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Title: The Principles of Psychology, Volume 2 (of 2)

Author: William James

Release date: August 4, 2018 [eBook #57634]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY, VOLUME 2 (OF 2) ***




Produced by Clare Graham & Marc D'Hooghe at Free Literature
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THE PRINCIPLES
OF
PSYCHOLOGY


BY

WILLIAM JAMES

PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOL II.

NEW YORK

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

1918




CONTENTS.


CHAPTER XVII.

SENSATION

Its distinction from perception. Its cognitive
function--acquaintance with qualities. No pure sensations after the
first days of life. The 'relativity of knowledge'. The law of
contrast. The psychological and the physiological theories of it.
Hering's experiments. The 'eccentric projection' of sensations.


CHAPTER XVIII.

IMAGINATION

Our images are usually vague. Vague images not necessarily general
notions. Individuals differ in imagination; Gabon's researches.
The 'visile' type, 58. The 'audile' type. The 'motile' type.
Tactile images, 65. The neural process of imagination. Its
relations to that of sensation.


CHAPTER XIX.

THE PERCEPTION OF 'THINGS'

Perception and sensation. Perception is of definite and probable
things. Illusions;--of the first type;--of the second
type. The neural process in perception. 'Apperception'.
Is perception an unconscious inference? Hallucinations,
114. The neural process in hallucination. Binet's theory.
'Perception-time'.


CHAPTER XX.

THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE

The feeling of crude extensity. The perception of spatial order.
Space-'relations'. The meaning of localization. 'Local
signs'. The construction of 'real' space. The subdivision
of the original sense-spaces. The sensation of motion over
surfaces. The measurement of the sense-spaces by each other.
Their summation. Feelings of movement in joints. Feelings
of muscular contraction. Summary so far. How the blind
perceive space. Visual space. Helmholtz and Reid on the
test of a sensation. The theory of identical points. The
theory of projection. Ambiguity of retinal impressions;--of
eye-movements. The choice of the visual reality. Sensations
which we ignore. Sensations which seem suppressed. Discussion
of Wundt's and Helmholtz's reasons for denying that retinal sensations
are of extension. Summary. Historical remarks.


CHAPTER XXI.

THE PERCEPTION OF REALITY

Belief and its opposites. The various orders of reality.
'Practical' realities. The sense of our own bodily existence is
the nucleus of all reality. The paramount reality of sensations.
The influence of emotion and active impulse on belief. Belief
in theories. Doubt. Relations of belief and will.


CHAPTER XXII.

REASONING

'Recepts'. In reasoning, we pick out essential qualities.
What is meant by a mode of conceiving. What is involved in the
existence of general propositions. The two factors of reasoning.
Sagacity. The part played by association by similarity.
The intellectual contrast between brute and man: association by
similarity the fundamental human distinction. Different orders of
human genius.


CHAPTER XXIII.

THE PRODUCTION OF MOVEMENT

The diffusive wave. Every sensation produces reflex effects on the
whole organism.


CHAPTER XXIV.

INSTINCT

Its definition. Instincts not always blind or invariable.
Two principles of non-uniformity in instincts: 1) Their inhibition by
habits; 2) Their transitoriness. Man has more instincts than
any other mammal. Reflex impulses. Imitation. Emulation.
Pugnacity. Sympathy. The hunting instinct. Fear.
Acquisitiveness. Constructiveness. Play. Curiosity.
Sociability and shyness. Secretiveness. Cleanliness.
Shame. Love. Maternal love.


CHAPTER XXV.

THE EMOTIONS

Instinctive reaction and emotional expression shade imperceptibly into
each other. The expression of grief; of fear; of hatred.
Emotion is a consequence, not the cause, of the bodily expression.
Difficulty of testing this view. Objections to it discussed.
The subtler emotions, 468. No special brain-centres for emotion.
Emotional differences between individuals. The genesis of the
various emotions.


CHAPTER XXVI.

WILL

Voluntary movements: they presuppose a memory of involuntary movements.
Kinæsthetic impressions, 488. No need to assume feelings of
innervation. The 'mental cue' for a movement may be an image of
its visual or auditory effects as well as an image of the way it feels.
Ideo-motor action. Action after deliberation. Five types
of decision. The feeling of effort. Unhealthiness of will:
1) The explosive type; 2) The obstructed type. Pleasure
and pain are not the only springs of action. All consciousness
is impulsive. What we will depends on what idea dominates in
our mind. The idea's outward effects follow from the cerebral
machinery. Effort of attention to a naturally repugnant idea is
the essential feature of willing. The free-will controversy.
Psychology, as a science, can safely postulate determinism, even if
free-will be true. The education of the Will. Hypothetical
brain-schemes.


CHAPTER XXVII.

HYPNOTISM

Modes of operating and susceptibility. Theories about the hypnotic
state. The symptoms of the trance.


CHAPTER XXVIII.

NECESSARY TRUTHS AND THE EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE

Programme of the chapter. Elementary feelings are innate.
The question refers to their combinations. What is meant by
'experience'. Spencer on ancestral experience. Two ways
in which new cerebral structure arises: the 'back-door' and the
'front-door' way. The genesis of the elementary mental categories.
The genesis of the natural sciences. Scientific conceptions
arise as accidental variations. The genesis of the pure sciences.
Series of evenly increasing terms. The principle of mediate
comparison. That of skipped intermediaries. Classification.
Predication. Formal logic. Mathematical propositions.
Arithmetic. Geometry. Our doctrine is the same as
Locke's. Relations of ideas _v._ couplings of things The
natural sciences are inward ideal schemes with which the order of
nature proves congruent. Metaphysical principles are properly only
postulates. Æsthetic and moral principles are quite incongruent
with the order of nature. Summary of what precedes. The
origin of instincts. Insufficiency of proof for the transmission
to the next generation of acquired habits. Weismann's views.
Conclusion.

INDEX.




PSYCHOLOGY.

CHAPTER XVII.

SENSATION.


After inner perception, outer perception! The next three chapters will
treat of the processes by which we cognize at all times the present
world of space and the material things which it contains. And first, of
the process called Sensation.


SENSATION AND PERCEPTION DISTINGUISHED.


_The words Sensation and Perception_ do not carry very definitely
discriminated meanings in popular speech, and in Psychology also their
meanings run into each other. Both of them name processes in which we
cognize an objective world; both (under normal conditions) need the
stimulation of incoming nerves ere they can occur; Perception always
involves Sensation as a portion of itself; and Sensation in turn never
takes place in adult life without Perception also being there. They are
therefore names for different cognitive _functions_, not for different
sorts of mental _fact_. The nearer the object cognized comes to being a
simple quality like 'hot,' 'cold,' 'red,' 'noise,' 'pain,' apprehended
irrelatively to other things, the more the state of mind approaches
pure sensation. The fuller of relations the object is, on the contrary;
the more it is something classed, located, measured, compared, assigned
to a function, etc., etc.; the more unreservedly do we call the state
of mind a perception, and the relatively smaller is the part in it
which sensation plays.

_Sensation, then, so long as we take the analytic point of view,
differs from Perception only in the extreme simplicity of its object or
content._[1] Its function is that of mere _acquaintance_ with a fact.
Perception's function, on the other hand, is knowledge _about_[2] a
fact; and this knowledge admits of numberless degrees of complication.
But in both sensation and perception we perceive the fact as an
_immediately present outward reality_, and this makes them differ from
'thought' and 'conception,' whose objects do not appear present in this
immediate physical way. _From the physiological_ _point of view both
sensations and perceptions differ from 'thoughts'_ (in the narrower
sense of the word) _in the fact that nerve-currents coming in from
the periphery are involved in their production. In perception these
nerve-currents arouse voluminous associative or reproductive processes
in the cortex; but when sensation occurs alone, or with a minimum of
perception, the accompanying reproductive processes are at a minimum
too._

I shall in this chapter discuss some general questions more especially
relative to Sensation. In a later chapter perception will take its
turn. I shall entirely pass by the classification and natural history
of our special 'sensations,' such matters finding their proper place,
and being sufficiently well treated, in all the physiological books.[3]


THE COGNITIVE FUNCTION OF SENSATION.


