considerations. These make
us believe that our sensibility is altering all the time, so that the
same object cannot easily give us the same sensation over again. We feel
things differently accordingly as we are sleepy or awake, hungry or
full, fresh or tired; differently at night and in the morning,
differently in summer and in winter; and above all, differently in
childhood, manhood, and old age. And yet we never doubt that our
feelings reveal the same world, with the same sensible qualities and the
same sensible things occupying it. The difference of the sensibility is
shown best by the difference of our emotion about the things from one
age to another, or when we are in different organic moods. What was
bright and exciting becomes weary, flat, and unprofitable. The bird's
song is tedious, the breeze is mournful, the sky is sad.
To these indirect presumptions that our sensations, following the
mutations of our capacity for feeling, are always undergoing an
essential change, must be added another presumption, based on what must
happen in the brain. Every sensation corresponds to some cerebral
action. For an identical sensation to recur it would have to occur the
second time _in an unmodified brain_. But as this, strictly speaking, is
a physiological impossibility, so is an unmodified feeling an
impossibility; for to every brain-modification, however small, we
suppose that there must correspond a change of equal amount in the
consciousness which the brain subserves.
But if the assumption of 'simple sensations' recurring in immutable
shape is so easily shown to be baseless, how much more baseless is the
assumption of immutability in the larger masses of our thought!
For there it is obvious and palpable that our state of mind is never
precisely the same. Every thought we have of a given fact is, strictly
speaking, unique, and only bears a resemblance of kind with our other
thoughts of the same fact. When the identical fact recurs, we _must_
think of it in a fresh manner, see it under a somewhat different angle,
apprehend it in different relations from those in which it last
appeared. And the thought by which we cognize it is the thought of
it-in-those-relations, a thought suffused with the consciousness of all
that dim context. Often we are ourselves struck at the strange
differences in our successive views of the same thing. We wonder how we
ever could have opined as we did last month about a certain matter. We
have outgrown the possibility of that state of mind, we know not how.
From one year to another we see things in new lights. What was unreal
has grown real, and what was exciting is insipid. The friends we used to
care the world for are shrunken to shadows; the women once so divine,
the stars, the woods, and the waters, how now so dull and common!--the
young girls that brought an aura of infinity, at present hardly
distinguishable existences; the pictures so empty; and as for the books,
what _was_ there to find so mysteriously significant in Goethe, or in
John Mill so full of weight? Instead of all this, more zestful than ever
is the work; and fuller and deeper the import of common duties and of
common goods.
I am sure that this concrete and total manner of regarding the mind's
changes is the only true manner, difficult as it may be to carry it out
in detail. If anything seems obscure about it, it will grow clearer as
we advance. Meanwhile, if it be true, it is certainly also true that no
two 'ideas' are ever exactly the same, which is the proposition we
started to prove. The proposition is more important theoretically than
it at first sight seems. For it makes it already impossible for us to
follow obediently in the footprints of either the Lockian or the
Herbartian school, schools which have had almost unlimited influence in
Germany and among ourselves. No doubt it is often _convenient_ to
formulate the mental facts in an atomistic sort of way, and to treat the
higher states of consciousness as if they were all built out of
unchanging simple ideas which 'pass and turn again.' It is convenient
often to treat curves as if they were composed of small straight lines,
and electricity and nerve-force as if they were fluids. But in the one
case as in the other we must never forget that we are talking
symbolically, and that there is nothing in nature to answer to our
words. _A permanently existing 'Idea' which makes its appearance before
the footlights of consciousness at periodical intervals is as
mythological an entity as the Jack of Spades._
=Within each personal consciousness, thought is sensibly continuous.= I
can only define 'continuous' as that which is without breach, crack, or
division. The only breaches that can well be conceived to occur within
the limits of a single mind would either be _interruptions_,
_time_-gaps during which the consciousness went out; or they would be
breaks in the content of the thought, so abrupt that what followed had
no connection whatever with what went before. The proposition that
consciousness feels continuous, means two things:
_a._ That even where there is a time-gap the consciousness after it
feels as if it belonged together with the consciousness before it, as
another part of the same self;
_b._ That the changes from one moment to another in the quality of the
consciousness are never absolutely abrupt.
