"I tell Lucie to keep her arms raised after she shall have awakened.

Hardly is she in the normal state, when up go her arms above her head,

but she pays no attention to them. She goes, comes, converses, holding

her arms high in the air. If asked what her arms are doing, she is

surprised at such a question, and says very sincerely: 'My hands are

doing nothing; they are just like yours.'... I command her to weep,

and when awake she really sobs, but continues in the midst of her

tears to talk of very gay matters. The sobbing over, there remained no

trace of this grief, which seemed to have been quite sub-conscious."

The primary self often has to invent an hallucination by which to mask

and hide from its own view the deeds which the other self is enacting.

Léonie 3[206] writes real letters whilst Léonie 1 believes that she

is knitting; or Lucie 2 really comes to the doctor's office, whilst

Lucie 1 believes herself to be at home. This is a sort of delirium. The

alphabet, or the series of numbers, when handed over to the attention

of the secondary personage may for the time be lost to the normal

self. Whilst the hand writes the alphabet, obediently to command, the

'subject,' to her great stupefaction, finds herself unable to recall

it, etc. Few things are more curious than these relations of mutual

exclusion, of which all gradations exist between the several partial

consciousnesses.

* * * * *

How far this splitting up of the mind into separate consciousnesses may

exist in each one of us is a problem. M. Janet holds that it is only

possible where there is abnormal weakness, and consequently a defect

of unifying or co-ordinating power. An hysterical woman abandons part

of her consciousness because she is too weak nervously to hold it

together. The abandoned part meanwhile may solidify into a secondary or

sub-conscious self. In a perfectly sound subject, on the other hand,

what is dropped out of mind at one moment keeps coming back at the

next. The whole fund of experiences and knowledges remains integrated,

and no split-off portions of it can get organized stably enough to form

subordinate selves. The stability, monotony, and stupidity of these

latter is often very striking. The post-hypnotic sub-consciousness

seems to think of nothing but the order which it last received;

the cataleptic sub-consciousness, of nothing but the last position

imprinted on the limb. M. Janet could cause definitely circumscribed

reddening and tumefaction of the skin on two of his subjects, by

suggesting to them in hypnotism the hallucination of a mustard-poultice

of any special shape. "J'ai tout le temps pensé à votre sinapisme,"

says the subject, when put back into trance after the suggestion has

taken effect. A man N., whom M. Janet operated on at long intervals,

was betweenwhiles tampered with by another operator, and when put

to sleep again by M. Janet, said he was 'too far away to receive

orders, being in Algiers.' The other operator, having suggested that

hallucination, had forgotten to remove it before waking the subject

from his trance, and the poor passive trance-personality had stuck for

weeks in the stagnant dream. Léonie's sub-conscious performances having

been illustrated to a caller, by a '_pied de nez_' executed with her

left hand in the course of conversation, when, a year later, she meets

him again, up goes the same hand to her nose again, without Léonie's

normal self suspecting the fact.

* * * * *

All these facts, taken together, form unquestionably the beginning

of an inquiry which is destined to throw a new light into the very

abysses of our nature. It is for that reason that I have cited them at

such length in this early chapter of the book. They prove one thing

conclusively, namely, that _we must never take a person's testimony,

however sincere, that he has felt nothing, as proof positive that

no feeling has been there._ It may have been there as part of the

consciousness of a 'secondary personage,' of whose experiences the

primary one whom we are consulting can naturally give no account. In

hypnotic subjects (as we shall see in a later chapter) just as it

is the easiest thing in the world to paralyze a movement or member

by simple suggestion, so it is easy to produce what is called a

systematized anæsthesia by word of command. A systematized anæsthesia

means an insensibility, not to any one element of things, but to some

one concrete thing or class of things. The subject is made blind or

deaf to a certain person in the room and to no one else, and thereupon

denies that that person is present, or has spoken, etc. M. P. Janet's

Lucie, blind to some of the numbered cards in her lap (p. 207 above),

is a case in point. Now when the object is simple, like a red wafer

or a black cross, the subject, although he denies that he sees it when

he looks straight at it, nevertheless gets a 'negative after-image' of

it when he looks away again, showing that the _optical impression_ of

it has been received. Moreover reflection shows that such a subject

must _distinguish the object from others like it in order to be blind

to it._ Make him blind to one person in the room, set all the persons

in a row, and tell him to count them. He will count all but that one.

But how can he tell _which_ one not to count without recognizing who

he is? In like manner, make a stroke on paper or blackboard, and tell

him it is not there, and he will see nothing but the clean paper or

board. Next (he not looking) surround the original stroke with other

strokes exactly like it, and ask him what he sees. He will point out

one by one all the new strokes, and omit the original one every time,

no matter how numerous the new strokes may be, or in what order they

are arranged. Similarly, if the original single stroke to which he is

blind be _doubled_ by a prism of some sixteen degrees placed before one

of his eyes (both being kept open), he will say that he now sees _one_

stroke, and point in the direction in which the image seen through the

prism lies, ignoring still the original stroke.

Obviously, then, he is not blind to the _kind_ of stroke in the least.

He is blind only to one individual stroke of that kind in a particular

position on the board or paper--that is to a particular complex object;

and, paradoxical as it may seem to say so, he must distinguish it with

great accuracy from others like it, in order to remain blind to it when

the others are brought near. He discriminates it, as a preliminary to

not seeing it at all.

Again, when by a prism before one eye a previously invisible line has

been made visible to that eye, and the other eye is thereupon closed

or screened, _its_ closure makes no difference; the line still remains

visible. But if then the prism be removed, the line will disappear even

to the eye which a moment ago saw it, and both eyes will revert to

their original blind state.

We have, then, to deal in these cases neither with a blindness of the

eye itself, nor with a mere failure to notice, but with something much

more complex; namely, an active counting out and positive exclusion of

certain objects. It is as when one 'cuts' an acquaintance, 'ignores'

a claim, or 'refuses to be influenced' by a consideration. But the

perceptive activity which works to this result is disconnected from the

consciousness which is personal, so to speak, to the subject, and makes

of the object concerning which the suggestion is made, its own private

possession and prey.[207]

The mother who is asleep to every sound but the stirrings of her

babe, evidently has the babe-portion of her auditory sensibility

systematically awake. Relatively to that, the rest of her mind is

in a state of systematized anæsthesia. That department, split off

and disconnected from the sleeping part, can none the less wake the

latter up in case of need. So that on the whole the quarrel between

Descartes and Locke as to whether the mind ever sleeps is less near

to solution than ever. On _a priori_ speculative grounds Locke's view

that thought and feeling may at times wholly disappear seems the more

plausible. As glands cease to secrete and muscles to contract, so the

brain should sometimes cease to carry currents, and with this minimum

of its activity might well coexist a minimum of consciousness. On the

other hand, we see how deceptive are appearances, and are forced to

admit that a part of consciousness may sever its connections with other

parts and yet continue to be. On the whole it is best to abstain from a

conclusion. The science of the near future will doubtless answer this

question more wisely than we can now.

Let us turn now to consider the

RELATIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS TO SPACE.

This is the problem known in the history of philosophy as the _question

of the seat of the soul_. It has given rise to much literature, but

we must ourselves treat it very briefly. Everything depends on what

we conceive the soul to be, an extended or an inextended entity. If

the former, it may occupy a seat. If the latter, it may not; though

it has been thought that even then it might still have a _position_.

Much hair-splitting has arisen about the possibility of an inextended

thing nevertheless being _present_ throughout a certain amount of

extension. We must distinguish the kinds of presence. In some manner

our consciousness is 'present' to everything with which it is in

relation. I am _cognitively_ present to Orion whenever I perceive that

constellation, but I am not _dynamically_ present there, I work no

effects. To my brain, however, I am dynamically present, inasmuch as

my thoughts and feelings seem to react upon the processes thereof. If,

then, by the seat of the mind is meant nothing more than the locality

with which it stands in immediate dynamic relations, we are certain

to be right in saying that its seat is somewhere in the cortex of the

brain. Descartes, as is well known, thought that the inextended soul

was immediately present to the pineal gland. Others, as Lotze in his

earlier days, and W. Volkmann, think its position must be at some

point of the structureless matrix of the anatomical brain-elements,

at which point they suppose that all nerve-currents may cross and

combine. The scholastic doctrine is that the soul is totally present,

both in the whole and in each and every part of the body. This mode

of presence is said to be due to the soul's inextended nature and to

its simplicity. Two extended entities could only correspond in space

with one another, part to part,--but not so does the soul, which has

no parts, correspond with the body. Sir Wm. Hamilton and Professor

Bowen defend something like this view. I. H. Fichte, Ulrici, and, among

American philosophers, Mr. J. E. Walter,[208] maintain the soul to be a

space-filling principle. Fichte calls it the inner body, Ulrici likens

it to a fluid of non-molecular composition. These theories remind us

of the 'theosophic' doctrines of the present day, and carry us back to

times when the soul as vehicle of consciousness was not discriminated,

as it now is, from the vital principle presiding over the formation of

the body. Plato gave head, breast, and abdomen to the immortal reason,

the courage, and the appetites, as their seats respectively. Aristotle

argues that the heart is the sole seat. Elsewhere we find the blood,

the brain, the lungs, the liver the kidneys even, in turn assigned as

seat of the whole or part of the soul.[209]

The truth is that if the thinking principle is extended we neither know

its form nor its seat; whilst if unextended, it is absurd to speak

of its having any space-relations at all. Space-relations we shall

see hereafter to be _sensible_ things. The only objects that can have

mutual relations of position are objects that are perceived coexisting

in the same felt space. A thing not perceived at all, such as the

inextended soul must be, cannot coexist with any perceived objects in

this way. No lines can be felt stretching from it to the other objects.

It can form no terminus to any space-interval. It can therefore in no

intelligible sense enjoy position. Its relations cannot be spatial,

but must be exclusively cognitive or dynamic, as we have seen. So far

as they are dynamic, to talk of the soul being 'present' is only a

figure of speech. Hamilton's doctrine that the soul is present to the

whole body is at any rate false: for cognitively its presence extends

far beyond the body, and dynamically it does not extend beyond the

brain.[210]

THE RELATIONS OF MINDS TO OTHER OBJECTS

are either relations to _other minds_, or to _material things_. The

material things are either the mind's _own brain_, on the one hand, or

_anything else_, on the other. The relations of a mind to its own brain

are of a unique and utterly mysterious sort; we discussed them in the

last two chapters, and can add nothing to that account.

The mind's relations to other objects than the brain are _cognitive

and emotional_ relations exclusively, so far as we know. It _knows_

them, and it inwardly _welcomes or rejects_ them, but it has no other

dealings with them. When it seems to _act_ upon them, it only does so

through the intermediary of its own body, so that not it but the body

is what acts on them, and the brain must first act upon the body. The

same is true when other things seem to act on it--they only act on

the body, and through that on its brain.[211] All that it _can_ do

_directly_ is to know other things, misknow or ignore them, and to find

that they interest it, in this fashion or in that.

Now the _relation of knowing_ is the most mysterious thing in the

world. If we ask how one thing _can_ know another we are led into the

heart of _Erkenntnisstheorie_ and metaphysics. The psychologist, for

his part, does not consider the matter so curiously as this. Finding

a world before him which he cannot but believe that _he_ knows, and

setting himself to study his own past thoughts, or someone else's

thoughts, of what he believes to be that same world; he cannot but

conclude that those other thoughts know it after their fashion even as

he knows it after his. Knowledge becomes for him an ultimate relation

that must be admitted, whether it be explained or not, just like

difference or resemblance, which no one seeks to explain.