_A pure sensation is an abstraction;_ and when we adults talk of our
'sensations' we mean one of two things: either certain _objects_,
namely simple _qualities_ or _attributes_ like _hard, hot, pain;_ or
else those of our thoughts in which acquaintance with these objects
is least combined with knowledge about the relations of them to other
things. As we can only think or talk about the relations of objects
with which we have _acquaintance_ already, we are forced to postulate
a function in our thought whereby we first become aware of the _bare
immediate natures_ by which our several objects are distinguished.
This function is sensation. And just as logicians always point out
the distinction between substantive terms of discourse and relations
found to obtain between them, so psychologists, as a rule, are ready to
admit this function, of the vision of the terms or matters meant, as
something distinct from the knowledge about them and of their relations
_inter se_. Thought with the former function is sensational, with the
latter, intellectual. Our earliest thoughts are almost exclusively
sensational. They merely give us a set of _thats_, or _its_, of
subjects of discourse, with their relations not brought out. The
first time we see _light_, in Condillac's phrase we _are_ it rather
rather than see it. But all our later optical knowledge is about what
this experience gives. And though we were struck blind from that first
moment, our scholarship in the subject would lack no essential feature
so long as our memory remained. In training-institutions for the blind
they teach the pupils as much _about_ light as in ordinary schools.
Reflection, refraction, the spectrum, the ether-theory, etc., are all
studied. But the best taught born-blind pupil of such an establishment
yet lacks a knowledge which the least instructed seeing baby has. They
can never show him what light is in its 'first intention'; and the loss
of that sensible knowledge no book-learning can replace. All this is so
obvious that we usually find sensation 'postulated' as an element of
experience, even by those philosophers who are least inclined to make
much of its importance, or to pay respect to the knowledge which it
brings.[4]

But the trouble is that most, if not all, of those who admit it,
admit it as a fractional _part_ of the thought, in the old-fashioned
atomistic sense which we have so often criticised.

Take the pain called toothache for example. Again and again we feel it
and greet it as the same real item in the universe. We must therefore,
it is supposed, have a distinct pocket for it in our mind into which it
and nothing else will fit. This pocket, when filled, is the sensation
of toothache; and must be either filled or half-filled whenever and
under whatever form toothache is present to our thought, and whether
much or little of the rest of the mind be filled at the same time.
Thereupon of course comes up the paradox and mystery: If the knowledge
of toothache be pent up in this separate mental pocket, how can it be
known _cum alio_ or brought into one view with anything else? This
pocket knows nothing else; no other part of the mind knows toothache.
The knowing of toothache _cum alio_ must be a miracle. And the miracle
must have an Agent. And the Agent must be a Subject or Ego 'out of
time,'--and all the rest of it, as we saw in Chapter X. And then begins
the well-worn round of recrimination between the sensationalists and
the spiritualists, from which we are saved by our determination from
the outset to accept the psychological point of view, and to admit
knowledge whether of simple toothaches or of philosophic systems as
an ultimate fact. There are realities and there are 'states of mind,'
and the latter know the former; and it is just as wonderful for a
state of mind to be a 'sensation' and know a simple pain as for it to
be a thought and know a system of related things.[5] But there is no
reason to suppose that when different states of mind know different
things about the same toothache, they do so by virtue of their all
_containing_ faintly or vividly the original pain. Quite the reverse.
The by-gone sensation of my gout was painful, as Reid somewhere says;
the _thought_ of the same gout as by-gone is pleasant, and in no
respect resembles the earlier mental state.

Sensations, then, first make us acquainted with innumerable things, and
then are replaced by thoughts which know the same things in altogether
other ways. And Locke's main doctrine remains eternally true, however
hazy some of his language may have been, that

 "though there be a great number of considerations wherein things
 may be compared one with another, and so a multitude of relations;
 yet they all _terminate in_, and are concerned about, those simple
 ideas[6] either of sensation or reflection, which I think to be the
 whole materials of all our knowledge.... The simple ideas we receive
 from sensation and reflection are the _boundaries_ of our thoughts;
 beyond which, the mind whatever efforts it would make, is not able to
 advance one jot; nor can it make any discoveries when it would pry
 into the nature and hidden causes of those ideas."[7]

The nature and hidden causes of ideas will never be unravelled till
the _nexus_ between the brain and consciousness is cleared up. All
we can say now is that sensations are _first_ things in the way of
consciousness. Before conceptions can come, sensations must have
come; but before sensations come, no psychic fact need have existed,
a nerve-current is enough. If the nerve-current be not given, nothing
else will take its place. To quote the good Locke again:

 "It is not in the power of the most exalted wit or enlarged
 understanding, by any quickness or variety of thoughts, to invent or
 frame one new simple idea [i.e. sensation] in the mind.... I would
 have any one try to fancy any taste which had never affected his
 palate, or frame the idea of a scent he had never smelt; and when
 he can do this, I will also conclude that a blind man hath ideas of
 colors, and a deaf man true distinct notions of sounds."[8]

The brain is so made that all currents in it run one way. Consciousness
of some sort goes with all the currents, but it is only when new
currents are entering that it has the sensational _tang_. And it is
only then that consciousness directly _encounters_ (to use a word of
Mr. Bradley's) a reality outside itself.

The difference between such encounter and all conceptual knowledge is
very great. A blind man may know all _about_ the sky's blueness, and
I may know all _about_ your toothache, conceptually; tracing their
causes from primeval chaos, and their consequences to the crack of
doom. But so long as he has not felt the blueness, nor I the toothache,
our knowledge, wide as it is, of these realities, will be hollow
and inadequate. Somebody must _feel_ blueness, somebody must _have_
toothache, to make human knowledge of these matters real. Conceptual
systems which neither began nor left off in sensations would be like
bridges without piers. Systems about fact must plunge themselves into
sensation as bridges plunge their piers into the rock. Sensations are
the stable rock, the _terminus a quo_ and the _terminus ad quem_ of
thought. To find such termini is our aim with all our theories--to
conceive first when and where a certain sensation may be had, and then
to have it. Finding it stops discussion. Failure to find it kills the
false conceit of knowledge. Only when you deduce a possible sensation
for me from your theory, and give it to me when and where the theory
requires, do I begin to be sure that your thought has anything to do
with truth.

_Pure sensations can only be realized in the earliest days of life._
They are all but impossible to adults with memories and stores of
associations acquired. Prior to all impressions on sense-organs the
brain is plunged in deep sleep and consciousness is practically
non-existent. Even the first weeks after birth are passed in almost
unbroken sleep by human infants. It takes a strong message from the
sense-organs to break this slumber. In a new-born brain this gives
rise to an absolutely pure sensation. But the experience leaves its
'unimaginable touch' on the matter of the convolutions, and the next
impression which a sense-organ transmits produces a cerebral reaction
in which the awakened vestige of the last impression plays its part.
Another sort of feeling and a higher grade of cognition are the
consequence; and the complication goes on increasing till the end of
life, no two successive impressions falling on an identical brain, and
no two successive thoughts being exactly the same. (See Vol. I, p. 230
ff.)

_The first sensation which an infant gets is for him the Universe._
And the Universe which he later comes to know is nothing but an
amplification and an implication of that first simple germ which,
by accretion on the one hand and intussusception on the other,
has grown so big and complex and articulate that its first estate
is unrememberable. In his dumb awakening to the consciousness of
_something there_, a mere _this_ as yet (or something for which
even the term _this_ would perhaps be too discriminative, and the
intellectual acknowledgment of which would be better expressed by
the bare interjection 'lo!'), the infant encounters an object in
which (though it be given in a pure sensation) all the 'categories
of the understanding' are contained. _It has objectivity, unity,
substantiality, causality, in the full sense in which any later object
or system of objects has these things._ Here the young knower meets
and greets his world; and the miracle of knowledge bursts forth, as
Voltaire says, as much in the infant's lowest sensation as in the
highest achievement of a Newton's brain. The physiological condition
of this first sensible experience is probably nerve-currents coming
in from many peripheral organs at once. Later, the one confused Fact
which these currents cause to appear is perceived to be many facts,
and to contain many qualities.[9] For as the currents vary, and the
brain-paths are moulded by them, other thoughts with other 'objects'
come, and the 'same thing' which was apprehended as a present _this_
soon figures as a past _that_, about which many unsuspected things have
come to light. The principles of this development have been laid down
already in Chapters XII and XIII, and nothing more need here be added
to that account.


"THE RELATIVITY OF KNOWLEDGE."


