So nothing is easier than to imagine how, when a current once has

traversed a path, it should traverse it more readily still a second

time. But what made it ever traverse it the first time?[140] In

answering this question we can only fall back on our general conception

of a nervous system as a mass of matter whose parts, constantly kept

in states of different tension, are as constantly tending to equalize

their states. The equalization between any two points occurs through

whatever path may at the moment be most pervious. But, as a given point

of the system may belong, actually or potentially, to many different

paths, and, as the play of nutrition is subject to accidental changes,

_blocks_ may from time to time occur, and make currents shoot through

unwonted lines. Such an unwonted line would be a new-created path,

which if traversed repeatedly, would become the beginning of a new

reflex arc. All this is vague to the last degree, and amounts to little

more than saying that a new path may be formed by the sort of _chances_

that in nervous material are likely to occur. But, vague as it is, it

is really the last word of our wisdom in the matter.[141]

It must be noticed that the growth of structural modification in

living matter may be more rapid than in any lifeless mass, because the

incessant nutritive renovation of which the living matter is the seat

tends often to corroborate and fix the impressed modification, rather

than to counteract it by renewing the original constitution of the

tissue that has been impressed. Thus, we notice after exercising our

muscles or our brain in a new way, that we can do so no longer at that

time; but after a day or two of rest, when we resume the discipline,

our increase in skill not seldom surprises us. I have often noticed

this in learning a tune; and it has led a German author to say that we

learn to swim during the winter and to skate during the summer.

Dr. Carpenter writes:[142]

"It is a matter of universal experience that every kind of training

for special aptitudes is both far more effective, and leaves a more

permanent impress, when exerted on the _growing_ organism than when

brought to bear on the adult. The effect of such training is shown

in the tendency of the organ to 'grow to' the mode in which it is

habitually exercised; as is evidenced by the increased size and power

of particular sets of muscles, and the extraordinary flexibility

of joints, which are acquired by such as have been early exercised

in gymnastic performances.... There is no part of the organism of

man in which the _reconstructive activity_ is so great, during the

whole period of life, as it is in the ganglionic substance of the

brain. This is indicated by the enormous supply of blood which it

receives.... It is, moreover, a fact of great significance that

the nerve-substance is specially distinguished by its _reparative_

power. For while injuries of other tissues (such as the muscular)

which are distinguished by the _speciality_ of their structure and

endowments, are repaired by substance of a lower or less specialized

type, those of nerve-substance are repaired by a complete reproduction

of the normal tissue; as is evidenced in the sensibility of the

newly forming skin which is closing over an open wound, or in the

recovery of the sensibility of a piece of 'transplanted' skin, which

has for a time been rendered insensible by the complete interruption

of the continuity of its nerves. The most remarkable example of

this reproduction, however, is afforded by the results of M.

Brown-Séquard's[143] experiments upon the gradual restoration of the

functional activity of the spinal cord after its complete division;

which takes place in a way that indicates rather a _reproduction_ of

the whole, or the lower part of the cord and of the nerves proceeding

from it, than a mere _reunion_ of divided surfaces. This reproduction

is but a special manifestation of the reconstructive change which is

_always_ taking place in the nervous system; it being not less obvious

to the eye of reason that the 'waste' occasioned by its functional

activity must be constantly repaired by the production of new tissue,

than it is to the eye of sense that such reparation supplies an actual

_loss_ of substance by disease or injury.

"Now, in this constant and active reconstruction of the nervous

system, we recognize a most marked conformity to the general plan

manifested in the nutrition of the organism as a whole. For, in

the first place, it is obvious that there is a tendency to the

production of a _determinate type_ of structure; which type is often

not merely that of the species, but some special modification of it

which characterized one or both of the progenitors. But this type is

peculiarly liable to modification during the early period of life; in

which the functional activity of the nervous system (and particularly

of the brain) is extraordinarily great, and the reconstructive process

proportionally active. And this modifiability expresses itself in the

formation of the mechanism by which those _secondarily automatic_

modes of movement come to be established, which, in man, take the

place of those that are _congenital_ in most of the animals beneath

him; and those modes of sense-perception come to be _acquired_, which

are elsewhere clearly _instinctive_. For there can be no reasonable

doubt that, in both cases, a nervous mechanism is _developed_ in the

course of this self-education, corresponding with that which the lower

animals inherit from their parents. The _plan_ of that _rebuilding_

process, which is necessary to maintain the integrity of the organism

generally, and which goes on with peculiar activity in this portion of

it, is thus being incessantly modified; and in this manner all that

portion of it which ministers to the _external_ life of sense and

motion that is shared by man with the animal kingdom at large, becomes

at adult age the expression of the habits which the individual has

acquired during the period of growth and development. Of these habits,

some are common to the race generally, while others are peculiar to

the individual; those of the former kind (such as walking erect) being

universally acquired, save where physical inability prevents; while

for the latter a special training is needed, which is usually the more

effective the earlier it is begun--as is remarkably seen in the case

of such feats of dexterity as require a conjoint education of the

perceptive and of the motor powers. And when thus developed during

the period of growth, so as to have become a part of the constitution

of the adult, the acquired mechanism is thenceforth maintained in the

ordinary course of the nutritive operations, so as to be ready for use

when called upon, even after long inaction.

"What is so clearly true of the nervous apparatus of animal life

can scarcely be otherwise than true of that which ministers to the

automatic activity of the mind. For, as already shown, the study

of psychology has evolved no more certain result than that there

are uniformities of mental action which are so entirely conformable

to those of bodily action as to indicate their intimate relation

to a 'mechanism of thought and feeling,' acting under the like

conditions with that of sense and motion. The psychical principles

of _association_, indeed, and the physiological principles of

_nutrition_, simply express--the former in terms of mind, the latter

in terms of brain--the universally admitted fact that any sequence of

mental action which has been frequently repeated tends to perpetuate

itself; so that we find ourselves automatically prompted to _think,

feel,_ or _do_ what we have been before accustomed to think, feel,

or do, under like circumstances, without any consciously formed

_purpose_, or anticipation of results. For there is no reason to

regard the cerebrum as an exception to the general principle that,

while each part of the organism tends to _form itself_ in accordance

with the mode in which it is habitually exercised, this tendency

will be especially strong in the nervous apparatus, in virtue of

that _incessant regeneration_ which is the very condition of its

functional activity. It scarcely, indeed, admits of doubt that every

state of ideational consciousness which is either _very strong_ or is

_habitually repeated_ leaves an organic impression on the cerebrum; in

virtue of which that same state may be reproduced at any future time,

in respondence to a suggestion fitted to excite it.... The 'strength

of early association' is a fact so universally recognized that the

expression of it has become proverbial; and this precisely accords

with the physiological principle that, during the period of growth

and development, the formative activity of the brain will be most

amenable to directing influences. It is in this way that what is early

'learned by heart' becomes branded in (as it were) upon the cerebrum;

so that its 'traces' are never lost, even though the conscious

memory of it may have completely faded out. For, when the organic

modification has been once _fixed_ in the growing brain, it becomes a

part of the normal fabric, and is regularly _maintained_ by nutritive

substitution; so that it may endure to the end of life, like the scar

of a wound."

Dr. Carpenter's phrase that _our nervous system grows to the modes in

which it has been exercised_ expresses the philosophy of habit in a

nutshell. We may now trace some of the practical applications of the

principle to human life.

The first result of it is that _habit simplifies the movements required

to achieve a given result, makes them more accurate and diminishes

fatigue_.

"The beginner at the piano not only moves his finger up and down in

order to depress the key, he moves the whole hand, the forearm and

even the entire body, especially moving its least rigid part, the

head, as if he would press down the key with that organ too. Often

a contraction of the abdominal muscles occurs as well. Principally,

however, the impulse is determined to the motion of the hand and of

the single finger. This is, in the first place, because the movement

of the finger is the movement _thought of_ and, in the second place,

because its movement and that of the key are the movements we try to

_perceive_, along with the results of the latter on the ear. The more

often the process is repeated, the more easily the movement follows,

on account of the increase in permeability of the nerves engaged.

"But the more easily the movement occurs, the slighter is the stimulus

required to set it up; and the slighter the stimulus is, the more its

effect is confined to the fingers alone.

"Thus, an impulse which originally spread its effects over the whole

body, or at least over many of its movable parts, is gradually

determined to a single definite organ, in which it effects the

contraction of a few limited muscles. In this change the thoughts and

perceptions which start the impulse acquire more and more intimate

causal relations with a particular group of motor nerves.

"To recur to a simile, at least partially apt, imagine the nervous

system to represent a drainage-system, inclining, on the whole, toward

certain muscles, but with the escape thither somewhat clogged. Then

streams of water will, on the whole, tend most to fill the drains

that go towards these muscles and to wash out the escape. In case of

a sudden 'flushing,' however, the whole system of channels will fill

itself, and the water overflow everywhere before it escapes. But a

moderate quantity of water invading the system will flow through the

proper escape alone.

"Just so with the piano-player. As soon as his impulse, which has

gradually learned to confine itself to single muscles, grows extreme,

it overflows into larger muscular regions. He usually plays with his

fingers, his body being at rest. But no sooner does he get excited

than his whole body becomes 'animated,' and he moves his head and

trunk, in particular, as if these also were organs with which he meant

to belabor the keys."[144]

Man is born with a tendency to do more things than he has ready-made

arrangements for in his nerve-centres. Most of the performances of

other animals are automatic. But in him the number of them is so

enormous, that most of them must be the fruit of painful study. If

practice did not make perfect, nor habit economize the expense of

nervous and muscular energy, he would therefore be in a sorry plight.

As Dr. Maudsley says:[145]

"If an act became no easier after being done several times, if

the careful direction of consciousness were necessary to its

accomplishment on each occasion, it is evident that the whole activity

of a lifetime might be confined to one or two deeds--that no progress

could take place in development. A man might be occupied all day in

dressing and undressing himself; the attitude of his body would

absorb all his attention and energy; the washing of his hands or the

fastening of a button would be as difficult to him on each occasion

as to the child on its first trial; and he would, furthermore, be

completely exhausted by his exertions. Think of the pains necessary to

teach a child to stand, of the many efforts which it must make, and of

the ease with which it at last stands, unconscious of any effort. For

while secondarily automatic acts are accomplished with comparatively

little weariness--in this regard approaching the organic movements, or

the original reflex movements--the conscious effort of the will soon

produces exhaustion. A spinal cord without ... memory would simply

be an idiotic spinal cord.... It is impossible for an individual to

realize how much he owes to its automatic agency until disease has

impaired its functions."

The next result is that _habit diminishes the conscious attention with

which our acts are performed_.