Were our topic Absolute Mind instead of being the concrete minds of

individuals dwelling in the natural world, we could not tell whether

that Mind had the function of knowing or not, as knowing is commonly

understood. We might learn the complexion of its thoughts; but, as we

should have no realities outside of it to compare them with,--for if

we had, the Mind would not be Absolute,--we could not criticise them,

and find them either right or wrong; and we should have to call them

simply the thoughts, and not the _knowledge_, of the Absolute Mind.

Finite minds, however, can be judged in a different way, because the

psychologist himself can go bail for the independent reality of the

objects of which they think. He knows these to exist outside as well as

inside the minds in question; he thus knows whether the minds think and

_know_, or only think; and though his knowledge is of course that of a

fallible mortal, there is nothing in the conditions that should make it

more likely to be wrong in this case than in any other.

Now by what tests does the psychologist decide whether the state of

mind he is studying is a bit of knowledge, or only a subjective fact

not referring to anything outside itself?

He uses the tests we all practically use. If the state of mind

_resembles_ his own idea of a certain reality; or if without resembling

his idea of it, it seems to imply that reality and refer to it by

operating upon it through the bodily organs; or even if it resembles

and operates on some other reality that implies, and leads up to,

and terminates in, the first one,--in either or all of these cases

the psychologist admits that the state of mind takes cognizance,

directly or remotely, distinctly or vaguely, truly or falsely, of the

reality's nature and position in the world. If, on the other hand, the

mental state under examination neither resembles nor operates on any

of the realities known to the psychologist, he calls it a subjective

state pure and simple, possessed of no cognitive worth. If, again,

it resemble a reality or a set of realities as he knows them, but

altogether fail to operate on them or modify their course by producing

bodily motions which the psychologist sees, then the psychologist, like

all of us, may be in doubt. Let the mental state, for example, occur

during the sleep of its subject. Let the latter dream of the death of

a certain man, and let the man simultaneously die. Is the dream a mere

coincidence, or a veritable cognition of the death? Such puzzling cases

are what the Societies for 'Psychical Research' are collecting and

trying to interpret in the most reasonable way.

If the dream were the only one of the kind the subject ever had in

his life, if the context of the death in the dream differed in many

particulars from the real death's context, and if the dream led to

no action about the death, unquestionably we should all call it a

strange coincidence, and naught besides. But if the death in the dream

had a long context, agreeing point for point with every feature that

attended the real death; if the subject were constantly having such

dreams, all equally perfect, and if on awaking he had a habit of acting

immediately as if they were true and so getting 'the start' of his more

tardily informed neighbors,--we should probably all have to admit that

he had some mysterious kind of clairvoyant power, that his dreams in

an inscrutable way knew just those realities which they figured, and

that the word 'coincidence' failed to touch the root of the matter.

And whatever doubts any one preserved would completely vanish if it

should appear that from the midst of his dream he had the power of

_interfering_ with the course of the reality, and making the events in

it turn this way or that, according as he dreamed they should. Then at

least it would be certain that he and the psychologist were dealing

with the _same_. It is by such tests as these that we are convinced

that the waking minds of our fellows and our own minds know the same

external world.

* * * * *

_The psychologist's attitude towards cognition_ will be so important in

the sequel that we must not leave it until it is made perfectly clear.

_It is a thoroughgoing dualism._ It supposes two elements, mind knowing

and thing known, and treats them as irreducible. Neither gets out of

itself or into the other, neither in any way _is_ the other, neither

_makes_ the other. They just stand face to face in a common world, and

one simply knows, or is known unto, its counterpart. This singular

relation is not to be expressed in any lower terms, or translated into

any more intelligible name. Some sort of _signal_ must be given by the

thing to the mind's brain, or the knowing will not occur--we find as a

matter of fact that the mere _existence_ of a thing outside the brain

is not a sufficient cause for our knowing it: it must strike the brain

in some way, as well as be there, to be known. But the brain being

struck, the knowledge is constituted by a new construction that occurs

altogether _in_ the mind. The thing remains the same whether known or

not.[212] And when once there, the knowledge may remain there, whatever

becomes of the thing.

By the ancients, and by unreflecting people perhaps to-day, knowledge

is explained as the _passage_ of something from without into the

mind--the latter, so far, at least, as its sensible affections go,

being passive and receptive. But even in mere sense-impression the

duplication of the object by an inner construction must take place.

Consider, with Professor Bowne, what happens when two people converse

together and know each other's mind.

"No thoughts leave the mind of one and cross into the mind of the

other. When we speak of an exchange of thought, even the crudest mind

knows that this is a mere figure of speech.... To perceive another's

thought, we must construct his thought within ourselves;... this

thought is our own and is strictly original with us. At the same time

we owe it to the other; and if it had not originated with him, it

would probably not have originated with us. But what has the other

done?... This: by an entirely mysterious world-order, the speaker is

enabled to produce a series of signs which are totally unlike [the]

thought, but which, by virtue of the same mysterious order, act

as a series of incitements upon the hearer, so that he constructs

within himself the corresponding mental state. The act of the speaker

consists in availing himself of the proper incitements. The act of

the hearer is immediately only the reaction of the soul against the

incitement.... All communion between finite minds is of this sort....

Probably no reflecting person would deny this conclusion, but when

we say that what is thus true of perception of another's thought

is equally true of the perception of the outer world in general,

many minds will be disposed to question, and not a few will deny it

outright. Yet there is no alternative but to affirm that to perceive

the universe we must construct it in thought, and that our knowledge

of the universe is but the unfolding of the mind's inner nature....

By describing the mind as a waxen tablet, and things as impressing

themselves upon it, we seem to get great insight until we think to

ask where this extended tablet is, and how things stamp themselves

on it, and how the perceptive act would be explained even if they

did.... The immediate antecedents of sensation and perception are

a series of nervous changes in the brain. Whatever we know of the

outer world is revealed only in and through these nervous changes.

But these are totally unlike the objects assumed to exist as their

causes. If we might conceive the mind as in the light, and in direct

contact with its objects, the imagination at least would be comforted;

but when we conceive the mind as coming in contact with the outer

world only in the dark chamber of the skull, and then not in contact

with the objects perceived, but only with a series of nerve-changes

of which, moreover, it knows nothing, it is plain that the object

is a long way off. All talk of pictures, impressions, etc., ceases

because of the lack of all the conditions to give such figures any

meaning. It is not even clear that we shall ever find our way out

of the darkness into the world of light and reality again. We begin

with complete trust in physics and the senses, and are forthwith

led away from the object into a nervous labyrinth, where the object

is entirely displaced by a set of nervous changes which are totally

unlike anything but themselves. Finally, we land in the dark chamber

of the skull. The object has gone completely, and knowledge has not

yet appeared. Nervous signs are the raw material of all knowledge of

the outer world according to the most decided realism. But in order

to pass beyond these signs into a knowledge of the outer world, we

must posit an interpreter who shall read back these signs into their

objective meaning. But that interpreter, again, must implicitly

contain the meaning of the universe within itself; and these signs are

really but excitations which cause the soul to unfold what is within

itself. Inasmuch as by common consent the soul communicates with the

outer world only through these signs, and never comes nearer to the

object than such signs can bring it, it follows that the principles

of interpretation must be in the mind itself, and that the resulting

construction is primarily only an expression of the mind's own nature.

All reaction is of this sort; it expresses the nature of the reacting

agent, and knowledge comes under the same head, this fact makes it

necessary for us either to admit a pre-established harmony between the

laws and nature of thought and the laws and nature of things, or else

to allow that the objects of perception, the universe as it appears,

are purely phenomenal, being but the way in which the mind reacts

against the ground of its sensations."[213]

The dualism of Object and Subject and their pre-established harmony are

what the psychologist as such must assume, whatever ulterior monistic

philosophy he may, as an individual who has the right also to be a

metaphysician, have in reserve. I hope that this general point is now

made clear, so that we may leave it, and descend to some distinctions

of detail.

* * * * *

_There are two kinds of knowledge_ broadly and practically

distinguishable: we may call them respectively _knowledge of

acquaintance_ and _knowledge-about_. Most languages express the

distinction; thus, _γνῶναι, εὶδέναι; noscere, scire; kennen, wissen;

connaître, savoir_.[214] I am acquainted with many people and things,

which I know very little about, except their presence in the places

where I have met them. I know the color blue when I see it, and the

flavor of a pear when I taste it; I know an inch when I move my finger

through it; a second of time, when I feel it pass; an effort of

attention when I make it; a difference between two things when I notice

it; but _about_ the inner nature of these facts or what makes them

what they are, I can say nothing at all. I cannot impart acquaintance

with them to any one who has not already made it himself. I cannot

_describe_ them, make a blind man guess what blue is like, define to a

child a syllogism, or tell a philosopher in just what respect distance

is just what it is, and differs from other forms of relation. At most,

I can say to my friends, Go to certain places and act in certain ways,

and these objects will probably come. All the elementary natures of the

world, its highest genera, the simple qualities of matter and mind,

together with the kinds of relation that subsist between them, must

either not be known at all, or known in this dumb way of acquaintance

without _knowledge-about_. In minds able to speak at all there is, it

is true, _some_ knowledge about everything. Things can at least be

classed, and the times of their appearance told. But in general, the

less we analyze a thing, and the fewer of its relations we perceive,

the less we know about it and the more our familiarity with it is of

the acquaintance-type. The two kinds of knowledge are, therefore, as

the human mind practically exerts them, relative terms. That is, the

same thought of a thing may be called knowledge-about it in comparison

with a simpler thought, or acquaintance with it in comparison with a

thought of it that is more articulate and explicit still.

The grammatical sentence expresses this. Its 'subject' stands for an

object of acquaintance which, by the addition of the predicate, is to

get something known about it. We may already know a good deal, when

we hear the subject named--its name may have rich connotations. But,

know we much or little then, we know more still when the sentence is

done. We can relapse at will into a mere condition of acquaintance with

an object by scattering our attention and staring at it in a vacuous

trance-like way. We can ascend to knowledge _about_ it by rallying our

wits and proceeding to notice and analyze and think. What we are only

acquainted with is only _present_ to our minds; we _have_ it, or the

idea of it. But when we know about it, we do more than merely have

it; we seem, as we think over its relations, to subject it to a sort

of _treatment_ and to _operate_ upon it with our thought. The words

_feeling_ and _thought_ give voice to the antithesis. Through feelings

we become acquainted with things, but only by our thoughts do we know

about them. Feelings are the germ and starting point of cognition,

thoughts the developed tree. The minimum of grammatical subject, of

objective presence, of reality known about, the mere beginning of

knowledge, must be named by the word that says the least. Such a word

is the interjection, as _lo! there! ecco! voilà!_ or the article or

demonstrative pronoun introducing the sentence, as _the, it, that_. In

Chapter XII we shall see a little deeper into what this distinction,

between the mere mental having or feeling of an object and the thinking

of it, portends.

The mental states usually distinguished as feelings are the _emotions_,

and the _sensations_ we get from skin, muscle, viscus, eye, ear, nose,

and palate. The 'thoughts,' as recognized in popular parlance, are the

_conceptions_ and _judgments_. When we treat of these mental states in

particular we shall have to say a word about the cognitive function and

value of each. It may perhaps be well to notice now that our senses

only give us acquaintance with facts of body, and that of the mental

states of other persons we only have conceptual knowledge. Of our own

past states of mind we take cognizance in a peculiar way. They are

'objects of memory,' and appear to us endowed with a sort of warmth and

intimacy that makes the perception of them seem more like a process of

sensation than like a thought.

FOOTNOTES:

[198] Messrs. Payton Spence (Journal of Spec. Phil., x, 338, xiv,

286) and M. M. Garver (Amer. Jour. of Science, 3d series, xx,

189) argue, the one from speculative, the other from experimental

grounds, that, the physical condition of consciousness being neural

vibration, the consciousness must itself be incessantly interrupted by

unconsciousness--about fifty times a second, according to Garver.