To the reader who is tired of so much _Erkenntnisstheorie_ I can only
say that I am so myself, but that it is indispensable, in the actual
state of opinions about Sensation, to try to clear up just what the
word means. Locke's pupils seek to do the impossible with sensations,
and against them we must once again insist that sensations 'clustered
together' cannot build up our more intellectual states of mind. Plato's
earlier pupils used to admit Sensation's existence, grudgingly, but
they trampled it in the dust as something corporeal, non-cognitive,
and vile.[10] His latest followers seem to seek to crowd it out of
existence altogether. The only reals for the neo-Hegelian writers
appear to be _relations_, relations without terms, or whose terms
are only speciously such and really consist in knots, or gnarls of
relations finer still _in infinitum_.

 "Exclude from what we have considered real all qualities constituted
 by relation, we find that none are left." "Abstract the many relations
 from the one thing and there is nothing.... Without the relations it
 would not exist at all."[11] "The single feeling is nothing real."
 "On the recognition of relations as constituting the _nature_ of
 ideas, rests the possibility of any tenable theory of their reality."

Such quotations as these from the late T. H. Green[12] would be matters
of curiosity rather than of importance, were it not that sensationalist
writers themselves believe in a so-called 'Relativity of Knowledge,'
which, if they only understood it, they would see to be identical
with Professor Green's doctrine. They tell us that the relation of
sensations to each other is something belonging to their essence, and
that no one of them has an absolute content:

 "That, e.g., black can only be felt in contrast to white, or at
 least in distinction from a paler or a deeper black; similarly a
 tone or a sound only in alternation with others or with silence; and
 in like manner a smell, a taste, a touch, only, so to speak, _in
 statu nascendi_, whilst, when the stimulus continues, all sensation
 disappears. This all seems at first sight to be splendidly consistent
 both with itself and with the facts. But looked at more closely, it is
 seen that neither is the case."[13]

The two leading facts from which the doctrine of universal relativity
derives its wide-spread credit are these:

1) The _psychological fact_ that so much of our actual knowledge _is_
of the relations of things--even our simplest sensations in adult life
are habitually referred to classes as we take them in; and

2) The _physiological fact_ that our senses and brain must have periods
of change and repose, else we cease to feel and think.

Neither of these facts proves anything about the presence or
non-presence to our mind of absolute qualities with which we become
sensibly acquainted. Surely not the psychological fact; for our
inveterate love of relating and comparing things does not alter the
intrinsic qualities or nature of the things compared, or undo their
absolute givenness. And surely not the physiological fact; for the
length of time during which we can feel or attend to a quality is
altogether irrelevant to the intrinsic constitution of the quality
felt. The time, moreover, is long enough in many instances, as
sufferers from neuralgia know.[14] And the doctrine of relativity,
not proved by these facts, is flatly disproved by other facts even
more patent. So far are we from not knowing (in the words of Professor
Bain) "any one thing by itself, but only the difference between it
and another thing," that if this were true the whole edifice of our
knowledge would collapse. If all we felt were the _difference_ between
the _C_ and _D_, or _c_ and _d_, on the musical scale, that being the
same in the two pairs of notes, the pairs themselves would be the same,
and language could get along without substantives. But Professor Bain
does not mean seriously what he says, and we need spend no more time on
this vague and popular form of the doctrine.[15] The facts which seem
to hover before the minds of its champions are those which are best
described under the head of a physiological law.


THE LAW OF CONTRAST.


I will first enumerate the main facts which fall under this law, and
then remark upon what seems to me their significance for psychology.[16]

[Nowhere are the phenomena of contrast better exhibited, and their
laws more open to accurate study, than in connection with the sense
of sight. Here both kinds--simultaneous and successive--can easily be
observed, for they are of constant occurrence. Ordinarily they remain
unnoticed, in accordance with the general law of economy which causes
us to select for conscious notice only such elements of our object as
will serve us for æsthetic or practical utility, and to neglect the
rest; just as we ignore the double images, the _mouches volantes_,
etc., which exist for everyone, but which are not discriminated
without careful attention. But by attention we may easily discover
the general facts involved in contrast. We find that _in general the
color and brightness of one object always apparently affect the color
and brightness of any other object seen simultaneously with it or
immediately after_.

In the first place, if we look for a moment at any surface and then
turn our eyes elsewhere, the complementary color and opposite degree
of brightness to that of the first surface tend to mingle themselves
with the color and the brightness of the second. This is _successive
contrast_. It finds its explanation in the fatigue of the organ of
sight, causing it to respond to any particular stimulus less and
less readily the longer such stimulus continues to act. This is
shown clearly in the very marked changes which occur in case of
continued fixation of one particular point of any field. The field
darkens slowly, becomes more and more indistinct, and finally, if
one is practised enough in holding the eye perfectly steady, slight
differences in shade and color may entirely disappear. If we now turn
aside the eyes, a negative after-image of the field just fixated at
once forms, and mingles its sensations with those which may happen to
come from anything else looked at. This influence is distinctly evident
only when the first surface has been 'fixated' without movement of
the eyes. It is, however, none the less present at all times, even
when the eye wanders from point to point, causing each sensation to
be modified more or less by that just previously experienced. On this
account successive contrast is almost sure to be present in cases of
simultaneous contrast, and to complicate the phenomena.

A _visual image is modified not only by other sensations just
previously experienced, but also by all those experienced
simultaneously with it, and especially by such as proceed from
contiguous portions of the retina_. This is the phenomenon of
_simultaneous contrast_. In this, as in successive contrast, both
brightness and hue are involved. A bright object appears still brighter
when its surroundings are darker than itself, and darker when they are
brighter than itself. Two colors side by side are apparently changed by
the admixture, with each, of the complement of the other. And lastly,
a gray surface near a colored one is tinged with the complement of the
latter.[17]

The phenomena of simultaneous contrast in sight are so complicated
by other attendant phenomena that it is difficult to isolate
them and observe them in their purity. Yet it is evidently of the
greatest importance to do so, if one would conduct his investigations
accurately. Neglect of this principle has led to many mistakes being
made in accounting for the facts observed. As we have seen, if the eye
is allowed to wander here and there about the field as it ordinarily
does, successive contrast results and allowance must be made for
its presence. It can be avoided only by carefully fixating with the
well-rested eye a point of one field, and by then observing the changes
which occur in this field when the contrasting field is placed by its
side. Such a course will insure pure simultaneous contrast. But even
thus it lasts in its purity for a moment only. It reaches its maximum
of effect immediately after the introduction of the contrasting field,
and then, if the fixation is continued, it begins to weaken rapidly
and soon disappears; thus undergoing changes similar to those observed
when any field whatever is fixated steadily and the retina becomes
fatigued by unchanging stimuli. If one continues still further to
fixate the same point, the color and brightness of one field tend to
spread themselves over and mingle with the color and brightness of the
neighboring fields, thus substituting '_simultaneous induction_' for
simultaneous contrast.

Not only must we recognize and eliminate the effects of successive
contrast, of temporal changes due to fixation, and of simultaneous
induction, in analyzing the phenomena of simultaneous contrast, but we
must also take into account _various other influences which modify its
effects_. Under favorable circumstances the contrast-effects are very
striking, and did they always occur as strongly they could not fail to
attract the attention. But they are not always clearly apparent, owing
to various disturbing causes which form no exception to the laws of
contrast, but which have a modifying effect on its phenomena. When,
for instance, the ground observed has many distinguishable features--a
_coarse grain, rough surface, intricate pattern,_ etc.--the contrast
effect appears weaker. This does not imply that the effects of contrast
are absent, but merely that the resulting sensations are overpowered
by the many other stronger sensations which entirely occupy the
attention. On such a ground a faint negative after-image--undoubtedly
due to retinal modifications--may become invisible; and even weak
objective differences in color may become imperceptible. For example, a
faint spot or grease-stain on woollen cloth, easily seen at a distance,
when the fibres are not distinguishable, disappears when closer
examination reveals the intricate nature of the surface.

Another frequent cause of the apparent absence of contrast is the
presence of narrow dark intermediate fields, such as are formed by
_bordering a field with black lines, or by the shaded contours of
objects_. When such fields interfere with the contrast, it is because
black and white can absorb much color without themselves becoming
clearly colored; and because such lines separate other fields too far
for them to distinctly influence one another. Even weak objective
differences in color may be made imperceptible by such means.

A third case where contrast does not clearly appear is where the _color
of the contrasting fields is too weak or too intense_, or where there
is _much difference in brightness between the two fields_. In the
latter case, as can easily be shown, it is the contrast of brightness
which interferes with the color-contrast and makes it imperceptible.
For this reason contrast shows best between fields of about equal
brightness. But the intensity of the color must not be too great, for
then its very darkness necessitates a dark contrasting field which
is too absorbent of induced color to allow the contrast to appear
strongly. The case is similar if the fields are too light.