The case of the time-gaps, as the simplest, shall be taken first.
_a._ When Paul and Peter wake up in the same bed, and recognize that
they have been asleep, each one of them mentally reaches back and makes
connection with but _one_ of the two streams of thought which were
broken by the sleeping hours. As the current of an electrode buried in
the ground unerringly finds its way to its own similarly buried mate,
across no matter how much intervening earth; so Peter's present
instantly finds out Peter's past, and never by mistake knits itself on
to that of Paul. Paul's thought in turn is as little liable to go
astray. The past thought of Peter is appropriated by the present Peter
alone. He may have a _knowledge_, and a correct one too, of what Paul's
last drowsy states of mind were as he sank into sleep, but it is an
entirely different sort of knowledge from that which he has of his own
last states. He _remembers_ his own states, whilst he only _conceives_
Paul's. Remembrance is like direct feeling; its object is suffused with
a warmth and intimacy to which no object of mere conception ever
attains. This quality of warmth and intimacy and immediacy is what
Peter's _present_ thought also possesses for itself. So sure as this
present is me, is mine, it says, so sure is anything else that comes
with the same warmth and intimacy and immediacy, me and mine. What the
qualities called warmth and intimacy may in themselves be will have to
be matter for future consideration. But whatever past states appear with
those qualities must be admitted to receive the greeting of the present
mental state, to be owned by it, and accepted as belonging together with
it in a common self. This community of self is what the time-gap cannot
break in twain, and is why a present thought, although not ignorant of
the time-gap, can still regard itself as continuous with certain chosen
portions of the past.
Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such
words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents
itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river'
or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described.
_In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of
consciousness, or of subjective life._
_b._ But now there appears, even within the limits of the same self, and
between thoughts all of which alike have this same sense of belonging
together, a kind of jointing and separateness among the parts, of which
this statement seems to take no account. I refer to the breaks that are
produced by sudden _contrasts in the quality_ of the successive segments
of the stream of thought. If the words 'chain' and 'train' had no
natural fitness in them, how came such words to be used at all? Does not
a loud explosion rend the consciousness upon which it abruptly breaks,
in twain? No; for even into our awareness of the thunder the
awareness of the previous silence creeps and continues; for what
we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder _pure_, but
thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it. Our feeling of
the same objective thunder, coming in this way, is quite different from
what it would be were the thunder a continuation of previous thunder.
The thunder itself we believe to abolish and exclude the silence; but
the _feeling_ of the thunder is also a feeling of the silence as just
gone; and it would be difficult to find in the actual concrete
consciousness of man a feeling so limited to the present as not to have
an inkling of anything that went before.
='Substantive' and 'Transitive' States of Mind.=--When we take a general
view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first
is the different pace of its parts. Like a bird's life, it seems to be
an alternation of flights and perchings. The rhythm of language
expresses this, where every thought is expressed in a sentence, and
every sentence closed by a period. The resting-places are usually
occupied by sensorial imaginations of some sort, whose peculiarity is
that they can be held before the mind for an indefinite time, and
contemplated without changing; the places of flight are filled with
thoughts of relations, static or dynamic, that for the most part obtain
between the matters contemplated in the periods of comparative rest.
_Let us call the resting-places the 'substantive parts,' and the places
of flight the 'transitive parts,' of the stream of thought._ It then
appears that our thinking tends at all times towards some other
substantive part than the one from which it has just been dislodged. And
we may say that the main use of the transitive parts is to lead us from
one substantive conclusion to another.
