[360] I must say that I am wholly unconscious of the peculiar feelings
in the scalp which Fechner goes on to describe. "The feeling of
strained attention in the different sense-organs seems to be only a
muscular one produced in using these various organs by setting in
motion, by a sort of reflex action, the muscles which belong to them.
One can ask, then, with what particular muscular contraction the sense
of strained attention in the effort to recall something is associated?
On this question my own feeling gives me a decided answer; it comes to
me distinctly, not as a sensation of tension in the inside of the head,
but as a feeling of strain and contraction in the scalp with a pressure
from without inwards over the whole cranium, undoubtedly caused by a
contraction of the muscles of the scalp. This harmonizes very well with
the German popular expression _den Kopf zusammennehmen_, etc., etc. In
a former illness, in which I could not endure the slightest effort of
continuous thought, and had no theoretical bias on this question, the
muscles of the scalp, especially those of the occiput, assumed a fairly
morbid degree of sensibility whenever I tried to _think_." (_Ibid._
pp. 490-491.) In an early writing by Professor Mach, after speaking
of the way in which by attention we decompose complex musical sounds
into their elements, this investigator continues: "It is more than
a figure of speech when one says that we 'search' among the sounds.
This hearkening search is very observably a bodily activity, just like
attentive looking in the case of the eye. If, obeying the drift of
physiology, we understand by attention nothing mystical, but a bodily
disposition, it is most natural to seek it in the variable tension
of the muscles of the ear. Just so, what common men call attentive
looking reduces itself mainly to accommodating and setting of the
optic axes.... According to this, it seems to me a very plausible view
that quite generally Attention has its seat in the mechanism of the
body. If nervous work is being done through certain channels, that by
itself is a mechanical ground for other channels being closed." (Wien.
Sitzungsberichte, Math. Naturw., xlviii, 2, 297. 1863.)
[361] Physiol. Optik, p. 741.
[362] Hermann's Handbuch, iii, i, 548.
[363] Helmholtz: Tonempfindungen, 3d ed. 85-9 (Engl. tr., 2d ed. 50,
51; see also pp. 60-1).
[364] Physiol. Psych., ii, 209.
[365] Physiol. Optik, 741.
[366] P. 728.
[367] Popular Scientific Lectures, Eng. Trans., p. 295.
[368] Similarly in the verses which some one tried to puzzle me with
the other day: "_Gui n'a beau dit, qui sabot dit, nid a beau dit elle?_"
[369] I cannot refrain from referring in a note to an additional set
of facts instanced by Lotze in his Medizinische Psychologie, § 431,
although I am not satisfied with the explanation, fatigue of the
sense-organ, which _he_ gives. "In quietly lying and contemplating a
wall-paper pattern, sometimes it is the ground, sometimes the design,
which is clearer and consequently comes nearer.... Arabesques of
monochromic many-convoluted lines now strike us as composed of one,
now of another connected linear system, and all without any intention
on our part. [This is beautifully seen in Moorish patterns; but a
simple diagram like Fig. 39 also shows it well. We see it sometimes
as two large triangles superposed, sometimes as a hexagon with angles
spanning its sides, sometimes as six small triangles stuck together at
their corners.]... Often it happens in revery that when we stare at a
picture, suddenly some one of its features will be lit up with especial
clearness, although neither its optical character nor its meaning
discloses any motive for such an arousal of the attention.... To one
in process of becoming drowsy the surroundings alternately fade into
darkness and abruptly brighten up. The talk of the bystanders seems now
to come from indefinite distances; but at the next moment it startles
us by its threatening loudness at our very ear," etc. These variations,
which everyone will have noticed, are, it seems to me, easily
explicable by the very unstable equilibrium of our ideational centres,
of which constant change is the law. We _conceive_ one set of lines as
object, the other as background, and forthwith the first set becomes
the set we _see_. There need be no _logical_ motive for the conceptual
change, the irradiations of brain-tracts by each other, according to
accidents of nutrition, 'like sparks in burnt-up paper,' suffice. The
changes during drowsiness are still more obviously due to this cause.
[Illustration: FIG. 39.]
[370] The Emotions and the Will, 3d ed. p. 370.
[371] Psychologie de l'Attention (1889), p. 32 ff.
[372] Philosophische Studien, iv, 413 ff.
[373] See Lange, _loc. cit._ p. 417, for another proof of his view,
drawn from the phenomenon of retinal rivalry.
[374] Many of my students have at my request experimented with imagined
letters of the alphabet and syllables, and they tell me that they
can see them inwardly as total colored pictures without following
their outlines with the eye. I am myself a bad visualizer, and make
movements all the while.--M. L. Marillier, in an article of eminent
introspective power which appeared after my text was written (Remarques
sur le Mécanisme de l'Attention, in Revue Philosophique, vol. xxvii, p.
566), has contended against Ribot and others for the non-dependence of
sensory upon motor images in their relations to attention. I am glad to
cite him as an ally.
[375] Drs. Ferrier (Functions of the Brain, §§ 102-3) and Obersteiner
(Brain, i, 439 ff.) treat it as the essential feature. The author
whose treatment of the subject is by far the most thorough and
satisfactory is Prof. G. E. Müller, whose little work Zur Théorie der
sinnlichen Aufmerksamkeit, Inauguraldissertation, Leipzig, Edelmann
(1874?), is for learning and acuteness a model of what a monograph
should be. I should like to have quoted from it, but the Germanism
of its composition makes quotation quite impossible. See also G. H.
Lewes: Problems of Life and Mind, 3d Series, Prob. 2, chap. 10; G.
H. Schneider: Der menschliche Wille, 294 ff., 309 ff.; C. Stumpf:
Tonpsychologie, i, 67-75; W. B. Carpenter: Mental Physiology, chap. 3;
Cappie in 'Brain,' July 1886 (hyperæmia-theory); J. Sully in 'Brain,'
Oct. 1890.
[376] L'Enfant de trois à sept Ans, p. 108.
[377] Psychologie de l'Attention, p. 53.
[378] Repetition of this sort does not confer _intelligence_ of what
is said, it only keeps the mind from wandering into other channels.
The intelligence sometimes comes in beats, as it were, at the end of
sentences, or in the midst of words which were mere words until then.
See above, p. 281.
[379] The reader will please observe that I am saying all that can
_possibly_ be said in favor of the effect-theory, since, inclining
as I do myself to the cause-theory, I do not want to undervalue the
enemy. As a matter of fact, one might begin to take one's stand against
the effect theory at the outset, with the phenomenon of immediate
sensorial attention. One might say that attention causes the movements
of adjustment of the eyes, for example, and is not merely their effect.
Hering writes most emphatically to this effect: "The movements from
one point of fixation to another are occasioned and regulated by the
changes of place of the attention. When an object, seen at first
indirectly, draws our attention to itself, the corresponding movement
of the eye follows without further ado, as a consequence of the
attention's migration and of our effort to make the object distinct.
The wandering of the attention entails that of the fixation point.
Before its movement begins, its goal is already in consciousness and
grasped by the attention, and the location of this spot in the total
space seen is what determines the direction and amount of the movement
of the eye." (Hermann's Handbuch, p. 534.) I do not here insist on
this, because it is hard to tell whether the attention or the movement
comes first (Hering's reasons, pp. 535-6, also 544-6, seem to me
ambiguous), and because, even if the attention to the object does come
first, it may be a mere effect of stimulus and association. Mach's
theory that the _will to look_ is the _space-feeling itself_ may be
compared with Hering's in this place. See Mach's Beiträge zur Analyse
der Empfindungen (1886), pp. 55 ff.
[380] F. H. Bradley, "Is there a Special Activity of Attention?" in
'Mind,' xi, 305, and Lipps, Grundtatsachen, chaps. iv and xxx, have
stated it similarly.
[381] More will be said of the matter when we come to the chapter on
the Will.
[382] See, for a defence of the notion of inward activity, Mr. James
Ward's searching articles in 'Mind,' xii, 45 and 564.
[383] It must be admitted that some little time will often elapse
before this effort succeeds. As a child, I slept in a nursery with a
very loud-ticking clock, and remember my astonishment more than once,
on listening for its tick, to find myself unable to catch it for what
seemed a long space of time; then suddenly it would break into my
consciousness with an almost startling loudness.--M. Delbœuf somewhere
narrates how, sleeping in the country near a mill-dam, he woke in the
night and thought the water had ceased to flow, but on looking out of
the open window saw it flowing in the moonlight, and then heard it too.
[384] Zur Theorie d. sinnl. Aufmerksamkeit, p. 128 foll.
[385] I have begun to inquire experimentally whether any of the
measurable functions of the workmen change after the din of machinery
stops at a workshop. So far I have found no constant results as regards
either pulse, breathing, or strength of squeeze by the hand. I hope to
prosecute the inquiry farther (May, 1890).
CHAPTER XII.
CONCEPTION.
THE SENSE OF SAMENESS.
In Chapter VIII, p. 221, the distinction was drawn between two kinds of
knowledge of things, bare acquaintance with them and knowledge about
them. The possibility of two such knowledges depends on a fundamental
psychical peculiarity which may be entitled "_the principle of
constancy in the mind's meanings_" and which may be thus expressed:
"_The same matters can be thought of in successive portions of the
mental stream, and some of these portions can know that they mean
the same matters which the other portions meant._" One might put it
otherwise by saying that "_the mind can always intend, and know when it
intends, to think of the Same._"
This _sense of sameness_ is the very keel and backbone of our thinking.
We saw in Chapter X how the consciousness of personal identity reposed
on it, the present thought finding in its memories a warmth and
intimacy which it recognizes as the same warmth and intimacy it now
feels. This sense of identity of the knowing subject is held by some
philosophers to be the only vehicle by which the world hangs together.
It seems hardly necessary to say that a sense of identity of the known
object would perform exactly the same unifying function, even if the
sense of subjective identity were lost. And without the intention to
think of the same outer things over and over again, and the sense that
we were doing so, our sense of our own personal sameness would carry us
but a little way towards making a universe of our experience.
Note, however, that we are in the first instance speaking of the sense
of sameness from the point of view of the mind's structure alone, and
not from the point of view of the universe. We are psychologizing, not
philosophizing, That is, we do not care whether there be any _real_
sameness in _things_ or not, or whether the mind be true or false in
its assumptions of it. Our principle only lays it down that the mind
makes continual use of the _notion_ of sameness, and if deprived of
it, would have a different structure from what it has. In a word, the
principle that the mind can mean the Same is true of its _meanings_,
but not necessarily of aught besides.[386] The mind must conceive as
possible that the Same should be before it, for our experience to be
the sort of thing it is. Without the psychological sense of identity,
sameness might rain down upon us from the outer world for ever and we
be none the wiser. With the psychological sense, on the other hand,
the outer world might be an unbroken flux, and yet we should perceive
a repeated experience. Even now, the world may be a place in which
the same thing never did and never will come twice. The thing we mean
to point at may change from top to bottom and we be ignorant of the
fact. But in our meaning itself we are not deceived; our intention is
to think of the same. The name which I have given to the principle,
in calling it the law of constancy in our meanings, accentuates its
subjective character, and justifies us in laying it down as the most
important of all the features of our mental structure.
Not all psychic life need be assumed to have the sense of sameness
developed in this way. In the consciousness of worms and polyps,
though the same realities may frequently impress it, the feeling of
sameness may seldom emerge. We, however, running back and forth, like
spiders on the web they weave, feel ourselves to be working over
identical materials and thinking them in different ways. And the man
who identifies the materials most is held to have the most philosophic
human mind.
CONCEPTION DEFINED.