One may state this abstractly thus: If an act require for its execution

a chain, _A, B, C, D, E, F, G,_ etc., of successive nervous events,

then in the first performances of the action the conscious will must

choose each of these events from a number of wrong alternatives that

tend to present themselves; but habit soon brings it about that each

event calls up its own appropriate successor without any alternative

offering itself, and without any reference to the conscious will,

until at last the whole chain, _A, B, C, D, E, F, G,_ rattles itself

off as soon as _A_ occurs, just as if _A_ and the rest of the chain

were fused into a continuous stream. When we are learning to walk,

to ride, to swim, skate, fence, write, play, or sing, we interrupt

ourselves at every step by unnecessary movements and false notes. When

we are proficients, on the contrary, the results not only follow with

the very minimum of muscular action requisite to bring them forth,

they also follow from a single instantaneous 'cue.' The marksman sees

the bird, and, before he knows it, he has aimed and shot. A gleam in

his adversary's eye, a momentary pressure from his rapier, and the

fencer finds that he has instantly made the right parry and return. A

glance at the musical hieroglyphics, and the pianist's fingers have

rippled through a cataract of notes. And not only is it the right

thing at the right time that we thus involuntarily do, but the wrong

thing also, if it be an habitual thing. Who is there that has never

wound up his watch on taking off his waistcoat in the daytime, or

taken his latch-key out on arriving at the door-step of a friend? Very

absent-minded persons in going to their bedroom to dress for dinner

have been known to take off one garment after another and finally to

get into bed, merely because that was the habitual issue of the first

few movements when performed at a later hour. The writer well remembers

how, on revisiting Paris after ten years' absence, and, finding himself

in the street in which for one winter he had attended school, he lost

himself in a brown study, from which he was awakened by finding himself

upon the stairs which led to the apartment in a house many streets

away in which he had lived during that earlier time, and to which his

steps from the school had then habitually led. We all of us have a

definite routine manner of performing certain daily offices connected

with the toilet, with the opening and shutting of familiar cupboards,

and the like. Our lower centres know the order of these movements, and

show their knowledge by their 'surprise' if the objects are altered

so as to oblige the movement to be made in a different way. But our

higher thought-centres know hardly anything about the matter. Few men

can tell off-hand which sock, shoe, or trousers-leg they put on first.

They must first mentally rehearse the act; and even that is often

insufficient--the act must be _performed_. So of the questions, Which

valve of my double door opens first? Which way does my door swing? etc.

I cannot _tell_ the answer; yet my _hand_ never makes a mistake. No one

can _describe_ the order in which he brushes his hair or teeth; yet it

is likely that the order is a pretty fixed one in all of us.

These results may be expressed as follows:

In action grown habitual, what instigates each new muscular

contraction to take place in its appointed order is not a thought or a

perception, but the _sensation occasioned by the muscular contraction

just finished_. A strictly voluntary act has to be guided by idea,

perception, and volition, throughout its whole course. In an habitual

action, mere sensation is a sufficient guide, and the upper regions

of brain and mind are set comparatively free. A diagram will make the

matter clear:

[Illustration: FIG. 24.]

Let _A, B, C, D, E, F, G_ represent an habitual chain of muscular

contractions, and let _a, b, c, d, e, f_ stand for the respective

sensations which these contractions excite in us when they are

successively performed. Such sensations will usually be of the muscles,

skin, or joints of the parts moved, but they may also be effects of the

movement upon the eye or the ear. Through them, and through them alone,

we are made aware whether the contraction has or has not occurred. When

the series, _A, B, C, D, E, F, G,_ is being learned, each of these

sensations becomes the object of a separate perception by the mind.

By it we test each movement, to see if it be right before advancing

to the next. We hesitate, compare, choose, revoke, reject, etc.,

by intellectual means; and the order by which the next movement is

discharged is an express order from the ideational centres after this

deliberation has been gone through.

In habitual action, on the contrary, the only impulse which the

centres of idea or perception need send down is the initial impulse,

the command to _start_. This is represented in the diagram by _V_; it

may be a thought of the first movement or of the last result, or a

mere perception of some of the habitual conditions of the chain, the

presence, e.g., of the keyboard near the hand. In the present case, no

sooner has the conscious thought or volition instigated movement _A_,

than _A_, through the sensation _a_ of its own occurrence, awakens

_B_ reflexly; _B_ then excites _C_ through _b_, and so on till the

chain is ended, when the intellect generally takes cognizance of the

final result. The process, in fact, resembles the passage of a wave

of 'peristaltic' motion down the bowels. The intellectual perception

at the end is indicated in the diagram by the effect of _G_ being

represented, at _G'_, in the ideational centres above the merely

sensational line. The sensational impressions, _a, b, c, d, e, f,_

are all supposed to have their seat below the ideational lines. That

our ideational centres, if involved at all by _a, b, c, d, e, f,_ are

involved in a minimal degree, is shown by the fact that the attention

may be wholly absorbed elsewhere. We may say our prayers, or repeat the

alphabet, with our attention far away.

"A musical performer will play a piece which has become familiar

by repetition while carrying on an animated conversation, or while

continuously engrossed by some train of deeply interesting thought;

the accustomed sequence of movements being directly prompted by

the _sight_ of the notes, or by the remembered succession of the

_sounds_ (if the piece is played from memory), aided in both cases

by the guiding sensations derived from the muscles themselves. But,

further, a higher degree of the same 'training' (acting on an organism

specially fitted to profit by it) enables an accomplished pianist to

play a difficult piece of music at sight; the movements of the hands

and fingers following so immediately upon the sight of the notes that

it seems impossible to believe that any but the very shortest and most

direct track can be the channel of the nervous communication through

which they are called forth. The following curious example of the same

class of _acquired aptitudes_, which differ from instincts only in

being prompted to action by the will, is furnished by Robert Houdin:

"'With a view of cultivating the rapidity of visual and tactile

perception, and the precision of respondent movements, which are

necessary for success in every kind of prestidigitation, Houdin early

practised the art of juggling with balls in the air; and having, after

a month's practice, become thorough master of the art of keeping up

_four_ balls at once, he placed a book before him, and, while the

balls were in the air, accustomed himself to read without hesitation.

'This,' he says, 'will probably seem to my readers very extraordinary;

but I shall surprise them still more when I say that I have just

amused myself with repeating this curious experiment. Though thirty

years have elapsed since the time I was writing, and though I have

scarcely once touched the balls during that period, I can still manage

to read with ease while keeping _three_ balls up.'"(Autobiography, p.

26.)[146]

We have called _a, b, c, d, e, f,_ the antecedents of the successive

muscular attractions, by the name of sensations. Some authors seem

to deny that they are even this. If not even this, they can only be

centripetal nerve-currents, not sufficient to arouse feeling, but

sufficient to arouse motor response.[147] It may be at once admitted

that they are not distinct _volitions_. The will, if any will be

present, limits itself to a _permission_ that they exert their motor

effects. Dr. Carpenter writes:

"There may still be metaphysicians who maintain that actions which

were originally prompted by the will with a distinct intention, and

which are still entirely under its control, can never cease to be

volitional; and that either an infinitesimally small amount of will

is required to sustain them when they have been once set going, or

that the will is in a sort of pendulum-like oscillation between the

two actions--the maintenance of the train of _thought_, and the

maintenance of the train of _movement_. But if only an infinitesimally

small amount of will is necessary to sustain them, is not this

tantamount to saying that they go on by a force of their own? And

does not the experience of the _perfect continuity_ of our train of

thought during the performance of movements that have become habitual,

entirely negative the hypothesis of oscillation? Besides, if such an

oscillation existed, there must be _intervals_ in which each action

goes on _of itself_; so that its essentially automatic character is

virtually admitted. The physiological explanation, that the mechanism

of locomotion, as of other habitual movements, _grows to_ the mode

in which it is early exercised, and that it then works automatically

under the general control and direction of the will, can scarcely

be put down by any assumption of an hypothetical necessity, which

rests only on the basis of ignorance of one side of our composite

nature."[148]

But if not distinct acts of will, these immediate antecedents of each

movement of the chain are at any rate accompanied by consciousness of

some kind. They are _sensations_ to which we are _usually inattentive_,

but which immediately call our attention if they go _wrong_.

Schneider's account of these sensations deserves to be quoted. In the

act of walking, he says, even when our attention is entirely off,

"we are continuously aware of certain muscular feelings; and we have,

moreover, a feeling of certain impulses to keep our equilibrium and

to set down one leg after another. It is doubtful whether we could

preserve equilibrium if no sensation of our body's attitude were

there, and doubtful whether we should advance our leg if we had no

sensation of its movement as executed, and not even a minimal feeling

of impulse to set it down. Knitting appears altogether mechanical,

and the knitter keeps up her knitting even while she reads or is

engaged in lively talk. But if we ask her how this be possible, she

will hardly reply that the knitting goes on of itself. She will rather

say that she has a feeling of it, that she feels in her hands that

she knits and how she must knit, and that therefore the movements of

knitting are called forth and regulated by the sensations associated

therewithal, even when the attention is called away.

"So of every one who practises, apparently automatically, a

long-familiar handicraft. The smith turning his tongs as he smites

the iron, the carpenter wielding his plane, the lace-maker with her

bobbin, the weaver at his loom, all will answer the same question

in the same way by saying that they have a feeling of the proper

management of the implement in their hands.

"In these cases, the feelings which are conditions of the appropriate

acts are very faint. But none the less are they necessary. Imagine

your hands not feeling; your movements could then only be provoked

by ideas, and if your ideas were then diverted away, the movements

ought to come to a standstill, which is a consequence that seldom

occurs."[149]

Again:

"An idea makes you take, for example, a violin into your left hand.

But it is not necessary that your idea remain fixed on the contraction

of the muscles of the left hand and fingers in order that the violin

may continue to be held fast and not let fall. The sensations

themselves which the holding of the instrument awakens in the hand,

since they are associated with the motor impulse of grasping, are

sufficient to cause this impulse, which then lasts as long as the

feeling itself lasts, or until the impulse is inhibited by the idea of

some antagonistic motion."

And the same may be said of the manner in which the right hand holds

the bow:

"It sometimes happens, in beginning these simultaneous combinations,

that one movement or impulse will cease if the consciousness turn

particularly toward another, because at the outset the guiding

sensations must _all_ be strongly _felt_. The bow will perhaps slip

from the fingers, because some of the muscles have relaxed. But the

slipping is a cause of new sensations starting up in the hand, so that

the attention is in a moment brought back to the grasping of the bow.

"The following experiment shows this well: When one begins to play

on the violin, to keep him from raising his right elbow in playing

a book is placed under his right armpit, which he is ordered to hold

fast by keeping the upper arm tight against his body. The muscular

feelings, and feelings of contact connected with the book, provoke an

impulse to press it tight. But often it happens that the beginner,

whose attention gets absorbed in the production of the notes, lets

drop the book. Later, however, this never happens; the faintest

sensations of contact suffice to awaken the impulse to keep it in

its place, and the attention may be wholly absorbed by the notes and

the fingering with the left hand. _The simultaneous combination of

movements is thus in the first instance conditioned by the facility

with which in us, alongside of intellectual processes, processes of

inattentive feeling may still go on._"[150]

This brings us by a very natural transition to the _ethical

implications of the law of habit_. They are numerous and momentous.

Dr. Carpenter, from whose 'Mental Physiology' we have quoted, has so

prominently enforced the principle that our organs grow to the way in

which they have been exercised, and dwelt upon its consequences, that

his book almost deserves to be called a work of edification, on this

account alone. We need make no apology, then, for tracing a few of

these consequences ourselves:

"Habit a second nature! Habit is ten times nature," the Duke of

Wellington is said to have exclaimed; and the degree to which this is

true no one can probably appreciate as well as one who is a veteran

soldier himself. The daily drill and the years of discipline end by

fashioning a man completely over again, as to most of the possibilities

of his conduct.