Now it is very difficult, introspectively, to see the transitive parts
for what they really are. If they are but flights to a conclusion,
stopping them to look at them before the conclusion is reached is really
annihilating them. Whilst if we wait till the conclusion _be_ reached,
it so exceeds them in vigor and stability that it quite eclipses and
swallows them up in its glare. Let anyone try to cut a thought across in
the middle and get a look at its section, and he will see how difficult
the introspective observation of the transitive tracts is. The rush of
the thought is so headlong that it almost always brings us up at the
conclusion before we can arrest it. Or if our purpose is nimble enough
and we do arrest it, it ceases forthwith to be itself. As a snowflake
crystal caught in the warm hand is no longer a crystal but a drop, so,
instead of catching the feeling of relation moving to its term, we find
we have caught some substantive thing, usually the last word we were
pronouncing, statically taken, and with its function, tendency, and
particular meaning in the sentence quite evaporated. The attempt at
introspective analysis in these cases is in fact like seizing a spinning
top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to
see how the darkness looks. And the challenge to _produce_ these
transitive states of consciousness, which is sure to be thrown by
doubting psychologists at anyone who contends for their existence, is as
unfair as Zeno's treatment of the advocates of motion, when, asking them
to point out in what place an arrow is when it moves, he argues the
falsity of their thesis from their inability to make to so preposterous
a question an immediate reply.
The results of this introspective difficulty are baleful. If to hold
fast and observe the transitive parts of thought's stream be so hard,
then the great blunder to which all schools are liable must be the
failure to register them, and the undue emphasizing of the more
substantive parts of the stream. Now the blunder has historically worked
in two ways. One set of thinkers have been led by it to
_Sensationalism_. Unable to lay their hands on any substantive feelings
corresponding to the innumerable relations and forms of connection
between the sensible things of the world, finding no _named_ mental
states mirroring such relations, they have for the most part denied that
any such states exist; and many of them, like Hume, have gone on to deny
the reality of most relations _out_ of the mind as well as in it. Simple
substantive 'ideas,' sensations and their copies, juxtaposed like
dominoes in a game, but really separate, everything else verbal
illusion,--such is the upshot of this view. The _Intellectualists_, on
the other hand, unable to give up the reality of relations _extra
mentem_, but equally unable to point to any distinct substantive
feelings in which they were known, have made the same admission that
such feelings do not exist. But they have drawn an opposite conclusion.
The relations must be known, they say, in something that is no feeling,
no mental 'state,' continuous and consubstantial with the subjective
tissue out of which sensations and other substantive conditions of
consciousness are made. They must be known by something that lies on an
entirely different plane, by an _actus purus_ of Thought, Intellect, or
Reason, all written with capitals and considered to mean something
unutterably superior to any passing perishing fact of sensibility
whatever.
But from our point of view both Intellectualists and Sensationalists are
wrong. If there be such things as feelings at all, _then so surely as
relations between objects exist_ in rerum naturâ, _so surely, and more
surely, do feelings exist to which these relations are known_. There is
not a conjunction or a preposition, and hardly an adverbial phrase,
syntactic form, or inflection of voice, in human speech, that does not
express some shading or other of relation which we at some moment
actually feel to exist between the larger objects of our thought. If we
speak objectively, it is the real relations that appear revealed; if we
speak subjectively, it is the stream of consciousness that matches each
of them by an inward coloring of its own. In either case the relations
are numberless, and no existing language is capable of doing justice to
all their shades.
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_. Yet we do not: so inveterate has our
habit become of recognizing the existence of the substantive parts
alone, that language almost refuses to lend itself to any other use.