_The function by which we thus identify a numerically distinct and
permanent subject of discourse is called_ CONCEPTION; and the thoughts
which are its vehicles are called _concepts_. But the word 'concept'
is often used as if it stood for the object of discourse itself; and
this looseness feeds such evasiveness in discussion that I shall avoid
the use of the expression concept altogether, and speak of 'conceiving
state of mind,' or something similar, instead. The word 'conception'
is unambiguous. It properly denotes neither the mental state nor what
the mental state signifies, but the relation between the two, namely,
the _function_ of the mental state in signifying just that particular
thing. It is plain that one and the same mental state can be the
vehicle of many conceptions, can mean a particular thing, and a great
deal more besides. If it has such a multiple conceptual function, it
may be called an act of compound conception.
We may conceive realities supposed to be extra-mental, as steam-engine;
fictions, as mermaid; or mere _entia rationis_, like difference or
nonentity. But whatever we do conceive, our conception is of that and
nothing else--nothing else, that is, _instead_ of that, though it may
be of much else _in addition_ to that. Each act of conception results
from our attention singling out some one part of the mass of matter
for thought which the world presents, and holding fast to it, without
confusion.[387] Confusion occurs when we do not know whether a certain
object proposed to us is the same with one of our meanings or not;
so that the conceptual function requires, to be complete, that the
thought should not only say 'I mean this,' but also say 'I don't mean
that.'[388]
Each conception thus eternally remains what it is, and never can
become another. The mind may change its states, and its meanings, at
different times; may drop one conception and take up another, but the
dropped conception can in no intelligible sense be said to _change
into_ its successor. The paper, a moment ago white, I may now see to
have been scorched black. But my conception 'white' does not change
into my conception 'black.' On the contrary, it stays alongside of the
objective blackness, as a different meaning in my mind, and by so doing
lets me judge the blackness as the paper's change. Unless it stayed, I
should simply say 'blackness' and know no more. Thus, amid the flux of
opinions and of physical things, the world of conceptions, or things
intended to be thought about, stands stiff and immutable, like Plato's
Realm of Ideas.[389]
Some conceptions are of things, some of events, some of qualities. Any
fact, be it thing, event, or quality, may be conceived sufficiently
for purposes of identification, if only it be singled out and marked
so as to separate it from other things. Simply calling it 'this' or
'that' will suffice. To speak in technical language, a subject may
be conceived by its _denotation_, with no _connotation_, or a very
minimum of connotation, attached. The essential point is that it should
be re-identified by us as that which the talk is about; and no full
representation of it is necessary for this, even when it is a fully
representable thing.
In this sense, creatures extremely low in the intellectual scale may
have conception. All that is required is that they should recognize
the same experience again. A polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a
feeling of 'Hollo! thingumbob again!' ever flitted through its mind.
Most of the objects of our thought, however, are to some degree
represented as well as merely pointed out. Either they are things
and events perceived or imagined, or they are qualities apprehended
in a positive way. Even where we have no intuitive acquaintance with
the nature of a thing, if we know any of the relations of it at all,
anything _about_ it, that is enough to individualize and distinguish
it from all the other things which we might mean. Many of our topics
of discourse are thus _problematical_, or defined by their relations
only. We think of a thing _about_ which certain facts must obtain,
but we do not yet know how the thing will look when it is realized.
Thus we conceive of a perpetual-motion machine. It is a _quæsitum_
of a perfectly definite kind,--we can always tell whether the actual
machines offered us do or do not agree with what we mean by it. The
natural possibility or impossibility of the thing does not touch the
question of its conceivability in this problematic way. 'Round square,'
'black-white-thing,' are absolutely definite conceptions; it is a mere
accident, as far as conception goes, that they happen to stand for
things which nature never lets us sensibly perceive.[390]
CONCEPTIONS ARE UNCHANGEABLE.
The fact that the same real topic of discourse is at one time
conceived as a mere 'that' or 'that which, etc.,' and is at another
time conceived with additional specifications, has been treated by
many authors as a proof that conceptions themselves are fertile
and self-developing. A conception, according to the Hegelizers in
philosophy, 'develops its own significance,' 'makes explicit what it
implicitly contained,' passes, on occasion, 'over into its opposite,'
and in short loses altogether the blankly self-identical character we
supposed it to maintain. The figure we viewed as a polygon appears to
us now as a sum of juxtaposed triangles; the number hitherto conceived
as thirteen is at last noticed to be six plus seven, or prime; the man
thought honest is believed a rogue. Such changes of our opinion are
viewed by these thinkers as evolutions of our conception, from within.
The facts are unquestionable; our knowledge does grow and change by
rational and inward processes, as well as by empirical discoveries.
Where the discoveries are empirical, no one pretends that the
propulsive agency, the force that makes the knowledge develop, is
mere conception. All admit it to be our continued exposure to the
_thing_, with its power to impress our senses. Thus strychnin, which
tastes bitter, we find will also kill, etc. Now I say that where the
new knowledge merely comes from _thinking_, the facts are essentially
the same, and that _to talk of self-development on the part of
our conceptions is a very bad way of stating the case_. Not new
sensations, as in the empirical instance, but new conceptions, are the
indispensable conditions of advance.
For if the alleged cases of self-development be examined it will
be found, I believe, that the new truth affirms in every case a
_relation_ between the original subject of conception and some new
subject conceived later on. These new subjects of conception arise in
various ways. Every one of our conceptions is of something which our
attention originally tore out of the continuum of felt experience,
and provisionally isolated so as to make of it an individual topic
of discourse. Every one of them has a way, if the mind is left alone
with it, of suggesting other parts of the continuum from which it was
torn, for conception to work upon in a similar way. This 'suggestion'
is often no more than what we shall later know as the association
of ideas. Often, however, it is a sort of invitation to the mind to
play, add lines, break number-groups, etc. Whatever it is, it brings
new conceptions into consciousness, which latter thereupon may or may
not expressly attend to the relation in which the new stands to the
old. Thus I have a conception of equidistant lines. Suddenly, I know
not whence, there pops into my head the conception of their meeting.
Suddenly again I think of the meeting and the equidistance both
together, and perceive them incompatible. "_Those_ lines will never
meet," I say. Suddenly again the word 'parallel' pops into my head.
'They are parallels,' I continue; and so on. Original conceptions to
start with; adventitious conceptions pushed forward by multifarious
psychologic causes; comparisons and combinations of the two; resultant
conceptions to end with; which latter may be of either rational or
empirical relations.
As regards these relations, they are conceptions of the second degree,
as one might say, and their birthplace is the mind itself. In Chapter
XXVIII I shall at considerable length defend the mind's claim to
originality and fertility in bringing them forth. But no single one
of the mind's conceptions is fertile _of itself_ as the opinion which
I criticise pretends. When the several notes of a chord are sounded
together, we get a new feeling from their combination. This feeling is
due to the mind reacting upon that group of sounds in that determinate
way, and no one would think of saying of any single note of the chord
that it 'developed' of itself into the other notes or into the feeling
of harmony. So of Conceptions. No one of them develops into any other.
But if two of them are thought at once, their _relation_ may come to
consciousness, and form matter for a third conception.
Take 'thirteen' for example, which is said to develop into 'prime.'
What really happens is that we compare the utterly changeless
conception of thirteen with various other conceptions, those of the
different multiples of two, three, four, five, and six, and ascertain
that it _differs_ from them all. Such difference is a freshly
ascertained relation. It is only for mere brevity's sake that we call
it a property of the original thirteen, the property of being prime.
We shall see in the next chapter that (if we count out æsthetic and
moral relations between things) the only important relations of which
the mere inspection of conceptions makes us aware are relations of
comparison, that is, of difference and no-difference, between them. The
judgment 6 + 7 = 13 expresses the relation of _equality_ between two
ideal objects, 13 on the one hand and 6 + 7 on the other, successively
conceived and compared. The judgments 6 + 7 > 12, or 6 + 7 < 14,
express in like manner relations of inequality between ideal objects.
But if it be unfair to say that the conception of 6 + 7 generates that
of 12 or of 14, surely it is as unfair to say that it generates that of
13.
The conceptions of 12, 13, and 14 are each and all generated by
individual acts of the mind, playing with its materials. When,
comparing two ideal objects, we find them equal, the conception of one
of them may be that of a whole and of the other that of all its parts.
This particular case is, it seems to me, the only case which makes
the notion of one conception evolving into another sound plausible.
But even in this case the conception, as such, of the whole does not
evolve into the conception, as such, of the parts. Let the conception
of some object as a whole be given first. To begin with, it points
to and identifies for future thought a certain _that_. The 'whole'
in question might be one of those mechanical puzzles of which the
difficulty is to unlock the parts. In this case, nobody would pretend
that the richer and more elaborate conception which we gain of the
puzzle after solving it came directly out of our first crude conception
of it, for it is notoriously the outcome of experimenting with our
hands. It is true that, as they both mean _that same puzzle_, our
earlier thought and our later thought have one conceptual function, are
vehicles of one conception. But in addition to being the vehicle of
this bald unchanging conception, 'that same puzzle,' the later thought
is the vehicle of all those other conceptions which it took the manual
experimentation to acquire. Now, it is just the same where the whole
is mathematical instead of being mechanical. Let it be a polygonal
space, which we cut into triangles, and of which we then affirm that
it _is_ those triangles. Here the experimentation (although usually
done by a pencil in the hands) may be done by the unaided imagination.
We hold the space, first conceived as polygonal simply, in our mind's
eye until our attention wandering to and fro within it has carved it
into the triangles. The triangles are a new conception, the result of
this new operation. Having once conceived them, however, and compared
them with the old polygon which we originally conceived and which we
have never ceased conceiving, we judge them to fit exactly into its
area. The earlier and later conceptions, we say, are of one and the
same space. But this relation between triangles and polygon which the
mind cannot help finding if it compares them at all, is very badly
expressed by saying that the old conception has developed into the new.
New conceptions come from new sensations, new movements, new emotions,
new associations, new acts of attention, and new comparisons of old
conceptions, and not in other ways. Endogenous prolification is not a
mode of growth to which conceptions can lay claim.
I hope, therefore, that I shall not be accused of huddling mysteries
out of sight, when I insist that the psychology of conception is
not the place in which to treat of those of continuity and change.
Conceptions form the one class of entities that cannot under any
circumstances change. They can cease to be, altogether; or they can
stay, as what they severally are; but there is for them no middle
way. They form an essentially discontinuous system, and translate the
process of our perceptual experience, which is naturally a flux, into a
set of stagnant and petrified terms. The very conception of flux itself
is an absolutely changeless meaning in the mind: it signifies just that
one thing, flux, immovably.--And, with this, the doctrine of the flux
of the concept may be dismissed, and need not occupy our attention
again.[391]
'ABSTRACT' IDEAS.
We have now to pass to a less excusable mistake. There are philosophers
who deny that associated things can be broken asunder at all, even
provisionally, by the conceiving mind. The opinion known as Nominalism
says that we really never frame any conception of the partial elements
of an experience, but are compelled, whenever we think it, to think it
in its totality, just as it came.
I will be silent of mediæval Nominalism, and begin with Berkeley,
who is supposed to have rediscovered the doctrine for himself. His
asseverations against 'abstract ideas' are among the oftenest quoted
passages in philosophic literature.