"There is a story, which is credible enough, though it may not be

true, of a practical joker, who, seeing a discharged veteran carrying

home his dinner, suddenly called out, 'Attention!' whereupon the man

instantly brought his hands down, and lost his mutton and potatoes in

the gutter. The drill had been thorough, and its effects had become

embodied in the man's nervous structure."[151]

Riderless cavalry-horses, at many a battle, have been seen to come

together and go through their customary evolutions at the sound of

the bugle-call. Most trained domestic animals, dogs and oxen, and

omnibus- and car-horses, seem to be machines almost pure and simple,

undoubtingly, unhesitatingly doing from minute to minute the duties

they have been taught, and giving no sign that the possibility of an

alternative ever suggests itself to their mind. Men grown old in prison

have asked to be readmitted after being once set free. In a railroad

accident to a travelling menagerie in the United States some time in

1881, a tiger, whose cage had broken open, is said to have emerged,

but presently crept back again, as if too much bewildered by his new

responsibilities, so that he was without difficulty secured.

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious

conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of

ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings

of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of

life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. It keeps

the fisherman and the deck-hand at sea through the winter; it holds the

miner in his darkness, and nails the countryman to his log-cabin and

his lonely farm through all the months of snow; it protects us from

invasion by the natives of the desert and the frozen zone. It dooms us

all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or

our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees,

because there is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late

to begin again. It keeps different social strata from mixing. Already

at the age of twenty-five you see the professional mannerism settling

down on the young commercial traveller, on the young doctor, on the

young minister, on the young counsellor-at-law. You see the little

lines of cleavage running through the character, the tricks of thought,

the prejudices, the ways of the 'shop,' in a word, from which the man

can by-and-by no more escape than his coat-sleeve can suddenly fall

into a new set of folds. On the whole, it is best he should not escape.

It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the

character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.

If the period between twenty and thirty is the critical one in the

formation of intellectual and professional habits, the period below

twenty is more important still for the fixing of _personal_ habits,

properly so called, such as vocalization and pronunciation, gesture,

motion, and address. Hardly ever is a language learned after twenty

spoken without a foreign accent; hardly ever can a youth transferred

to the society of his betters unlearn the nasality and other vices of

speech bred in him by the associations of his growing years. Hardly

ever, indeed, no matter how much money there be in his pocket, can

he even learn to _dress_ like a gentleman-born. The merchants offer

their wares as eagerly to him as to the veriest 'swell,' but he

simply _cannot_ buy the right things. An invisible law, as strong as

gravitation, keeps him within his orbit, arrayed this year as he was

the last; and how his better-bred acquaintances contrive to get the

things they wear will be for him a mystery till his dying day.

The great thing, then, in all education, is to _make our nervous

system our ally instead of our enemy_. It is to fund and capitalize

our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund.

_For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible,

as many useful actions as we can,_ and guard against the growing into

ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard

against the plague. The more of the details of our daily life we can

hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher

powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no

more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but

indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking

of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the

beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional

deliberation. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding,

or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as

practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. If there be such

daily duties not yet ingrained in any one of my readers, let him begin

this very hour to set the matter right.

In Professor Bain's chapter on 'The Moral Habits' there are some

admirable practical remarks laid down. Two great maxims emerge from his

treatment. The first is that in the acquisition of a new habit, or

the leaving off of an old one, we must take care to _launch ourselves

with as strong and decided an initiative as possible_. Accumulate all

the possible circumstances which shall re-enforce the right motives;

put yourself assiduously in conditions that encourage the new way; make

engagements incompatible with the old; take a public pledge, if the

case allows; in short, envelop your resolution with every aid you know.

This will give your new beginning such a momentum that the temptation

to break down will not occur as soon as it otherwise might; and every

day during which a breakdown is postponed adds to the chances of its

not occurring at all.

The second maxim is: _Never suffer an exception to occur till the new

habit is securely rooted in your life_. Each lapse is like the letting

fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single

slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again. _Continuity_

of training is the great means of making the nervous system act

infallibly right. As Professor Bain says:

"The peculiarity of the moral habits, contradistinguishing them from

the intellectual acquisitions, is the presence of two hostile powers,

one to be gradually raised into the ascendant over the other. It

is necessary, above all things, in such a situation, never to lose

a battle. Every gain on the wrong side undoes the effect of many

conquests on the right. The essential precaution, therefore, is so

to regulate the two opposing powers that the one may have a series

of uninterrupted successes, until repetition has fortified it to

such a degree as to enable it to cope with the opposition, under

any circumstances. This is the theoretically best career of mental

progress."

The need of securing success at the _outset_ is imperative. Failure at

first is apt to dampen the energy of all future attempts, whereas past

experience of success nerves one to future vigor. Goethe says to a man

who consulted him about an enterprise but mistrusted his own powers:

"Ach! you need only blow on your hands!" And the remark illustrates the

effect on Goethe's spirits of his own habitually successful career.

Prof. Baumann, from whom I borrow the anecdote,[152] says that the

collapse of barbarian nations when Europeans come among them is due

to their despair of ever succeeding as the new-comers do in the larger

tasks of life. Old ways are broken and new ones not formed.

The question of 'tapering-off,' in abandoning such habits as drink and

opium-indulgence, comes in here, and is a question about which experts

differ within certain limits, and in regard to what may be best for an

individual case. In the main, however, all expert opinion would agree

that abrupt acquisition of the new habit is the best way, _if there be

a real possibility of carrying it out_. We must be careful not to give

the will so stiff a task as to insure its defeat at the very outset;

but, _provided one can stand it_, a sharp period of suffering, and then

a free time, is the best thing to aim at, whether in giving up a habit

like that of opium, or in simply changing one's hours of rising or of

work. It is surprising how soon a desire will die of inanition if it be

_never_ fed.

"One must first learn, unmoved, looking neither to the right nor

left, to walk firmly on the straight and narrow path, before one can

begin 'to make one's self over again.' He who every day makes a fresh

resolve is like one who, arriving at the edge of the ditch he is to

leap, forever stops and returns for a fresh run. Without _unbroken_

advance there is no such thing as _accumulation_ of the ethical forces

possible, and to make this possible, and to exercise us and habituate

us in it, is the sovereign blessing of regular _work_."[153]

A third maxim may be added to the preceding pair: _Seize the very first

possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every

emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits

you aspire to gain._ It is not in the moment of their forming, but

in the moment of their producing _motor effects_, that resolves and

aspirations communicate the new 'set' to the brain. As the author last

quoted remarks:

"The actual presence of the practical opportunity alone furnishes the

fulcrum upon which the lever can rest, by means of which the moral

will may multiply its strength, and raise itself aloft. He who has no

solid ground to press against will never get beyond the stage of empty

gesture-making."

No matter how full a reservoir of _maxims_ one may possess, and no

matter how good one's _sentiments_ may be, if one have not taken

advantage of every concrete opportunity to _act_, one's character may

remain entirely unaffected for the better. With mere good intentions,

hell is proverbially paved. And this is an obvious consequence of the

principles we have laid down. A 'character,' as J. S. Mill says, 'is

a completely fashioned will'; and a will, in the sense in which he

means it, is an aggregate of tendencies to act in a firm and prompt and

definite way upon all the principal emergencies of life. A tendency

to act only becomes effectively ingrained in us in proportion to the

uninterrupted frequency with which the actions actually occur, and

the brain 'grows' to their use. Every time a resolve or a fine glow

of feeling evaporates without bearing practical fruit is worse than a

chance lost; it works so as positively to hinder future resolutions

and emotions from taking the normal path of discharge. There is no

more contemptible type of human character than that of the nerveless

sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of

sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed.

Rousseau, inflaming all the mothers of France, by his eloquence, to

follow Nature and nurse their babies themselves, while he sends his

own children to the foundling hospital, is the classical example of

what I mean. But every one of us in his measure, whenever, after

glowing for an abstractly formulated Good, he practically ignores

some actual case, among the squalid 'other particulars' of which that

same Good lurks disguised, treads straight on Rousseau's path. All

Goods are disguised by the vulgarity of their concomitants, in this

work-a-day world; but woe to him who can only recognize them when he

thinks them in their pure and abstract form! The habit of excessive

novel-reading and theatre-going will produce true monsters in this

line. The weeping of a Russian lady over the fictitious personages in

the play, while her coachman is freezing to death on his seat outside,

is the sort of thing that everywhere happens on a less glaring scale.

Even the habit of excessive indulgence in music, for those who are

neither performers themselves nor musically gifted enough to take

it in a purely intellectual way, has probably a relaxing effect upon

the character. One becomes filled with emotions which habitually pass

without prompting to any deed, and so the inertly sentimental condition

is kept up. The remedy would be, never to suffer one's self to have an

emotion at a concert, without expressing it afterward in _some_ active

way.[154] Let the expression be the least thing in the world--speaking

genially to one's aunt, or giving up one's seat in a horse-car, if

nothing more heroic offers--but let it not fail to take place.

These latter cases make us aware that it is not simply _particular

lines_ of discharge, but also _general forms_ of discharge, that

seem to be grooved out by habit in the brain. Just as, if we let our

emotions evaporate, they get into a way of evaporating; so there is

reason to suppose that if we often flinch from making an effort, before

we know it the effort-making capacity will be gone; and that, if we

suffer the wandering of our attention, presently it will wander all the

time. Attention and effort are, as we shall see later, but two names

for the same psychic fact. To what brain-processes they correspond we

do not know. The strongest reason for believing that they do depend on

brain-processes at all, and are not pure acts of the spirit, is just

this fact, that they seem in some degree subject to the law of habit,

which is a material law. As a final practical maxim, relative to these

habits of the will, we may, then, offer something like this: _Keep

the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise

every day_. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little

unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason

than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire

need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand

the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man

pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and

possibly may never bring him a return. But if the fire _does_ come,

his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man

who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention,

energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will

stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his

softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.

The physiological study of mental conditions is thus the most powerful

ally of hortatory ethics. The hell to be endured hereafter, of which

theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this

world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way. Could

the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles

of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the

plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never

to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its

never so little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play,

excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, 'I won't count

this time!' Well! he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count

it; but it is being counted none the less. Down among his nerve-cells

and fibres the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it

up to be used against him when the next temptation comes. Nothing we

ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out. Of course,

this has its good side as well as its bad one. As we become permanent

drunkards by so many separate drinks, so we become saints in the moral,

and authorities and experts in the practical and scientific spheres, by

so many separate acts and hours of work. Let no youth have any anxiety

about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. If

he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working-day, he may safely

leave the final result to itself. He can with perfect certainty count

on waking up some fine morning, to find himself one of the competent

ones of his generation, in whatever pursuit he may have singled out.

Silently, between all the details of his business, the _power of

judging_ in all that class of matter will have built itself up within

him as a possession that will never pass away. Young people should know

this truth in advance. The ignorance of it has probably engendered more

discouragement and faint-heartedness in youths embarking on arduous

careers than all other causes put together.

FOOTNOTES:

[136] This chapter has already appeared in the Popular Science Monthly

for February 1887.

[137] In the sense above explained, which applies to inner structure as

well as to outer form.

[138] Revue Philosophique, i, 324.

[139] Some paths, to be sure, are banked up by bodies moving through

them under too great pressure, and made impervious. These special cases

we disregard.

[140] We cannot say _the will_, for, though many, perhaps most, human

habits were once voluntary actions, no action, as we shall see in

a later chapter, can be _primarily_ such. While an habitual action

may once have been voluntary, the voluntary action must before that,

at least once, have been impulsive or reflex. It is this very first

occurrence of all that we consider in the text.

[141] Those who desire a more definite formulation may consult J.