Consider once again the analogy of the brain. We believe the brain to be
an organ whose internal equilibrium is always in a state of change--the
change affecting every part. The pulses of change are doubtless more
violent in one place than in another, their rhythm more rapid at this
time than at that. As in a kaleidoscope revolving at a uniform rate,
although the figures are always rearranging themselves, there are
instants during which the transformation seems minute and interstitial
and almost absent, followed by others when it shoots with magical
rapidity, relatively stable forms thus alternating with forms we should
not distinguish if seen again; so in the brain the perpetual
rearrangement must result in some forms of tension lingering relatively
long, whilst others simply come and pass. But if consciousness
corresponds to the fact of rearrangement itself, why, if the
rearrangement stop not, should the consciousness ever cease? And if a
lingering rearrangement brings with it one kind of consciousness, why
should not a swift rearrangement bring another kind of consciousness as
peculiar as the rearrangement itself?
=The object before the mind always has a 'Fringe.'= There are other
unnamed modifications of consciousness just as important as the
transitive states, and just as cognitive as they. Examples will show
what I mean.
Suppose three successive persons say to us: 'Wait!' 'Hark!' 'Look!' Our
consciousness is thrown into three quite different attitudes of
expectancy, although no definite object is before it in any one of the
three cases. Probably no one will deny here the existence of a real
conscious affection, a sense of the direction from which an impression
is about to come, although no positive impression is yet there.
Meanwhile we have no names for the psychoses in question but the names
hark, look, and wait.
Suppose we try to recall a forgotten name. The state of our
consciousness is peculiar. There is a gap therein; but no mere gap. It
is a gap that is intensely active. A sort of wraith of the name is in
it, beckoning us in a given direction, making us at moments tingle with
the sense of our closeness, and then letting us sink back without the
longed-for term. If wrong names are proposed to us, this singularly
definite gap acts immediately so as to negate them. They do not fit
into its mould. And the gap of one word does not feel like the gap of
another, all empty of content as both might seem necessarily to be when
described as gaps. When I vainly try to recall the name of Spalding, my
consciousness is far removed from what it is when I vainly try to recall
the name of Bowles. There are innumerable consciousnesses of _want_, no
one of which taken in itself has a name, but all different from each
other. Such a feeling of want is _toto cœlo_ other than a want of
feeling: it is an intense feeling. The rhythm of a lost word may be
there without a sound to clothe it; or the evanescent sense of something
which is the initial vowel or consonant may mock us fitfully, without
growing more distinct. Every one must know the tantalizing effect of the
blank rhythm of some forgotten verse, restlessly dancing in one's mind,
striving to be filled out with words.
What is that first instantaneous glimpse of some one's meaning which we
have, when in vulgar phrase we say we 'twig' it? Surely an altogether
specific affection of our mind. And has the reader never asked himself
what kind of a mental fact is his _intention of saying a thing_ before
he has said it? It is an entirely definite intention, distinct from all
other intentions, an absolutely distinct state of consciousness,
therefore; and yet how much of it consists of definite sensorial images,
either of words or of things? Hardly anything! Linger, and the words and
things come into the mind; the anticipatory intention, the divination is
there no more. But as the words that replace it arrive, it welcomes them
successively and calls them right if they agree with it, it rejects them
and calls them wrong if they do not. The intention _to-say-so-and-so_ is
the only name it can receive. One may admit that a good third of our
psychic life consists in these rapid premonitory perspective views of
schemes of thought not yet articulate. How comes it about that a man
reading something aloud for the first time is able immediately to
emphasize all his words aright, unless from the very first he have a
sense of at least the form of the sentence yet to come, which sense is
fused with his consciousness of the present word, and modifies its
emphasis in his mind so as to make him give it the proper accent as he
utters it? Emphasis of this kind almost altogether depends on
grammatical construction. If we read 'no more,' we expect presently a
'than'; if we read 'however,' it is a 'yet,' a 'still,' or a
'nevertheless,' that we expect. And this foreboding of the coming verbal
and grammatical scheme is so practically accurate that a reader
incapable of understanding four ideas of the book he is reading aloud
can nevertheless read it with the most delicately modulated expression
of intelligence.