"It is agreed," he says, "on all hands that the qualities or modes
of things do never really exist each of them apart by itself, and
separated from all others, but are mixed, as it were, and blended
together, several in the same object. But, we are told, the mind being
able to consider each quality singly, or abstracted from those other
qualities with which it is united, does by that means frame to itself
abstract ideas.... After this manner, it is said, we come by the
abstract idea of man, or, if you please, humanity, or human nature;
wherein it is true there is included color, because there is no man
but has some color, but then it can be neither white, nor black, nor
any particular color, because there is no one particular color wherein
all men partake. So likewise there is included stature, but then it
is neither tall stature nor low stature, nor yet middle stature, but
something abstracted from all these. And so of the rest.... Whether
others have this wonderful faculty of abstracting their ideas, they
best can tell: for myself, I find indeed I have a faculty of imagining
or representing to myself the ideas of those particular things I have
perceived and of variously compounding and dividing them.... I can
consider the hand, the eye, the nose, each by itself abstracted or
separated from the rest of the body. But then, whatever hand or eye
I imagine, it must have some particular shape and color. Likewise
the idea of man that I frame to myself must be either of a white, or
a black, or a tawny, a straight, or a crooked, a tall, or a low, or
a middle-sized man. I cannot by any effort of thought conceive the
abstract idea above described. And it is equally impossible for me to
form the abstract idea of motion distinct from the body moving, and
which is neither swift nor slow, curvilinear nor rectilinear; and the
like may be said of all other abstract general ideas whatsoever....
And there is ground to think most men will acknowledge themselves to
be in my case. The generality of men which are simple and illiterate
never pretend to abstract notions. It is said they are difficult, and
not to be attained without pains and study.
"Now I would fain know at what time it is men are employed in
surmounting that difficulty, and furnishing themselves with those
necessary helps for discourse. It cannot be when they are grown up,
for then it seems they are not conscious of any such painstaking; it
remains therefore to be the business of their childhood. And surely
the great and multiplied labor of framing abstract notions will be
found a hard task for that tender age. Is it not a hard thing to
imagine that a couple of children cannot prate together of their
sugar-plums and rattles and the rest of their little trinkets, till
they have first tacked together numberless inconsistencies, and so
framed in their minds abstract general ideas, and annexed them to
every common name they make use of?"[392]
The note, so bravely struck by Berkeley, could not, however, be well
sustained in face of the fact patent to every human being that we
_can_ mean color without meaning any particular color, and stature
without meaning any particular height. James Mill, to be sure, chimes
in heroically in the chapter on Classification of his 'Analysis'; but
in his son John the nominalistic voice has grown so weak that, although
'abstract ideas' are repudiated as a matter of traditional form, the
opinions uttered are really nothing but a conceptualism ashamed to call
itself by its own legitimate name.[393] Conceptualism says the mind can
conceive any quality or relation it pleases, and mean nothing but it,
in isolation from everything else in the world. This is, of course, the
doctrine which we have professed. John Mill says:
"The formation of a Concept does not consist in separating the
attributes which are said to compose it from all other attributes
of the same object, and enabling us to conceive those attributes,
disjoined from any others. We neither conceive them, nor think
them, nor cognize them in any way, as a thing apart, but solely as
forming, in combination with numerous other attributes, the idea of an
individual object. But, though meaning them only as part of a larger
agglomeration, we have the power of fixing our attention on them, to
the neglect of the other attributes with which we think them combined.
_While the concentration of attention lasts, if it is sufficiently
intense, we may be temporarily unconscious of any of the other
attributes, and may really, for a brief interval, have nothing-present
to our mind but the attributes constituent of the concept_.... General
concepts, therefore, we have, properly speaking, none; we have only
complex ideas of objects in the concrete: but we are able to _attend
exclusively to certain parts_ of the concrete idea: and by that
_exclusive attention_ we enable those parts to _determine exclusively
the course of our thoughts_ as subsequently called up by association;
and are in a condition to carry on a train of meditation or reasoning
relating to those parts only, _exactly as if_ we were able to
_conceive_ them separately from the rest."[394]
This is a lovely example of Mill's way of holding piously to his
general statements, but conceding in detail all that their adversaries
ask. If there be a better description extant, of a mind in possession
of an 'abstract idea,' than is contained in the words I have
italicized, I am unacquainted with it. The Berkeleyan nominalism thus
breaks down.
* * * * *
It is easy to lay bare the false assumption which underlies the whole
discussion of the question as hitherto carried on. That assumption is
that ideas, in order to know, must be cast in the exact likeness of
whatever things they know, and that the only things that can be known
are those which ideas can resemble. The error has not been confined
to nominalists. _Omnis cognitio fit per assimilationem cognoscentis
et cogniti_ has been the maxim, more or less explicitly assumed, of
writers of every school. Practically it amounts to saying that an idea
must _be_ a duplicate edition of what it knows[395]--in other words,
that it can only know itself--or, more shortly still, that knowledge
in any strict sense of the word, as a self-transcendent function, is
impossible.
Now our own blunt statements about the ultimateness of the cognitive
relation, and the difference between the 'object' of the thought and
its mere 'topic' or 'subject of discourse' (cf. pp. 275 ff.), are all
at variance with any such theory; and we shall find more and more
occasion, as we advance in this book, to deny its general truth. All
that a state of mind need do, in order to take cognizance of a reality,
intend it, or be 'about' it, is to lead to a remoter state of mind
which either acts upon the reality or resembles it. The only class of
thoughts which can with any show of plausibility be said to resemble
their objects are sensations. The stuff of which all our other thoughts
are composed is symbolic, and a thought attests its pertinency to a
topic by simply _terminating_, sooner or later, in a sensation which
resembles the latter.
But Mill and the rest believe that a thought must _be_ what it means,
and mean what it _is_, and that if it be a picture of an entire
individual, it cannot mean any part of him to the exclusion of the
rest. I say nothing here of the preposterously false descriptive
psychology involved in the statement that the only things we can
mentally picture are individuals completely determinate in all
regards. Chapter XVIII will have something to say on that point, and
we can ignore it here. For even if it were true that our images were
always of concrete individuals, it would not in the least follow that
our meanings were of the same.
_The sense of our meaning is an entirely peculiar element of the
thought._ It is one of those evanescent and 'transitive' facts of mind
which introspection cannot turn round upon, and isolate and hold up
for examination, as an entomologist passes round an insect on a pin.
In the (somewhat clumsy) terminology I have used, it pertains to the
'fringe' of the subjective state, and is a 'feeling of tendency,' whose
neural counterpart is undoubtedly a lot of dawning and dying processes
too faint and complex to be traced. The geometer, with his one definite
figure before him, knows perfectly that his thoughts apply to countless
other figures as well, and that although he _sees_ lines of a certain
special bigness, direction, color, etc., he _means_ not one of these
details. When I use the word _man_ in two different sentences, I may
have both times exactly the same sound upon my lips and the same
picture in my mental eye, but I may mean, and at the very moment of
uttering the word and imagining the picture, know that I mean, two
entirely different things. Thus when I say: "What a wonderful man
Jones is!" I am perfectly aware that I mean by man to exclude Napoleon
Bonaparte or Smith. But when I say: "What a wonderful thing Man is!"
I am equally well aware that I mean to _in_clude not only Jones, but
Napoleon and Smith as well. This added consciousness is an absolutely
positive sort of feeling, transforming what would otherwise be mere
noise or vision into something _understood_; and determining the sequel
of my thinking, the later words and images, in a perfectly definite
way. We saw in Chapter IX that the image _per se_, the nucleus, is
_functionally_ the least important part of the thought. _Our doctrine,
therefore, of the 'fringe' leads to a perfectly satisfactory decision
of the nominalistic and conceptualistic controversy,_ so far as it
touches psychology. _We must decide in favor of the conceptualists,_
and affirm that the power to think things, qualities, relations, or
whatever other elements there may be, isolated and abstracted from
the total experience in which they appear, is the most indisputable
function of our thought.
UNIVERSALS.
After abstractions, universals! The 'fringe,' which lets us believe in
the one, lets us believe in the other too. An individual conception
is of something restricted, in its application, to a single case. A
universal or general conception is of an entire class, or of something
belonging to an entire class, of things. The conception of an abstract
quality is, taken by itself, neither universal nor particular.[396] If
I abstract _white_ from the rest of the wintry landscape this morning,
it is a perfectly definite conception, a self-identical quality which I
may mean again; but, as I have not yet individualized it by expressly
meaning to restrict it to this particular snow, nor thought at all of
the possibility of other things to which it may be applicable, it is
so far nothing but a 'that,' a 'floating adjective,' as Mr. Bradley
calls it, or a topic broken out from the rest of the world. Properly
it is, in this state, a singular--I have 'singled it out;' and when,
later, I universalize or individualize its application, and my thought
turns to mean either _this_ white or _all possible_ whites, I am in
reality meaning two new things and forming two new conceptions.[397]
Such an alteration of my meaning has nothing to do with any change
in the image I may have in my mental eye, but solely with the vague
consciousness that surrounds the image, of the sphere to which it is
intended to apply. We can give no more definite account of this vague
consciousness than has been given on pp. 249-266. But that is no
reason for denying its presence.[398]
But the nominalists and traditional conceptualists find matter for an
inveterate quarrel in these simple facts. Full of their notion that
an idea, feeling, or state of consciousness can at bottom only be
aware of its own quality; and agreeing, as they both do, that such an
idea or state of consciousness is a perfectly determinate, singular,
and transitory thing; they find it impossible to conceive how it
should become the vehicle of a knowledge of anything permanent or
universal. "To know a universal, it must be universal; for like can
only be known by like," etc. Unable to reconcile these incompatibles,
the knower and the known, each side immolates one of them to save the
other. The nominalists 'settle the hash' of the thing known by denying
it to be ever a genuine universal; the conceptualists despatch the
knower by denying it to be a state of mind, in the sense of being
a perishing segment of thoughts' stream, consubstantial with other
facts of sensibility. They invent, instead of it, as the vehicle of
the knowledge of universals, an _actus purus intellectus_, or an Ego,
whose function is treated as quasi-miraculous and nothing if not
awe-inspiring, and which it is a sort of blasphemy to approach with the
intent to explain and make common, or reduce to lower terms. Invoked
in the first instance as a vehicle for the knowledge of universals,
the higher principle presently is made the indispensable vehicle of
all thinking whatever, for, it is contended, "a universal element is
present in every thought." The nominalists meanwhile, who dislike
_actus purus_ and awe-inspiring principles and despise the reverential
mood, content themselves with saying that we are mistaken in supposing
we ever get sight of the face of an universal; and that what deludes us
is nothing but the swarm of 'individual ideas' which may at any time be
awakened by the hearing of a name.
If we open the pages of either school, we find it impossible to tell,
in all the whirl about universal and particular, when the author
is talking about universals in the mind, and when about objective
universals, so strangely are the two mixed together. James Ferrier, for
example, is the most brilliant of anti-nominalist writers. But who is
nimble-witted enough to count, in the following sentences from him, the
number of times he steps from the known to the knower, and attributes
to both whatever properties he finds in either one?
"To think is to pass from the singular or particular to the idea
[concept] or universal.... Ideas are necessary because no thinking
can take place without them. They are universal, inasmuch as they
are completely divested of the particularity which characterizes
all the phenomena of mere sensation. To grasp the nature of this
universality is not easy. Perhaps the best means by which this end
may be compassed is by contrasting it with the particular. It is not
difficult to understand that a sensation, a phenomenon of sense, is
never more than the particular which it is. As such, that is, in its
strict particularity, it is absolutely unthinkable. In the very act
of being thought, something more than it emerges, and this something
more cannot be again the particular.... Ten particulars _per se_
cannot be thought of any more than one particular can be thought
of;... there always emerges in thought an additional something, which
is the possibility of other particulars to an indefinite extent....
The indefinite additional something which they are instances of is a
universal.... The idea or universal cannot possibly be pictured in the
imagination, for this would at once reduce it to the particular....