_To obtain the best contrast-effects, therefore, the contracting fields
should be near together, should not be separated by shadows or black
lines, should be of homogeneous texture, and should be of about equal
brightness and medium intensity of color._ Such conditions do not
often occur naturally, the disturbing influences being present in case
of almost all ordinary objects, thus making the effects of contrast
far less evident. To eliminate these disturbances and to produce the
conditions most favorable for the appearance of good contrast-effects,
various experiments have been devised, which will be explained in
comparing the rival theories of explanation.

       *       *       *       *       *

There are _two theories--the psychological and the
physiological_--which attempt to explain the phenomena of contrast.

Of these the _psychological one_ was the first to gain prominence.
_Its most able advocate has been Helmholtz. It explains contrast
as a_ DECEPTION OF JUDGMENT. In ordinary life our sensations have
interest for us only so far as they give us practical knowledge.
Our chief concern is to recognize objects, and we have no occasion
to estimate exactly their absolute brightness and color. Hence we
gain no facility in so doing, but neglect the constant changes in
their shade, and are very uncertain as to the exact degree of their
brightness or tone of their color. When objects are near one another
"we are inclined to consider those differences which are clearly and
surely perceived as greater than those which appear uncertain in
perception or which must be judged by aid of memory,"[18] just as we
see a medium-sized man taller than he really is when he stands beside
a short man. Such deceptions are more easily possible in the judgment
of small differences than of large ones; also where there is but one
element of difference instead of many. In a large number of cases of
contrast, in all of which a whitish spot is surrounded on all sides
by a colored surface--Meyer's experiment, the mirror experiment,
colored shadows, etc., soon to be described--the contrast is produced,
according to Helmholtz, by the fact that "a colored illumination or a
transparent colored covering appears to be spread out over the field,
and observation does not show directly that it fails on the white
spot."[19] We therefore believe that we see the latter through the
former color. Now

 "Colors have their greatest importance for us in so far as they are
 properties of bodies and can serve as signs for the recognition
 of bodies.... We have become accustomed, in forming a judgment in
 regard to the colors of bodies, to eliminate the varying brightness
 and color of the illumination. We have sufficient opportunity to
 investigate the same colors of objects in full sunshine, in the blue
 light of the clear sky, in the weak white light of a cloudy day, in
 the reddish-yellow light of the sinking sun or of the candle. Moreover
 the colored reflections of surrounding objects are involved. Since
 we see the same colored objects under these varying illuminations,
 we learn to form a correct conception of the color of the object in
 spite of the difference in illumination, i.e. to judge how such an
 object would appear in white illumination; and since only the constant
 color of the object interests us, we do not become conscious of the
 particular sensations on which our judgment rests. So also we are
 at no loss, when we see an object through a colored covering, to
 distinguish what belongs to the color of the covering and what to
 the object. In the experiments mentioned we do the same also where
 the covering over the object is not at all colored, because of the
 deception into which we fall, and in consequence of which we ascribe
 to the body a false color, the color complementary to the colored
 portion of the covering."[20]

We think that we see the complementary color through the colored
covering,--for these two colors together would give the sensation of
white which is actually experienced. If, however, in any way the white
spot is recognized as an independent object, or if it is compared with
another object known to be white, our judgment is no longer deceived
and the contrast does not appear.

 "As soon as the contrasting field is recognized as an independent
 body which lies above the colored ground, or even through an adequate
 tracing of its outlines is seen to be a separate field, the contrast
 disappears. Since, then, the judgment of the spatial position, the
 material independence, of the object in question is decisive for the
 determination of its color, it follows that the contrast-color arises
 not through an act of sensation but through an act of judgment."[21]

In short, the apparent change in color or brightness through contrast
is due to no change in excitation of the organ, to no change in
sensation; but in consequence of a false judgment the unchanged
sensation is wrongly interpreted, and thus leads to a changed
_perception_ of the brightness or color.

       *       *       *       *       *

In opposition to this theory has been developed one which attempts to
explain all cases of contrast as depending purely on _physiological
action of the terminal apparatus of vision. Hering is the most
prominent supporter of this view._ By great originality in devising
experiments and by insisting on rigid care in conducting them, he has
been able to detect the faults in the psychological theory and to
practically establish the validity of his own. Every visual sensation,
he maintains, is correlated to a physical process in the nervous
apparatus. Contrast is occasioned, not by a false idea resulting from
unconscious conclusions, but by the fact that the excitation of any
portion of the retina--and the consequent sensation--depends not only
on its own illumination, but on that of the rest of the retina as well.

 "If this psycho-physical process is aroused, as usually happens, by
 light-rays impinging on the retina, its nature depends not only on
 the nature of these rays, but also on the constitution of the entire
 nervous apparatus which is connected with the organ of vision, and on
 the state in which it finds itself."[22]

When a limited portion of the retina is aroused by external stimuli,
the rest of the retina, and especially the immediately contiguous
parts, tends to react also, and in such a way as to produce
therefrom the sensation of the opposite degree of brightness and the
complementary color to that of the directly-excited portion. When a
gray spot is seen alone, and again when it appears colored through
contrast, the objective light from the spot is in both cases the same.
Helmholtz maintains that the neural process and the corresponding
_sensation_ also remain unchanged, but are differently _interpreted_;
Hering, that the neural process and the sensation are themselves
changed, and that the 'interpretation' is the direct conscious
correlate of the altered retinal conditions. According to the one, the
contrast is psychological in its origin; according to the other, it is
purely physiological. In the cases cited above where the contrast-color
is no longer apparent--on a ground with many distinguishable features,
on a field whose borders are traced with black lines, etc.,--the
psychological theory, as we have seen, attributes this to the fact
that under these circumstances we judge the smaller patch of color to
be an independent object on the surface, and are no longer deceived
in judging it to be something over which the color of the ground is
drawn. The physiological theory, on the other hand, maintains that the
contrast-effect is still produced, but that the conditions are such
that the slight changes in color and brightness which it occasions
become imperceptible.

       *       *       *       *       *

The two theories, stated thus broadly, may seem equally plausible.
Hering, however, has conclusively proved, by experiments with
after-images, that the process on one part of the retina does modify
that on neighboring portions, under conditions where deception of
judgment is impossible.[23] A careful examination of the facts of
contrast will show that its phenomena must be due to this cause. _In
all the cases which one may investigate it will be seen that the
upholders of the psychological theory have failed to conduct their
experiments with sufficient care._ They have not excluded successive
contrast, have overlooked the changes due to steady fixation, and have
failed to properly account for the various modifying influences which
have been mentioned above. We can easily establish this if we examine
the most striking experiments in simultaneous contrast.

Of these one of the best known and most easily arranged is that known
as _Meyer's experiment_. A scrap of gray paper is placed on a colored
background, and both are covered by a sheet of transparent white paper.
The gray spot then assumes a contrast-color, complementary to that of
the background, which shines with a whitish tinge through the paper
which covers it. Helmholtz explains the phenomenon thus:

 "If the background is green, the covering-paper itself appears to be
 of a greenish color. If now the substance of the paper extends without
 apparent interruption over the gray which lies under it, we think that
 we see an object glimmering through the greenish paper, and such an
 object must in turn be rose-red, in order to give white light. If,
 however, the gray spot has its limits so fixed that it appears to be
 an independent object, the continuity with the greenish portion of the
 surface fails, and we regard it as a gray object which lies on this
 surface."[24]

The contrast-color may thus be made to disappear by tracing in black
the outlines of the gray scrap, or by placing above the tissue paper
another gray scrap of the same degree of brightness, and comparing
together the two grays. On neither of them does the contrast-color now
appear.

Hering[25] shows clearly that this interpretation is incorrect, and
that the disturbing factors are to be otherwise explained. In the first
place, the experiment can be so arranged that we could not possibly be
deceived into believing that we see the gray through a colored medium.
Out of a sheet of gray paper cut strips 5 mm. wide in such a way that
there will be alternately an empty space and a bar of gray, both of the
same width, the bars being held together by the uncut edges of the gray
sheet (thus presenting an appearance like a gridiron). Lay this on a
colored background--e.g. green--cover both with transparent paper, and
above all put a black frame which covers all the edges, leaving visible
only the bars, which are now alternately green and gray. The gray bars
appear strongly colored by contrast, although, since they occupy as
much space as the green bars, we are not deceived into believing that
we see the former through a green medium. The same is true if we weave
together into a basket pattern narrow strips of green and gray and
cover them with the transparent paper.