It is, the reader will see, the reinstatement of the vague and
inarticulate to its proper place in our mental life which I am so
anxious to press on the attention. Mr. Galton and Prof. Huxley have, as
we shall see in the chapter on Imagination, made one step in advance in
exploding the ridiculous theory of Hume and Berkeley that we can have no
images but of perfectly definite things. Another is made if we overthrow
the equally ridiculous notion that, whilst simple objective qualities
are revealed to our knowledge in 'states of consciousness,' relations
are not. But these reforms are not half sweeping and radical enough.
What must be admitted is that the definite images of traditional
psychology form but the very smallest part of our minds as they actually
live. The traditional psychology talks like one who should say a river
consists of nothing but pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful,
and other moulded forms of water. Even were the pails and the pots all
actually standing in the stream, still between them the free water would
continue to flow. It is just this free water of consciousness that
psychologists resolutely overlook. Every definite image in the mind is
steeped and dyed in the free water that flows round it. With it goes the
sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it
came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The
significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo or penumbra
that surrounds and escorts it,--or rather that is fused into one with it
and has become bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh; leaving it, it
is true, an image of the same _thing_ it was before, but making it an
image of that thing newly taken and freshly understood.
_Let us call the consciousness of this halo of relations around the
image by the name of 'psychic overtone' or 'fringe.'_
=Cerebral Conditions of the 'Fringe.'=--Nothing is easier than to
symbolize these facts in terms of brain-action. Just as the echo of the
_whence_, the sense of the starting point of our thought, is probably
due to the dying excitement of processes but a moment since vividly
aroused; so the sense of the whither, the foretaste of the terminus,
must be due to the waxing excitement of tracts or processes whose
psychical correlative will a moment hence be the vividly present feature
of our thought. Represented by a curve, the neurosis underlying
consciousness must at any moment be like this:
[Illustration: FIG. 52.]
Let the horizontal in Fig. 52 be the line of time, and let the three
curves beginning at _a_, _b_, and _c_ respectively stand for the neural
processes correlated with the thoughts of those three letters. Each
process occupies a certain time during which its intensity waxes,
culminates, and wanes. The process for _a_ has not yet died out, the
process for _c_ has already begun, when that for _b_ is culminating. At
the time-instant represented by the vertical line all three processes
are _present_, in the intensities shown by the curve. Those before _c_'s
apex _were_ more intense a moment ago; those after it _will be_ more
intense a moment hence. If I recite _a_, _b_, _c_, then, at the moment
of uttering _b_, neither _a_ nor _c_ is out of my consciousness
altogether, but both, after their respective fashions, 'mix their dim
lights' with the stronger _b_, because their processes are both awake in
some degree.
It is just like 'overtones' in music: they are not separately heard by
the ear; they blend with the fundamental note, and suffuse it, and alter
it; and even so do the waxing and waning brain-processes at every moment
blend with and suffuse and alter the psychic effect of the processes
which are at their culminating point.
=The 'Topic' of the Thought.=--If we then consider the _cognitive
function_ of different states of mind, we may feel assured that the
difference between those that are mere 'acquaintance' and those that are
'knowledges-_about_' is reducible almost entirely to the absence or
presence of psychic fringes or overtones. Knowledge _about_ a thing is
knowledge of its relations. Acquaintance with it is limitation to the
bare impression which it makes. Of most of its relations we are only
aware in the penumbral nascent way of a 'fringe' of unarticulated
affinities about it. And, before passing to the next topic in order, I
must say a little of this sense of affinity, as itself one of the most
interesting features of the subjective stream.
=Thought may be equally rational in any sort of terms.= _In all our
voluntary thinking there is some_ TOPIC or SUBJECT about which all the
members of the thought revolve. Relation to this topic or interest is
constantly felt in the fringe, and particularly the relation of harmony
and discord, of furtherance or hindrance of the topic. Any thought the
quality of whose fringe lets us feel ourselves 'all right,' may be
considered a thought that furthers the topic. Provided we only feel its
object to have a place in the scheme of relations in which the topic
also lies, that is sufficient to make of it a relevant and appropriate
portion of our train of ideas.