[199] That the appearance of mental activity here is real can be proved

by suggesting to the 'hypnotized' somnambulist that he shall remember

when he awakes. He will then often do so.

[200] For more details, cf. Malebranche, Rech. de la Verité, bk.

iii, chap. i; J. Locke, Essay conc. H. U., book iii, ch. i; C. Wolf,

Psychol. rationalis, § 59; Sir W. Hamilton, Lectures on Metaph.,

lecture xvii; J. Bascom, Science of Mind, § 12; Th. Jouffroy, Mélanges

Philos., 'du Sommeil'; H. Holland, Chapters on Mental Physiol., p. 80;

B. Brodie, Psychol. Researches, p. 147; E. M. Chesley, Journ. of Spec.

Phil., vol. xi, p. 72; Th. Ribot, Maladies de la Personnalité, pp.

8-10; H. Lotze, Metaphysics, § 533.

[201] L'Automatisme Psychologique, Paris, 1889, _passim_.

[202] See his articles in the Chicago Open Court, for July, August and

November, 1889. Also in the Revue Philosophique for 1889 and '90.

[203] This whole phenomenon shows how an idea which remains itself

below the threshold of a certain conscious self may occasion

associative effects therein. The skin-sensations unfelt by the

patient's primary consciousness awaken nevertheless their usual visual

associates therein.

[204] See Proceedings of American Soc. for Psych. Research, vol. i, p.

548.

[205] Proceedings of the (London) Soc. for Psych. Research, May, 1887,

p. 268 ff.

[206] M. Janet designates by numbers the different personalities which

the subject may display.

[207] How to conceive of this state of mind is not easy. It would be

much simpler to understand the process, if adding new strokes made

the first one visible. There would then be two different objects

apperceived as totals,--paper with one stroke, paper with many strokes;

and, blind to the former, he would see all that was in the latter,

because he would have apperceived it as a different total in the first

instance.

A process of this sort occurs sometimes (not always) when the new

strokes, instead of being mere repetitions of the original one, are

lines which combine with it into a total object, say a human face. The

subject of the trance then may regain his sight of the line to which he

had previously been blind, by seeing it as part of the face.

[208] Perception of Space and Matter, 1879, part ii, chap. 3.

[209] For a very good condensed history of the various opinions, see

W. Volkmann von Volkmar, Lehrbuch d. Psychologie, § 16, Anm. Complete

references to Sir W. Hamilton are given in J. E. Walter, Perception of

Space and Matter, pp. 65-6.

[210] Most contemporary writers ignore the question of the soul's

seat. Lotze is the only one who seems to have been much concerned

about it, and his views have varied. Cf. Medicinische Psychol., § 10.

Microcosmus, bk. iii, ch. 2. Metaphysic, bk. iii, ch. 5. Outlines of

Psychol., part ii, ch. 3. See also G. T. Fechner, Psychophysik, chap.

xxxvii.

[211] I purposely ignore 'clairvoyance' and action upon distant things

by 'mediums,' as not yet matters of common consent.

[212] I disregard _consequences_ which may later come to the thing from

the fact that it is known. The knowing _per se_ in no wise affects the

thing.

[213] B. P. Bowne: Metaphysics, pp. 407-10. Cf. also Lotze: Logik, §§

308, 326-7.

[214] Cf. John Grote: Exploratio Philosophica, p. 60; H. Helmholtz,

Popular Scientific Lectures, London, p. 308-9.

CHAPTER IX.[215]

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT.

We now begin our study of the mind from within. Most books start with

sensations, as the simplest mental facts, and proceed synthetically,

constructing each higher stage from those below it. But this is

abandoning the empirical method of investigation. No one ever had a

simple sensation by itself. Consciousness, from our natal day, is of a

teeming multiplicity of objects and relations, and what we call simple

sensations are results of discriminative attention, pushed often to a

very high degree. It is astonishing what havoc is wrought in psychology

by admitting at the outset apparently innocent suppositions, that

nevertheless contain a flaw. The bad consequences develop themselves

later on, and are irremediable, being woven through the whole texture

of the work. The notion that sensations, being the simplest things, are

the first things to take up in psychology is one of these suppositions.

The only thing which psychology has a right to postulate at the outset

is the fact of thinking itself, and that must first be taken up and

analyzed. If sensations then prove to be amongst the elements of the

thinking, we shall be no worse off as respects them than if we had

taken them for granted at the start.

_The first fact for us, then, as psychologists, is that thinking of

some sort goes on._ I use the word thinking, in accordance with what

was said on p. 186, for every form of consciousness indiscriminately.

If we could say in English 'it thinks,' as we say 'it rains 'or 'it

blows,' we should be stating the fact most simply and with the minimum

of assumption. As we cannot, we must simply say that _thought goes on_.

FIVE CHARACTERS IN THOUGHT.

How does it go on? We notice immediately five important characters in

the process, of which it shall be the duty of the present chapter to

treat in a general way:

1) Every thought tends to be part of a personal consciousness.

2) Within each personal consciousness thought is always changing.

3) Within each personal consciousness thought is sensibly continuous.

4) It always appears to deal with objects independent of itself.

5) It is interested in some parts of these objects to the exclusion

of others, and welcomes or rejects--_chooses_ from among them, in a

word--all the while.

In considering these five points successively, we shall have to plunge

_in medias res_ as regards our vocabulary, and use psychological terms

which can only be adequately defined in later chapters of the book.

But every one knows what the terms mean in a rough way; and it is only

in a rough way that we are now to take them. This chapter is like a

painter's first charcoal sketch upon his canvas, in which no niceties

appear.

1) _Thought tends to Personal Form._

When I say _every thought is part of a personal consciousness_,

'personal consciousness' is one of the terms in question. Its meaning

we know so long as no one asks us to define it, but to give an accurate

account of it is the most difficult of philosophic tasks. This task we

must confront in the next chapter; here a preliminary word will suffice.

In this room--this lecture-room, say--there are a multitude of

thoughts, yours and mine, some of which cohere mutually, and some not.

They are as little each-for-itself and reciprocally independent as

they are all-belonging-together. They are neither: no one of them is

separate, but each belongs with certain others and with none beside.

My thought belongs with my other thoughts, and your thought with your

other thoughts. Whether anywhere in the room there be a mere thought,

which is nobody's thought, we have no means of ascertaining, for we

have no experience of its like. The only states of consciousness that

we naturally deal with are found in personal consciousnesses, minds,

selves, concrete particular I's and you's.

Each of these minds keeps its own thoughts to itself. There is no

giving or bartering between them. No thought even comes into direct

_sight_ of a thought in another personal consciousness than its own.

Absolute insulation, irreducible pluralism, is the law. It seems as if

the elementary psychic fact were not _thought_ or _this thought_ or

_that thought_, but _my thought_, every thought being _owned_. Neither

contemporaneity, nor proximity in space, nor similarity of quality and

content are able to fuse thoughts together which are sundered by this

barrier of belonging to different personal minds. The breaches between

such thoughts are the most absolute breaches in nature. Everyone will

recognize this to be true, so long as the existence of _something_

corresponding to the term 'personal mind' is all that is insisted on,

without any particular view of its nature being implied. On these

terms the personal self rather than the thought might be treated as

the immediate datum in psychology. The universal conscious fact is

not 'feelings and thoughts exist,' but 'I think' and 'I feel.'[216]

No psychology, at any rate, can question the _existence_ of personal

selves. The worst a psychology can do is so to interpret the nature of

these selves as to rob them of their worth. A French writer, speaking

of our ideas, says somewhere in a fit of anti-spiritualistic excitement

that, misled by certain peculiarities which they display, we 'end by

personifying' the procession which they make,--such personification

being regarded by him as a great philosophic blunder on our part. It

could only be a blunder if the notion of personality meant something

essentially different from anything to be found in the mental

procession. But if that procession be itself the very 'original' of the

notion of personality, to personify it cannot possibly be wrong. It is

already personified. There are no marks of personality to be gathered

_aliunde_, and then found lacking in the train of thought. It has them

all already; so that to whatever farther analysis we may subject that

form of personal selfhood under which thoughts appear, it is, and must

remain, true that the thoughts which psychology studies do continually

tend to appear as parts of personal selves.

I say 'tend to appear' rather than 'appear,' on account of those facts

of sub-conscious personality, automatic writing, etc., of which we

studied a few in the last chapter. The buried feelings and thoughts

proved now to exist in hysterical anæsthetics, in recipients of

post-hypnotic suggestion, etc., themselves are parts of _secondary

personal selves_. These selves are for the most part very stupid and

contracted, and are cut off at ordinary times from communication with

the regular and normal self of the individual; but still they form

conscious unities, have continuous memories, speak, write, invent

distinct names for themselves, or adopt names that are suggested; and,

in short, are entirely worthy of that title of secondary personalities

which is now commonly given them. According to M. Janet these secondary

personalities are always abnormal, and result from the splitting of

what ought to be a single complete self into two parts, of which one

lurks in the background whilst the other appears on the surface as

the only self the man or woman has. For our present purpose it is

unimportant whether this account of the origin of secondary selves is

applicable to all possible cases of them or not, for it certainly is

true of a large number of them. Now although the _size_ of a secondary

self thus formed will depend on the number of thoughts that are

thus split-off from the main consciousness, the _form_ of it tends

to personality, and the later thoughts pertaining to it remember

the earlier ones and adopt them as their own. M. Janet caught the

actual moment of inspissation (so to speak) of one of these secondary

personalities in his anæsthetic somnambulist Lucie. He found that when

this young woman's attention was absorbed in conversation with a third

party, her anæsthetic hand would write simple answers to questions

whispered to her by himself. "Do you hear?" he asked. "_No,_" was the

unconsciously written reply. "But to answer you must hear." "_Yes,

quite so._" "Then how do you manage?" "_I don't know._" "There must be

some one who hears me." "_Yes._" "Who?" "_Someone other than Lucie._"

"Ah! another person. Shall we give her a name?" "_No._" "Yes, it will

be more convenient." "_Well, Adrienne, then._" "Once baptized, the

subconscious personage," M. Janet continues, "grows more definitely

outlined and displays better her psychological characters. In

particular she shows us that she is conscious of the feelings excluded

from the consciousness of the primary or normal personage. She it is

who tells us that I am pinching the arm or touching the little finger

in which Lucie for so long has had no tactile sensations."[217]

In other cases the adoption of the name by the secondary self is more

spontaneous. I have seen a number of incipient automatic writers

and mediums as yet imperfectly 'developed,' who immediately and of

their own accord write and speak in the name of departed spirits.

These may be public characters, as Mozart, Faraday, or real persons

formerly known to the subject, or altogether imaginary beings.

Without prejudicing the question of real 'spirit-control' in the more

developed sorts of trance-utterance, I incline to think that these

(often deplorably unintelligent) rudimentary utterances are the work

of an inferior fraction of the subject's own natural mind, set free

from control by the rest, and working after a set pattern fixed by the

prejudices of the social environment. In a spiritualistic community we

get optimistic messages, whilst in an ignorant Catholic village the

secondary personage calls itself by the name of a demon, and proffers

blasphemies and obscenities, instead of telling us how happy it is in

the summer-land.[218]

Beneath these tracts of thought, which, however rudimentary, are

still organized selves with a memory, habits, and sense of their own

identity, M. Janet thinks that the facts of catalepsy in hysteric

patients drive us to suppose that there are thoughts quite unorganized

and impersonal. A patient in cataleptic trance (which can be produced

artificially in certain hypnotized subjects) is without memory on

waking, and seems insensible and unconscious as long as the cataleptic

condition lasts. If, however, one raises the arm of such a subject it

stays in that position, and the whole body can thus be moulded like

wax under the hands of the operator, retaining for a considerable

time whatever attitude he communicates to it. In hysterics whose arm,

for example, is anæsthetic, the same thing may happen. The anæsthetic

arm may remain passively in positions which it is made to assume; or

if the hand be taken and made to hold a pencil and trace a certain

letter, it will continue tracing that letter indefinitely on the

paper. These acts, until recently, were supposed to be accompanied by

no consciousness at all: they were physiological reflexes. M. Janet

considers with much more plausibility that feeling escorts them.