Fiske's 'Cosmic Philosophy,' vol. ii, pp. 142-146 and Spencer's

'Principles of Biology,' sections 302 and 303, and the part entitled

'Physical Synthesis' of his 'Principles of Psychology.' Mr. Spencer

there tries, not only to show how new actions may arise in nervous

systems and form new reflex arcs therein, but even how nervous

tissue may actually be born by the passage of new waves of isometric

transformation through an originally indifferent mass. I cannot help

thinking that Mr. Spencer's data, under a great show of precision,

conceal vagueness and improbability, and even self-contradiction.

[142] 'Mental Physiology' (1874) pp. 339-345.

[143] [See, later, Masius in Van Benedens' and Van Bambeke's 'Archives

de Biologie,' vol. i (Liège, 1880).--W. J.]

[144] G. H. Schneider: 'Der menschliche Wille' (1882), pp. 417-419

(freely translated). For the drain-simile, see also Spencer's

'Psychology,' part v, chap. viii.

[145] Physiology of Mind, p. 155.

[146] Carpenter's 'Mental Physiology' (1874), pp. 217, 218.

[147] Von Hartmann devotes a chapter of his 'Philosophy of the

Unconscious' (English translation, vol. i, p. 72) to proving that they

must be both _ideas_ and _unconscious_.

[148] 'Mental Physiology,' p. 20.

[149] 'Der menschliche Wille,' pp. 447, 448.

[150] 'Der menschliche Wille,' p. 439. The last sentence is rather

freely translated--the sense is unaltered.

[151] Huxley's 'Elementary Lessons in Physiology,' lesson xii.

[152] See the admirable passage about success at the outset, in his

Handbuch der Moral (1878), pp. 38-43.

[153] J. Bahnsen: 'Beiträge zu Charakterologie' (1867), vol i, p. 209.

[154] See for remarks on this subject a readable article by Miss V.

Scudder on 'Musical Devotees and Morals,' in the Andover Review for

January. 1887.

CHAPTER V.

THE AUTOMATON-THEORY.

In describing the functions of the hemispheres a short way back, we

used language derived from both the bodily and the mental life, saying

now that the animal made indeterminate and unforeseeable reactions,

and anon that he was swayed by considerations of future good and

evil; treating his hemispheres sometimes as the seat of memory and

ideas in the psychic sense, and sometimes talking of them as simply a

complicated addition to his reflex machinery. This sort of vacillation

in the point of view is a fatal incident of all ordinary talk about

these questions; but I must now settle my scores with those readers to

whom I already dropped a word in passing (see Footnote 6) and who have

probably been dissatisfied with my conduct ever since.

Suppose we restrict our view to facts of one and the same plane, and

let that be the bodily plane: cannot all the outward phenomena of

intelligence still be exhaustively described? Those mental images,

those 'considerations,' whereof we spoke,--presumably they do not

arise without neural processes arising simultaneously with them,

and presumably each consideration corresponds to a process _sui

generis_, and unlike all the rest. In other words, however numerous

and delicately differentiated the train of ideas may be, the train

of brain-events that runs alongside of it must in both respects be

exactly its match, and we must postulate a neural machinery that offers

a living counterpart for every shading, however fine, of the history

of its owner's mind. Whatever degree of complication the latter may

reach, the complication of the machinery must be quite as extreme,

otherwise we should have to admit that there may be mental events to

which no brain-events correspond. But such an admission as this the

physiologist is reluctant to make. It would violate all his beliefs.

'No psychosis without neurosis,' is one form which the principle of

continuity takes in his mind.

But this principle forces the physiologist to make still another step.

If neural action is as complicated as mind; and if in the sympathetic

system and lower spinal cord we see what, so far as we know, is

unconscious neural action executing deeds that to all outward intent

may be called intelligent; what is there to hinder us from supposing

that even where we know consciousness to be there, the still more

complicated neural action which we believe to be its inseparable

companion is alone and of itself the real agent of whatever intelligent

deeds may appear? "As actions of a certain degree of complexity are

brought about by mere mechanism, why may not actions of a still greater

degree of complexity be the result of a more refined mechanism?" The

conception of reflex action is surely one of the best conquests of

physiological theory; why not be radical with it? Why not say that just

as the spinal cord is a machine with few reflexes, so the hemispheres

are a machine with many, and that that is all the difference? The

principle of continuity would press us to accept this view.

But what on this view could be the function of the consciousness

itself? _Mechanical_ function it would have none. The sense-organs

would awaken the brain-cells; these would awaken each other in rational

and orderly sequence, until the time for action came; and then the last

brain-vibration would discharge downward into the motor tracts. But

this would be a quite autonomous chain of occurrences, and whatever

mind went with it would be there only as an 'epiphenomenon,' an inert

spectator, a sort of 'foam, aura, or melody' as Mr. Hodgson says,

whose opposition or whose furtherance would be alike powerless over

the occurrences themselves. When talking, some time ago, we ought

not, accordingly, _as physiologists_, to have said anything about

'considerations' as guiding the animal. We ought to have said 'paths

left in the hemispherical cortex by former currents,' and nothing more.

Now so simple and attractive is this conception from the consistently

physiological point of view, that it is quite wonderful to see how late

it was stumbled on in philosophy, and how few people, even when it

has been explained to them, fully and easily realize its import. Much

of the polemic writing against it is by men who have as yet failed to

take it into their imaginations. Since this has been the case, it seems

worth while to devote a few more words to making it plausible, before

criticising it ourselves.

To Descartes belongs the credit of having first been bold enough to

conceive of a completely self-sufficing nervous mechanism which should

be able to perform complicated and apparently intelligent acts. By a

singularly arbitrary restriction, however, Descartes stopped short at

man, and while contending that in beasts the nervous machinery was all,

he held that the higher acts of man were the result of the agency of

his rational soul. The opinion that beasts have no consciousness at

all was of course too paradoxical to maintain itself long as anything

more than a curious item in the history of philosophy. And with its

abandonment the very notion that the nervous system _per se_ might work

the work of intelligence, which was an integral, though detachable

part of the whole theory, seemed also to slip out of men's conception,

until, in this century, the elaboration of the doctrine of reflex

action made it possible and natural that it should again arise. But it

was not till 1870, I believe, that Mr. Hodgson made the decisive step,

by saying that feelings, no matter how intensely they may be present,

can have no causal efficacy whatever, and comparing them to the colors

laid on the surface of a mosaic, of which the events in the nervous

system are represented by the stones.[155] Obviously the stones are

held in place by each other and not by the several colors which they

support.

About the same time Mr. Spalding, and a little later Messrs. Huxley

and Clifford, gave great publicity to an identical doctrine,

though in their case it was backed by less refined metaphysical

considerations.[156]

A few sentences from Huxley and Clifford may be subjoined to make the

matter entirely clear. Professor Huxley says:

"The consciousness of brutes would appear to be related to the

mechanism of their body simply as a collateral product of its working,

and to be as completely without any power of modifying that working as

the steam-whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine

is without influence on its machinery. Their volition, if they have

any, is an emotion _indicative_ of physical changes, not a _cause_ of

such changes.... The soul stands related to the body as the bell of a

clock to the works, and consciousness answers to the sound which the

bell gives out when it is struck.... Thus far I have strictly confined

myself to the automatism of brutes.... It is quite true that, to the

best of my judgment, the argumentation which applies to brutes holds

equally good of men; and, therefore, that all states of consciousness

in us, as in them, are immediately caused by molecular changes of the

brain-substance. It seems to me that in men, as in brutes, there is

no proof that any state of consciousness is the cause of change in

the motion of the matter of the organism. If these positions are well

based, it follows that our mental conditions are simply the symbols

in consciousness of the changes which take place automatically in the

organism; and that, to take an extreme illustration, the feeling we

call volition is not the cause of a voluntary act, but the symbol of

that state of the brain which is the immediate cause of that act. We

are conscious automata."

Professor Clifford writes:

"All the evidence that we have goes to show that the physical world

gets along entirely by itself, according to practically universal

rules.... The train of physical facts between the stimulus sent into

the eye, or to any one of our senses, and the exertion which follows

it, and the train of physical facts which goes on in the brain, even

when there is no stimulus and no exertion,--these are perfectly

complete physical trams, and every step is fully accounted for by

mechanical conditions.... The two things are on utterly different

platforms--the physical facts go along by themselves, and the mental

facts go along by themselves. There is a parallelism between them,

but there is no interference of one with the other. Again, if anybody

says that the will influences matter, the statement is not untrue, but

it is nonsense. Such an assertion belongs to the crude materialism of

the savage. The only thing which influences matter is the position

of surrounding matter or the motion of surrounding matter.... The

assertion that another man's volition, a feeling in his consciousness

that I cannot perceive, is part of the train of physical facts which

I may perceive,--this is neither true nor untrue, but nonsense; it

is a combination of words whose corresponding ideas will not go

together.... Sometimes one series is known better, and sometimes

the other; so that in telling a story we speak sometimes of mental

and sometimes of material facts. A feeling of chill made a man run;

strictly speaking, the nervous disturbance which coexisted with that

feeling of chill made him run, if we want to talk about material

facts; or the feeling of chill produced the form of sub-consciousness

which coexists with the motion of legs, if we want to talk about

mental facts.... When, therefore, we ask: 'What is the physical link

between the ingoing message from chilled skin and the outgoing message

which moves the leg? 'and the answer is, 'A man's will,' we have as

much right to be amused as if we had asked our friend with the picture

what pigment was used in painting the cannon in the foreground, and

received the answer, 'Wrought iron.' It will be found excellent

practice in the mental operations required by this doctrine to imagine

a train, the fore part of which is an engine and three carriages

linked with iron couplings, and the hind part three other carriages

linked with iron couplings; the bond between the two parts being made

up out of the sentiments of amity subsisting between the stoker and

the guard."

To comprehend completely the consequences of the dogma so confidently

enunciated, one should unflinchingly apply it to the most complicated

examples. The movements of our tongues and pens, the flashings of our

eyes in conversation, are of course events of a material order, and as

such their causal antecedents must be exclusively material. If we knew

thoroughly the nervous system of Shakespeare, and as thoroughly all

his environing conditions, we should be able to show why at a certain

period of his life his hand came to trace on certain sheets of paper

those crabbed little black marks which we for shortness' sake call

the manuscript of Hamlet. We should understand the rationale of every

erasure and alteration therein, and we should understand all this

without in the slightest degree acknowledging the existence of the

thoughts in Shakespeare's mind. The words and sentences would be taken,

not as signs of anything beyond themselves, but as little outward

facts, pure and simple. In like manner we might exhaustively write

the biography of those two hundred pounds, more or less, of warmish

albuminoid matter called Martin Luther, without ever implying that it

felt.

But, on the other hand, nothing in all this could prevent us from

giving an equally complete account of either Luther's or Shakespeare's

spiritual history, an account in which every gleam of thought and

emotion should find its place. The mind-history would run alongside

of the body-history of each man, and each point in the one would

correspond to, but not react upon, a point in the other. So the melody

floats from the harp-string, but neither checks nor quickens its

vibrations; so the shadow runs alongside the pedestrian, but in no way

influences his steps.