Now we may think about our topic mainly in words, or we may think about
it mainly in visual or other images, but this need make no difference as
regards the furtherance of our knowledge of the topic. If we only feel
in the terms, whatever they be, a fringe of affinity with each other and
with the topic, and if we are conscious of approaching a conclusion, we
feel that our thought is rational and right. The words in every language
have contracted by long association fringes of mutual repugnance or
affinity with each other and with the conclusion, which run exactly
parallel with like fringes in the visual, tactile, and other ideas. The
most important element of these fringes is, I repeat, the mere feeling
of harmony or discord, of a right or wrong direction in the thought.
If we know English and French and begin a sentence in French, all the
later words that come are French; we hardly ever drop into English. And
this affinity of the French words for each other is not something merely
operating mechanically as a brain-law, it is something we feel at the
time. Our understanding of a French sentence heard never falls to so low
an ebb that we are not aware that the words linguistically belong
together. Our attention can hardly so wander that if an English word be
suddenly introduced we shall not start at the change. Such a vague sense
as this of the words belonging together is the very minimum of fringe
that can accompany them, if 'thought' at all. Usually the vague
perception that all the words we hear belong to the same language and to
the same special vocabulary in that language, and that the grammatical
sequence is familiar, is practically equivalent to an admission that
what we hear is sense. But if an unusual foreign word be introduced, if
the grammar trip, or if a term from an incongruous vocabulary suddenly
appear, such as 'rat-trap' or 'plumber's bill' in a philosophical
discourse, the sentence detonates as it were, we receive a shock from
the incongruity, and the drowsy assent is gone. The feeling of
rationality in these cases seems rather a negative than a positive
thing, being the mere absence of shock, or sense of discord, between the
terms of thought.
Conversely, if words do belong to the same vocabulary, and if the
grammatical structure is correct, sentences with absolutely no meaning
may be uttered in good faith and pass unchallenged. Discourses at
prayer-meetings, re-shuffling the same collection of cant phrases, and
the whole genus of penny-a-line-isms and newspaper-reporter's flourishes
give illustrations of this. "The birds filled the tree-tops with their
morning song, making the air moist, cool, and pleasant," is a sentence I
remember reading once in a report of some athletic exercises in Jerome
Park. It was probably written unconsciously by the hurried reporter, and
read uncritically by many readers.
[Illustration: FIG. 53.]
We see, then, that it makes little or no difference in what sort of
mind-stuff, in what quality of imagery, our thinking goes on. The only
images _intrinsically_ important are the halting-places, the substantive
conclusions, provisional or final, of the thought. Throughout all the
rest of the stream, the feelings of relation are everything, and the
terms related almost naught. These feelings of relation, these psychic
overtones, halos, suffusions, or fringes about the terms, may be the
same in very different systems of imagery. A diagram may help to
accentuate this indifference of the mental means where the end is the
same. Let _A_ be some experience from which a number of thinkers start.
Let _Z_ be the practical conclusion rationally inferrible from it. One
gets to this conclusion by one line, another by another; one follows a
course of English, another of German, verbal imagery. With one, visual
images predominate; with another, tactile. Some trains are tinged with
emotions, others not; some are very abridged, synthetic and rapid;
others, hesitating and broken into many steps. But when the penultimate
terms of all the trains, however differing _inter se_, finally shoot
into the same conclusion, we say, and rightly say, that all the thinkers
have had substantially the same thought. It would probably astound each
of them beyond measure to be let into his neighbor's mind and to find
how different the scenery there was from that in his own.