This inability to form any sort of picture or representation of
an idea does not proceed from any imperfection or limitation of
our faculties, but is a quality inherent in the very nature of
intelligence. A contradiction is involved in the supposition that an
idea or a universal can become the object either of sense or of the
imagination. An idea is thus diametrically opposed to an image."[399]
The nominalists, on their side, admit a _quasi_-universal, something
which we think _as if it were_ universal, though it is not; and in
all that they say about this something, which they explain to be 'an
indefinite number of particular ideas,' the same vacillation between
the subjective and the objective points of view appears. The reader
never can tell whether an 'idea' spoken of is supposed to be a knower
or a known. The authors themselves do not distinguish. They want to get
something in the mind which shall _resemble_ what is out of the mind,
however vaguely, and they think that when that fact is accomplished, no
farther questions will be asked. James Mill writes:[400]
"The word, man, we shall say, is first applied to an individual; it
is first associated with the idea of that individual, and acquires
the power of calling up the idea of him; it is next applied to
another individual and acquires the power of calling up the idea of
him; so of another and another, till it has become associated with
an indefinite number, and has acquired the power of calling up an
indefinite number of those ideas indifferently. What happens? It
does call up an indefinite number of the ideas of individuals as
often as it occurs; and calling them in close connection, it forms
a species of complex idea of them.... It is also a fact, that when
an idea becomes to a certain extent complex, from the multiplicity
of the ideas it _comprehends_, it is of necessity indistinct;... and
this indistinctness has, doubtless, been a main cause of the mystery
which has appeared to belong to it.... It thus appears that the word
_man_ is not a word having a very simple idea, as was the opinion of
the realists; nor a word having no idea at all, as was that of the
[earlier] nominalists; but a word calling up an indefinite number of
ideas, by the irresistible laws of association, and forming them into
one very complex and indistinct, but not therefore unintelligible,
idea."
Berkeley had already said:[401]
"A word becomes general by being made the sign, not of an abstract
general idea, but of many several particular ideas, any one of which
it indifferently suggests to the mind. An idea which, considered in
itself, is particular, becomes general by being made to represent or
stand for all other particular ideas of the same sort."
'Stand for,' not _know_; 'becomes general,' not becomes _aware
of something_ general; 'particular ideas,' not particular
_things_--everywhere the same timidity about begging the fact of
knowing, and the pitifully impotent attempt to foist it in the shape
of a mode of _being_ of 'ideas.' If the fact to be conceived be the
indefinitely numerous actual and possible members of a class, then it
is assumed that if we can only get enough ideas to huddle together
for a moment in the mind, the _being_ of each several one of them
there will be an equivalent for the _knowing_, or _meaning_, of _one_
member of the class in question; and their number will be so large as
to confuse our tally and leave it doubtful whether all the possible
members of the class have thus been satisfactorily told off or not.
Of course this is nonsense. An idea neither is what it knows, nor knows
what it is; nor will swarms of copies of the same 'idea,' recurring in
stereotyped form, or 'by the irresistible laws of association formed
into one idea,' ever be the same thing as a thought of '_all the
possible members_' of a class. We must mean _that_ by an altogether
special bit of consciousness _ad hoc_. But it is easy to translate
Berkeley's, Hume's, and Mill's notion of a swarm of ideas into cerebral
terms, and so to make them stand for something real; and, in this
sense, I think the doctrine of these authors less hollow than the
opposite one which makes the vehicle of universal conceptions to be
an _actus purus_ of the soul. If each 'idea' stand for some special
nascent nerve-process, then the aggregate of these nascent processes
might have for its conscious correlate a psychic 'fringe,' which should
be just that universal meaning, or intention that the name or mental
picture employed should mean all the possible individuals of the class.
Every peculiar complication of brain-processes must have some peculiar
correlate in the soul. To one set of processes will correspond the
thought of an indefinite taking of the extent of a word like _man_;
to another set that of a particular taking; and to a third set that
of a universal taking, of the extent of the same word. The thought
corresponding to either set of processes, is always itself a unique and
singular event, whose dependence on its peculiar nerve-process I of
course am far from professing to explain.[402]
Truly in comparison with the fact that every conception, whatever
it be of, is one of the mind's immutable possessions, the question
whether a single thing, or a whole class of things, or only an
unassigned quality, be meant by it, is an insignificant matter of
detail. Our meanings are of singulars, particulars, indefinites, and
universals, mixed together in every way. A singular individual is as
much _conceived_ when he is isolated and identified away from the
rest of the world in my mind, as is the most rarefied and universally
applicable quality he may possess--_being_, for example, when treated
in the same way.[403] From every point of view, the overwhelming and
portentous character ascribed to universal conceptions is surprising.
Why, from Plato and Aristotle downwards, philosophers should have vied
with each other in scorn of the knowledge of the particular, and in
adoration of that of the general, is hard to understand, seeing that
the more adorable knowledge ought to be that of the more adorable
things, and that the _things_ of worth are all concretes and singulars.
The only value of universal characters is that they help us, by
reasoning, to know new truths about individual things. The restriction
of one's meaning, moreover, to an individual thing, probably requires
even more complicated brain-processes than its extension to all the
instances of a kind; and the mere mystery, as such, of the knowledge,
is equally great, whether generals or singulars be the things known. In
sum, therefore, the traditional universal-worship can only be called a
bit of perverse sentimentalism, a philosophic 'idol of the cave.'
* * * * *
It may seem hardly necessary to add (what follows as a matter of
course from pp. 229-237, and what has been implied in our assertions
all along) that _nothing can be conceived twice over without being
conceived in entirely different states of mind_. Thus, my arm-chair is
one of the things of which I have a conception; I knew it yesterday
and recognized it when I looked at it. But if I think of it to-day as
the same arm-chair which I looked at yesterday, it is obvious that
the very conception of it as the same is an additional complication
to the thought, whose inward constitution must alter in consequence.
In short, it is logically impossible that the same thing should be
_known as the same_ by two successive copies of the same thought. As
a matter of fact, the thoughts by which we know that we mean the same
thing are apt to be very different indeed from each other. We think
the thing now in one context, now in another; now in a definite image,
now in a symbol. Sometimes our sense of its identity pertains to the
mere fringe, sometimes it involves the nucleus, of our thought. We
never can break the thought asunder and tell just which one of its
bits is the part that lets us know which subject is referred to; but
nevertheless we always _do_ know which of all possible subjects we have
in mind. Introspective psychology must here throw up the sponge; the
fluctuations of subjective life are too exquisite to be arrested by its
coarse means. It must confine itself to bearing witness to the fact
that all sorts of different subjective states do form the vehicle by
which the same is known; and it must contradict the opposite view.
The ordinary Psychology of 'ideas' constantly talks as if the vehicle
of the same thing-known must be the same recurrent state of mind,
and as if the having over again of the same 'idea' were not only a
necessary but a sufficient condition for meaning the same thing twice.
But this recurrence of the same idea would utterly defeat the existence
of a repeated knowledge of anything. It would be a simple reversion
into a pre-existent state, with nothing gained in the interval, and
with complete unconsciousness of the state having existed before. Such
is not the way in which we think. As a rule we are fully aware that
we have thought before of the thing we think of now. The continuity
and permanency of the topic is of the essence of our intellection.
We recognize the old problem, and the old solutions; and we go on to
alter and improve and substitute one predicate for another without ever
letting the subject change.
This is what is meant when it is said that thinking consists in making
_judgments_. A succession of judgments may all be about the same thing.
The general practical postulate which encourages us to keep thinking
at all is that by going on to do so we shall judge better _of the same
things_ than if we do not.[404] In the successive judgments, all sorts
of new operations are performed on the things, and all sorts of new
results brought out, without the sense of the main topic ever getting
lost. At the outset, we merely _have_ the topic; then we _operate_ on
it; and finally we have it again in a richer and truer way. A compound
conception has been substituted for the simple one, but with full
consciousness that both are of the Same.
The distinction between having and operating is as natural in the
mental as in the material world. As our hands may hold a bit of wood
and a knife, and yet do naught with either; so our mind may simply
be aware of a thing's existence, and yet neither attend to it nor
discriminate it, neither locate nor count nor compare nor like nor
dislike nor deduce it, nor recognize it articulately as having been
met with before. At the same time we know that, instead of staring at
it in this entranced and senseless way, we may rally our activity in
a moment, and locate, class, compare, count, and judge it. There is
nothing involved in all this which we did not postulate at the very
outset of our introspective work: realities, namely, _extra mentem_,
thoughts, and possible relations of cognition between the two. The
result of the thoughts' operating on the data given to sense is to
transform the order in which experience _comes_ into an entirely
different order, that of the _conceived_ world. There is no spot of
light, for example, which I pick out and proceed to define as a pebble,
which is not thereby torn from its mere time- and space-neighbors,
and thought in conjunction with things physically parted from it by
the width of nature. Compare the form in which facts appear in a
text-book of physics, as logically subordinated laws, with that in
which we naturally make their acquaintance. The conceptual scheme is
a sort of sieve in which we try to gather up the world's contents.
Most facts and relations fall through its meshes, being either too
subtle or insignificant to be fixed in any conception. But whenever a
physical reality is caught and identified as the same with something
already conceived, it remains on the sieve, and all the predicates
and relations of the conception with which it is identified become
its predicates and relations too; it is subjected to the sieve's
network, in other words. Thus comes to pass what Mr. Hodgson calls
the translation of the perceptual into the conceptual order of the
world.[405] In Chapter XXII we shall see how this translation always
takes place for the sake of some subjective _interest_, and how the
conception with which we handle a bit of sensible experience is
really nothing but a teleological instrument. _This whole function
of conceiving, of fixing, and holding fast to meanings, has no
significance apart from the fact that the conceiver is a creature with
partial purposes and private ends._ There remains, therefore, much more
to be said about conception, but for the present this will suffice.
FOOTNOTES:
[386] There are two other 'principles of identity' in philosophy.
The _ontological_ one asserts that every real thing is what it is,
that _a_ is _a_, and _b, b_. The _logical_ one says that what is once
true of the subject of a judgment is always true of that subject.
The ontological law is a tautological truism; the logical principle
is already more, for it implies subjects unalterable by time. The
_psychological_ law also implies facts which might not be realized:
there might be no succession of thoughts; or if there were, the later
ones might not think of the earlier; or if they did, they might not
recall the content thereof; or, recalling the content, they might not
take it as 'the same' with anything else.
[387] In later chapters we shall see that determinate relations exist
between the various data thus fixed upon by the mind. These are called
_a priori_ or axiomatic relations. Simple inspection of the data
enables us to perceive them; and one inspection is as effective as
a million for engendering in us the conviction that between _those_
data that relation must always hold. To change the relation we should
have to make the data different. 'The guarantee for the uniformity
and adequacy' of the data can only be the mind's own power to fix
upon any objective content, and to mean that content as often as it
likes. This right of the mind to 'construct' permanent ideal objects
for itself out of the data of experience seems, singularly enough,
to be a stumbling-block to many. Professor Robertson in his clear
and instructive article 'Axioms' in the Encyclopædia Britannica (9th
edition) suggests that it may only be where _movements_ enter into the
constitution of the ideal object (as they do in geometrical figures)
that we can "_make_ the ultimate relations to be what for us they
must be in all circumstances." He makes, it is true, a concession
in favor of conceptions of number abstracted from "subjective
occurrences succeeding each other in time" because these also are
acts "of construction, dependent on the power we have of voluntarily
determining the flow of subjective consciousness." "The content of
passive sensation," on the other hand, "may indefinitely vary beyond
any control of ours." What if it do vary, so long as we can continue
to think of and mean the qualities it varied from? We can 'make' ideal
objects for ourselves out of irrecoverable bits of passive experience
quite as perfectly as out of easily repeatable active experiences. And
when we have got our objects together and compared them, we do not
_make_, but _find_, their relations.
[388] Cf. Hodgson, Time and Space, § 46. Lotze, Logic, § 11.
[389] "For though a man in a fever should from sugar have a bitter
taste which at another time would produce a sweet one, yet the idea of
bitter in that man's mind would be as distinct as if he had tasted only
gall." (Locke's Essay bk. ii, chap. xi, § 3. Read the whole section!)