Why, then, if it is a true sensation due to physiological causes, and
not an error of judgment, which causes the contrast, does the color
disappear when the outlines of the gray scrap are traced, enabling us
to recognize it as an independent object? In the first place, it does
not necessarily do so, as will easily be seen if the experiment is
tried. The contrast-color often remains distinctly visible in spite
of the black outlines. In the second place, there are many adequate
reasons why the effect should be modified. Simultaneous contrast is
always strongest at the border-line of the two fields; but a narrow
black field now separates the two, and itself by contrast strengthens
the whiteness of both original fields, which were already little
saturated in color; and on black and on white, contrast-colors show
only under the most favorable circumstances. Even weak objective
differences in color may be made to disappear by such tracing of
outlines, as can be seen if we place on a gray background a scrap of
faintly-colored paper, cover it with transparent paper and trace its
outlines. Thus we see that it is not the recognition of the contrasting
field as an independent object which interferes with its color, but
rather a number of entirely explicable physiological disturbances.

The same may be proved in the case of holding above the tissue paper a
second gray scrap and comparing it with that underneath. To avoid the
disturbances caused by using papers of different brightness, the second
scrap should be made exactly like the first by covering the same gray
with the same tissue paper, and carefully cutting a piece about 10 mm.
square out of both together. To thoroughly guard against successive
contrast, which so easily complicates the phenomena, we must carefully
prevent all previous excitation of the retina by colored light. This
may be done by arranging thus: Place the sheet of tissue paper on a
glass pane, which rests on four supports; under the paper put the first
gray scrap. By means of a wire, fasten the second gray scrap 2 or 3 cm.
above the glass plate. Both scraps appear exactly alike, except at the
edges. Gaze now at both scraps, with eyes not exactly accommodated, so
that they appear near one another, with a very narrow space between.
Shove now a colored field (green) underneath the glass plate, and the
contrast appears at once on both scraps. If it appears less clearly
on the upper scrap, it is because of its bright and dark edges, its
inequalities, its grain, etc. When the accommodation is exact, there is
no essential change, although then on the upper scrap the bright edge
on the side toward the light, and the dark edge on the shadow side,
disturb somewhat. By continued fixation the contrast becomes weaker
and finally yields to simultaneous induction, causing the scraps to
become indistinguishable from the ground. Remove the green field and
both scraps become green, by successive induction. If the eye moves
about freely these last-named phenomena do not appear, but the contrast
continues indefinitely and becomes stronger. When Helmholtz found that
the contrast on the lower scrap disappeared, it was evidently because
he then really held the eye fixed. This experiment may be disturbed by
holding the upper scrap wrongly and by the differences in brightness of
its edges, or by other inequalities, but not by that recognizing of it
'as an independent body lying above the colored ground,' on which the
psychological explanation rests.

In like manner the claims of the psychological explanation can be
shown to be inadequate in other cases of contrast. Of frequent use
are revolving disks, which are especially efficient in showing good
contrast-phenomena, because all inequalities of the ground disappear
and leave a perfectly homogeneous surface. On a white disk are arranged
colored sectors, which are interrupted midway by narrow black fields in
such a way that when the disk is revolved the white becomes mixed with
the color and the black, forming a colored disk of weak saturation on
which appears a gray ring. The latter is colored by contrast with the
field which surrounds it. Helmholtz explains the fact thus:

 "The difference of the compared colors appears greater than it really
 is either because this difference, when it is the only existing one
 and draws the attention to itself alone, makes a stronger impression
 than when it is one among many, or because the different colors of the
 surface are conceived as alterations of the one ground-color of the
 surface such as might arise through shadows falling on it, through
 colored reflexes, or through mixture with colored paint or dust. In
 truth, to produce an objectively gray spot on a green surface, a
 reddish coloring would be necessary."[26]

This explanation is easily proved false by painting the disk with
narrow green and gray concentric rings, and giving each a different
saturation. The contrast appears though there is no ground-color, and
no longer a single difference, but many. The facts which Helmholtz
brings forward in support of his theory are also easily turned against
him. He asserts that if the color of the ground is too intense, or
if the gray ring is bordered by black circles, the contrast becomes
weaker; that no contrast appears on a white scrap held over the
colored field; and that the gray ring when compared with such scrap
loses its contrast-color either wholly or in part. Hering points out
the inaccuracy of all these claims. Under favorable conditions it is
impossible to make the contrast disappear by means of black enclosing
lines, although they naturally form a disturbing element; increase
in the saturation of the field, if disturbance through increasing
brightness-contrast is to be avoided, demands a darker gray field, on
which contrast-colors are less easily perceived; and careful use of the
white scrap leads to entirely different results. The contrast-color
does appear upon it when it is first placed above the colored field;
but if it is carefully fixated, the contrast-color diminishes very
rapidly both on it and on the ring, from causes already explained.
To secure accurate observation, all complication through successive
contrast should be avoided thus: first arrange the white scrap, then
interpose a gray screen between it and the disk, rest the eye, set the
wheel in motion, fixate the scrap, and then have the screen removed.
The contrast at once appears clearly, and its disappearance through
continued fixation can be accurately watched.

Brief mention of a few other cases of contrast must suffice. The
so-called mirror experiment consists of placing at an angle of 45º a
green (or otherwise colored) pane of glass, forming an angle with two
white surfaces, one horizontal and the other vertical. On each white
surface is a black spot. The one on the horizontal surface is seen
through the glass and appears dark green, the other is reflected from
the surface of the glass to the eye, and appears by contrast red. The
experiment may be so arranged that we are not aware of the presence of
the green glass, but think that we are looking directly at a surface
with green and red spots upon it; in such a case there is no deception
of judgment caused by making allowance for the colored medium through
which we think that we see the spot, and therefore the psychological
explanation does not apply. On excluding successive contrast by
fixation the contrast soon disappears as in all similar experiments.[27]

_Colored shadows_ have long been thought to afford a convincing proof
of the fact that simultaneous contrast is psychological in its origin.
They are formed whenever an opaque object is illuminated from two
separate sides by lights of different colors. When the light from one
source is white, its shadow is of the color of the other light, and
the second shadow is of a color complementary to that of the field
illuminated by both lights. If now we take a tube, blackened inside,
and through it look at the colored shadow, none of the surrounding
field being visible, and then have the colored light removed, the
shadow still appears colored, although 'the circumstances which
caused it have disappeared.' This is regarded by the psychologists as
conclusive evidence that the color is due to deception of judgment.
It can, however, easily be shown that the persistence of the color
seen through the tube is due to fatigue of the retina through the
prevailing light, and that when the colored light is removed the color
slowly disappears as the equilibrium of the retina becomes gradually
restored. When successive contrast is carefully guarded against, the
simultaneous contrast, whether seen directly or through the tube, never
lasts for an instant on removal of the colored field. The physiological
explanation applies throughout to all the phenomena presented by
colored shadows.[28]

If we have a small field whose illumination remains constant,
surrounded by a large field of changing brightness, an increase or
decrease in brightness of the latter results in a corresponding
apparent decrease or increase respectively in the brightness of the
former, while the large field seems to be unchanged. Exner says:

 "This illusion of sense shows that we are inclined to regard as
 constant the dominant brightness in our field of vision, and hence to
 refer the changing difference between this and the brightness of a
 limited field to a change in brightness of the latter."

The result, however, can be shown to depend not on illusion, but on
actual retinal changes, which alter the sensation experienced. The
irritability of those portions of the retina lighted by the large field
becomes much reduced in consequence of fatigue, so that the increase
in brightness becomes much less apparent than it would be without this
diminution in irritability. The small field, however, shows the change
by a change in the contrast-effect induced upon it by the surrounding
parts of the retina.[29]

The above cases show clearly that _physiological processes, and not
deception of judgment, are responsible for contrast of color_. To say
this, however, is not to maintain that our perception of a color is
never in any degree modified by our judgment of what the particular
colored thing before us may be. We have unquestionable illusions of
color due to wrong inferences as to what object is before us. Thus Von
Kries[30] speaks of wandering through evergreen forests covered with
snow, and thinking that through the interstices of the boughs he saw
the deep blue of pine-clad mountains, covered with snow and lighted by
brilliant sunshine; whereas what he really saw was the white snow on
trees near by, lying in shadow].[31]

Such a mistake as this is undoubtedly of psychological origin. It is
a wrong _classification_ of the appearances, due to the arousal of
intricate processes of association amongst which is the suggestion of a
different hue from that really before the eyes. In the ensuing chapters
such illusions as this will be treated of in considerable detail. But
it is a mistake to interpret the simpler cases of contrast in the light
of such illusions as these. These illusions can be rectified in an
instant, and we then wonder how they could have been. They come from
insufficient attention, or from the fact that the impression which we
get is a sign of more than one possible object, and can be interpreted
in either way. In none of these points do they resemble simple
color-contrast, which _unquestionably is a phenomenon of sensation
immediately aroused_.