Another inference, apparently more paradoxical still, needs to be

made, though, as far as I am aware, Dr. Hodgson is the only writer

who has explicitly drawn it. That inference is that feelings, not

causing nerve-actions, cannot even cause each other. To ordinary

common sense, felt pain is, as such, not only the cause of outward

tears and cries, but also the cause of such inward events as sorrow,

compunction, desire, or inventive thought. So the consciousness of

good news is the direct producer of the feeling of joy, the awareness

of premises that of the belief in conclusions. But according to

the automaton-theory, each of the feelings mentioned is only the

correlate of some nerve-movement whose _cause_ lay wholly in a previous

nerve-movement. The first nerve-movement called up the second; whatever

feeling was attached to the second consequently found itself following

upon the feeling that was attached to the first. If, for example, good

news was the consciousness correlated with the first movement, then

joy turned out to be the correlate in consciousness of the second.

But all the while the items of the nerve series were the only ones in

causal continuity; the items of the conscious series, however inwardly

rational their sequence, were simply juxtaposed.

REASONS FOR THE THEORY.

The 'conscious automaton-theory,' as this conception is generally

called, is thus a radical and simple conception of the manner in

which certain facts may possibly occur. But between conception and

belief, proof ought to lie. And when we ask, 'What proves that all

this is more than a mere conception of the possible?' it is not easy

to get a sufficient reply. If we start from the frog's spinal cord and

reason by continuity, saying, as that acts so intelligently, _though

unconscious_, so the higher centres, _though conscious_, may have the

intelligence they show quite as mechanically based; we are immediately

met by the exact counter-argument from continuity, an argument actually

urged by such writers as Pflüger and Lewes, which starts from the acts

of the hemispheres, and says: "As _these_ owe _their_ intelligence to

the consciousness which we know to be there, so the intelligence of

the spinal cord's acts must really be due to the invisible presence of

a consciousness lower in degree." All arguments from continuity work

in two ways: you can either level up or level down by their means. And

it is clear that such arguments as these can eat each other up to all

eternity.

There remains a sort of philosophic faith, bred like most faiths from

an æsthetic demand. Mental and physical events are, on all hands,

admitted to present the strongest contrast in the entire field of

being. The chasm which yawns between them is less easily bridged over

by the mind than any interval we know. Why, then, not call it an

absolute chasm, and say not only that the two worlds are different,

but that they are independent? This gives us the comfort of all simple

and absolute formulas, and it makes each chain homogeneous to our

consideration. When talking of nervous tremors and bodily actions, we

may feel secure against intrusion from an irrelevant mental world.

When, on the other hand, we speak of feelings, we may with equal

consistency use terms always of one denomination, and never be annoyed

by what Aristotle calls 'slipping into another kind.' The desire on

the part of men educated in laboratories not to have their physical

reasonings mixed up with such incommensurable factors as feelings is

certainly very strong. I have heard a most intelligent biologist say:

"It is high time for scientific men to protest against the recognition

of any such thing as consciousness in a scientific investigation." In

a word, feeling constitutes the 'unscientific' half of existence, and

any one who enjoys calling himself a 'scientist' will be too happy to

purchase an untrammelled homogeneity of terms in the studies of his

predilection, at the slight cost of admitting a dualism which, in the

same breath that it allows to mind an independent status of being,

banishes it to a limbo of causal inertness, from whence no intrusion or

interruption on its part need ever be feared.

Over and above this great postulate that matters must be kept simple,

there is, it must be confessed, still another highly abstract reason

for denying causal efficacity to our feelings. We can form no positive

image of the _modus operandi_ of a volition or other thought affecting

the cerebral molecules.

"Let us try to imagine an idea, say of food, producing a movement, say

of carrying food to the mouth.... What is the method of its action?

Does it assist the decomposition of the molecules of the gray matter,

or does it retard the process, or does it alter the direction in

which the shocks are distributed? Let us imagine the molecules of the

gray matter combined in such a way that they will fall into simpler

combinations on the impact of an incident force. Now suppose the

incident force, in the shape of a shock from some other centre, to

impinge upon these molecules. By hypothesis it will decompose them,

and they will fall into the simpler combination. How is the idea of

food to prevent this decomposition? Manifestly it can do so only by

increasing; the force which binds the molecules together. Good! Try

to imagine the idea of a beefsteak binding two molecules together.

It is impossible. Equally impossible is it to imagine a similar idea

loosening the attractive force between two molecules."[157]

This passage from an exceedingly clever writer expresses admirably

the difficulty to which I allude. Combined with a strong sense of the

'chasm' between the two worlds, and with a lively faith in reflex

machinery, the sense of this difficulty can hardly fail to make one

turn consciousness out of the door as a superfluity so far as one's

explanations go. One may bow her out politely, allow her to remain as

an 'epiphenomenon' (invaluable word!), but one insists that matter

shall hold all the power.

"Having thoroughly recognized the fathomless abyss that separates mind

from matter, and having so blended the very notion into his very

nature that there is no chance of his ever forgetting it or failing

to saturate with it all his meditations, the student of psychology

has next to appreciate the association between these two orders of

phenomena.... They are associated in a manner so intimate that some

of the greatest thinkers consider them different aspects of the same

process.... When the rearrangement of molecules takes place in the

higher regions of the brain, a change of consciousness simultaneously

occurs.... The change of consciousness never takes place without the

change in the brain; the change in the brain never ... without the

change in consciousness. But _why_ the two occur together, or what

the link is which connects them, we do not know, and most authorities

believe that we never shall and never can know. Having firmly and

tenaciously grasped these two notions, of the absolute separateness

of mind and matter, and of the invariable concomitance of a mental

change with a bodily change, the student will enter on the study of

psychology with half his difficulties surmounted."[158]

Half his difficulties ignored, I should prefer to say. For this

'concomitance' in the midst of 'absolute separateness' is an utterly

irrational notion. It is to my mind quite inconceivable that

consciousness should have _nothing to do_ with a business which it

so faithfully attends. And the question, 'What has it to do?' is one

which psychology has no right to 'surmount,' for it is her plain duty

to consider it. The fact is that the whole question of interaction

and influence between things is a metaphysical question, and cannot

be discussed at all by those who are unwilling to go into matters

thoroughly. It is truly enough hard to imagine the 'idea of a beefsteak

binding two molecules together;' but since Hume's time it has been

equally hard to imagine _anything_ binding them together. The whole

notion of 'binding' is a mystery, the first step towards the solution

of which is to clear scholastic rubbish out of the way. Popular

science talks of 'forces,' 'attractions' or 'affinities' as binding

the molecules; but clear science, though she may use such words to

abbreviate discourse, has no use for the conceptions, and is satisfied

when she can express in simple 'laws' the bare space-relations of the

molecules as functions of each other and of time. To the more curiously

inquiring mind, however, this simplified expression of the bare facts

is not enough; there must be a 'reason' for them, and something must

'determine' the laws. And when one seriously sits down to consider what

sort of a thing one _means_ when one asks for a 'reason,' one is led so

far afield, so far away from popular science and its scholasticism, as

to see that even such a fact as the existence or non-existence in the

universe of 'the idea of a beefsteak' may not be wholly indifferent to

other facts in the same universe, and in particular may have something

to do with determining the distance at which two molecules in that

universe shall lie apart. If this is so, then common-sense, though the

intimate nature of causality and of the connection of things in the

universe lies beyond her pitifully bounded horizon, has the root and

gist of the truth in her hands when she obstinately holds to it that

feelings and ideas are causes. However inadequate our ideas of causal

efficacy may be, we are less wide of the mark when we say that our

ideas and feelings have it, than the Automatists are when they say they

haven't it. As in the night all cats are gray, so in the darkness of

metaphysical criticism all causes are obscure. But one has no right

to pull the pall over the psychic half of the subject only, as the

automatists do, and to say that _that_ causation is unintelligible,

whilst in the same breath one dogmatizes about _material_ causation

as if Hume, Kant, and Lotze had never been born. One cannot thus

blow hot and cold. One must be impartially _naif_ or impartially

critical. If the latter, the reconstruction must be thorough-going or

'metaphysical,' and will probably preserve the common-sense view that

ideas are forces, in some translated form. But Psychology is a mere

natural science, accepting certain terms uncritically as her data, and

stopping short of metaphysical reconstruction. Like physics, she must

be _naive_; and if she finds that in her very peculiar field of study

ideas _seem_ to be causes, she had better continue to talk of them

as such. She gains absolutely nothing by a breach with common-sense

in this matter, and she loses, to say the least, all naturalness

of speech. If feelings are causes, of course their effects must be

furtherances and checkings of internal cerebral motions, of which in

themselves we are entirely without knowledge. It is probable that for

years to come we shall have to infer what happens in the brain either

from our feelings or from motor effects which we observe. The organ

will be for us a sort of vat in which feelings and motions somehow go

on stewing together, and in which innumerable things happen of which we

catch but the statistical result. Why, under these circumstances, we

should be asked to forswear the language of our childhood I cannot well

imagine, especially as it is perfectly compatible with the language of

physiology. The feelings can produce nothing absolutely new, they can

only reinforce and inhibit reflex currents which already exist, and the

original organization of these by physiological forces must always be

the ground-work of the psychological scheme.

My conclusion is that to urge the automaton-theory upon us, as it is

now urged, on purely _a priori_ and _quasi-_metaphysical grounds, is an

_unwarrantable impertinence in the present state of psychology_.

REASONS AGAINST THE THEORY.

But there are much more positive reasons than this why we ought to

continue to talk in psychology as if consciousness had causal efficacy.

The _particulars of the distribution of consciousness_, so far as we

know them, _point to its being efficacious_. Let us trace some of them.

It is very generally admitted, though the point would be hard to prove,

that consciousness grows the more complex and intense the higher we

rise in the animal kingdom. That of a man must exceed that of an

oyster. From this point of view it seems an organ, superadded to the

other organs which maintain the animal in the struggle for existence;

and the presumption of course is that it helps him in some way in the

struggle, just as they do. But it cannot help him without being in some

way efficacious and influencing the course of his bodily history. If

now it could be shown in what way consciousness _might_ help him, and

if, moreover, the defects of his other organs (where consciousness is

most developed) are such as to make them need just the kind of help

that consciousness would bring provided it _were_ efficacious; why,

then the plausible inference would be that it came just _because_ of

its efficacy--in other words, its efficacy would be inductively proved.

Now the study of the phenomena of consciousness which we shall make

throughout the rest of this book will show us that consciousness is

at all times primarily _a selecting agency_.[159] Whether we take it

in the lowest sphere of sense, or in the highest of intellection, we

find it always doing one thing, choosing one out of several of the

materials so presented to its notice, emphasizing and accentuating that

and suppressing as far as possible all the rest. The item emphasized is

always in close connection with some _interest_ felt by consciousness

to be paramount at the time.

But what are now the defects of the nervous system in those animals

whose consciousness seems most highly developed? Chief among them must

be _instability_. The cerebral hemispheres are the characteristically

'high' nerve-centres, and we saw how indeterminate and unforeseeable

their performances were in comparison with those of the basal ganglia

and the cord. But this very vagueness constitutes their advantage.