[390] Black round things, square white things, _per contra_, Nature
gives us freely enough. But the combinations which she refuses to
realize may exist as distinctly, in the shape of postulates, as
those which she gives may exist in the shape of positive images, in
our mind. As a matter of fact, she _may_ realize a warm cold thing
whenever two points of the skin, so near together as not to be locally
distinguished, are touched, the one with a warm, the other with a cold,
piece of metal. The warmth and the cold are then often felt as if in
the same objective place. Under similar conditions two objects, one
sharp and the other blunt, may feel like one sharp blunt thing. The
same space may appear of two colors if, by optical artifice, one of the
colors is made to appear as if seen _through_ the other.--Whether any
two attributes whatever shall be compatible or not, in the sense of
appearing or not to occupy the same place and moment, depends simply
on _de facto_ peculiarities of natural bodies and of our sense-organs.
_Logically_, anyone combination of qualities is to the full as
_conceivable_ as any other, and has as distinct a meaning for thought.
What necessitates this remark is the confusion deliberately kept up
by certain authors (e.g. Spencer, Psychology, §§ 420-7) between the
inconceivable and the not-distinctly-imaginable. How do we know _which_
things we cannot imagine unless by first conceiving them, meaning
_them_ and not other things?
[391] Arguments seldom make converts in matters philosophical; and
some readers, I know, who find that they conceive a certain matter
differently from what they did, will still prefer saying they have two
different editions of the same conception, one evolved from the other,
to saying they have two different conceptions of the same thing. It
depends, after all, on how we define conception. We ourselves defined
it as the function by which a state of mind means to think the same
whereof it thought on a former occasion. Two states of mind will
accordingly be two editions of the same conception just so far as
either does mean to think what the other thought; but no farther. If
either mean to think what the other did not think, it is a different
conception from the other. And if either mean to think all that the
other thought, _and more_, it is a different conception, so far as the
_more_ goes. In this last case one state of mind has two conceptual
functions. Each thought decides, by its own authority, which, out of
all the conceptive functions open to it, it shall now renew; with
which other thought it shall identify itself as a conceiver, and just
how far. "The same A which I once meant," it says, "I shall now mean
again, and mean it with C as its predicate (or what not) instead of B,
as before." In all this, therefore, there is absolutely no changing,
but only uncoupling and recoupling of conceptions. Compound conceptions
come, as functions of new states of mind. Some of these functions are
the same with previous ones, some not. Any changed opinion, then,
_partly_ contains new editions (absolutely identical with the old,
however) of former conceptions, _partly_ absolutely new conceptions.
The division is a perfectly easy one to make in each particular case.
[392] Principles of Human Knowledge, Introduction, §§ 10, 14.
[393] 'Conceptualisme honteux,' Rabier, Psychologie, 310.
[394] Exam. of Hamilton, p. 393. Cf. also Logic, bk. ii, chap. v, § 1,
and bk iv, chap ii, § 1.
[395] E.g.: "The knowledge of things must mean that the mind finds
itself in them, or that, in some way, the difference between them and
the mind is dissolved." (E. Caird, Philosophy of Kant, first edition,
p. 553.)
[396] The traditional conceptualist doctrine is that an abstract must
_eo ipso_ be a universal. Even modern and independent authors like
Prof. Dewey (Psychology, 207) obey the tradition: "The mind seizes
upon some one aspect,... abstracts or prescinds it. This very seizure
of some one element generalizes the one abstracted.... Attention, in
drawing it forth, makes it a distinct content of consciousness, and
thus universalizes it; it is considered no longer in its particular
connection with the object, but on its own account; that is, as an
idea, or what it signifies to the mind; and significance is always
universal."
[397] C. F. Reid's Intellectual Powers, Essay v, chap.
iii.--_Whiteness_ is one thing, _the whiteness of this sheet of paper_
another thing.
[398] Mr. F. H. Bradley says the conception or the 'meaning' "consists
of a part of the content, cut off, fixed by the mind, and considered
apart from the existence of the sign. It would not be correct to add,
and referred away to another real subject; for where we think without
judging, and where we deny, that description would not be applicable."
This seems to be the same doctrine as ours; the application to one or
to all subjects of the abstract fact conceived (i.e. its individuality
or its universality), constituting a new conception. I am, however,
not quite sure that Mr. Bradley steadily maintains this ground. Cf.
the first chapter of his Principles of Logic. The doctrine I defend
is stoutly upheld in Rosmini's Philosophical System, Introduction by
Thomas Davidson, p. 43 (London, 1882).
[399] Lectures on Greek Philosophy, pp. 33-39.
[400] Analysis, chap. viii.
[401] Principles of Human Knowledge, Introduction, §§ 11, 12.
[402] It may add to the effect of the text to quote a passage from the
essay in 'Mind,' referred to on p. 224.
"Why may we not side with the conceptualists in saying that the
universal sense of a word does correspond to a mental fact of _some_
kind, but at the same time, agreeing with the nominalists that all
mental facts are modifications of subjective sensibility, why may we
not call that fact a 'feeling'? _Man_ meant for _mankind_ is in short
a different feeling from _man_ as a mere noise, or from _man_ meant
for _that_ man, to wit, John Smith alone. Not that the difference
consists simply in the fact that, when taken universally, the word
has one of Mr. Galton's 'blended' images of man associated with it.
Many persons have seemed to think that these blended or, as Prof.
Huxley calls them, 'generic' images are equivalent to concepts. But,
in itself, a blurred thing is just as particular as a sharp thing; and
the generic character of either sharp image or blurred image depends on
its being felt _with its representative function_. This function is the
mysterious _plus_, the understood meaning. But it is nothing applied to
the image from above, no pure act of reason inhabiting a supersensible
and semi-supernatural plane. It can be diagrammatized as continuous
with all the other segments of the subjective stream. It is just that
staining, fringe, or halo of obscurely felt relation to masses of other
imagery about to come, but not yet distinctly in focus, which we have
so abundantly set forth [in Chapter IX].
"If the image come unfringed, it reveals but a simple quality, thing,
or event; if it come fringed, it may reveal something expressly taken
universally or in a scheme of relations. The difference between thought
and feeling thus reduces itself, in the last subjective analysis, to
the presence or absence of 'fringe.' And this in turn reduces itself,
with much probability, in the last physiological analysis, to the
absence or presence of sub-excitements in other convolutions of the
brain than those whose discharges underlie the more definite nucleus,
the substantive ingredient, of the thought,--in this instance, the word
or image it may happen to arouse.
"The contrast is not, then, as the Platonists would have it, between
certain subjective facts called images and sensations, and others
called acts of relating intelligence; the former being blind perishing
things, knowing not even their own existence as such, whilst the latter
combine the poles in the mysterious synthesis of their cognitive sweep.
The contrast is really between two _aspects_, in which all mental
facts without exception may be taken; their structural aspect, as
being subjective, and their functional aspect, as being cognitions.
In the former aspect, the highest as well as the lowest is a feeling,
a peculiarly tinged segment of the stream. This tingeing is its
sensitive body, the _wie ihm zu Muthe ist_, the way it feels whilst
passing. In the latter aspect, the lowest mental fact as well as the
highest may grasp some bit of truth as its content, even though that
truth were as relationless a matter as a bare unlocalized and undated
quality of pain. From the cognitive point of view, all mental facts
are intellections. From the subjective point of view all are feelings.
Once admit that the passing and evanescent are as real parts of the
stream as the distinct and comparatively abiding; once allow that
fringes and halos, inarticulate perceptions, whereof the objects are as
yet unnamed, mere nascencies of cognition, premonitions, awarenesses
of direction, are thoughts _sui generis_, as much as articulate
imaginings and propositions are; once restore, I say, the _vague_ to
its psychological rights, and the matter presents no further difficulty.
"And then we see that the current opposition of Feeling to Knowledge
is quite a false issue. If every feeling is at the same time a bit
of knowledge, we ought no longer to talk of mental states differing
by having more or less of the cognitive quality; they only differ in
knowing more or less, in having much fact or little fact for their
object. The feeling of a broad scheme of relations is a feeling that
knows much; the feeling of a simple quality is a feeling that knows
little. But the knowing itself, whether of much or of little, has the
same essence, and is as good knowing in the one case as in the other.
Concept and image, thus discriminated through their objects, are
consubstantial in their inward nature, as modes of feeling. The one,
as particular, will no longer be held to be a relatively base sort
of entity, to be taken as a matter of course, whilst the other, as
universal, is celebrated as a sort of standing miracle, to be adored
but not explained. Both concept and image, _quâ_ subjective, are
singular and particular. Both are moments of the stream, which come
and in an instant are no more. The word universality has no meaning as
applied to their psychic body or structure, which is always finite. It
only has a meaning when applied to their use, import, or reference to
the kind of object they may reveal. The representation, as such, of
the universal object is as particular as that of an object about which
we know so little that the interjection 'Ha!' is all it can evoke from
us in the way of speech. Both should be weighed in the same scales,
and have the same measure meted out to them whether of worship or of
contempt." (Mind, ix, pp. 18-19.)
[403] Hodgson, Time and Space, p. 404.
[404] Compare the admirable passage in Hodgson's Time and Space, p. 310.
[405] Philosophy of Reflection, i, 273-308.
CHAPTER XIII.
DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON.
It is matter of popular observation that some men have sharper senses
than others, and that some have acuter minds and are able to 'split
hairs' and see two shades of meaning where the majority see but one.
Locke long ago set apart the faculty of discrimination as one in which
men differ individually. What he wrote is good enough to quote as an
introduction to this chapter:
"Another faculty we may take notice of in our minds is that of
discerning and distinguishing between the several ideas it has. It
is not enough to have a confused perception of something in general:
unless the mind had a distinct perception of different objects and
their qualities, it would be capable of very little knowledge; though
the bodies that affect us were as busy about us as they are now,
and the mind were continually employed in thinking. On this faculty
of distinguishing one thing from another depends the evidence and
certainty of several even very general propositions, which have passed
for innate truths; because men, overlooking the true cause why those
propositions find universal assent, impute it wholly to native uniform
impressions; whereas it in truth depends upon this clear discerning
faculty of the mind, whereby it perceives two ideas to be the same or
different. But of this more hereafter?
"How much the imperfection of accurately discriminating ideas one from
another lies either in the dulness or faults of the organs of sense,
or want of acuteness, exercise, or attention in the understanding, or
hastiness and precipitancy natural to some tempers, I will not here
examine: it suffices to take notice that this is one of the operations
that the mind may reflect on and observe in itself. It is of that
consequence to its other knowledge, that so far as this faculty is in
itself dull, or not rightly made use of for the distinguishing one
thing from another, so far our notions are confused, and our reason
and judgment disturbed or misled. If in having our ideas in the
memory ready at hand consists quickness of parts; in this of having
them unconfused, and being able nicely to distinguish one thing from
another where there is but the least difference, consists in a great
measure the exactness of judgment and clearness of reason which is to
be observed in one man above another. And hence, perhaps, may be given
some reason of that common observation,--that men who have a great
deal of wit and prompt memories have not always the clearest judgment
or deepest reason. For, wit lying most in the assemblage of ideas, and
putting those together with quickness and variety wherein can be found
any resemblance or congruity, thereby to make up pleasant pictures and
agreeable visions in the fancy; judgment, on the contrary, lies quite
on the other side, in separating carefully one from another ideas
wherein can be found the least difference, thereby to avoid being
misled by similitude and by affinity to take one thing for another.