       *       *       *       *       *

I have dwelt upon the facts of color-contrast at such great length
because they form so good a text to comment on in my struggle
against the view that sensations are immutable psychic things which
coexist with higher mental functions. Both sensationalists and
intellectualists agree that such sensations exist. They _fuse_, say
the pure sensationalists, and _make_ the higher mental function;
they _are combined_ by activity of the Thinking Principle, say the
intellectualists. I myself have contended that they _do not exist_ in
or alongside of the higher mental function when that exists. The things
which arouse them exist; and the higher mental function also knows
these same things. But just as its knowledge of the things supersedes
and displaces their knowledge, so it supersedes and displaces them,
when it comes, being as much as they are a direct resultant of whatever
momentary brain-conditions may obtain. The psychological theory of
contrast, on the other hand, holds the sensations still to exist in
themselves unchanged before the mind, whilst the 'relating activity' of
the latter deals with them freely and settles to its own satisfaction
what each shall be, in view of what the others also are. Wundt says
expressly that the Law of Relativity is "not a law of sensation but
a law of Apperception;" and the word Apperception connotes with him
a higher intellectual spontaneity.[32] This way of taking things
belongs with the philosophy that looks at the _data_ of sense as
something earth-born and servile, and the 'relating of them together'
as something spiritual and free. Lo! the spirit can even change the
intrinsic quality of the sensible facts themselves if by so doing it
can relate them better to each other! But (apart from the difficulty of
seeing how changing the sensations should relate them better) is it not
manifest that the relations are part of the 'content' of consciousness,
part of the 'object,' just as much as the sensations are? Why ascribe
the former exclusively to the _knower_ and the latter to the _known_?
The _knower_ is in every case a unique pulse of thought corresponding
to a unique reaction of the brain upon its conditions. All that the
facts of contrast show us is that the _same real thing_ may give us
quite different sensations when the conditions alter, and that we
must therefore be careful which one to select as the thing's truest
representative.

       *       *       *       *       *

_There are many other facts beside the phenomena of contrast_ which
prove that _when two objects act together on us the sensation which
either would give alone becomes a different sensation_. A certain
amount of skin dipped in hot water gives the perception of a certain
heat. More skin immersed makes the heat much more intense, although
of course the water's heat is the same. A certain extent as well
as intensity, in the quantity of the stimulus is requisite for any
quality to be felt. Fick and Wunderli could not distinguish heat
from touch when both were applied through a hole in a card, and so
confined to a small part of the skin. Similarly there is a _chromatic
minimum_ of size in objects. The image they cast on the retina must
needs have a certain extent, or it will give no sensation of color
at all. Inversely, more intensity in the outward impression may make
the subjective object more extensive. This happens, as will be shown
in Chapter XIX, when the illumination is increased: The whole room
expands and dwindles according as we raise or lower the gas-jet. It is
not easy to explain any of these results as illusions of judgment due
to the inference of a wrong objective cause for the sensation which we
get. No more is this easy in the case of Weber's observation that a
thaler laid on the skin of the forehead feels heavier when cold than
when warm; or of Szabadföldi's observation that small wooden disks
when heated to 122° Fahrenheit often feel heavier than those which are
larger but not thus warmed;[33] or of Hall's observation that a heavy
point moving over the skin seems to go faster than a lighter one moving
at the same rate of speed.[34]

Bleuler and Lehmann some years ago called attention to a strange
idiosyncrasy found in some persons, and consisting in the fact that
impressions on the eye, skin, etc., were accompanied by distinct
sensations of _sound_.[35] _Colored hearing_ is the name sometimes
given to the phenomenon, which has now been repeatedly described. Quite
lately the Viennese aurist Urbantschitsch has proved that these cases
are only extreme examples of a very general law, and that all our
sense-organs influence each other's sensations.[36] The hue of patches
of color so distant as not to be recognized was immediately, in U.'s
patients, perceived when a tuning-fork was sounded close to the ear.
Sometimes, on the contrary, the field was darkened by the sound. The
acuity of vision was increased, so that letters too far off to be read
could be read when the tuning-fork was heard. Urbantschitsch, varying
his experiments, found that their results were mutual, and that sounds
which were on the limits of audibility became audible when lights of
various colors were exhibited to the eye. Smell, taste, touch, sense
of temperature, etc., were all found to fluctuate when lights were
seen and sounds were heard. Individuals varied much in the degree and
kind of effect produced, but almost every one experimented on seems to
have been in some way affected. The phenomena remind one somewhat of
the 'dynamogenic' effects of sensations upon the strength of muscular
contraction observed by M. Féré, and later to be described. The most
familiar examples of them seem to be the increase of _pain_ by noise
or light, and the increase of _nausea_ by all concomitant sensations.
Persons suffering in any way instinctively seek stillness and darkness.

       *       *       *       *       *

Probably every one will agree that the best way of formulating all such
facts is physiological: it must be that the cerebral process of the
first sensation is reinforced or otherwise altered by the other current
which comes in. No one, surely, will prefer a psychological explanation
_here_. Well, it seems to me that _all_ cases of mental reaction
to a plurality of stimuli must be like these cases, and that the
physiological formulation is everywhere the simplest and the best. When
simultaneous red and green light make us see yellow, when three notes
of the scale make us hear a chord, it is not because the sensations of
red and of green and of each of the three notes enter the mind as such,
and there 'combine' or 'are combined by its relating activity' into
the yellow and the chord, it is because the larger sum of light-waves
and of air-waves arouses new cortical processes, to which the yellow
and the chord directly correspond. Even when the sensible qualities of
things enter into the objects of our highest thinking, it is surely
the same. Their several _sensations_ do not continue to exist there
tucked away. They are _replaced_ by the higher thought which, although
a different psychic unit from them, knows the same sensible qualities
which they know.

The principles laid down in Chapter VI seem then to be corroborated in
this new connection. _You cannot build up one thought or one sensation
out of many; and only direct experiment can inform us of what we shall
perceive when we get many stimuli at once._


THE 'ECCENTRIC PROJECTION' OF SENSATIONS.


We often hear the opinion expressed that all our sensations at first
appear to us as subjective or internal, and are afterwards and by a
special act on our part 'extradited' or 'projected' so as to appear
located in an outer world. Thus we read in Professor Ladd's valuable
work that

 "Sensations... are psychical states _whose place_--so far as they
 can be said to have one--_is the mind_. The transference of these
 sensations from mere mental states to physical processes located
 in the periphery of the body, or to qualities of things projected
 in space external to the body, is a mental act. It may rather be
 said to be a mental _achievement_ [cf. Cudworth, footnote 10,
 as to knowledge being _conquering_], for it is an act which in
 its perfection results from a long and intricate process of
 development.... Two noteworthy stages, or 'epoch-making' achievements
 in the process of elaborating the presentations of sense, require a
 special consideration. These are '_localization_,' or the transference
 of the composite sensations from mere states of the mind to processes
 or conditions recognized as taking place at more or less definitely
 fixed points or areas of the body; and '_eccentric projection_'
 (sometimes called 'eccentric perception') or the giving to these
 sensations an objective existence (in the fullest sense of the word
 'objective') as qualities of objects situated within a field of space
 and in contact with, or more or less remotely distant from, the
 body."[37]

It seems to me that there is not a vestige of evidence for this view.
It hangs together with the opinion that our sensations are originally
devoid of all spatial content,[38] an opinion which I confess that I
am wholly at a loss to understand. As I look at my bookshelf opposite
I cannot frame to myself an idea, however imaginary, of any feeling
which I could ever possibly have got from it except the feeling of the
same big extended sort of outward fact which I now perceive. So far is
it from being true that our first way of feeling things is the feeling
of them as subjective or mental, that the exact opposite seems rather
to be the truth. Our earliest, most instinctive, least developed kind
of consciousness is the objective kind; and only as reflection becomes
developed do we become aware of an inner world at all. Then indeed
we enrich it more and more, even to the point of becoming idealists,
with the spoils of the outer world which at first was the only world
we knew. But subjective consciousness, aware of itself as subjective,
does not at first exist. Even an attack of pain is surely felt at first
objectively as something in space which prompts to motor reaction, and
to the very end it is located, not in the mind, but in some bodily part.