The feeling is probably merely that of the position or movement of

the limb, and it produces no more than its natural effects when it

discharges into the motor centres which keep the position maintained,

or the movement incessantly renewed.[219] Such thoughts as these, says

M. Janet, "are known by _no one_, for disaggregated sensations reduced

to a state of mental dust are not synthetized in any personality."[220]

He admits, however, that these very same unutterably stupid thoughts

tend to develop memory,--the cataleptic ere long moves her arm at a

bare hint; so that they form no important exception to the law that all

thought tends to assume the form of personal consciousness.

2) _Thought is in Constant Change._

I do not mean necessarily that no one state of mind has any

duration--even if true, that would be hard to establish. The change

which I have more particularly in view is that which takes place in

sensible intervals of time; and the result on which I wish to lay

stress is this, that _no state once gone can recur and be identical

with what it was before_. Let us begin with Mr. Shadworth Hodgson's

description:

"I go straight to the facts, without saying I go to perception, or

sensation, or thought, or any special mode at all. What I find when I

look at my consciousness at all is that what I cannot divest myself

of, or not have in consciousness, if I have any consciousness at all,

is a sequence of different feelings. I may shut my eyes and keep

perfectly still, and try not to contribute anything of my own will;

but whether I think or do not think, whether I perceive external

things or not, I always have a succession of different feelings.

Anything else that I may have also, of a more special character,

comes in as parts of this succession, Not to have the succession of

different feelings is not to be conscious at all.... The chain of

consciousness is a sequence of _differents_."[221]

Such a description as this can awaken no possible protest from any

one. We all recognize as different great classes of our conscious

states. Now we are seeing, now hearing; now reasoning, now willing;

now recollecting, now expecting; now loving, now hating; and in a

hundred other ways we know our minds to be alternately engaged. But

all these are complex states. The aim of science is always to reduce

complexity to simplicity; and in psychological science we have the

celebrated 'theory of _ideas_' which, admitting the great difference

among each other of what may be called concrete conditions of mind,

seeks to show how this is all the resultant effect of variations in

the _combination_ of certain simple elements of consciousness that

always remain the same. These mental atoms or molecules are what

Locke called 'simple ideas.' Some of Locke's successors made out that

the only simple ideas were the sensations strictly so called. Which

ideas the simple ones may be does not, however, now concern us. It is

enough that certain philosophers have thought they could see under the

dissolving-view-appearance of the mind elementary facts of _any_ sort

that remained unchanged amid the flow.

And the view of these philosophers has been called little into

question, for our common experience seems at first sight to corroborate

it entirely. Are not the sensations we get from the same object, for

example, always the same? Does not the same piano-key, struck with

the same force, make us hear in the same way? Does not the same grass

give us the same feeling of green, the same sky the same feeling of

blue, and do we not get the same olfactory sensation no matter how many

times we put our nose to the same flask of cologne? It seems a piece

of metaphysical sophistry to suggest that we do not; and yet a close

attention to the matter shows that _there is no proof that the same

bodily sensation is ever got by us twice_.

_What is got twice is the same_ OBJECT. We hear the same _note_ over

and over again; we see the same _quality_ of green, or smell the same

objective perfume, or experience the same _species_ of pain. The

realities, concrete and abstract, physical and ideal, whose permanent

existence we believe in, seem to be constantly coming up again before

our thought, and lead us, in our carelessness, to suppose that our

'ideas' of them are the same ideas. When we come, some time later, to

the chapter on Perception, we shall see how inveterate is our habit

of not attending to sensations as subjective facts, but of simply

using them as stepping-stones to pass over to the recognition of the

realities whose presence they reveal. The grass out of the window

now looks to me of the same green in the sun as in the shade, and

yet a painter would have to paint one part of it dark brown, another

part bright yellow, to give its real, sensational effect. We take

no heed, as a rule, of the different way in which the same things

look and sound and smell at different distances and under different

circumstances. The sameness of the _things_ is what we are concerned

to ascertain; and any sensations that assure us of that will probably

be considered in a rough way to be the same with each other. This

is what makes off-hand testimony about the subjective identity of

different sensations well-nigh worthless as a proof of the fact. The

entire history of Sensation is a commentary on our inability to tell

whether two sensations received apart are exactly alike. What appeals

to our attention far more than the absolute quality or quantity of

a given sensation is its _ratio_ to whatever other sensations we may

have at the same time. When everything is dark a somewhat less dark

sensation makes us see an object white. Helmholtz calculates that the

white marble painted in a picture representing an architectural view by

moonlight is, when seen by daylight, from ten to twenty thousand times

brighter than the real moonlit marble would be.[222]

Such a difference as this could never have been _sensibly_ learned; it

had to be inferred from a series of indirect considerations. There are

facts which make us believe that our sensibility is altering all the

time, so that the same object cannot easily give us the same sensation

over again. The eye's sensibility to light is at its maximum when the

eye is first exposed, and blunts itself with surprising rapidity.

A long night's sleep will make it see things twice as brightly on

wakening, as simple rest by closure will make it see them later in

the day.[223] We feel things differently according as we are sleepy

or awake, hungry or full, fresh or tired; differently at night and

in the morning, differently in summer and in winter, and above all

things differently in childhood, manhood, and old age. Yet we never

doubt that our feelings reveal the same world, with the same sensible

qualities and the same sensible things occupying it. The difference

of the sensibility is shown best by the difference of our emotion

about the things from one age to another, or when we are in different

organic moods. What was bright and exciting becomes weary, flat, and

unprofitable. The bird's song is tedious, the breeze is mournful, the

sky is sad.

To these indirect presumptions that our sensations, following the

mutations of our capacity for feeling, are always undergoing an

essential change, must be added another presumption, based on what

must happen in the brain. Every sensation corresponds to some cerebral

action. For an identical sensation to recur it would have to occur the

second time _in an unmodified brain_. But as this, strictly speaking,

is a physiological impossibility, so is an unmodified feeling an

impossibility; for to every brain-modification, however small, must

correspond a change of equal amount in the feeling which the brain

subserves.

All this would be true if even sensations came to us pure and single

and not combined into 'things.' Even then we should have to confess

that, however we might in ordinary conversation speak of getting the

same sensation again, we never in strict theoretic accuracy could do

so; and that whatever was true of the river of life, of the river of

elementary feeling, it would certainly be true to say, like Heraclitus,

that we never descend twice into the same stream.

But if the assumption of 'simple ideas of sensation' recurring in

immutable shape is so easily shown to be baseless, how much more

baseless is the assumption of immutability in the larger masses of our

thought!

For there it is obvious and palpable that our state of mind is never

precisely the same. Every thought we have of a given fact is, strictly

speaking, unique, and only bears a resemblance of kind with our other

thoughts of the same fact. When the identical fact recurs, we _must_

think of it in a fresh manner, see it under a somewhat different

angle, apprehend it in different relations from those in which it

last appeared. And the thought by which we cognize it is the thought

of it-in-those-relations, a thought suffused with the consciousness

of all that dim context. Often we are ourselves struck at the strange

differences in our successive views of the same thing. We wonder how

we ever could have opined as we did last month about a certain matter.

We have outgrown the possibility of that state of mind, we know not

how. From one year to another we see things in new lights. What was

unreal has grown real, and what was exciting is insipid. The friends

we used to care the world for are shrunken to shadows; the women, once

so divine, the stars, the woods, and the waters, how now so dull and

common! the young girls that brought an aura of infinity, at present

hardly distinguishable existences; pictures so empty; and as for the

books, what _was_ there to find so mysteriously significant in Goethe,

or in John Mill so full of weight? Instead of all this, more zestful

than ever is the work, the work; and fuller and deeper the import of

common duties and of common goods.

But what here strikes us so forcibly on the flagrant scale exists on

every scale, down to the imperceptible transition from one hour's

outlook to that of the next. Experience is remoulding us every moment,

and our mental reaction on every given thing is really a resultant of

our experience of the whole world up to that date. The analogies of

brain-physiology must again be appealed to to corroborate our view.

Our earlier chapters have taught us to believe that, whilst we think,

our brain changes, and that, like the aurora borealis, its whole

internal equilibrium shifts with every pulse of change. The precise

nature of the shifting at a given moment is a product of many factors.

The accidental state of local nutrition or blood-supply may be among

them. But just as one of them certainly is the influence of outward

objects on the sense-organs during the moment, so is another certainly

the very special susceptibility in which the organ has been left at

that moment by all it has gone through in the past. Every brain-state

is partly determined by the nature of this entire past succession.

Alter the latter in any part, and the brain-state must be somewhat

different. Each present brain-state is a record in which the eye of

Omniscience might read all the foregone history of its owner. It is out

of the question, then, that any total brain-state should identically

recur. Something like it may recur; but to suppose _it_ to recur would

be equivalent to the absurd admission that all the states that had

intervened between its two appearances had been pure nonentities, and

that the organ after their passage was exactly as it was before. And

(to consider shorter periods) just as, in the senses, an impression

feels very differently according to what has preceded it; as one

color succeeding another is modified by the contrast, silence sounds

delicious after noise, and a note, when the scale is sung up, sounds

unlike itself when the scale is sung down; as the presence of certain

lines in a figure changes the apparent form of the other lines, and as

in music the whole æsthetic effect comes from the manner in which one

set of sounds alters our feeling of another; so, in thought, we must

admit that those portions of the brain that have just been maximally

excited retain a kind of soreness which is a condition of our present

consciousness, a codeterminant of how and what we now shall feel.[224]

Ever some tracts are waning in tension, some waxing, whilst others

actively discharge. The states of tension have as positive an influence

as any in determining the total condition, and in deciding what the

_psychosis_ shall be. All we know of submaximal nerve-irritations,

and of the summation of apparently ineffective stimuli, tends to show

that _no_ changes in the brain are physiologically ineffective, and

that presumably none are bare of psychological result. But as the

brain-tension shifts from one relative state of equilibrium to another,

like the gyrations of a kaleidoscope, now rapid and now slow, is it

likely that its faithful psychic concomitant is heavier-footed than

itself, and that it cannot match each one of the organ's irradiations

by a shifting inward iridescence of its own? But if it can do this, its

inward iridescences must be infinite, for the brain-redistributions are

in infinite variety. If so coarse a thing as a telephone-plate can be

made to thrill for years and never reduplicate its inward condition,

how much more must this be the case with the infinitely delicate brain?

I am sure that this concrete and total manner of regarding the mind's

changes is the only true manner, difficult as it may be to carry it out

in detail. If anything seems obscure about it, it will grow clearer as

we advance. Meanwhile, if it be true, it is certainly also true that

no two 'ideas' are ever exactly the same, which is the proposition we

started to prove. The proposition is more important theoretically than

it at first sight seems. For it makes it already impossible for us

to follow obediently in the footprints of either the Lockian or the

Herbartian school, schools which have had almost unlimited influence

in Germany and among ourselves. No doubt it is often _convenient_ to

formulate the mental facts in an atomistic sort of way, and to treat

the higher states of consciousness as if they were all built out of

unchanging simple ideas. It is convenient often to treat curves as

if they were composed of small straight lines, and electricity and

nerve-force as if they were fluids. But in the one case as in the

other we must never forget that we are talking symbolically, and that

there is nothing in nature to answer to our words. _A permanently

existing 'idea' or 'Vorstellung' which makes its appearance before the

footlights of consciousness at periodical intervals, is as mythological

an entity as the Jack of Spades._

What makes it convenient to use the mythological formulas is the whole

organization of speech, which, as was remarked a while ago, was not

made by psychologists, but by men who were as a rule only interested

in the facts their mental states revealed. They only spoke of their

states as _ideas of this or of that thing_. What wonder, then, that the

thought is most easily conceived under the law of the thing whose name

it bears! If the thing is composed of parts, then we suppose that the

thought of the thing must be composed of the thoughts of the parts.