This is a way of proceeding quite contrary to metaphor and allusion,
wherein for the most part lies that entertainment and pleasantry of
wit which strikes so lively on the fancy, and therefore, so acceptable
to all people because its beauty appears at first sight, and there is
required no labor of thought to examine what truth or reason there is
in it."[406]
But Locke's descendants have been slow to enter into the path whose
fruitfulness was thus pointed out by their master, and have so
neglected the study of discrimination that one might almost say that
the classic English psychologists have, as a school, hardly recognized
it to exist. 'Association' has proved itself in their hands the one
all-absorbing power of the mind. Dr. Martineau, in his review of Bain,
makes some very weighty remarks on this onesidedness of the Lockian
school. Our mental history, says he, is, in its view,
"a perpetual formation of new compounds: and the words 'association,'
'cohesion,' 'fusion,' 'indissoluble connection,' all express the
change from plurality of data to some unity of result. An explanation
of the process therefore requires two things: a true enumeration of
the primary constituents, and a correct statement of their laws of
combination: just as, in chemistry, we are furnished with a list of
the simple elements, and the with then principles of their synthesis.
Now the latter of these two conditions we find satisfied by the
association-psychologists: but not the former. They are not agreed
upon their catalogue of elements, or the marks by which they may know
the simple from the compound. The psychologic unit is not fixed; that
which is called one impression by Hartley is treated as half-a-dozen
or more by Mill: and the tendency of the modern teachers on this point
is to recede more and more from the better-chosen track of their
master. Hartley, for example, regarded the whole present effect upon
us of any single object--say, an orange--as a single sensation; and
the whole vestige it left behind, as a single 'idea of sensation.'
His modern disciples, on the other hand, consider this same effect
as an aggregate from a plurality of sensations, and the ideal trace
it leaves as highly compound. 'The idea of an object,' instead of
being an elementary starting-point with them, is one of the elaborate
results of repetition and experience; and is continually adduced as
remarkably illustrating the fusing power of habitual association. Thus
James Mill observes:
"'It is to this great law of association that we trace the formation
of our ideas of what we call external objects; that is, the ideas of
a certain number of sensations, received together so frequently that
they coalesce as it were, and are spoken of under the idea of unity.
Hence, what we call the idea of a tree, the idea of a stone, the
idea of a horse, the idea of a man. In using the names, tree, horse,
man, the names of what I call objects, I am referring, and can be
referring, only to my own sensations; in fact, therefore, only naming
a certain number of sensations regarded as in a particular state of
combination, that is, concomitance. Particular sensations of sight,
of touch, of the muscles, are the sensations to the ideas of which,
color, extension, roughness, hardness, smoothness, taste, smell, so
coalescing as to appear one idea, I give the name of the idea of a
tree.'[407]
"To precisely the same effect Mr. Bain remarks:
"'External objects usually affect us through a plurality of senses.
The pebble on the sea-shore is pictured on the eye as form and color.
We take it up in the hand and repeat the impression of form, with
the additional feeling of touch. Knock two together, and there is a
characteristic sound. To preserve the impression of an object of this
kind, there must be an association of all these different effects.
Such association, when matured and firm, is our idea, our intellectual
grasp of the pebble. Passing to the organic world, and plucking a
rose, we have the same effects of form to the eye and hand, color and
touch, with new effects of odor and taste. A certain time is requisite
for the coherence of all these qualities in one aggregate, so as to
give us for all purposes the enduring image of the rose. When fully
acquired, any one of the characteristic impressions will revive the
others; the odor, the sight, the feeling of the thorny stalk--each of
these by itself will hoist the entire impression into the view.'[408]
"Now, this order of derivation, making our objective knowledge begin
with plurality of impression and arrive at unity, we take to be a
complete inversion of our psychological history. Hartley, we think,
was perfectly right in taking no notice of the number of inlets
through which an object delivers its effect upon us, and, in spite of
this circumstance, treating the effect as one.... Even now, after life
has read us so many analytic lessons, in proportion as we can fix the
attitude of our scene and ourselves, the sense of plurality in our
impressions retreats, and we lapse into an undivided consciousness;
losing, for instance, the separate notice of any uniform hum in the
ear, or light in the eye, or weight of clothes on the body, though
not one of them is inoperative on the complexion of our feeling. This
law, once granted, must be carried far beyond Hartley's point. Not
only must each object present itself to us integrally before it shells
off into its qualities, but the whole scene around us must disengage
for us object after object from its still background by emergence and
change; and even our self-detachment from the world over against us
must wait for the start of collision between the force we issue and
that which we receive. To confine ourselves to the simplest case:
when a red ivory ball, seen for the first time, has been withdrawn,
it will leave a mental representation of itself, in which all that it
simultaneously gave us will indistinguishably coexist. Let a white
ball succeed to it; now, and not before, will an attribute detach
itself, and the color, by force of contrast, be shaken out into the
foreground. Let the white ball be replaced by an egg: and this new
difference will bring the form into notice from its previous slumber.
And thus, that which began by being simply an object, cut out from the
surrounding scene, becomes for us first a _red_ object, and then a
_red round_ object; and so on. Instead, therefore, of the qualities,
as separately given, subscribing together and adding themselves up
to present us with the object as their aggregate, the object is
beforehand with them, and from its integrity delivers them out to our
knowledge, one by one. In this disintegration, the primary nucleus
never loses its substantive character or name; whilst the difference
which it throws off appears as a mere attribute, expressed by an
adjective. Hence it is that we are compelled to think of the object as
_having_, not as _being_, its qualities; and can never heartily admit
the belief of any loose lot of attributes really fusing themselves
into a _thing_. The unity of the original whole is not felt to go
to pieces and be resolved into the properties which it successively
gives off; it retains a residuary existence, which constitutes it
a _substance_, as against the emerging quality, which is only its
_phenomenal predicate_. Were it not for this perpetual process of
differentiation of self from the world, of object from its scene,
of attribute from object, no step of Abstraction could be taken; no
qualities could fall under our notice; and had we ten thousand senses,
they would all converge and meet in but one consciousness. But if this
be so, it is an utter falsification of the order of nature to speak
of sensations grouping themselves into aggregates, and so composing
for us the objects of which we think; and the whole language of
the theory, in regard to the field of synchronous existences, is a
direct inversion of the truth. Experience proceeds and intellect is
trained, not by Association, but by _Dissociation_, not by reduction
of pluralities of impression to one, but by the opening out of one
into many; and a true psychological history must expound itself in
analytic rather than synthetic terms. Precisely those ideas--of
Substance, of Mind, of Cause, of Space--which this system treats as
infinitely complex, the last result of myriads of confluent elements,
are in truth the residuary simplicities of consciousness, whose
stability the eddies and currents of phenomenal experience have left
undisturbed."[409]
The truth is that Experience is trained by _both_ association and
dissociation, and that psychology must be writ _both_ in synthetic and
in analytic terms. Our original sensible totals are, on the one hand,
subdivided by discriminative attention, and, on the other, united
with other totals,--either through the agency of our own movements,
carrying our senses from one part of space to another, or because new
objects come successively and replace those by which we were at first
impressed. The 'simple impression' of Hume, the 'simple idea' of Locke
are both abstractions, never realized in experience. Experience, from
the very first, presents us with concreted objects, vaguely continuous
with the rest of the world which envelops them in space and time, and
potentially divisible into inward elements and parts. These objects
we break asunder and reunite. We must treat them in both ways for our
knowledge of them to grow; and it is hard to say, on the whole, which
way preponderates. But since the elements with which the traditional
associationism performs its constructions--'simple sensations,'
namely--are all products of discrimination carried to a high pitch, it
seems as if we ought to discuss the subject of analytic attention and
discrimination first.
The noticing of any _part_ whatever of our object is an act of
discrimination. Already on p. 404 I have described the manner in which
we often spontaneously lapse into the undiscriminating state, even with
regard to objects which we have already learned to distinguish. Such
anæsthetics as chloroform, nitrous oxide, etc., sometimes bring about
transient lapses even more total, in which numerical discrimination
especially seems gone; for one sees light and hears sound, but whether
one or many lights and sounds is quite impossible to tell. Where the
parts of an object have already been discerned, and each made the
object of a special discriminative act, we can with difficulty feel
the object again in its pristine unity; and so prominent may our
consciousness of its composition be, that we may hardly believe that it
ever could have appeared undivided. But this is an erroneous view, the
undeniable fact being that _any number of impressions, from any number
of sensory sources, falling simultaneously on a mind_ WHICH HAS NOT YET
EXPERIENCED THEM SEPARATELY, _will fuse into a single undivided object
for that mind._ The law is that all things fuse that _can_ fuse, and
nothing separates except what must. What makes impressions separate
we have to study in this chapter. Although they separate easier if
they come in through distinct nerves, yet distinct nerves are not an
unconditional ground of their discrimination, as we shall presently
see. The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at
once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion; and to the
very end of life, our location of all things in one space is due to the
fact that the original extents or bignesses of all the sensations which
came to our notice at once, coalesced together into one and the same
space. There is no other reason than this why "the hand I touch and see
coincides spatially with the hand I immediately feel."[410]
It is true that we may sometimes be tempted to exclaim, when once a
lot of hitherto unnoticed details of the object lie before us, "How
could we ever have been ignorant of these things and yet have felt
the object, or drawn the conclusion, as if it were a _continuum_, a
_plenum_? There would have been _gaps_--but we felt no gaps; wherefore
we must have seen and heard these details, leaned upon these steps;
they must have been operative upon our minds, just as they are now,
only _unconsciously_, or at least _inattentively_. Our first unanalyzed
sensation was really composed of these elementary sensations, our first
rapid conclusion was really based on these intermediate inferences, all
the while, only we failed to note the fact." But this is nothing but
the fatal 'psychologist's fallacy' (p. 196) of treating an inferior
state of mind as if it must somehow know implicitly all that is
explicitly known _about the same topic_ by superior states of mind.
The thing thought of is unquestionably the same, but it is thought
twice over in two absolutely different psychoses,--once as an unbroken
unit, and again as a sum of discriminated parts. It is not one thought
in two editions, but two entirely distinct thoughts of one thing.
And each thought is within itself a _continuum_, a _plenum_, needing
no contributions from the other to fill up its gaps. As I sit here,
I think objects, and I make inferences, which the future is sure to
analyze and articulate and riddle with discriminations, showing me
many things wherever I now notice one. Nevertheless, my thought feels
quite sufficient unto itself for the time being; and ranges from pole
to pole, as free, and as unconscious of having overlooked anything, as
if it possessed the greatest discriminative enlightenment. We all cease
analyzing the world at some point, and notice no more differences. The
last units with which we stop are our objective elements of being.
Those of a dog are different from those of a Humboldt; those of a
practical man from those of a metaphysician. But the dog's and the
practical man's thoughts _feel_ continuous, though to the Humboldt or
the metaphysician they would appear full of gaps and defects. And they
_are_ continuous, _as thoughts_. It is only _as mirrors of things_ that
the superior minds find them full of omissions. And when the omitted
things are discovered and the unnoticed differences laid bare, it is
not that the old _thoughts_ split up, but that _new thoughts supersede_
them, which make new judgments about the same objective world.
THE PRINCIPLE OF MEDIATE COMPARISON.
When we discriminate an element, we may contrast it with the case of
its own absence, of its simply not being there, without reference
to what _is_ there; or we may also take the latter into account.
Let the first sort of discrimination be called _existential_, the
latter _differential_ discrimination. A peculiarity of differential
discriminations is that they result in a perception of differences
which are felt as _greater or less_ one than the other. Entire groups
of differences may be ranged in series: the musical scale, the color
scale, are examples. Every department of our experience may have
its data written down in an evenly gradated order, from a lowest to
a highest member. And any one datum may be a term in several such
orders. A given note may have a high place in the pitch-series, a low
place in the loudness-series, and a medium place in the series of
agreeablenesses. A given tint must, in order to be fully determined,
have its place assigned in the series of qualities, in the series
of purities (freedom from white), and in the series of intensities
or brightnesses. It may be low in one of these respects, but high
in another. In passing from term to term in any such series we are
conscious not only of each step of difference being equal to (or
greater or less than) the last, but we are conscious of proceeding
in a _uniform direction_, different from other possible directions.