 "A sensation which should not awaken an impulse to move, nor any
 tendency to produce an outward effect, would manifestly be useless to
 a living creature. On the principles of evolution such a sensation
 could never be developed. Therefore every sensation originally refers
 to something external and independent of the sentient creature.
 Rhizopods (according to Engelmann's observations) retract their
 pseudopodia whenever these touch foreign bodies, even if these
 foreign bodies are the pseudopodia of other individuals of their
 own species, whilst the mutual contact of their own pseudopodia is
 followed by no such contraction. These low animals can therefore
 already feel an outer world--even in the absence of innate ideas of
 causality, and probably without any clear consciousness of space. In
 truth the conviction that something exists outside of ourselves does
 not come from thought. It comes from sensation; it rests on the same
 ground as our conviction of our own existence.... If we consider the
 behavior of new-born animals, we never find them betraying that they
 are first of all conscious of their sensations as purely subjective
 excitements. We far more readily incline to explain the astonishing
 certainty with which they make use of their sensations (and which is
 an effect of adaptation and inheritance) as the result of an inborn
 intuition of the outer world.... Instead of starting from an original
 pure subjectivity of sensation, and seeking how this could possibly
 have acquired an objective signification, we must, on the contrary,
 begin by the possession of objectivity by the sensation and then show
 how for reflective consciousness the latter becomes interpreted as an
 effect of the object, how in short the original immediate objectivity
 becomes changed into a remote one."[39]

Another confusion, much more common than the denial of all objective
character to sensations, is the assumption that they are all originally
located _inside the body_ and are projected outward by a secondary
act. This secondary judgment is always false, according to M. Taine,
so far as the place of the sensation itself goes. But it happens to
_hit_ a real object which is at the point towards which the sensation
is projected; so we may call its result, according to this author, a
_veridical hallucination_.[40] The word Sensation, to begin with, is
constantly, in psychological literature, used as if it meant one and
the same thing with the _physical impression_ either in the terminal
organs or in the centres, which is its antecedent condition, and this
notwithstanding that by sensation we mean a mental, not a physical,
fact. But those who expressly mean by it a mental fact still leave to
it a physical _place_, still think of it as objectively inhabiting the
very neural tracts which occasion its appearance when they are excited;
and then (going a step farther) they think that it must _place itself_
where _they_ place it, or be subjectively sensible of that place as its
habitat in the first instance, and afterwards have to be _moved_ so as
to appear elsewhere.

All this seems highly confused and unintelligible. Consciousness, as
we saw in an earlier chapter (vol. I p. 214) cannot properly be said
to _inhabit_ any place. It has dynamic relations with the brain, and
cognitive relations with everything and anything. From the one point
of view _we_ may say that a sensation is in the same place with the
brain (if we like), just as from the other point of view we may say
that it is in the same place with whatever quality it may be cognizing.
But the supposition that a sensation primitively _feels either itself
or its object to be in the same place with the brain_ is absolutely
groundless, and neither _a priori_ probability nor facts from
experience can be adduced to show that such a deliverance forms any
part of the original cognitive function of our sensibility.

Where, then, do we feel the objects of our original sensations to be?

Certainly a child newly born in Boston, who gets a sensation from the
candle-flame which lights the bedroom, or from his diaper-pin, does
not feel either of these objects to be situated in longitude 72° W.
and latitude 41° N. He does not feel them to be in the third story of
the house. He does not even feel them in any distinct manner to be
to the right or the left of any of the other sensations which he may
be getting from other objects in the room at the same time. He does
not, in short, know anything _about_ their space-relations to anything
else in the world. The flame fills its own place, the pain fills its
own place; but as yet these places are neither identified with, nor
discriminated from, any other places. That comes later. For the places
thus first sensibly known are elements of the child's space-world which
remain with him all his life; and by memory and later experience he
learns a vast number of things _about_ those places which at first he
did not know. But to the end of time certain places of the world remain
defined for him as the places _where those sensations were_; and his
only possible answer to the question _where anything is_ will be to say
'_there_,' and to name some sensation or other like those first ones,
which shall identify the spot. Space _means_ but the aggregate of all
our possible sensations. There is no duplicate space known _aliunde_,
or created by an 'epoch-making achievement' into which our sensations,
originally spaceless, are dropped. They _bring_ space and all its
places to our intellect, and do not derive it thence.

By his body, then, the child later means simply _that place where_
the pain from the pin, and a lot of other sensations like it, were or
are felt. It is no more true to say that he locates that pain in his
body, than to say that he locates his body in that pain. Both are true:
that pain is part of what he _means by the word body_. Just so by the
outer world the child means nothing more than _that place where_ the
candle-flame and a lot of other sensations like it are felt. He no more
locates the candle in the outer world than he locates the outer world
in the candle. Once again, he does both; for the candle is part of what
he _means_ by 'outer world.'

       *       *       *       *       *

This (it seems to me) will be admitted, and will (I trust) be made
still more plausible in the chapter on the Perception of Space. But the
later developments of this perception are so complicated that these
simple principles get easily overlooked. One of the complications
comes from the fact that things _move_, and that the original object
which we feel them to be splits into two parts, one of which remains as
their whereabouts and the other goes off as their quality or nature.
We then contrast where they _were_ with where they _are_. If _we_ do
not move, the sensation of _where they were_ remains unchanged; but we
ourselves presently move, so that that also changes; and 'where they
were' becomes no longer the actual sensation which it was originally,
but a sensation which we merely conceive as possible. Gradually the
system of these possible sensations, takes more and more the place of
the actual sensations. 'Up' and 'down' become 'subjective' notions;
east and west grow more 'correct' than 'right' and 'left' etc.; and
things get at last more 'truly' located by their relation to certain
ideal fixed co-ordinates than by their relation either to our bodies
or to those objects by which their place was originally defined. _Now
this revision of our original localizations is a complex affair; and
contains some facts which may very naturally come to be described as
translocations whereby sensations get shoved farther off than they
originally appeared._

Few things indeed are more striking than the changeable distance which
the objects of many of our sensations may be made to assume. A fly's
humming may be taken for a distant steam-whistle; or the fly itself,
seen out of focus, may for a moment give us the illusion of a distant
bird. The same things seem much nearer or much farther, according as we
look at them through one end or another of an opera-glass. Our whole
optical education indeed is largely taken up with assigning their
proper distances to the objects of our retinal sensations. An infant
will grasp at the moon; later, it is said, he projects that sensation
to a distance which he knows to be beyond his reach. In the much quoted
case of the 'young gentleman who was born blind,' and who was 'couched'
for the cataract by Mr. Chesselden, it is reported of the patient
that "when he first saw, he was so far from making any judgment about
distances, that he thought all objects whatever touched his eyes (as he
expressed it) as what he felt did his skin." And other patients born
blind, but relieved by surgical operation, have been described as
bringing their hand close to their eyes to feel for the objects which
they at first saw, and only gradually stretching out their hand when
they found that no contact occurred. Many have concluded from these
facts that our earliest visual objects must seem in immediate contact
with our eyes.

But tactile objects also may be affected with a like ambiguity of
situation.

If one of the hairs of our head be pulled, we are pretty accurately
sensible of the direction of the pulling by the movements imparted to
the head.[41] But the feeling of the pull is localized, not in that
part of the hair's length which the fingers hold, but in the scalp
itself. This seems connected with the fact that our hair hardly serves
at all as a tactile organ. In creatures with _vibrissæ_, however, and
in those quadrupeds whose whiskers are tactile organs, it can hardly be
doubted that the feeling is projected out of the root into the shaft of
the hair itself. We ourselves have an approach to this when the beard
as a whole, or the hair as a whole, is touched. We perceive the contact
at some distance from the skin.

When fixed and hard appendages of the body, like the teeth and nails,
are touched, we feel the contact where it objectively is, and not
deeper in, where the nerve-terminations lie. If, however, the tooth is
loose, we feel two contacts, spatially separated, one at its root, one
at its top.