The last peculiarity to which attention is to be drawn in this first
rough description of thought's stream is that--
=Consciousness is always interested more in one part of its object than
in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it
thinks.=
The phenomena of selective attention and of deliberative will are of
course patent examples of this choosing activity. But few of us are
aware how incessantly it is at work in operations not ordinarily called
by these names. Accentuation and Emphasis are present in every
perception we have. We find it quite impossible to disperse our
attention impartially over a number of impressions. A monotonous
succession of sonorous strokes is broken up into rhythms, now of one
sort, now of another, by the different accent which we place on
different strokes. The simplest of these rhythms is the double one,
tick-tóck, tick-tóck, tick-tóck. Dots dispersed on a surface are
perceived in rows and groups. Lines separate into diverse figures. The
ubiquity of the distinctions, _this_ and _that_, _here_ and _there_,
_now_ and _then_, in our minds is the result of our laying the same
selective emphasis on parts of place and time.
But we do far more than emphasize things, and unite some, and keep
others apart. We actually _ignore_ most of the things before us. Let me
briefly show how this goes on.
To begin at the bottom, what are our very senses themselves, as we saw
on pp. 10-12, but organs of selection? Out of the infinite chaos of
movements, of which physics teaches us that the outer world consists,
each sense-organ picks out those which fall within certain limits of
velocity. To these it responds, but ignores the rest as completely as if
they did not exist. Out of what is in itself an undistinguishable,
swarming _continuum_, devoid of distinction or emphasis, our senses make
for us, by attending to this motion and ignoring that, a world full of
contrasts, of sharp accents, of abrupt changes, of picturesque light and
shade.
If the sensations we receive from a given organ have their causes thus
picked out for us by the conformation of the organ's termination,
Attention, on the other hand, out of all the sensations yielded, picks
out certain ones as worthy of its notice and suppresses all the rest. We
notice only those sensations which are signs to us of _things_ which
happen practically or æsthetically to interest us, to which we therefore
give substantive names, and which we exalt to this exclusive status of
independence and dignity. But in itself, apart from my interest, a
particular dust-wreath on a windy day is just as much of an individual
_thing_, and just as much or as little deserves an individual name, as
my own body does.
And then, among the sensations we get from each separate thing, what
happens? The mind selects again. It chooses certain of the sensations to
represent the thing most _truly_, and considers the rest as its
appearances, modified by the conditions of the moment. Thus my table-top
is named _square_, after but one of an infinite number of retinal
sensations which it yields, the rest of them being sensations of two
acute and two obtuse angles; but I call the latter _perspective_ views,
and the four right angles the _true_ form of the table, and erect the
attribute squareness into the table's essence, for æsthetic reasons of
my own. In like manner, the real form of the circle is deemed to be the
sensation it gives when the line of vision is perpendicular to its
centre--all its other sensations are _signs_ of this sensation. The real
sound of the cannon is the sensation it makes when the ear is close by.
The real color of the brick is the sensation it gives when the eye looks
squarely at it from a near point, out of the sunshine and yet not in the
gloom; under other circumstances it gives us other color-sensations
which are but signs of this--we then see it looks pinker or bluer than
it really is. The reader knows no object which he does not represent to
himself by preference as in some typical attitude, of some normal size,
at some characteristic distance, of some standard tint, etc., etc. But
all these essential characteristics, which together form for us the
genuine objectivity of the thing and are contrasted with what we call
the subjective sensations it may yield us at a given moment, are mere
sensations like the latter. The mind chooses to suit itself, and decides
what particular sensation shall be held more real and valid than all the
rest.
Next, in a world of objects thus individualized by our mind's selective
industry, what is called our 'experience' is almost entirely determined
by our habits of attention. A thing may be present to a man a hundred
times, but if he persistently fails to notice it, it cannot be said to
enter into his experience. We are all seeing flies, moths, and beetles
by the thousand, but to whom, save an entomologist, do they say anything
distinct? On the other hand, a thing met only once in a lifetime may
leave an indelible experience in the memory. Let four men make a tour in
Europe. One will bring home only picturesque impressions--costumes and
colors, parks and views and works of architecture, pictures and statues.