This _consciousness of serial increase of differences_ is one of the
fundamental facts of our intellectual life. More, _more_, MORE, of the
same kind of difference, we say, as we advance from term to term, and
realize that the farther on we get the larger grows the breach between
the term we are at and the one from which we started. Between any two
terms of such a series the difference is greater than that between
any intermediate terms, or than that between an intermediate term and
either of the extremes. The louder than the loud is louder than the
less loud; the farther than the far is farther than the less far; the
earlier than the early is earlier than the late; the higher than the
high is higher than the low; the bigger than the big is bigger than
the small; or, to put it briefly and universally, _the more than the
more is more than the less_; such is _the great synthetic principle of
mediate comparison which is involved in the possession by the human
mind of the sense of serial increase_. In Chapter XXVIII we shall see
the altogether overwhelming importance of this principle in the conduct
of all our higher rational operations.
ARE ALL DIFFERENCES DIFFERENCES OF COMPOSITION?
Each of the differences in one of these uniform series feels like a
definite sensible quantity, and each term seems like the last term with
this quantity added. In many concrete objects which differ from one
another we can plainly see that the difference does consist singly
in the fact that one object is the same as the other _plus_ something
else, or that they both have an identical part, to which each adds
a distinct remainder. Thus two pictures may be struck from the same
block, but one of them may differ in having color added; or two carpets
may show an identical pattern which in each is woven in distinct hues.
Similarly, two classes of sensation may have the same emotional tone
but negate each other in remaining respects--a dark color and a deep
sound, for example; or two faces may have the same shape of nose but
everything else unlike. The similarity of the same note sounded by
instruments of different timbre is explained by the coexistence of
a fundamental tone common to both, with over-tones in one which the
other lacks. Dipping my hand into water and anon into a colder water,
I may then observe certain additional feelings, broader and deeper
irradiations of the cold, so to speak, which were not in the earlier
experience, though for aught I can tell, the feelings may be otherwise
the same. 'Hefting' first one weight, and then another, new feelings
may start out in my elbow-joint, wrist, and elsewhere, and make me call
the second weight the heavier of the twain. In all these cases each
of the differing things may be represented by two parts, one that is
common to it and the others, and another that is peculiar to itself. If
they form a series, _A, B, C, D,_ etc., and the common part be called
_X_, whilst the lowest difference be called _d_, then the composition
of the series would be as follows:
_A_ = _X_ + _d_;
_B_ = (_X_ + _d_) + _d_, or _X_ + 2_d_;
_C_ = _X_ + 3_d_;
_D_ = _X_ + 4_d_;
........
If _X_ itself were ultimately composed of _d_'s we should have
the entire series explained as due to the varying combination and
re-combination with itself of an unvarying element; and all the
apparent differences of quality would be translated into differences
of quantity alone. This is the sort of reduction which the atomic
theory in physics and the mind-stuff theory in psychology regard as
their ideal. So that, following the analogy of our instances, one might
easily be tempted to generalize and to say that all difference is
but addition and subtraction, and that what we called 'differential'
discrimination is only 'existential' discrimination in disguise; that
is to say, that where _A_ and _B_ differ, we merely discern something
in the one which the other is without. _Absolute identity in things
up to a certain point, then absolute non-identity,_ would on this
theory take the place of those ultimate qualitative unlikenesses
between them, in which we naturally believe; and the mental function
of discrimination, ceasing to be regarded as an ultimate one, would
resolve itself into mere logical affirmation and negation, or
perception that a feature found in one thing, in another does not exist.
* * * * *
Theoretically, however, this theory is full of difficulty. If all the
differences which we feel were _in one direction_, so that all objects
could be arranged in one series (however long), it might still work.
But when we consider the notorious fact that objects differ from each
other in _divergent directions_, it grows well nigh impossible to make
it do so. For then, supposing that an object differed from things
in one direction by the increment _d_, it would have to differ from
things in another direction by a different sort of increment, call it
_d'_; so that, after getting rid of qualitative unlikeness between
objects, we should have it back on our hands again between their
increments. We may of course re-apply our method, and say that the
difference between _d_ and _d'_ is not a qualitative unlikeness, but a
fact of composition, one of them being the same as the other _plus_ an
increment of still higher order, _δ_ for example, added. But when we
recollect that everything in the world can be compared with everything
else, and that the number of directions of difference is indefinitely
great, then we see that the complication of self-compoundings of the
ultimate differential increment by which, on this theory, all the
innumerable unlikenesses of the world are explained, in order to avoid
writing any of them down as ultimate differences of kind, would beggar
all conception. It is the mind-dust theory; with all its difficulties
in a particularly uncompromising form; and all for the sake of the
fantastic pleasure of being able arbitrarily to say that there is
between the things in the world and between the 'ideas' in the mind
nothing but absolute sameness and absolute not-sameness of elements,
the not-sameness admitting no degrees.
To me it seems much wiser to turn away from such transcendental
extravagances of speculation, and to abide by the natural appearances.
These would leave unlikeness as an indecomposable relation amongst
things, and a relation moreover of which there were all degrees.
Absolute not-sameness would be the maximal degree, absolute sameness
the minimal degree of this unlikeness, the discernment of which would
be one of our ultimate cognitive powers.[411] Certainly the natural
appearances are dead against the notion that no qualitative differences
exist. With the same clearness with which, in certain objects, we do
feel a difference to be a mere matter of _plus_ and _minus_, in other
objects we feel that this is not the case. Contrast our feeling of
the difference between the length of two lines with our feeling of
the difference between blue and yellow, or with that between right
and left. Is right equal to left with something added? Is blue yellow
_plus_ something? If so, _plus_ what?[412] So long as we stick to
_verifiable_ psychology, _we are forced to admit that differences of
simple_ KIND _form an irreducible sort of relation_ between some of
the elements of our experience, and forced to deny that differential
discrimination can everywhere be reduced to the mere ascertainment
that elements present in one fact, in another fail to exist. The
perception that an element exists in one thing and does not exist in
another and the perception of qualitative difference are, in short,
entirely disconnected mental functions.[413]
But at the same time that we insist on this, we must also admit that
differences of quality, however abundant, are not the only distinctions
with which our mind has to deal. Differences which seem of mere
composition, of number, of _plus_ and _minus_, also abound.[414] But it
will be best for the present to disregard all these quantitative cases
and, taking the others (which, by the least favorable calculation, will
still be numerous enough), to consider next _the manner in which we
come to cognize simple differences of kind_. We cannot _explain_ the
cognition; we can only ascertain the conditions by virtue of which it
occurs.
THE CONDITIONS OF DISCRIMINATION.
_What, then, are the conditions under which we discriminate things
differing in a simple way?_
First, _the things must_ BE _different_, either in time, or place, or
quality. If the difference in any of these regards is sufficiently
great, then we cannot overlook it, except by not noticing the things
at all. No one can help singling out a black stripe on a white ground,
or feeling the contrast between a bass note and a high one sounded
immediately after it. Discrimination is here _involuntary_. But where
the objective difference is less, discrimination need not so inevitably
occur, and may even require considerable effort of attention to be
performed at all.
Another condition which then favors it is that the sensations excited
by _the differing objects should not come to us simultaneously but fall
in immediate_ SUCCESSION upon the same organ. It is easier to compare
successive than simultaneous sounds, easier to compare two weights
or two temperatures by testing one after the other with the same
hand, than by using both hands and comparing both at once. Similarly
it is easier to discriminate shades of light or color by moving the
eye from one to the other, so that they successively stimulate the
same retinal tract. In testing the local discrimination of the skin,
by applying compass-points, it is found that they are felt to touch
different spots much more readily when set down one after the other
than when both are applied at once. In the latter case they may be two
or three inches apart on the back, thighs, etc., and still feel as
if they were set down in one spot. Finally, in the case of smell and
taste it is well-nigh impossible to compare simultaneous impressions
at all. The reason why successive impression so much favors the result
seems to be that there is a real _sensation of difference_, aroused
by the shock of transition from one perception to another which is
unlike the first. This sensation of difference has its own peculiar
quality, as difference, which remains sensible, no matter of what sort
the terms may be, between which it obtains. It is, in short, one of
those transitive feelings, or feelings of relation, of which I treated
in a former place (pp. 245 ff.); and, when once aroused, its object
lingers in the memory along with the substantive terms which precede
and follow, and enables our _judgments of comparison_ to be made.
We shall soon see reason to believe that no two terms can possibly
be _simultaneously_ perceived to differ, unless, in a preliminary
operation, we have successively attended to each, and, in so doing, had
the transitional sensation of difference between them aroused. A field
of consciousness, however complex, is never analyzed unless some of
its ingredients have changed. We _now_ discern, 'tis true, a multitude
of coexisting things about us at every moment: but this is because we
have had a long education, and each thing we now see distinct has been
already differentiated from its neighbors by repeated appearances in
successive order. To the infant, sounds, sights, touches, and pains,
form probably one unanalyzed bloom of confusion.[415]
Where the difference between the successive sensations is but slight,
the transition between them must be made as immediate as possible, and
both must be compared _in memory_, in order to get the best results.
One cannot judge accurately of the difference between two similar
wines, whilst the second is still in one's mouth. So of sounds,
warmths, etc.--we must get the dying phases of both sensations of the
pair we are comparing. Where, however, the difference is strong, this
condition is immaterial, and we can then compare a sensation actually
felt with another carried in memory only. The longer the interval of
time between the sensations, the more uncertain is their discrimination.
The difference, thus immediately felt between two terms, is independent
of our ability to identify either of the terms by itself. I can feel
two distinct spots to be touched on my skin, yet not know which is
above and which below. I can observe two neighboring musical tones to
differ, and still not know which of the two is the higher in pitch.
Similarly I may discriminate two neighboring tints, whilst remaining
uncertain which is the bluer or the yellower, or _how_ either differs
from its mate.[416]
* * * * *
With such direct perceptions of difference as this, we must not
confound those entirely unlike cases in which we _infer_ that two
things must differ because we know enough _about_ each of them taken
by itself to warrant our classing them under distinct heads. It often
happens, when the interval is long between two experiences, that our
judgments are guided, not so much by a positive image or copy of the
earlier one, as by our recollection of certain facts about it. Thus I
know that the sunshine to-day is less bright than on a certain day last
week, because I then said it was quite dazzling, a remark I should not
now care to make. Or I know myself to feel better now than I was last
summer, because I can now psychologize, and then I could not. We are
constantly busy comparing feelings with whose quality our imagination
has no sort of _acquaintance_ at the time--pleasures, or pains, for
example. It is notoriously hard to conjure up in imagination a lively
image of either of these classes of feeling. The associationists may
prate of an idea of pleasure being a pleasant idea, of an idea of
pain being a painful one, but the unsophisticated sense of mankind is
against them, agreeing with Homer that the memory of griefs when past
may be a joy, and with Dante that there is no greater sorrow than, in
misery, to recollect one's happier time.
Feelings remembered in this imperfect way _must_ be compared with
present or recent feelings by the aid of what we know about them. We
identify the remote experience in such a case by _conceiving it_. The
most perfect way of conceiving it is by defining it in terms of some
standard scale. If I know the thermometer to stand at zero to-day and
to have stood at 32° last Sunday, I know to-day to be colder, and I
know just how much colder, than it was last Sunday. If I know that a
certain note was _c_, and that this note is _d_, I know that this note
must be the higher of the two.