If one part of the thing have appeared in the same thing or in other

things on former occasions, why then we must be having even now the

very same 'idea' of that part which was there on those occasions. If

the thing is simple, its thought is simple. If it is multitudinous,

it must require a multitude of thoughts to think it. If a succession,

only a succession of thoughts can know it. If permanent, its thought

is permanent. And so on _ad libitum_. What after all is so natural

as to assume that one object, called by one name, should be known

by one affection of the mind? But, if language must thus influence

us, the agglutinative languages, and even Greek and Latin with their

declensions, would be the better guides. Names did not appear in them

inalterable, but changed their shape to suit the context in which

they lay. It must have been easier then than now to conceive of the

same object as being thought of at different times in non-identical

conscious states.

This, too, will grow clearer as we proceed. Meanwhile a necessary

consequence of the belief in permanent self-identical psychic facts

that absent themselves and recur periodically is the Humian doctrine

that our thought is composed of separate independent parts and is not a

sensibly continuous stream. That this doctrine entirely misrepresents

the natural appearances is what I next shall try to show.

3) _Within each personal consciousness, thought is sensibly continuous._

I can only define 'continuous' as that which is without breach, crack,

or division. I have already said that the breach from one mind to

another is perhaps the greatest breach in nature. The only breaches

that can well be conceived to occur within the limits of a single

mind would either be _interruptions, time_-gaps during which the

consciousness went out altogether to come into existence again at a

later moment; or they would be breaks in the _quality_, or content, of

the thought, so abrupt that the segment that followed had no connection

whatever with the one that went before. The proposition that within

each personal consciousness thought feels continuous, means two things:

1. That even where there is a time-gap the consciousness after it feels

as if it belonged together with the consciousness before it, as another

part of the same self;

2. That the changes from one moment to another in the quality of the

consciousness are never absolutely abrupt.

The case of the time-gaps, as the simplest, shall be taken first. And

first of all a word about time-gaps of which the consciousness may not

be itself aware.

On page 200 we saw that such time-gaps existed, and that they might

be more numerous than is usually supposed. If the consciousness is

not aware of them, it cannot feel them as interruptions. In the

unconsciousness produced by nitrous oxide and other anæsthetics, in

that of epilepsy and fainting, the broken edges of the sentient life

may meet and merge over the gap, much as the feelings of space of the

opposite margins of the 'blind spot' meet and merge over that objective

interruption to the sensitiveness of the eye. Such consciousness as

this, whatever it be for the onlooking psychologist, is for itself

unbroken. It _feels_ unbroken; a waking day of it is sensibly a unit

as long as that day lasts, in the sense in which the hours themselves

are units, as having all their parts next each other, with no intrusive

alien substance between. To expect the consciousness to feel the

interruptions of its objective continuity as gaps, would be like

expecting the eye to feel a gap of silence because it does not hear, or

the ear to feel a gap of darkness because it does not see. So much for

the gaps that are unfelt.

With the felt gaps the case is different. On waking from sleep, we

usually know that we have been unconscious, and we often have an

accurate judgment of how long. The judgment here is certainly an

inference from sensible signs, and its ease is due to long practice

in the particular field.[225] The result of it, however, is that the

consciousness is, _for itself,_ not what it was in the former case, but

interrupted and discontinuous, in the mere sense of the words. But in

the other sense of continuity, the sense of the parts being inwardly

connected and belonging together because they are parts of a common

whole, the consciousness remains sensibly continuous and one. What now

is the common whole? The natural name for it is _myself, I,_ or _me_.

When Paul and Peter wake up in the same bed, and recognize that they

have been asleep, each one of them mentally reaches back and makes

connection with but _one_ of the two streams of thought which were

broken by the sleeping hours. As the current of an electrode buried

in the ground unerringly finds its way to its own similarly buried

mate, across no matter how much intervening earth; so Peter's present

instantly finds out Peter's past, and never by mistake knits itself

on to that of Paul. Paul's thought in turn is as little liable to

go astray. The past thought of Peter is appropriated by the present

Peter alone. He may have a _knowledge_, and a correct one too, of

what Paul's last drowsy states of mind were as he sank into sleep,

but it is an entirely different sort of knowledge from that which he

has of his own last states. He _remembers_ his own states, whilst

he only _conceives_ Paul's. Remembrance is like direct feeling; its

object is suffused with a warmth and intimacy to which no object of

mere conception ever attains. This quality of warmth and intimacy and

immediacy is what Peter's _present_ thought also possesses for itself.

So sure as this present is me, is mine, it says, so sure is anything

else that comes with the same warmth and intimacy and immediacy, me and

mine. What the qualities called warmth and intimacy may in themselves

be will have to be matter for future consideration. But whatever past

feelings appear with those qualities must be admitted to receive the

greeting of the present mental state, to be owned by it, and accepted

as belonging together with it in a common self. This community of

self is what the time-gap cannot break in twain, and is why a present

thought, although not ignorant of the time-gap, can still regard itself

as continuous with certain chosen portions of the past.

Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such

words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents

itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A

'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally

described. _In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of

thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life._

* * * * *

But now there appears, even within the limits of the same self, and

between thoughts all of which alike have this same sense of belonging

together, a kind of jointing and separateness among the parts, of which

this statement seems to take no account. I refer to the breaks that

are produced by sudden _contrasts in the quality_ of the successive

segments of the stream of thought If the words 'chain' and 'train' had

no natural fitness in them, how came such words to be used at all? Does

not a loud explosion rend the consciousness upon which it abruptly

breaks, in twain? Does not every sudden shock, appearance of a new

object, or change in a sensation, create a real interruption, sensibly

felt as such, which cuts the conscious stream across at the moment at

which it appears? Do not such interruptions smite us every hour of our

lives, and have we the right, in their presence, still to call our

consciousness a continuous stream?

This objection is based partly on a confusion and partly on a

superficial introspective view.

The confusion is between the thoughts themselves, taken as subjective

facts, and the things of which they are aware. It is natural to make

this confusion, but easy to avoid it when once put on one's guard.

The things are discrete and discontinuous; they do pass before us in

a train or chain, making often explosive appearances and rending each

other in twain. But their comings and goings and contrasts no more

break the flow of the thought that thinks them than they break the

time and the space in which they lie. A silence may be broken by a

thunder-clap, and we may be so stunned and confused for a moment by the

shock as to give no instant account to ourselves of what has happened.

But that very confusion is a mental state, and a state that passes us

straight over from the silence to the sound. The transition between the

thought of one object and the thought of another is no more a break in

the _thought_ than a joint in a bamboo is a break in the wood. It is

a part of the _consciousness_ as much as the joint is a part of the

_bamboo_.

The superficial introspective view is the overlooking, even when

the things are contrasted with each other most violently, of the

large amount of affinity that may still remain between the thoughts

by whose means they are cognized. Into the awareness of the thunder

itself the awareness of the previous silence creeps and continues;

for what we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder _pure_,

but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it.[226] Our

feeling of the same objective thunder, coming in this way, is quite

different from what it would be were the thunder a continuation of

previous thunder. The thunder itself we believe to abolish and exclude

the silence; but the _feeling_ of the thunder is also a feeling of

the silence as just gone; and it would be difficult to find in the

actual concrete consciousness of man a feeling so limited to the

present as not to have an inkling of anything that went before. Here,

again, language works against our perception of the truth. We name our

thoughts simply, each after its thing, as if each knew its own thing

and nothing else. What each really knows is clearly the thing it is

named for, with dimly perhaps a thousand other things. It ought to

be named after all of them, but it never is. Some of them are always

things known a moment ago more clearly; others are things to be known

more clearly a moment hence.[227] Our own bodily position, attitude,

condition, is one of the things of which _some_ awareness, however

inattentive, invariably accompanies the knowledge of whatever else

we know. We think; and as we think we feel our bodily selves as the

seat of the thinking. If the thinking be _our_ thinking, it must be

suffused through all its parts with that peculiar warmth and intimacy

that make it come as ours. Whether the warmth and intimacy be anything

more than the feeling of the same old body always there, is a matter

for the next chapter to decide. _Whatever_ the content of the ego may

be, it is habitually felt _with_ everything else by us humans, and must

form a _liaison_ between all the things of which we become successively

aware.[228]

On this gradualness in the changes of our mental content the principles

of nerve-action can throw some more light. When studying, in Chapter

III, the summation of nervous activities, we saw that no state of the

brain can be supposed instantly to die away. If a new state comes, the

inertia of the old state will still be there and modify the result

accordingly. Of course we cannot tell, in our ignorance, what in each

instance the modifications ought to be. The commonest modifications

in sense-perception are known as the phenomena of contrast. In

æsthetics they are the feelings of delight or displeasure which certain

particular orders in a series of impressions give. In thought, strictly

and narrowly so called, they are unquestionably that consciousness of

the _whence_ and the _whither_ that always accompanies its flows. If

recently the brain-tract _a_ was vividly excited, and then _b_, and now

vividly _c_, the total present consciousness is not produced simply

by _c_'s excitement, but also by the dying vibrations of _a_ and _b_

as well. If we want to represent the brain-process we must write it

thus: __{a}b^{c}_--three different processes coexisting, and correlated

with them a thought which is no one of the three thoughts which they

would have produced had each of them occurred alone. But whatever this

fourth thought may exactly be, it seems impossible that it should not

be something _like_ each of the three other thoughts whose tracts are

concerned in its production, though in a fast-waning phase.

It all goes back to what we said in another connection only a few

pages ago (p. 233). As the total neurosis changes, so does the total

psychosis change. But as the changes of neurosis are never absolutely

discontinuous, so must the successive psychoses shade gradually into

each other, although their _rate_ of change may be much faster at one

moment than at the next.

* * * * *

This difference in the rate of change lies at the basis of a difference

of subjective states of which we ought immediately to speak. When

the rate is slow we are aware of the object of our thought in a

comparatively restful and stable way. When rapid, we are aware of

a passage, a relation, a transition _from_ it, or _between_ it and

something else. As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful

stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different

pace of its parts. Like a bird's life, it seems to be made of an

alternation of flights and perchings. The rhythm of language expresses

this, where every thought is expressed in a sentence, and every

sentence closed by a period. The resting-places are usually occupied

by sensorial imaginations of some sort, whose peculiarity is that they

can be held before the mind for an indefinite time, and contemplated

without changing; the places of flight are filled with thoughts of

relations, static or dynamic, that for the most part obtain between the

matters contemplated in the periods of comparative rest.

_Let us call the resting-places the 'substantive parts,' and the

places of flight the 'transitive parts,' of the stream of thought._

It then appears that the main end of our thinking is at all times the

attainment of some other substantive part than the one from which we

have just been dislodged. And we may say that the main use of the

transitive parts is to lead us from one substantive conclusion to

another.