To another all this will be non-existent; and distances and prices,
populations and drainage-arrangements, door-and window-fastenings, and
other useful statistics will take their place. A third will give a rich
account of the theatres, restaurants, and public halls, and naught
beside; whilst the fourth will perhaps have been so wrapped in his own
subjective broodings as to be able to tell little more than a few names
of places through which he passed. Each has selected, out of the same
mass of presented objects, those which suited his private interest and
has made his experience thereby.
If now, leaving the empirical combination of objects, we ask how the
mind proceeds _rationally_ to connect them, we find selection again to
be omnipotent. In a future chapter we shall see that all Reasoning
depends on the ability of the mind to break up the totality of the
phenomenon reasoned about, into parts, and to pick out from among these
the particular one which, in the given emergency, may lead to the proper
conclusion. The man of genius is he who will always stick in his bill at
the right point, and bring it out with the right element--'reason' if
the emergency be theoretical, 'means' if it be practical--transfixed
upon it.
If now we pass to the æsthetic department, our law is still more
obvious. The artist notoriously selects his items, rejecting all tones,
colors, shapes, which do not harmonize with each other and with the main
purpose of his work. That unity, harmony, 'convergence of characters,'
as M. Taine calls it, which gives to works of art their superiority over
works of nature, is wholly due to _elimination_. Any natural subject
will do, if the artist has wit enough to pounce upon some one feature of
it as characteristic, and suppress all merely accidental items which do
not harmonize with this.
Ascending still higher, we reach the plane of Ethics, where choice
reigns notoriously supreme. An act has no ethical quality whatever
unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible. To sustain the
arguments for the good course and keep them ever before us, to stifle
our longing for more flowery ways, to keep the foot unflinchingly on the
arduous path, these are characteristic ethical energies. But more than
these; for these but deal with the means of compassing interests already
felt by the man to be supreme. The ethical energy _par excellence_ has
to go farther and choose which _interest_ out of several, equally
coercive, shall become supreme. The issue here is of the utmost
pregnancy, for it decides a man's entire career. When he debates, Shall
I commit this crime? choose that profession? accept that office, or
marry this fortune?--his choice really lies between one of several
equally possible future Characters. What he shall _become_ is fixed by
the conduct of this moment. Schopenhauer, who enforces his determinism
by the argument that with a given fixed character only one reaction is
possible under given circumstances, forgets that, in these critical
ethical moments, what consciously _seems_ to be in question is the
complexion of the character itself. The problem with the man is less
what act he shall now resolve to do than what being he shall now choose
to become.
Taking human experience in a general way, the choosings of different men
are to a great extent the same. The race as a whole largely agrees as to
what it shall notice and name; and among the noticed parts we select in
much the same way for accentuation and preference, or subordination and
dislike. There is, however, one entirely extraordinary case in which no
two men ever are known to choose alike. One great splitting of the whole
universe into two halves is made by each of us; and for each of us
almost all of the interest attaches to one of the halves; but we all
draw the line of division between them in a different place. When I say
that we all call the two halves by the same names, and that those names
are '_me_' and '_not-me_' respectively, it will at once be seen what I
mean. The altogether unique kind of interest which each human mind feels
in those parts of creation which it can call _me_ or _mine_ may be a
moral riddle, but it is a fundamental psychological fact. No mind can
take the same interest in his neighbor's _me_ as in his own. The
neighbor's me falls together with all the rest of things in one foreign
mass against which his own _me_ stands out in startling relief. Even
the trodden worm, as Lotze somewhere says, contrasts his own suffering
self with the whole remaining universe, though he have no clear
conception either of himself or of what the universe may be. He is for
me a mere part of the world; for him it is I who am the mere part. Each
of us dichotomizes the Kosmos in a different place.
Descending now to finer work than this first general sketch, let us in
the next chapter try to trace the psychology of this fact of
self-consciousness to which we have thus once more been led.