The inference that two things differ because their concomitants,
effects, names, kinds, or--to put it generally--their _signs_, differ,
is of course susceptible of unlimited complication. The sciences
furnish examples, in the way in which men are led, by noticing
differences in effects, to assume new hypothetical causes, differing
from any known heretofore. But no matter how many may be the steps
by which such inferential discriminations are made, _they all end in
a direct intuition of difference somewhere_. The _last_ ground for
inferring that A and B differ must be that, whilst A is an _m_, B is
an _n_, and that _m_ and _n_ are _seen to differ_. Let us then neglect
the complex cases, the A's and the B's, and go back to the study of the
unanalyzable perception of difference between their signs, the _m_'s
and the _n_'s, when these are seemingly simple terms.
I said that in their immediate succession the shock of their difference
was _felt_. It is felt _repeatedly_ when we go back and forth from
_m_ to _n_; and we make a point of getting it thus repeatedly (by
alternating our attention at least) whenever the shock is so slight
as to be with difficulty perceived. But in addition to being felt
at the brief instant of transition, the difference also feels as
if incorporated and taken up into the second term, which feels
'different-from-the-first' even while it lasts. It is obvious that the
'second term' of the mind in this case is not bald _n_, but a very
complex object; and that the sequence is not simply first '_m_,' then
'_difference_,' then '_n_'; but first '_m_,' then '_difference_,' then
'_n-different-from-m_.' The several thoughts, however, to which these
three several objects are revealed, are three ordinary 'segments' of
the mental 'stream.'
As our brains and minds are actually made, it is impossible to get
certain _m_'s and _n_'s in immediate sequence and to keep them _pure_.
If kept pure, it would mean that they remained uncompared. With us,
inevitably, by a mechanism which we as yet fail to understand, the
shock of difference is felt between them, and the second object is not
_n_ pure, but _n-as-different-from-m_.[417] It is no more a paradox
that under these conditions this cognition of _m_ and _n_ in mutual
relation should occur, than that under other conditions the cognition
of _m_'s or _n_'s simple quality should occur. But as it has been
treated as a paradox, and as a spiritual agent, not itself a portion
of the stream, has been invoked to account for it, a word of further
remark seems desirable.
My account, it will be noted, is merely a description of the facts
as they occur: feelings (or thoughts) each knowing something, but
the later one knowing, if preceded by a certain earlier one, a more
complicated object than it would have known had the earlier one not
been there. I offer no _explanation_ of such a sequence of cognitions.
The explanation (I devoutly expect) will be found some day to depend
on cerebral conditions. Until it is forthcoming, we can only treat the
sequence as a special case of the general law that every experience
undergone by the brain leaves in it a modification which is one factor
in determining what manner of experiences the following ones shall be
(_cf._ pp. 232-236). To anyone who denies the possibility of such a law
I have nothing to say, until he brings his proofs.
The sensationalists and the spiritualists meanwhile (filled both of
them with their notion that the mind must in some fashion _contain_
what it knows) begin by giving a crooked account of the facts. Both
admit that for _m_ and _n_ to be known in any way whatever, little
rounded and finished off duplicates of each must be contained in the
mind as separate entities. These pure ideas, so called, of _m_ and _n_
respectively, succeed each other there. And since they _are distinct_,
say the sensationalists, they are _eo ipso_ distinguished. "To have
ideas different and ideas distinguished, are synonymous expressions;
different and distinguished meaning exactly the same thing," says James
Mill.[418] "Distinguished!" say the spiritualists, "distinguished _by
what_, forsooth? Truly the respective ideas of _m_ and of _n_ in the
mind are distinct. But for that very reason neither can distinguish
itself from the other, for to do that it would have to be aware of the
other, and thus for the time being become the other, and that would
be to get mixed up with the other and to lose its own distinctness.
Distinctness of ideas and idea of distinctness, are not one thing, but
two. This last is a _relation_. Only a _relating principle_, opposed
in nature to all facts of feeling, an Ego, Soul, or Subject, is
competent, by being present to both of the ideas alike, to hold them
together and at the same time to keep them distinct."
But if the plain facts be admitted that the _pure_ idea of '_n_' is
_never in the mind at all_, when '_m_' has once gone before; and that
the feeling '_n-different-from-m_' is itself an absolutely unique
pulse of thought, the bottom of this precious quarrel drops out and
neither party is left with anything to fight about. Surely such a
consummation ought to be welcomed, especially when brought about, us
here, by a formulation of the facts which offers itself so naturally
and unsophistically.[419]
We may, then, conclude our examination of the manner in which simple
involuntary discrimination comes about, by saying, 1) that its vehicle
is a thought possessed of a knowledge of both terms compared and of
their difference; 2) that the necessary and sufficient condition (as
the human mind goes) for arousing this thought is that a thought or
feeling of one of the terms discriminated should, as immediately as
possible, precede that in which the other term is known; and 3) and
that the thought which knows the second term will then also know the
difference (or in more difficult cases will be continuously succeeded
by one which does know the difference) and both of the terms between
which it holds.
This last thought need, however, not _be_ these terms with their
difference, nor _contain_ them. A man's thought can know and mean
all sorts of things without those things getting bodily into it--the
distant, for example, the future, and the past.[420] The vanishing
term in the case which occupies us vanishes; but because it is the
specific term it is and nothing else, it leaves a specific influence
behind it when it vanishes, the effect of which is to determine the
succeeding pulse of thought in a perfectly characteristic way. Whatever
consciousness comes next must know the vanished term and call it
different from the one now there.
Here we are at the end of our tether about involuntary discrimination
of successively felt simple things; and must drop the subject,
hopeless of seeing any deeper into it for the present, and turn to
discriminations of a less simple sort.
THE PROCESS OF ANALYSIS.
And first, of the discrimination of simultaneously felt impressions!
Our first way of looking at a reality is often to suppose it simple,
but later we may learn to perceive it as compound. This new way of
knowing the same reality may conveniently be called by the name of
_Analysis_. It is manifestly one of the most incessantly performed of
all our mental processes, so let us examine the conditions under which
it occurs.
I think we may safely lay down at the outset this fundamental
principle, that _any total impression made on the mind must be
unanalyzable, whose elements are never experienced apart_. The
components of an absolutely changeless group of not-elsewhere-occurring
attributes could never be discriminated. If all cold things were wet
and all wet things cold, if all hard things pricked our skin, and no
other things did so; is it likely that we should discriminate between
coldness and wetness, and hardness and pungency respectively? If all
liquids were transparent and no non-liquid were transparent, it would
be long before we had separate names for liquidity and transparency. If
heat were a function of position above the earth's surface, so that the
higher a thing was the hotter it became, one word would serve for hot
and high. We have, in fact, a number of sensations whose concomitants
are almost invariably the same, and we find it, accordingly, almost
impossible to analyze them out from the totals in which they are found.
The contraction of the diaphragm and the expansion of the lungs, the
shortening of certain muscles and the rotation of certain joints, are
examples. The converging of the eyeballs and the accommodation for near
objects are, for each distance of the object (in the common use of the
eyes) inseparably linked, and neither can (without a sort of artificial
training which shall presently be mentioned) be felt by itself. We
learn that the _causes_ of such groups of feelings are multiple, and
therefore we frame theories about the composition of the feelings
themselves, by 'fusion,' 'integration,' 'synthesis,' or what not. But
by direct introspection no analysis of them is ever made. A conspicuous
case will come to view when we treat of the emotions. Every emotion
has its 'expression,' of quick breathing, palpitating heart, flushed
face, or the like. The expression gives rise to bodily feelings; and
the emotion is thus necessarily and invariably accompanied by these
bodily feelings. The consequence is that it is impossible to apprehend
it as a spiritual state by itself, or to analyze it away from the
lower feelings in question. It is in fact impossible to prove that it
exists as a distinct psychic fact. The present writer strongly doubts
that it does so exist. But those who are most firmly persuaded of its
existence must wait, to prove their point, until they can quote some as
yet unfound pathological case of an individual who shall have emotions
in a body in which either complete paralysis will have prevented their
expression, or complete anæsthesia will have made the latter unfelt.
In general, then, if an object affects us simultaneously in a number of
ways, _abcd_, we get a peculiar integral impression, which thereafter
characterizes to our mind the individuality of that object, and becomes
the sign of its presence; and which is only resolved into _a, b, c, d,_
respectively by the aid of farther experiences. These we now may turn
to consider.
_If any single quality or constituent, a, of such an object, have
previously been known by us isolatedly,_ or have in any other manner
already become an object of separate acquaintance on our part, so that
we have an image of it, distinct or vague, in our mind, disconnected
with _bcd, then that constituent a may be analyzed out from the total
impression_. Analysis of a thing means separate attention to each of
its parts. In Chapter XI we saw that one condition of attending to a
thing was the formation from within of a separate image of that thing,
which should, as it were, go out to meet the impression received.
Attention being the condition of analysis, and separate imagination
being the condition of attention, it follows also that separate
imagination is the condition of analysis. _Only such elements as we
are acquainted with, and can imagine, separately, can be discriminated
within a total sense-impression_. The image seems to welcome its own
mate from out of the compound, and to heighten the feeling thereof;
whereas it dampens and opposes the feeling of the other constituents;
and thus the compound becomes broken for our consciousness into parts.
All the facts cited in Chapter XI, to prove that attention involves
inward reproduction, go to prove this point as well. In looking for any
object in a room, for a book in a library, for example, we detect it
the more readily if, in addition to merely knowing its name, etc., we
carry in our mind a distinct image of its appearance. The assafœtida
in 'Worcestershire sauce' is not obvious to anyone who has not tasted
assafœtida _per se_. In a 'cold' color an artist would never be able to
analyze out the pervasive presence of _blue_, unless he had previously
made acquaintance with the color blue by itself. All the colors we
actually experience are mixtures. Even the purest primaries always come
to us with some white. Absolutely pure red or green or violet is never
experienced, and so can never be discerned in the so-called primaries
with which we have to deal: the latter consequently pass for pure.--The
reader will remember how an overtone can only be attended to in the
midst of its consorts in the voice of a musical instrument, by sounding
it previously alone. The imagination, being then full of it, hears
the like of it in the compound tone. Helmholtz, whose account of this
observation we formerly quoted, goes on to explain the difficulty of
the case in a way which beautifully corroborates the point I now seek
to prove. He says:
"The ultimate simple elements of the sensation of tone, simple tones
themselves, are rarely heard alone. Even those instruments by which
they can be produced (as tuning-forks before resonance-chambers),
when strongly excited, give rise to weak harmonic upper partials,
partly within and partly without the ear.... Hence the opportunities
are very scanty for impressing on our memory an exact and sure image
of these simple elementary tones. But if the constituents are only
indefinitely and vaguely known, the analysis of their sum into them
must be correspondingly uncertain. If we do not know with certainty
how much of the musical tone under consideration is to be attributed
to its prime, we cannot but be uncertain as to what belongs to the
partials. Consequently we must begin by making the individual elements
which have to be distinguished individually audible, so as to obtain
an entirely fresh recollection of the corresponding sensation, and the
whole business requires undisturbed and concentrated attention. We are
even without the ease that can be obtained by frequent repetitions of
the experiment, such as we possess in the analysis of musical chords
into their individual notes. In that case we hear the individual notes
sufficiently often by themselves, whereas we rarely hear simple tones,
and may almost be said never to hear the building up of a compound
from its simple tones."[421]
THE PROCESS OF ABSTRACTION.
Very few elements of reality are experienced by us in absolute
isolation. The most that usually happens to a constituent _a_, of a
compound phenomenon _abcd_, is that its _strength_ relatively to _bcd_
varies from a maximum to a minimum; or that it appears linked with
_other_ qualities, in other compounds, as _aefg_, or _ahik_. Either
of these vicissitudes in the mode of our experiencing _a_ may, under
favorable circumstances, lead us to feel the difference between it and
its concomitants, and to single it out--not absolutely, it is true, but
approximately--and so to analyze the compound of which it is a part.
The act of singling out is then called _abstraction_, and the element
disengaged is an _abstract_.