Now it is very difficult, introspectively, to see the transitive parts

for what they really are. If they are but flights to a conclusion,

stopping them to look at them before the conclusion is reached is

really annihilating them. Whilst if we wait till the conclusion _be_

reached, it so exceeds them in vigor and stability that it quite

eclipses and swallows them up in its glare. Let anyone try to cut a

thought across in the middle and get a look at its section, and he

will see how difficult the introspective observation of the transitive

tracts is. The rush of the thought is so headlong that it almost

always brings us up at the conclusion before we can arrest it. Or if

our purpose is nimble enough and we do arrest it, it ceases forthwith

to be itself. As a snow-flake crystal caught in the warm hand is no

longer a crystal but a drop, so, instead of catching the feeling of

relation moving to its term, we find we have caught some substantive

thing, usually the last word we were pronouncing, statically taken, and

with its function, tendency, and particular meaning in the sentence

quite evaporated. The attempt at introspective analysis in these cases

is in fact like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying

to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks. And

the challenge to _produce_ these psychoses, which is sure to be thrown

by doubting psychologists at anyone who contends for their existence,

is as unfair as Zeno's treatment of the advocates of motion, when,

asking them to point out in what place an arrow _is_ when it moves, he

argues the falsity of their thesis from their inability to make to so

preposterous a question an immediate reply.

The results of this introspective difficulty are baleful. If to hold

fast and observe the transitive parts of thought's stream be so

hard, then the great blunder to which all schools are liable must be

the failure to register them, and the undue emphasizing of the more

substantive parts of the stream. Were we not ourselves a moment since

in danger of ignoring any feeling transitive between the silence and

the thunder, and of treating their boundary as a sort of break in

the mind? Now such ignoring as this has historically worked in two

ways. One set of thinkers have been led by it to _Sensationalism_.

Unable to lay their hands on any coarse feelings corresponding to

the innumerable relations and forms of connection between the facts

of the world, finding no _named_ subjective modifications mirroring

such relations, they have for the most part denied that feelings of

relation exist, and many of them, like Hume, have gone so far as to

deny the reality of most relations _out_ of the mind as well as in it.

Substantive psychoses, sensations and their copies and derivatives,

juxtaposed like dominoes in a game, but really separate, everything

else verbal illusion,--such is the upshot of this view.[229] The

_Intellectualists_, on the other hand, unable to give up the reality

of relations _extra mentem_, but equally unable to point to any

distinct substantive feelings in which they were known, have made the

same admission that the feelings do not exist. But they have drawn

an opposite conclusion. The relations must be known, they say, in

something that is no feeling, no mental modification continuous and

consubstantial with the subjective tissue out of which sensations and

other substantive states are made. They are known, these relations,

by something that lies on an entirely different plane, by an _actus

purus_ of Thought, Intellect, or Reason, all written with capitals

and considered to mean something unutterably superior to any fact of

sensibility whatever.

But from our point of view both Intellectualists and Sensationalists

are wrong. If there be such things as feelings at all, _then so surely

as relations between objects exist in rerum naturâ, so surely, and more

surely, do feelings exist to which these relations are known_. There

is not a conjunction or a preposition, and hardly an adverbial phrase,

syntactic form, or inflection of voice, in human speech, that does

not express some shading or other of relation which we at some moment

actually feel to exist between the larger objects of our thought. If we

speak objectively, it is the real relations that appear revealed; if we

speak subjectively, it is the stream of consciousness that matches each

of them by an inward coloring of its own. In either case the relations

are numberless, and no existing language is capable of doing justice to

all their shades.

We ought to say a feeling of _and_, a feeling of _if_, a feeling of

_but_, and a feeling of _by_, quite as readily as we say a feeling of

_blue_ or a feeling of _cold_. Yet we do not: so inveterate has our

habit become of recognizing the existence of the substantive parts

alone, that language almost refuses to lend itself to any other use.

The Empiricists have always dwelt on its influence in making us suppose

that where we have a separate name, a separate thing must needs be

there to correspond with it; and they have rightly denied the existence

of the mob of abstract entities, principles, and forces, in whose favor

no other evidence than this could be brought up. But they have said

nothing of that obverse error, of which we said a word in Chapter VII,

(see p. 195), of supposing that where there is _no_ name no entity

can exist. All _dumb_ or anonymous psychic states have, owing to this

error, been coolly suppressed; or, if recognized at all, have been

named after the substantive perception they led to, as thoughts 'about'

this object or 'about' that, the stolid word _about_ engulfing all

their delicate idiosyncrasies in its monotonous sound. Thus the greater

and greater accentuation and isolation of the substantive parts have

continually gone on.

Once more take a look at the brain. We believe the brain to be an organ

whose internal equilibrium is always in a state of change,--the change

affecting every part. The pulses of change are doubtless more violent

in one place than in another, their rhythm more rapid at this time than

at that. As in a kaleidoscope revolving at a uniform rate, although

the figures are always rearranging themselves, there are instants

during which the transformation seems minute and interstitial and

almost absent, followed by others when it shoots with magical rapidity,

relatively stable forms thus alternating with forms we should not

distinguish if seen again; so in the brain the perpetual rearrangement

must result in some forms of tension lingering relatively long, whilst

others simply come and pass. But if consciousness corresponds to the

fact of rearrangement itself, why, if the rearrangement stop not,

should the consciousness ever cease? And if a lingering rearrangement

brings with it one kind of consciousness, why should not a swift

rearrangement bring another kind of consciousness as peculiar as the

rearrangement itself? The lingering consciousnesses, if of simple

objects, we call 'sensations' or 'images,' according as they are vivid

or faint; if of complex objects, we call them 'percepts' when vivid,

'concepts' or 'thoughts' when faint. For the swift consciousnesses

we have only those names of 'transitive states,' or 'feelings of

relation,' which we have used.[230] As the brain-changes are

continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like

dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted consciousness,

one unbroken stream.

_Feelings of Tendency._

So much for the transitive states. But there are other unnamed states

or qualities of states that are just as important and just as

cognitive as they, and just as much unrecognized by the traditional

sensationalist and intellectualist philosophies of mind. The first

fails to find them at all, the second finds their _cognitive function_,

but denies that anything in the way of _feeling_ has a share in

bringing it about. Examples will make clear what these inarticulate

psychoses, due to waxing and waning excitements of the brain, are

like.[231]

Suppose three successive persons say to us: 'Wait!' 'Hark!' 'Look!'

Our consciousness is thrown into three quite different attitudes of

expectancy, although no definite object is before it in any one of

the three cases. Leaving out different actual bodily attitudes, and

leaving out the reverberating images of the three words, which are of

course diverse, probably no one will deny the existence of a residual

conscious affection, a sense of the direction from which an impression

is about to come, although no positive impression is yet there.

Meanwhile we have no names for the psychoses in question but the names

hark, look, and wait.

Suppose we try to recall a forgotten name. The state of our

consciousness is peculiar. There is a gap therein; but no mere gap.

It is a gap that is intensely active. A sort of wraith of the name

is in it, beckoning us in a given direction, making us at moments

tingle with the sense of our closeness, and then letting us sink back

without the longed-for term. If wrong names are proposed to us, this

singularly definite gap acts immediately so as to negate them. They do

not fit into its mould. And the gap of one word does not feel like the

gap of another, all empty of content as both might seem necessarily

to be when described as gaps. When I vainly try to recall the name of

Spalding, my consciousness is far removed from what it is when I vainly

try to recall the name of Bowles. Here some ingenious persons will

say: "How _can_ the two consciousnesses be different when the terms

which might make them different are not there? All that is there, so

long as the effort to recall is vain, is the bare effort itself. How

should that differ in the two cases? You are making it seem to differ

by prematurely filling it out with the different names, although

these, by the hypothesis, have not yet come. Stick to the two efforts

as they are, without naming them after facts not yet existent, and

you'll be quite unable to designate any point in which they differ."

Designate, truly enough. We can only designate the difference by

borrowing the names of objects not yet in the mind. Which is to say

that our psychological vocabulary is wholly inadequate to name the

differences that exist, even such strong differences as these. But

namelessness is compatible with existence. There are innumerable

consciousnesses of emptiness, no one of which taken in itself has a

name, but all different from each other. The ordinary way is to assume

that they are all emptinesses of consciousness, and so the same state.

But the feeling of an absence is _toto cœlo_ other than the absence

of a feeling. It is an intense feeling. The rhythm of a lost word may

be there without a sound to clothe it; or the evanescent sense of

something which is the initial vowel or consonant may mock us fitfully,

without growing more distinct. Every one must know the tantalizing

effect of the blank rhythm of some forgotten verse, restlessly dancing

in one's mind, striving to be filled out with words.

Again, what is the strange difference between an experience tasted

for the first time and the same experience recognized as familiar,

as having been enjoyed before, though we cannot name it or say where

or when? A tune, an odor, a flavor sometimes carry this inarticulate

feeling of their familiarity so deep into our consciousness that

we are fairly shaken by its mysterious emotional power. But strong

and characteristic as this psychosis is--it probably is due to the

submaximal excitement of wide-spreading associational brain-tracts--the

only name we have for all its shadings is 'sense of familiarity.'

When we read such phrases as 'naught but,' 'either one or the other,'

'_a_ is _b_, but,' 'although it is, nevertheless,' 'it is an excluded

middle, there is no _tertium quid_,' and a host of other verbal

skeletons of logical relation, is it true that there is nothing more

in our minds than the words themselves as they pass? What then is

the meaning of the words which we think we understand as we read?

What makes that meaning different in one phrase from what it is in

the other? 'Who?' 'When?' 'Where?' Is the difference of felt meaning

in these interrogatives nothing more than their difference of sound?

And is it not (just like the difference of sound itself) known and

understood in an affection of consciousness correlative to it, though

so impalpable to direct examination? Is not the same true of such

negatives as 'no,' 'never,' 'not yet'?

The truth is that large tracts of human speech are nothing but _signs

of direction_ in thought, of which direction we nevertheless have an

acutely discriminative sense, though no definite sensorial image plays

any part in it whatsoever. Sensorial images are stable psychic facts;

we can hold them still and look at them as long as we like. These bare

images of logical movement, on the contrary, are psychic transitions,

always on the wing, so to speak, and not to be glimpsed except in

flight. Their function is to lead from one set of images to another.

As they pass, we feel both the waxing and the waning images in a way

altogether peculiar and a way quite different from the way of their

full presence. If we try to hold fast the feeling of direction, the

full presence comes and the feeling of direction is lost. The blank

verbal scheme of the logical movement gives us the fleeting sense of

the movement as we read it, quite as well as does a rational sentence

awakening definite imaginations by its words.

What is that first instantaneous glimpse of some one's meaning which we

have, when in vulgar phrase we say we 'twig' it? Surely an altogether

specific affection of our mind. And has the reader never asked himself

what kind of a mental fact is his _intention of saying a thing_ before

he has said it? It is an entirely definite intention, distinct from

all other intentions, an absolutely distinct state of consciousness,

therefore; and yet how much of it consists of definite sensorial

images, either of words or of things? Hardly anything! Linger, and

the words and things come into the mind; the anticipatory intention,

the divination is there no more. But as the words that replace it

arrive, it welcomes them successively and calls them right if they

agree with it, it rejects them and calls them wrong if they do not.

It has therefore a nature of its own of the most positive sort, and

yet what can we say about it without using words that belong to the

later mental facts that replace it? The intention _to-say-so-and-so_

is the only name it can receive. One may admit that a good third of

our psychic life consists in these rapid premonitory perspective views

of schemes of thought not yet articulate. How comes it about that a

man reading something aloud for the first time is able immediately to

emphasize all his words aright, unless from the very first he have a

sense of at least the form of the sentence yet to come, which sense

is fused with his consciousness of the present word, and modifies its

emphasis in his mind so as to make him give it the proper accent as

he utters it? Emphasis of this kind is almost altogether a matter of

grammatical construction. If we read 'no more' we expect presently to

come upon a 'than'; if we read 'however' at the outset of a sentence

it is a 'yet,' a 'still,' or a 'nevertheless,' that we expect. A noun

in a certain position demands a verb in a certain mood and number, in

another position it expects a relative pronoun. Adjectives call for

nouns, verbs for adverbs, etc., etc. And this foreboding of the coming

grammatical scheme combined with each successive uttered word is so

practically accurate that a reader incapable of understanding four

ideas of the book he is reading aloud, can nevertheless read it with

the most delicately modulated expression of intelligence.