They allow their possessor to adapt his conduct to the minutest

alterations in the environing circumstances, any one of which may be

for him a sign, suggesting distant motives more powerful than any

present solicitations of sense. It seems as if certain mechanical

conclusions should be drawn from this state of things. An organ,

swayed by slight impressions is an organ whose natural state is one of

unstable equilibrium. We may imagine the various lines of discharge

in the cerebrum to be almost on a par in point of permeability--what

discharge a given small impression will produce may be called

_accidental_, in the sense in which we say it is a matter of accident

whether a rain-drop falling on a mountain ridge descend the eastern

or the western slope. It is in this sense that we may call it a

matter of accident whether a child be a boy or a girl. The ovum is so

unstable a body that certain causes too minute for our apprehension

may at a certain moment tip it one way or the other. The natural law

of an organ constituted after this fashion can be nothing but a law

of caprice. I do not see how one could reasonably expect from it any

certain pursuance of useful lines of reaction, such as the few and

fatally determined performances of the lower centres constitute within

their narrow sphere. The dilemma in regard to the nervous system seems,

in short, to be of the following kind. We may construct one which

will react infallibly and certainly, but it will then be capable of

reacting to very few changes in the environment--it will fail to be

adapted to all the rest. We may, on the other hand, construct a nervous

system potentially adapted to respond to an infinite variety of minute

features in the situation; but its fallibility will then be as great

as its elaboration. We can never be sure that its equilibrium will

be upset in the appropriate direction. In short, a high brain may do

many things, and may do each of them at a very slight hint. But its

hair-trigger organization makes of it a happy-go-lucky, hit-or-miss

affair. It is as likely to do the crazy as the sane thing at any given

moment. A low brain does few things, and in doing them perfectly

forfeits all other use. The performances of a high brain are like dice

thrown forever on a table. Unless they be loaded, what chance is there

that the highest number will turn up oftener than the lowest?

All this is said of the brain as a physical machine pure and simple.

_Can consciousness increase its efficiency by loading its dice?_ Such

is the problem.

Loading its dice would mean bringing a more or less constant pressure

to bear in favor of _those_ of its performances which make for the most

permanent interests cf the brain's owner; it would mean a constant

inhibition of the tendencies to stray aside.

Well, just such pressure and such inhibition are what consciousness

_seems_ to be exerting all the while. And the interests in whose favor

it seems to exert them are _its_ interests and its alone, interests

which it _creates_, and which, but for it, would have no status in the

realm of being whatever. We talk, it is true, when we are darwinizing,

as if the mere _body_ that owns the brain had interests; we speak

about the utilities of its various organs and how they help or hinder

the body's survival; and we treat the survival as if it were an

absolute end, existing as such in the physical world, a sort of actual

_should-be_, presiding over the animal and judging his reactions,

quite apart from the presence of any commenting intelligence outside.

We forget that in the absence of some such superadded commenting

intelligence (whether it be that of the animal itself, or only ours

or Mr. Darwin's), the reactions cannot be properly talked of as

'useful' or 'hurtful' at all. Considered merely physically, all that

can be said of them is that _if_ they occur in a certain way survival

will as a matter of fact prove to be their incidental consequence.

The organs themselves, and all the rest of the physical world, will,

however, all the time be quite indifferent to this consequence, and

would quite as cheerfully, the circumstances changed, compass the

animal's destruction. In a word, survival can enter into a purely

physiological discussion only as an _hypothesis made by an onlooker_,

about the future. But the moment you bring a consciousness into the

midst, survival ceases to be a mere hypothesis. No longer is it, "_if_

survival is to occur, then so and so must brain and other organs work."

It has now become an imperative decree: "Survival _shall_ occur, and

therefore organs _must_ so work!" _Real_ ends appear for the first

time now upon the world's stage. The conception of consciousness as a

purely cognitive form of being, which is the pet way of regarding it

in many idealistic schools, modern as well as ancient, is thoroughly

anti-psychological, as the remainder of this book will show. Every

actually existing consciousness seems to itself at any rate to be a

_fighter for ends_, of which many, but for its presence, would not be

ends at all. Its powers of cognition are mainly subservient to these

ends, discerning which facts further them and which do not.

Now let consciousness only be what it seems to itself, and it will help

an instable brain to compass its proper ends. The movements of the

brain _per se_ yield the means of attaining these ends mechanically,

but only out of a lot of other ends, if so they may be called, which

are not the proper ones of the animal, but often quite opposed. The

brain is an instrument of possibilities, but of no certainties. But the

consciousness, with its own ends present to it, and knowing also well

which possibilities lead thereto and which away, will, if endowed with

causal efficacy, reinforce the favorable possibilities and repress the

unfavorable or indifferent ones. The nerve-currents, coursing through

the cells and fibres, must in this case be supposed strengthened by

the fact of their awaking one consciousness and dampened by awaking

another. _How_ such reaction of the consciousness upon the currents may

occur must remain at present unsolved: it is enough for my purpose to

have shown that it may not uselessly exist, and that the matter is less

simple than the brain-automatists hold.

All the facts of the natural history of consciousness lend color

to this view. Consciousness, for example, is only intense when

nerve-processes are hesitant. In rapid, automatic, habitual action

it sinks to a minimum. Nothing could be more fitting than this, if

consciousness have the teleological function we suppose; nothing more

meaningless, if not. Habitual actions are certain, and being in no

danger of going astray from their end, need no extraneous help. In

hesitant action, there seem many alternative possibilities of final

nervous discharge. The feeling awakened by the nascent excitement of

each alternative nerve-tract seems by its attractive or repulsive

quality to determine whether the excitement shall abort or shall become

complete. Where indecision is great, as before a dangerous leap,

consciousness is agonizingly intense. Feeling, from this point of view,

may be likened to a cross-section of the chain of nervous discharge,

ascertaining the links already laid down, and groping among the fresh

ends presented to it for the one which seems best to fit the case.

* * * * *

The phenomena of 'vicarious function' which we studied in Chapter II

seem to form another bit of circumstantial evidence. A machine in

working order acts fatally in one way. Our consciousness calls this the

right way. Take out a valve, throw a wheel out of gear or bend a pivot,

and it becomes a different machine, acting just as fatally in another

way which we call the wrong way. But the machine itself knows nothing

of wrong or right: matter has no ideals to pursue. A locomotive will

carry its train through an open drawbridge as cheerfully as to any

other destination.

A brain with part of it scooped out is virtually a new machine, and

during the first days after the operation functions in a thoroughly

abnormal manner. As a matter of fact, however, its performances

become from day to day more normal, until at last a practised eye

may be needed to suspect anything wrong. Some of the restoration is

undoubtedly due to 'inhibitions' passing away. But if the consciousness

which goes with the rest of the brain, be there not only in order

to take cognizance of each functional error, but also to exert

an efficient pressure to check it if it be a sin of commission,

and to lend a strengthening hand if it be a weakness or sin of

omission,--nothing seems more natural than that the remaining parts,

assisted in this way, should by virtue of the principle of habit grow

back to the old teleological modes of exercise for which they were at

first incapacitated. Nothing, on the contrary, seems at first sight

more unnatural than that they should vicariously take up the duties of

a part now lost without those _duties as such_ exerting any persuasive

or coercive force. At the end of Chapter XXVI I shall return to this

again.

* * * * *

There is yet another set of facts which seem explicable on the

supposition that consciousness has causal efficacy. _It is a well-known

fact that pleasures are generally associated with beneficial, pains

with detrimental, experiences._ All the fundamental vital processes

illustrate this law. Starvation, suffocation, privation of food, drink

and sleep, work when exhausted, burns, wounds, inflammation, the

effects of poison, are as disagreeable as filling the hungry stomach,

enjoying rest and sleep after fatigue, exercise after rest, and a

sound skin and unbroken bones at all times, are pleasant. Mr. Spencer

and others have suggested that these coincidences are due, not to any

pre-established harmony, but to the mere action of natural selection

which would certainly kill off in the long-run any breed of creatures

to whom the fundamentally noxious experience seemed enjoyable. An

animal that should take pleasure in a feeling of suffocation would, if

that pleasure were efficacious enough to make him immerse his head in

water, enjoy a longevity of four or five minutes. But if pleasures and

pains have no efficacy, one does not see (without some such _a priori_

rational harmony as would be scouted by the 'scientific' champions

of the automaton-theory) why the most noxious acts, such as burning,

might not give thrills of delight, and the most necessary ones, such

as breathing, cause agony. The exceptions to the law are, it is true,

numerous, but relate to experiences that are either not vital or not

universal. Drunkenness, for instance, which though noxious, is to many

persons delightful, is a very exceptional experience. But, as the

excellent physiologist Pick remarks, if all rivers and springs ran

alcohol instead of water, either all men would now be born to hate it

or our nerves would have been selected so as to drink it with impunity.

The only considerable attempt, in fact, that has been made to explain

the _distribution_ of our feelings is that of Mr. Grant Allen in his

suggestive little work _Physiological Æsthetics_; and his reasoning is

based exclusively on that causal efficacy of pleasures and pains which

the 'double-aspect' partisans so strenuously deny.

* * * * *

Thus, then, from every point of view the circumstantial evidence

against that theory is strong. _A priori_ analysis of both brain-action

and conscious action shows us that if the latter were efficacious it

would, by its selective emphasis, make amends for the indeterminateness

of the former; whilst the study _a posteriori_ of the _distribution_

of consciousness shows it to be exactly such as we might expect in an

organ added for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex

to regulate itself. The conclusion that it is useful is, after all

this, quite justifiable. But, if it is useful, it must be so through

its causal efficaciousness, and the automaton-theory must succumb

to the theory of common-sense. I, at any rate (pending metaphysical

reconstructions not yet successfully achieved), shall have no

hesitation in using the language of common-sense throughout this book.

FOOTNOTES:

[155] The Theory of Practice, vol. i, p. 416 ff.

[156] The present writer recalls how in 1869, when still a medical

student, he began to write an essay showing how almost every one who

speculated about brain-processes illicitly interpolated into his

account of them links derived from the entirely heterogeneous universe

of Feeling. Spencer, Hodgson (in his Time and Space), Maudsley,

Lockhart Clarke, Bain, Dr. S. Carpenter, and other authors were cited

as having been guilty of the confusion. The writing was soon stopped

because he perceived that the view which he was upholding against these

authors was a pure conception, with no proofs to be adduced of its

reality. Later it seemed to him that whatever _proofs_ existed really

told in favor of their view.

[157] Chas. Mercier: The Nervous System and the Mind (1888), p. 9.

[158] _Op. cit._ p. 11.

[159] See in particular the end of Chapter IX.

CHAPTER VI.

THE MIND-STUFF THEORY.

The reader who found himself swamped with too much metaphysics in the

last chapter will have a still worse time of it in this one, which is

exclusively metaphysical. Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually

obstinate effort to think clearly. The fundamental conceptions of

psychology are practically very clear to us, but theoretically they are

very confused, and one easily makes the obscurest assumptions in this

science without realizing, until challenged, what internal difficulties

they involve. When these assumptions have once established themselves

(as they have a way of doing in our very descriptions of the phenomenal

facts) it is almost impossible to get rid of them afterwards or to make

any one see that they are not essential features of the subject. The

only way to prevent this disaster is to scrutinize them beforehand and

make them give an articulate account of themselves before letting them

pass. One of the obscurest of the assumptions of which I speak is _the

assumption that our mental states are composite in structure, made up

of smaller states conjoined_. This hypothesis has outward advantages

which make it almost irresistibly attractive to the intellect, and

yet it is inwardly quite unintelligible. Of its unintelligibility,

however, half the writers on psychology seem unaware. As our own aim is

_to understand_ if possible, I make no apology for singling out this

particular notion for very explicit treatment before taking up the

descriptive part of our work. _The theory of 'mind-stuff' is the theory

that our mental states are compounds_, expressed in its most radical

form.

EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY DEMANDS A MIND-DUST.