Some will interpret these facts by calling them all cases in which

certain images, by laws of association, awaken others so very rapidly

that we think afterwards we felt the very _tendencies_ of the nascent

images to arise, before they were actually there. For this school the

only possible materials of consciousness are images of a perfectly

definite nature. Tendencies exist, but they are facts for the outside

psychologist rather than for the subject of the observation. The

tendency is thus a _psychical_ zero; only its _results_ are felt.

Now what I contend for, and accumulate examples to show, is that

'tendencies' are not only descriptions from without, but that they are

among the _objects_ of the stream, which is thus aware of them from

within, and must be described as in very large measure constituted of

_feelings_ of _tendency_, often so vague that we are unable to name

them at all. It is, in short, the re-instatement of the vague to its

proper place in our mental life which I am so anxious to press on the

attention. Mr. Galton and Prof. Huxley have, as we shall see in Chapter

XVIII, made one step in advance in exploding the ridiculous theory of

Hume and Berkeley that we can have no images but of perfectly definite

things. Another is made in the overthrow of the equally ridiculous

notion that, whilst simple objective qualities are revealed to our

knowledge in subjective feelings, relations are not. But these reforms

are not half sweeping and radical enough. What must be admitted is

that the definite images of traditional psychology form but the very

smallest part of our minds as they actually live. The traditional

psychology talks like one who should say a river consists of nothing

but pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other moulded

forms of water. Even were the pails and the pots all actually standing

in the stream, still between them the free water would continue to

flow. It is just this free water of consciousness that psychologists

resolutely overlook. Every definite image in the mind is steeped and

dyed in the free water that flows round it. With it goes the sense of

its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to

us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead. The significance, the

value, of the image is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and

escorts it,--or rather that is fused into one with it and has become

bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh; leaving it, it is true, an

image of the same _thing_ it was before, but making it an image of that

thing newly taken and freshly understood.

What is that shadowy scheme of the 'form' of an opera, play, or book,

which remains in our mind and on which we pass judgment when the actual

thing is done? What is our notion of a scientific or philosophical

system? Great thinkers have vast premonitory glimpses of schemes of

relation between terms, which hardly even as verbal images enter

the mind, so rapid is the whole process.[232] We all of us have

this permanent consciousness of whither our thought is going. It is

a feeling like any other, a feeling of what thoughts are next to

arise, before they have arisen. This field of view of consciousness

varies very much in extent, depending largely on the degree of mental

freshness or fatigue. When very fresh, our minds carry an immense

horizon with them. The present image shoots its perspective far before

it, irradiating in advance the regions in which lie the thoughts as

yet unborn. Under ordinary conditions the halo of felt relations is

much more circumscribed. And in states of extreme brain-fag the horizon

is narrowed almost to the passing word,--the associative machinery,

however, providing for the next word turning up in orderly sequence,

until at last the tired thinker is led to some kind of a conclusion. At

certain moments he may find himself doubting whether his thoughts have

not come to a full stop; but the vague sense of a _plus ultra_ makes

him ever struggle on towards a more definite expression of what it may

be; whilst the slowness of his utterance shows how difficult, under

such conditions, the labor of thinking must be.

The awareness that our _definite_ thought has come to a stop is an

entirely different thing from the awareness that our thought is

definitively completed. The expression of the latter state of mind is

the falling inflection which betokens that the sentence is ended, and

silence. The expression of the former state is 'hemming and hawing,' or

else such phrases as '_et cetera_,' or 'and so forth.' But notice that

every part of the sentence to be left incomplete feels differently as

it passes, by reason of the premonition we have that we shall be unable

to end it. The 'and so forth' casts its shadow back, and is as integral

a part of the object of the thought as the distinctest of images would

be.

Again, when we use a common noun, such as _man_, in a universal sense,

as signifying all possible men, we are fully aware of this intention

on our part, and distinguish it carefully from our intention when we

mean a certain group of men, or a solitary individual before us. In the

chapter on Conception we shall see how important this difference of

intention is. It casts its influence over the whole of the sentence,

both before and after the spot in which the word _man_ is used.

Nothing is easier than to symbolize all these facts in terms of

brain-action. Just as the echo of the _whence_, the sense of the

starting point of our thought, is probably due to the dying excitement

of processes but a moment since vividly aroused; so the sense of the

whither, the foretaste of the terminus, must be due to the waxing

excitement of tracts or processes which, a moment hence, will be the

cerebral correlatives of some thing which a moment hence will be

vividly present to the thought. Represented by a curve, the neurosis

underlying consciousness must at any moment be like this:

[Illustration: FIG. 27.]

Each point of the horizontal line stands for some brain-tract or

process. The height of the curve above the line stands for the

intensity of the process. All the processes are _present_, in the

intensities shown by the curve. But those before the latter's apex

_were_ more intense a moment ago; those after it _will be_ more intense

a moment hence. If I recite _a, b, c, d, e, f, g,_ at the moment

of uttering _d_, neither _a, b, c,_ nor _e, f, g,_ are out of my

consciousness altogether, but both, after their respective fashions,

'mix their dim lights' with the stronger one of the _d_, because their

neuroses are both awake in some degree.

There is a common class of mistakes which shows how brain-processes

begin to be excited before the thoughts attached to them are

_due_--due, that is, in substantive and vivid form. I mean those

mistakes of speech or writing by which, in Dr. Carpenter's words, "we

mispronounce or misspell a word, by introducing into it a letter or

syllable of some other, whose turn is shortly to come; or, it may be,

the whole of the anticipated word is substituted for the one which

ought to have been expressed."[233] In these cases one of two things

must have happened: either some local accident of nutrition _blocks_

the process that is _due_, so that other processes discharge that ought

as yet to be but nascently aroused; or some opposite local accident

_furthers_ the _latter processes_ and makes them explode before their

time. In the chapter on Association of Ideas, numerous instances will

come before us of the actual effect on consciousness of neuroses not

yet maximally aroused.

It is just like the 'overtones' in music. Different instruments give

the 'same note,' but each in a different voice, because each gives more

than that note, namely, various upper harmonics of it which differ from

one instrument to another. They are not separately heard by the ear;

they blend with the fundamental note, and suffuse it, and alter it; and

even so do the waxing and waning brain-processes at every moment blend

with and suffuse and alter the psychic effect of the processes which

are at their culminating point.

* * * * *

Let us use the words _psychic overtone, suffusion,_ or _fringe_, to

designate the influence of a faint brain-process upon our thought, as

it makes it aware of relations and objects but dimly perceived.[234]

If we then consider the _cognitive function_ of different states of

mind, we may feel assured that the difference between those that are

mere 'acquaintance,' and those that are 'knowledges-_about_' (see p.

221) is reducible almost entirely to the absence or presence of psychic

fringes or overtones. Knowledge _about_ a thing is knowledge of its

relations. Acquaintance with it is limitation to the bare impression

which it makes. Of most of its relations we are only aware in the

penumbral nascent way of a 'fringe' of unarticulated affinities about

it. And, before passing to the next topic in order, I must say a little

of this sense of affinity, as itself one of the most interesting

features of the subjective stream.

In all our voluntary thinking there is some topic or subject about

which all the members of the thought revolve. Half the time this

topic is a problem, a gap we cannot yet fill with a definite picture,

word, or phrase, but which, in the manner described some time back,

influences us in an intensely active and determinate psychic way.

Whatever may be the images and phrases that pass before us, we feel

their relation to this aching gap. To fill it up is our thoughts'

destiny. Some bring us nearer to that consummation. Some the gap

negates as quite irrelevant. Each swims in a felt fringe of relations

of which the aforesaid gap is the term. Or instead of a definite gap

we may merely carry a mood of interest about with us. Then, however

vague the mood, it will still act in the same way, throwing a mantle of

felt affinity over such representations, entering the mind, as suit it,

and tingeing with the feeling of tediousness or discord all those with

which it has no concern.

Relation, then, to our topic or interest is constantly felt in the

fringe, and particularly the relation of harmony and discord, of

furtherance or hindrance of the topic. When the sense of furtherance

is there, we are 'all right;' with the sense of hindrance we are

dissatisfied and perplexed, and cast about us for other thoughts. Now

_any_ thought the quality of whose fringe lets us feel ourselves 'all

right,' is an acceptable member of our thinking, whatever kind of

thought it may otherwise be. Provided we only feel it to have a place

in the scheme of relations in which the interesting topic also lies,

that is quite sufficient to make of it a relevant and appropriate

portion of our train of ideas.

_For the important thing about a train of thought is its conclusion._

That is the _meaning_, or, as we say, the topic of the thought. That is

what abides when all its other members have faded from memory. Usually

this conclusion is a word or phrase or particular image, or practical

attitude or resolve, whether rising to answer a problem or fill a

pre-existing gap that worried us, or whether accidentally stumbled on

in revery. In either case it stands out from the other segments of

the stream by reason of the peculiar interest attaching to it. This

interest _arrests_ it, makes a sort of crisis of it when it comes,

induces attention upon it and makes us treat it in a substantive way.

The parts of the stream that precede these substantive conclusions

are but the means of the latter's attainment. And, provided the same

conclusion be reached, the means may be as mutable as we like, for the

'meaning' of the stream of thought will be the same. What difference

does it make what the means are? "_Qu'importe le flacon, pourvu qu'on

ait l'ivresse?_" The relative unimportance of the means appears from

the fact that when the conclusion is there, we have always forgotten

most of the steps preceding its attainment. When we have uttered a

proposition, we are rarely able a moment afterwards to recall our exact

words, though we can express it in different words easily enough. The

practical upshot of a book we read remains with us, though we may not

recall one of its sentences.

The only paradox would seem to lie in supposing that the fringe of

felt affinity and discord can be the same in two heterogeneous sets of

images. Take a train of words passing through the mind and leading to

a certain conclusion on the one hand, and on the other hand an almost

wordless set of tactile, visual and other fancies leading to the same

conclusion. Can the halo, fringe, or scheme in which we feel the words

to lie be the same as that in which we feel the images to lie? Does not

the discrepancy of terms involve a discrepancy of felt relations among

them?

If the terms be taken _quâ_ mere sensations, it assuredly does. For

instance, the words may rhyme with each other,--the visual images can

have no such affinity as _that_. But _quâ_ thoughts, _quâ_ sensations

_understood_, the words have contracted by long association fringes of

mutual repugnance or affinity with each other and with the conclusion,

which run exactly parallel with like fringes in the visual, tactile

and other ideas. The most important element of these fringes is, I

repeat, the mere feeling of harmony or discord, of a right or wrong

direction in the thought. Dr. Campbell has, so far as I know, made the

best analysis of this fact, and his words, often quoted, deserve to be

quoted again. The chapter is entitled "What is the cause that nonsense

so often escapes being detected, both by the writer and by the reader?"

The author, in answering this question, makes (_inter alia_) the

following remarks:[235]

"That connection [he says] or relation which comes gradually to

subsist among the different words of a language, in the minds of those

who speak it,... is merely consequent on this, that those words are

employed as signs of connected or related things. It is an axiom in

geometry that things equal to the same thing are equal to one another.

It may, in like manner, be admitted as an axiom in psychology that

ideas associated by the same idea will associate one another. Hence it

will happen that if, from experiencing the connection of two things,

there results, as infallibly there will result, an association between

the ideas or notions annexed to them, as each idea will moreover be

associated by its sign, there will likewise be an association between

the ideas of the signs. Hence the sounds considered as signs will be

conceived to have a connection analogous to that which subsisteth

among the things signified; I say, the sounds considered as signs;

for this way of considering them constantly attends us in speaking,

writing, hearing, and reading. When we purposely abstract from it,

and regard them merely as sounds, we are instantly sensible that they

are quite unconnected, and have no other relation than what ariseth

from similitude of tone or accent. But to consider them in this manner

commonly results from previous design, and requires a kind of effort

which is not exerted in the ordinary use of speech. In ordinary use

they are regarded solely as signs, or, rather, they are confounded

with the things they signify; the consequence of which is that, in the

manner just now explained, we come insensibly to conceive a connection

among them of a very different sort from that of which sounds are

naturally susceptible.

"Now this conception, habit, or tendency of the mind, call it which

you please, is considerably strengthened by the frequent use of

language and by the structure of it. Language is the sole channel

through which we communicate our knowledge and discoveries to

others, and through which the knowledge and discoveries of others

are communicated to us. By reiterated recourse to this medium, it

necessarily happens that when things are related to each other, the

words signifying those things are more commonly brought together in

discourse. Hence the words and names by themselves, by customary

vicinity, contract in the fancy a relation additional to that which

they derive purely from being the symbols of related things. Farther,

this tendency is strengthened by the structure of language. All

languages whatever, even the most barbarous, as far as hath yet

appeared, are of a regular and analogical make. The consequence is

that similar relations in things will be expressed similarly; that

is, by similar inflections, derivations, compositions, arrangement

of words, or juxtaposition of particles, according to the genius or

grammatical form of the particular tongue. Now as, by the habitual use

of a language (even though it were quite irregular), the signs would

insensibly become connected in the imagination wherever the things

signified are connected in nature, so, by the regular structure of a

language, this connection among the signs is conceived as analogous to

that which subsisteth among their archetypes."

If we know English and French and begin a sentence in French, all the

later words that come are French; we hardly ever drop into English.

And this affinity of the French words for each other is not something

merely operating mechanically as a brain-law, it is something we feel

at the time. Our understanding of a French sentence heard never falls

to so low an ebb that we are not aware that the words linguistically

belong together. Our attention can hardly so wander that if an English

word be suddenly introduced we shall not start at the change. Such

a vague sense as this of the words belonging together is the very

minimum of fringe that can accompany them, if 'thought' at all. Usually

the vague perception that all the words we hear belong to the same

language and to the same special vocabulary in that language, and that

the grammatical sequence is familiar, is practically equivalent to an

admission that what we hear is sense. But if an unusual foreign word

be introduced, if the grammar trip, or if a term from an incongruous

vocabulary suddenly appear, such as 'rat-trap' or 'plumber's bill' in a

philosophical discourse, the sentence detonates, as it were, we receive

a shock from the incongruity, and the drowsy assent is gone. The

feeling of rationality in these cases seems rather a negative than a

positive thing, being the mere absence of shock, or sense of discord,

between the terms of thought.

So delicate and incessant is this recognition by the mind of the

mere fitness of words to be mentioned together that the slightest

misreading, such as 'casualty' for 'causality,' or 'perpetual' for

'perceptual,' will be corrected by a listener whose attention is so

relaxed that he gets no idea of the _meaning_ of the sentence at all.

Conversely, if words do belong to the same vocabulary, and if the

grammatical structure is correct, sentences with absolutely no meaning

may be uttered in good faith and pass unchallenged. Discourses at

prayer-meetings, reshuffling the same collection of cant phrases,

and the whole genus of penny-a-line-isms and newspaper-reporter's

flourishes give illustrations of this. "The birds filled the tree-tops

with their morning song, making the air moist, cool, and pleasant,"

is a sentence I remember reading once in a report of some athletic

exercises in Jerome Park. It was probably written unconsciously by the

hurried reporter, and read uncritically by many readers. An entire

volume of 784 pages lately published in Boston[236] is composed of

stuff like this passage picked out at random:

"The flow of the efferent fluids of all these vessels from their

outlets at the terminal loop of each culminate link on the surface of

the nuclear organism is continuous as their respective atmospheric

fruitage up to the altitudinal limit of their expansibility, whence,

when atmosphered by like but coalescing essences from higher

altitudes,--those sensibly expressed as the essential qualities of

external forms,--they descend, and become assimilated by the afferents

of the nuclear organism."[237]

There are every year works published whose contents show them to be by

real lunatics. To the reader, the book quoted from seems pure nonsense

from beginning to end. It is impossible to divine, in such a case,

just what sort of feeling of rational relation between the words may

have appeared to the author's mind. The border line between objective

sense and nonsense is hard to draw; that between subjective sense and

nonsense, impossible. Subjectively, any collocation of words may make

sense--even the wildest words in a dream--if one only does not doubt

their belonging together. Take the obscurer passages in Hegel: it is a

fair question whether the rationality included in them be anything more

than the fact that the words all belong to a common vocabulary, and are

strung together on a scheme of predication and relation,--immediacy,

self-relation, and what not,--which has habitually recurred. Yet there

seems no reason to doubt that the subjective feeling of the rationality

of these sentences was strong in the writer as he penned them, or even

that some readers by straining may have reproduced it in themselves.

* * * * *

To sum up, certain kinds of verbal associate, certain grammatical

expectations fulfilled, stand for a good part of our impression

that a sentence has a meaning and is dominated by the Unity of one

Thought. Nonsense in grammatical form sounds half rational; sense

with grammatical sequence upset sounds nonsensical; e.g., "Elba the

Napoleon English faith had banished broken to be Saint because Helena

at." Finally, there is about each word the psychic 'overtone' of

feeling that it brings us nearer to a forefelt conclusion. Suffuse all

the words of a sentence, as they pass, with these three fringes or

haloes of relation, let the conclusion seem worth arriving at, and all

will admit the sentence to be an expression of thoroughly continuous,

unified, and rational thought.[238]

Each word, in such a sentence, is felt, not only as a word, but as

having a _meaning_. The 'meaning' of a word taken thus dynamically in a

sentence may be quite different from its meaning when taken statically

or without context. The dynamic meaning is usually reduced to the bare

fringe we have described, of felt suitability or unfitness to the

context and conclusion. The static meaning, when the word is concrete,

as 'table,' 'Boston,' consists of sensory images awakened; when it is

abstract, as 'criminal legislation,' 'fallacy,' the meaning consists of

other words aroused, forming the so-called 'definition.'

Hegel's celebrated dictum that pure being is identical with pure

nothing results from his taking the words statically, or without the

fringe they wear in a context. Taken in isolation, they agree in the

single point of awakening no sensorial images. But taken dynamically,

or as significant,--as _thought_,--their fringes of relation, their

affinities and repugnances, their function and meaning, are felt and

understood to be absolutely opposed.

Such considerations as these remove all appearance of paradox from

those cases of extremely deficient visual imagery of whose existence

Mr. Galton has made us aware (see below). An exceptionally intelligent

friend informs me that he can frame no image whatever of the appearance

of his breakfast-table. When asked how he then remembers it at all, he

says he simple '_knows_' that it seated four people, and was covered

with a white cloth on which were a butter-dish, a coffee-pot, radishes,

and so forth. The mind-stuff of which this 'knowing' is made seems

to be verbal images exclusively. But if the words 'coffee,' 'bacon,'

'muffins,' and 'eggs' lead a man to speak to his cook, to pay his

bills, and to take measures for the morrow's meal exactly as visual

and gustatory memories would, why are they not, for all practical

intents and purposes, as good a kind of material in which to think?

In fact, we may suspect them to be for most purposes better than

terms with a richer imaginative coloring. The scheme of relationship

and the conclusion being the essential things in thinking, that kind

of mind-stuff which is handiest will be the best for the purpose.

Now words, uttered or unexpressed, are the handiest mental elements

we have. Not only are they very _rapidly_ revivable, but they are

revivable as actual sensations more easily than any other items of our

experience. Did they not possess some such advantage as this, it would

hardly be the case that the older men are and the more effective as

thinkers, the more, as a rule, they have lost their visualizing power

and depend on words. This was ascertained by Mr. Galton to be the case

with members of the Royal Society. The present writer observes it in

his own person most distinctly.

On the other hand, a deaf and dumb man can weave his tactile and visual

images into a system of thought quite as effective and rational as

that of a word-user. _The question whether thought is possible without

language_ has been a favorite topic of discussion among philosophers.

Some interesting reminiscences of his childhood by Mr. Ballard, a

deaf-mute instructor in the National College at Washington, show it to

be perfectly possible. A few paragraphs may be quoted here.

"In consequence of the loss of my hearing in infancy, I was debarred

from enjoying the advantages which children in the full possession of

their senses derive from the exercises of the common primary school,

from the every-day talk of their school-fellows and playmates, and

from the conversation of their parents and other grown-up persons.

"I could convey my thoughts and feelings to my parents and brothers by

natural signs or pantomime, and I could understand what they said to

me by the same medium; our intercourse being, however, confined to the

daily routine of home affairs and hardly going beyond the circle of my

own observation....

"My father adopted a course which he thought would, in some measure,

compensate me for the loss of my hearing. It was that of taking me

with him when business required him to ride abroad; and he took me

more frequently than he did my brothers; giving, as the reason for his

apparent partiality, that they could acquire information through the

ear, while I depended solely upon my eye for acquaintance with affairs

of the outside world....

"I have a vivid recollection of the delight I felt in watching the

different scenes we passed through, observing the various phases of

nature, both animate and inanimate; though we did not, owing to my

infirmity, engage in conversation. It was during those delightful

rides, some two or three years before my initiation into the rudiments

of written language, that I began to ask myself the question: _How

came the world into being?_ When this question occurred to my mind, I

set myself to thinking it over a long time. My curiosity was awakened

as to what was the origin of human life in its first appearance upon

the earth, and of vegetable life as well, and also the cause of the

existence of the earth, sun, moon, and stars.

"I remember at one time when my eye fell upon a very large old stump

which we happened to pass in one of our rides, I asked myself, 'Is

it possible that the first man that ever came into the world rose

out of that stump? But that stump is only a remnant of a once noble

magnificent tree, and how came that tree? Why, it came only by

beginning to grow out of the ground just like those little trees now

coming up.' And I dismissed from my mind, as an absurd idea, the

connection between the origin of man and a decaying old stump....

"I have no recollection of what it was that first suggested to me the

question as to the origin of things. I had before this time gained

ideas of the descent from parent to child, of the propagation of

animals, and of the production of plants from seeds. The question that

occurred to my mind was: whence came the first man, the first animal,

and the first plant, at the remotest distance of time, before which

there was no man, no animal, no plant; since I knew they all had a

beginning and an end.

"It is impossible to state the exact order in which these different

questions arose, i.e., about men, animals, plants, the earth, sun,

moon, etc. The lower animals did not receive so much thought as was

bestowed upon man and the earth; perhaps because I put man and beast

in the same class, since I believed that man would be annihilated

and there was no resurrection beyond the grave,--though I am told by

my mother that, in answer to my question, in the case of a deceased

uncle who looked to me like a person in sleep, she had tried to make

me understand that he would awake in the far future. It was my belief

that man and beast derived their being from the same source, and were

to be laid down in the dust in a state of annihilation. Considering

the brute animal as of secondary importance, and allied to man on a

lower level, man and the earth were the two things on which my mind

dwelled most.

"I think I was five years old, when I began to understand the

descent from parent to child and the propagation of animals. I was

nearly eleven years old, when I entered the Institution where I was

educated; and I remember distinctly that it was at least two years

before this time that I began to ask myself the question as to the

origin of the universe. My age was then about eight, not over nine

years.