In a general theory of evolution the inorganic comes first, then the

lowest forms of animal and vegetable life, then forms of life that

possess mentality, and finally those like ourselves that possess it

in a high degree. As long as we keep to the consideration of purely

outward facts, even the most complicated facts of biology, our task

as evolutionists is comparatively easy. We are dealing all the time

with matter and its aggregations and separations; and although our

treatment must perforce be hypothetical, this does not prevent it from

being _continuous_. The point which as evolutionists we are bound

to hold fast to is that all the new forms of being that make their

appearance are really nothing more than results of the redistribution

of the original and unchanging materials. The self-same atoms which,

chaotically dispersed, made the nebula, now, jammed and temporarily

caught in peculiar positions, form our brains; and the 'evolution' of

the brains, if understood, would be simply the account of how the atoms

came to be so caught and jammed. In this story no new _natures_, no

factors not present at the beginning, are introduced at any later stage.

But with the dawn of consciousness an entirely new nature seems to slip

in, something whereof the potency was _not_ given in the mere outward

atoms of the original chaos.

The enemies of evolution have been quick to pounce upon this undeniable

discontinuity in the data of the world and many of them, from the

failure of evolutionary explanations at this point, have inferred their

general incapacity all along the line. Every one admits the entire

incommensurability of feeling as such with material motion as such.

"A motion became a feeling!"--no phrase that our lips can frame is

so devoid of apprehensible meaning. Accordingly, even the vaguest of

evolutionary enthusiasts, when deliberately comparing material with

mental facts, have been as forward as any one else to emphasize the

'chasm' between the inner and the outer worlds.

"Can the oscillations of a molecule," says Mr. Spencer, "be

represented side by side with a nervous shock [he means a mental

shock], and the two be recognized as one? No effort enables us to

assimilate them. That a unit of feeling has nothing in common with a

unit of motion becomes more than ever manifest when we bring the two

into juxtaposition."[160]

And again:

"Suppose it to have become quite clear that a shock in consciousness

and a molecular motion are the subjective and objective faces of the

same thing; we continue utterly incapable of uniting the two, so as to

conceive that reality of which they are the opposite faces."[161]

In other words, incapable of perceiving in them any common character.

So Tyndall, in that lucky paragraph which has been quoted so often that

every one knows it by heart:

"The passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts

of consciousness is unthinkable. Granted that a definite thought and

a definite molecular action in the brain occur simultaneously; we do

not possess the intellectual organ, nor apparently any rudiment of the

organ, which would enable us to pass, by a process of reasoning, from

one to the other."[162]

Or in this other passage:

"We can trace the development of a nervous system and correlate with

it the parallel phenomena of sensation and thought. We see with

undoubting certainty that they go hand in hand. But we try to soar

in a vacuum the moment we seek to comprehend the connection between

them.... There is no fusion possible between the two classes of

facts--no motor energy in the intellect of man to carry it without

logical rupture from the one to the other."[163]

None the less easily, however, when the evolutionary afflatus is upon

them, do the very same writers leap over the breach whose flagrancy

they are the foremost to announce, and talk as if mind grew out of body

in a continuous way. Mr. Spencer, looking back on his review of mental

evolution, tells us how "in tracing up the increase we found ourselves

passing _without break_ from the phenomena of bodily life to the

phenomena of mental life."[164] And Mr. Tyndall, in the same Belfast

Address from which we just quoted, delivers his other famous passage:

"Abandoning all disguise, the confession that I feel bound to make

before you is that I prolong the vision backward across the boundary

of the experimental evidence, and discern in that matter which we,

in our ignorance and notwithstanding our professed reverence for its

Creator, have hitherto covered with opprobrium the promise and potency

of every form and quality of life."[165]

--mental life included, as a matter of course.

So strong a postulate is continuity! Now this book will tend to show

that mental postulates are on the whole to be respected. The demand for

continuity has, over large tracts of science, proved itself to possess

true prophetic power. We ought therefore ourselves sincerely to try

every possible mode of conceiving the dawn of consciousness so that it

may _not_ appear equivalent to the irruption into the universe of a new

nature, non-existent until then.

Merely to call the consciousness 'nascent' will not serve our

turn.[166] It is true that the word signifies not yet _quite_ born,

and so seems to form a sort of bridge between existence and nonentity.

But that is a verbal quibble. The fact is that discontinuity comes

in if a new nature comes in at all. The _quantity_ of the latter is

quite immaterial. The girl in 'Midshipman Easy' could not excuse the

illegitimacy of her child by saying, 'it was a little small one.'

And Consciousness, however little, is an illegitimate birth in any

philosophy that starts without it, and yet professes to explain all

facts by continuous evolution.

_If evolution is to work smoothly, consciousness in some shape must

have been present at the very origin of things._ Accordingly we find

that the more clear-sighted evolutionary philosophers are beginning

to posit it there. Each atom of the nebula, they suppose, must have

had an aboriginal atom of consciousness linked with it; and, just

as the material atoms have formed bodies and brains by massing

themselves together, so the mental atoms, by an analogous process of

aggregation, have fused into those larger consciousnesses which we know

in ourselves and suppose to exist in our fellow-animals. Some such

doctrine of _atomistic hylozoism_ as this is an indispensable part of a

thorough-going philosophy of evolution. According to it there must be

an infinite number of degrees of consciousness, following the degrees

of complication and aggregation of the primordial mind-dust. To prove

the separate existence of these degrees of consciousness by indirect

evidence, since direct intuition of them is not to be had, becomes

therefore the first duty of psychological evolutionism.

SOME ALLEGED PROOFS THAT MIND-DUST EXISTS.

Some of this duty we find already performed by a number of philosophers

who, though not interested at all in evolution, have nevertheless on

independent grounds convinced themselves of the existence of a vast

amount of sub-conscious mental life. The criticism of this general

opinion and its grounds will have to be postponed for a while. At

present let us merely deal with the arguments assumed to prove

aggregation of bits of mind-stuff into distinctly sensible feelings.

They are clear and admit of a clear reply.

The German physiologist A. Fick, in 1862, was, so far as I know, the

first to use them. He made experiments on the discrimination of the

feelings of warmth and of touch, when only a very small portion of the

skin was excited through a hole in a card, the surrounding parts being

protected by the card. He found that under these circumstances mistakes

were frequently made by the patient,[167] and concluded that this must

be because the number of sensations from the elementary nerve-tips

affected was too small to sum itself distinctly into either of the

qualities of feeling in question. He tried to show how a different

manner of the summation might give rise in one case to the heat and in

another to the touch.

"A feeling of temperature," he says, "arises when the intensities of

the units of feeling are evenly gradated, so that between two elements

_a_ and _b_ no other unit can spatially intervene whose intensity is

not also _between_ that of _a_ and _b_. A feeling of contact perhaps

arises when this condition is not fulfilled. Both kinds of feeling,

however, are composed of the same units."

But it is obviously far clearer to interpret such a gradation of

intensities as a brain-fact than as a mind-fact. If in the brain a

tract were first excited in one of the ways suggested by Prof. Fick,

and then again in the other, it might very well happen, for aught

we can say to the contrary, that the psychic accompaniment in the

one case would be heat, and in the other pain. The pain and the heat

would, however, not be composed of psychic units, but would each be

the direct result of one total brain-process. So long as this latter

interpretation remains open, Fick cannot be held to have proved psychic

summation.

Later, both Spencer and Taine, independently of each other, took up

the same line of thought. Mr. Spencer's reasoning is worth quoting _in

extenso_. He writes:

"Although the individual sensations and emotions, real or ideal,

of which consciousness is built up, appear to be severally simple,

homogeneous, unanalyzable, or of inscrutable natures, yet they are

not so. There is at least one kind of feeling which, as ordinarily

experienced, seems elementary, that is demonstrably not elementary.

And after resolving it into its proximate components, we can scarcely

help suspecting that other apparently-elementary feelings are also

compound, and may have proximate components like those which we can in

this one instance identify.

"Musical sound is the name we give to this seemingly simple feeling

which is clearly resolvable into simpler feelings. Well-known

experiments prove that when equal blows or taps are made one after

another at a rate not exceeding some sixteen per second, the effect

of each is perceived as a separate noise; but when the rapidity with

which the blows follow one another exceeds this, the noises are no

longer identified in separate states of consciousness, and there

arises in place of them a continuous state of consciousness, called

a tone. In further increasing the rapidity of the blows, the tone

undergoes the change of quality distinguished as rise in pitch; and

it continues to rise in pitch as the blows continue to increase in

rapidity, until it reaches an acuteness beyond which it is no longer

appreciable as a tone. So that out of units of feeling of the same

kind, many feelings distinguishable from one another in quality

result, according as the units are more or less integrated.

"This is not all. The inquiries of Professor Helmholtz have shown

that when, along with one series of these rapidly-recurring noises,

there is generated another series in which the noises are more rapid

though not so loud, the effect is a change in that quality known as

its _timbre_. As various musical instruments show us, tones which are

alike in pitch and strength are distinguishable by their harshness or

sweetness, their ringing or their liquid characters; and all their

specific peculiarities are proved to arise from the combination

of one, two, three, or more, supplementary series of recurrent

noises with the chief series of recurrent noises. So that while the

unlikenesses of feeling known as differences of pitch in tones are

due to differences of integration among the recurrent noises of one

series, the unlikenesses of feeling known as differences of _timbre_,

are due to the simultaneous integration with this series of other

series having other degrees of integration. And thus an enormous

number of qualitatively-contrasted kinds of consciousness that seem

severally elementary prove to be composed of one simple kind of

consciousness, combined and recombined with itself in multitudinous

ways.

"Can we stop short here? If the different sensations known as sounds

are built out of a common unit, is it not to be rationally inferred

that so likewise are the different sensations known as tastes, and

the different sensations known as odors, and the different sensations

known as colors? Nay, shall we not regard it as probable that there is

a unit common to all these strongly-contrasted classes of sensations?

If the unlikenesses among the sensations of each class may be due to

unlikenesses among the modes of aggregation of a unit of consciousness

common to them all; so too may the much greater unlikenesses between

the sensations of each class and those of other classes. There may be

a single primordial element of consciousness, and the countless kinds

of consciousness may be produced by the compounding of this element

with itself and the recompounding of its compounds with one another

in higher and higher degrees: so producing increased multiplicity,

variety, and complexity.

"Have we any clue to this primordial element? I think we have. That

simple mental impression which proves to be the unit of composition

of the sensation of musical tone, is allied to certain other simple

mental impressions differently originated. The subjective effect

produced by a crack or noise that has no appreciable duration is

little else than a nervous shock. Though we distinguish such a nervous

shock as belonging to what we call sounds, yet it does not differ very

much from nervous shocks of other kinds. An electric discharge sent

through the body causes a feeling akin to that which a sudden loud

report causes. A strong unexpected impression made through the eyes,

as by a flash of lightning, similarly gives rise to a start or shock;

and though the feeling so named seems, like the electric shock, to

have the body at large for its seat, and may therefore be regarded

as the correlative rather of the efferent than of the afferent

disturbance, yet on remembering the mental change that results from

the instantaneous transit of an object across the field of vision, I

think it may be perceived that the feeling accompanying the efferent

disturbance is itself reduced very nearly to the same form. The state

of consciousness so generated is, in fact, comparable in quality to

the initial state of consciousness caused by a blow (distinguishing

it from the pain or other feeling that commences the instant after);

which state of consciousness caused by a blow may be taken as the

primitive and typical form of the nervous shock. The fact that sudden

brief disturbances thus set up by different stimuli through different

sets of nerves cause feelings scarcely distinguishable in quality

will not appear strange when we recollect that distinguishableness of

feeling implies appreciable duration; and that when the duration is

greatly abridged, nothing more is known than that some mental change

has occurred and ceased. To have a sensation of redness, to know a

tone as acute or grave, to be conscious of a taste as sweet, implies

in each case a considerable continuity of state. If the state does

not last long enough to admit of its being contemplated, it cannot be

classed as of this or that kind; and becomes a momentary modification

very similar to momentary modifications otherwise caused.

"It is possible, then--may we not even say probable?--that something

of the same order as that which we call a nervous shock is the

ultimate unit of consciousness; and that all the unlikenesses

among our feelings result from unlike modes of integration of this

ultimate unit. I say of the same order, because there are discernible

differences among nervous shocks that are differently caused; and

the primitive nervous shock probably differs somewhat from each of

them. And I say of the same order, for the further reason that while

we may ascribe to them a general likeness in nature, we must suppose

a great unlikeness in degree. The nervous shocks recognized as such

are violent--must be violent before they can be perceived amid the

procession of multitudinous vivid feelings suddenly interrupted by

them. But the rapidly-recurring nervous shocks of which the different

forms of feeling consist, we must assume to be of comparatively

moderate, or even of very slight intensity. Were our various

sensations and emotions composed of rapidly-recurring shocks as strong

as those ordinarily called shocks, they would be unbearable; indeed

life would cease at once. We must think of them rather as successive

faint pulses of subjective change, each having the same quality as

the strong pulse of subjective change distinguished as a nervous

shock."[168]

INSUFFICIENCY OF THESE PROOFS.

[Illustration: FIG. 25.]

Convincing as this argument of Mr. Spencer's may appear on a first

reading, it is singular how weak it really is.[169] We do, it is true,

when we study the connection between a musical note and its outward

cause, find the note simple and continuous while the cause is multiple

and discrete. Somewhere, then, there _is_ a transformation, reduction,

or fusion. The question is, Where?--in the nerve-world or in the

mind-world? Really we have no experimental proof by which to decide;

and if decide we must, analogy and _a priori_ probability can alone

guide us. Mr. Spencer assumes that the fusion must come to pass in the

mental world, and that the physical processes get through air and ear,

auditory nerve and medulla, lower brain and hemispheres, without their

number being reduced. Figure 25 will make the point clear.

Let the line _a--b_ represent the threshold of consciousness: then

everything drawn below that line will symbolize a physical process,

everything above it will mean a fact of mind. Let the crosses stand

for the physical blows, the circles for the events in successively

higher orders of nerve-cells, and the horizontal marks for the facts of

feeling. Spencer's argument implies that each order of cells transmits

just as many impulses as it receives to the cells above it; so that if

the blows come at the rate of 20,000 in a second the cortical cells

discharge at the same rate, and one unit of feeling corresponds to each

one of the 20,000 discharges. Then, and only then, does 'integration'

occur, by the 20,000 units of feeling 'compounding with themselves'

into the 'continuous state of consciousness' represented by the short

line at the top of the figure.

Now such an interpretation as this flies in the face of physical

analogy, no less than of logical intelligibility. Consider physical

analogy first,

A pendulum may be deflected by a single blow, and swing back. Will

it swing back the more often the more we multiply the blows? No; for

if they rain upon the pendulum too fast, it will not swing at all

but remain deflected in a sensibly stationary state. In other words,

increasing the cause numerically need not equally increase numerically

the effect. Blow through a tube: you get a certain musical note; and

increasing the blowing increases for a certain time the loudness of

the note. Will this be true indefinitely? No; for when a certain force

is reached, the note, instead of growing louder, suddenly disappears

and is replaced by its higher octave. Turn on the gas slightly and

light it: you get a tiny flame. Turn on more gas, and the breadth

of the flame increases. Will this relation increase indefinitely?

No, again; for at a certain moment up shoots the flame into a ragged

streamer and begins to hiss. Send slowly through the nerve of a

frog's gastrocnemius muscle a succession of galvanic shocks: you get

a succession of twitches. Increasing the number of shocks does not

increase the twitching; on the contrary, it stops it, and we have

the muscle in the apparently stationary state of contraction called

tetanus. This last fact is the true analogue of what must happen

between the nerve-cell and the sensory fibre. It is certain that cells

are more inert than fibres, and that rapid vibrations in the latter can

only arouse relatively simple processes or states in the former. The

higher cells may have even a slower rate of explosion than the lower,

and so the twenty thousand supposed blows of the outer air may be

'integrated' in the cortex into a very small number of cell-discharges

in a second. This other diagram will serve to contrast this supposition

with Spencer's. In Fig. 26 all 'integration' occurs below the threshold

of consciousness. The frequency of cell-events becomes more and more

reduced as we approach the cells to which feeling is most directly

attached, until at last we come to a condition of things symbolized by

the larger ellipse, which may be taken to stand for some rather massive

and slow process of tension and discharge in the cortical centres, to

which, _as a whole_, the feeling of musical tone symbolized by the line

at the top of the diagram _simply and totally_ corresponds. It is as if

a long file of men were to start one after the other to reach a distant

point. The road at first is good and they keep their original distance

apart. Presently it is intersected by bogs each worse than the last,

so that the front men get so retarded that the hinder ones catch up

with them before the journey is done, and all arrive together at the

goal.[170]

[Illustration: FIG. 26.]

On this supposition there _are_ no unperceived units of mind-stuff

preceding and composing the full consciousness. The latter is itself

an immediate psychic fact and bears an immediate relation to the

neural state which is its unconditional accompaniment. Did each neural

shock give rise to its own psychic shock, and the psychic shocks then

combine, it would be impossible to understand why severing one part of

the central nervous system from another should break up the integrity

of the consciousness. The cut has nothing to do with the psychic world.

The atoms of mind-stuff ought to float off from the nerve-matter on

either side of it, and come together over it and fuse, just as well

as if it had not been made. We know, however, that they do not; that

severance of the paths of conduction between a man's left auditory

centre or optical centre and the rest of his cortex will sever all

communication between the words which he hears or sees written and the

rest of his ideas.

Moreover, if feelings can mix into a _tertium quid_, why do we not

take a feeling of greenness and a feeling of redness, and make a

feeling of yellowness out of them? Why has optics neglected the open

road to truth, and wasted centuries in disputing about theories of

color-composition which two minutes of introspection would have settled

forever[171] We cannot mix feelings as such, though we may mix the

objects we feel, and from _their_ mixture get new feelings. We cannot

even (as we shall later see) have two feelings in our mind at once. At

most we can compare together _objects previously presented_ to us in

distinct feelings; but then we find each object stubbornly maintaining

its separate identity before consciousness, whatever the verdict of the

comparison may be.[172]

SELF-COMPOUNDING OF MENTAL FACTS IS INADMISSIBLE.

But there is a still more fatal objection to the theory of mental

units 'compounding with themselves' or 'integrating.' It is logically

unintelligible; it leaves out the essential feature of all the

'combinations' we actually know.

_All the 'combinations' which we actually know are_ EFFECTS, _wrought

by the units said to be 'combined,'_ UPON SOME ENTITY OTHER THAN

THEMSELVES. Without this feature of a medium or vehicle, the notion of

combination has no sense.

"A multitude of contractile units, by joint action, and by being

all connected, for instance, with a single tendon, will pull at the

same, and will bring about a dynamical effect which is undoubtedly

the resultant of their combined individual energies.... On the whole,

tendons are to muscular fibres, and bones are to tendons, combining

recipients of mechanical energies. A medium of composition is

indispensable to the summation of energies. To realize the complete

dependence of mechanical resultants on a combining substratum, one may

fancy for a moment all the individually contracting muscular elements

severed from their attachments. They might then still be capable

of contracting with the same energy as before, yet no co-operative

result would be accomplished. The medium of dynamical combination

would be wanting. The multiple energies, singly exerted on no common

recipient, would lose themselves on entirely isolated and disconnected

efforts."[173]

In other words, no possible number of entities (call them as you

like, whether forces, material particles, or mental elements) can

sum _themselves_ together. Each remains, in the sum, what it always

was; and the sum itself exists only _for a bystander_ who happens to

overlook the units and to apprehend the sum as such; or else it exists

in the shape of some other _effect_ on an entity external to the sum

itself. Let it not be objected that H_{2} and O combine of themselves

into 'water,' and thenceforward exhibit new properties. They do not.

The 'water' is just the old atoms in the new position, H-O-H; the 'new

properties' are just their combined _effects_, when in this position,

upon external media, such as our sense-organs and the various reagents

on which water may exert its properties and be known.

"Aggregations are organized wholes only when they behave as such in

the presence of other things. A statue is an aggregation of particles

of marble, but as such it has no unity. For the spectator it is one;

in itself it is an aggregate; just as, to the consciousness of an ant

crawling over it, it may again appear a mere aggregate. No summing up

of parts can make an unity of a mass of discrete constituents, unless

this unity exist for some other subject, not for the mass itself."[174]

Just so, in the parallelogram of forces, the 'forces' themselves do

not combine into the diagonal resultant; a _body_ is needed on which

they may impinge, to exhibit their resultant effect. No more do musical

sounds combine _per se_ into concords or discords. Concord and discord

are names for their combined effects on that external medium, the

_ear_.

Where the elemental units are supposed to be feelings, the case is in

no wise altered. Take a hundred of them, shuffle them and pack them as

close together as you can (whatever that may mean); still each remains

the same feeling it always was, shut in its own skin, windowless,

ignorant of what the other feelings are and mean. There would be a

hundred-and-first feeling there, if, when a group or series of such

feelings were set up, a consciousness _belonging to the group as such_

should emerge. And this 101st feeling would be a totally new fact; the

100 original feelings might, by a curious physical law, be a signal

for its _creation_, when they came together; but they would have no

substantial identity with it, nor it with them, and one could never

deduce the one from the others, or (in any intelligible sense) say that

they _evolved_ it.

Take a sentence of a dozen words, and take twelve men and tell to each

one word. Then stand the men in a row or jam them in a bunch, and let

each think of his word as intently as he will; nowhere will there be

a consciousness of the whole sentence.[175] We talk of the 'spirit of

the age,' and the 'sentiment of the people,' and in various ways we

hypostatize 'public opinion.' But we know this to be symbolic speech,

and never dream that the spirit, opinion, sentiment, etc., constitute

a consciousness other than, and additional to, that of the several

individuals whom the words 'age,' 'people,' or 'public' denote. The

private minds do not agglomerate into a higher compound mind. This has

always been the invincible contention of the spiritualists against the

associationists in Psychology,--a contention which we shall take up

at greater length in Chapter X. The associationists say the mind is

constituted by a multiplicity of distinct 'ideas' _associated_ into

a unity. There is, they say, an idea of _a_, and also an idea of _b.

Therefore,_ they say, there is an idea of _a_ + _b_, or of _a_ and _b_

together. Which is like saying that the mathematical square of _a_ plus

that of _b_ is equal to the square of _a_ + _b_, a palpable untruth.

Idea of _a_ + idea of _b_ is _not_ identical with idea of (_a_ + _b_).

It is one, they are two; in it, what knows _a_ also knows _b_; in them,

what knows _a_ is expressly posited as not knowing _b_; etc. In short,

the two separate ideas can never by any logic be made to figure as one

and the same thing as the 'associated' idea.