From this ease to that of a hard body not organically connected with
the surface, but only accidentally in contact with it, the transition
is immediate. With the point of a cane we can trace letters in the air
or on a wall just as with the finger-tip; and in so doing feel the size
and shape of the path described by the cane's tip just as immediately
as, without a cane, we should feel the path described by the tip of our
finger. Similarly the draughtsman's immediate perception seems to be of
the point of his pencil, the surgeon's of the end of his knife, the
duellist's of the tip of his rapier as it plunges through his enemy's
skin. When on the middle of a vibrating ladder, we feel not only our
feet on the round, but the ladder's feet against the ground far below.
If we shake a locked iron gate we feel the middle, on which our hands
rest, move, but we equally feel the stability of the ends where the
hinges and the lock are, and we seem to feel all three at once.[42] And
yet the place where the contact is _received_ is in all these cases the
skin, whose sensations accordingly are sometimes interpreted as objects
on the surface, and at other times as objects a long distance off.

We shall learn in the chapter on Space that our feelings of our
own movement are principally due to the sensibility of our rotating
_joints_. Sometimes by fixing the attention, say on our elbow-joint,
we can feel the movement in the joint itself; but we always are
simultaneously conscious of the path which during the movement our
finger-tips describe through the air, and yet these same finger-tips
themselves are in no way physically modified by the motion. A blow on
our ulnar nerve behind the elbow is felt both there and in the fingers.
Refrigeration of the elbow produces pain in the fingers. Electric
currents passed through nerve-trunks, whether of cutaneous or of more
special sensibility (such as the optic nerve), give rise to sensations
which are vaguely localized beyond the nerve-tracts traversed. Persons
whose legs or arms have been amputated are, as is well known, apt to
preserve an illusory feeling of the lost hand or foot being there. Even
when they do not have this feeling constantly, it may be occasionally
brought back. This sometimes is the result of exciting electrically the
nerve-trunks buried in the stump.

 "I recently faradized," says Dr. Mitchell, "a case of disarticulated
 shoulder without warning my patient of the possible result. For two
 years he had altogether ceased to feel the limb. As the current
 affected the brachial plexus of nerves he suddenly cried aloud, 'Oh
 the hand,--the hand!' and attempted to seize the missing member. The
 phantom I had conjured up swiftly disappeared, but no spirit could
 have more amazed the man, so real did it seem."[43]

Now the apparent position of the lost extremity varies. Often the foot
seems on the ground, or follows the position of the artificial foot,
where one is used. Sometimes where the arm is lost the elbow will seem
bent, and the hand in a fixed position on the breast. Sometimes, again,
the position is non-natural, and the hand will seem to bud straight
out of the shoulder, or the foot to be on the same level with the knee
of the remaining leg. Sometimes, again, the position is vague; and
sometimes it is ambiguous, as in another patient of Dr. Weir Mitchell's
who

 "lost his leg at the age of eleven, and remembers that the foot by
 degrees approached, and at last reached the knee. When he began to
 wear an artificial leg it reassumed in time its old position, and he
 is never at present aware of the leg as shortened, unless for some
 time he talks and thinks of the stump, and of the missing leg, when ...
 the direction of attention to the part causes a feeling of discomfort,
 and the subjective sensation of active and unpleasant movement of the
 toes. With these feelings returns at once the delusion of the foot as
 being placed at the knee."

All these facts, and others like them, can easily be described as if
our sensations might be induced by circumstances to migrate from their
_original locality_ near the brain or near the surface of the body, and
to appear farther off; and (under different circumstances) to return
again after having migrated. But a little analysis of what happens
shows us that this description is inaccurate.

_The objectivity with which each of our sensations originally comes to
us, the roomy and spatial character which is a primitive part of its
content, is not in the first instance relative to any other sensation._
The first time we open our eyes we get an optical object which is _a
place_, but which is not yet _placed_ in relation to any other object,
nor identified with any place otherwise known. It is a place with
which so far we are only _acquainted_. When later we know that this
same place is in 'front' of us, that only means that we have learned
something _about_ it, namely, that it is _congruent with that_ _other_
place, called 'front,' which is given us by certain sensations of the
arm and hand or of the head and body. But at the first moment of our
optical experience, even though we already had an acquaintance with
our head, hand, and body, we could not possibly know anything about
their relations to this new seen object. It could not be immediately
located in respect of _them_. How its place agrees with the places
which their feelings yield is a matter of which only later experience
can inform us; and in the next chapter we shall see with some detail
how later experience does this by means of discrimination, association,
selection, and other constantly working functions of the mind. When,
therefore, the baby grasps at the moon, that does not mean that what
he sees fails to give him the sensation which he afterwards knows
as distance; it means only that he has not learned at what _tactile
or manual distance_ things which appear at that _visual distance_
are.[44] And when a person just operated for cataract gropes close to
his face for far-off objects, that only means the same thing. All the
ordinary optical signs of differing distances are absent from the poor
creature's sensation anyhow. His vision is monocular (only one eye
being operated at a time); the lens is gone, and everything is out of
focus; he feels photophobia, lachrymation, and other painful resident
sensations of the eyeball itself, whose place he has long since learned
to know in tactile terms; what wonder, then, that the first tactile
reaction which the new sensations provoke should be one associated with
the tactile situation of the organ itself? And as for his assertions
about the matter, what wonder, again, if, as Prof. Paul Janet says,
they are still expressed in the tactile language which is the only
one he knows. "_To be touched_ means for him to receive an impression
without first making a movement." His eye gets such an impression now;
so he can only say that the objects are 'touching it.'

 "All his language, borrowed from touch, but applied to the objects
 of his sight, make us think that he perceives differently from
 ourselves, whereas, at bottom, it is only his different way of
 talking about the same experience."[45]

The other cases of translocation of our sensations are equally easily
interpreted without supposing any 'projection' from a centre at which
they are originally perceived. Unfortunately the details are intricate;
and what I say now can only be made fully clear when we come to the
next chapter. We shall then see that we are constantly selecting
certain of our sensations as _realities_ and degrading others to the
status of _signs_ of these. When we get one of the signs we think of
the reality signified; and the strange thing is that then the reality
(which need not be itself a sensation at all at the time, but only an
idea) is so interesting that it acquires an hallucinatory strength,
which may even eclipse that of the relatively uninteresting sign and
entirely divert our attention from the latter. Thus the sensations to
which our joints give rise when they rotate are signs of what, through
a large number of other sensations, tactile and optical, we have come
to know as the movement of the whole limb. This movement of the whole
limb is what we _think of_ when the joint's nerves are excited in
that way; and _its_ place is so much more important than the joint's
place that our sense of the latter is taken up, so to speak, into our
perception of the former, and the sensation of the movement seems to
diffuse itself into our very fingers and toes. But by abstracting our
attention from the suggestion of the entire extremity we can perfectly
well perceive the same sensation as if it were concentrated in one
spot. We can identify it with a differently located tactile and visual
image of 'the joint' itself.

Just so when we feel the tip of our cane against the ground. The
peculiar sort of movement of the hand (impossible in one direction,
but free in every other) which we experience when the tip touches 'the
ground,' is a sign to us of the visual and tactile object which we
already know under that name. We think of 'the ground' as being there
and giving us the sensation of this kind of movement. The sensation,
we say, comes _from_ the ground. The ground's place seems to be its
place; although at the same time, and for very similar practical
reasons, we think of another optical and tactile object, 'the hand'
namely, and consider that _its_ place _also_ must be the place of our
sensation. In other words, we take an object or sensible content A,
and confounding it with another object otherwise known, B, or with
two objects otherwise known, B and C, we identify its place with
their places. But in all this there is _no 'projecting'_ (such as the
extradition-philosophers talk of) of A out of an _original_ place; no
primitive location which it first occupied, _away from_ these other
sensations, has to be contradicted; no natural 'centre,' from which it
is expelled, exists. That would imply that A aboriginally came to us in
definite local relations with other sensations, for to be _out_ of B
and C is to be in local relation with them as much as to be _in_ them
is so. But it was no more out of B and C than it was in them when it
first came to us. It simply had nothing to do with them. To say that
we feel a sensation's seat to be 'in the brain' or 'against the eye'
or 'under the skin' is to say as much _about_ it and to deal with it
in as non-primitive a way as to say that it is a mile off. These are
all secondary perceptions, ways of defining the sensation's seat _per
aliud_. They involve numberless associations, identifications, and
imaginations, and admit a great deal of vacillation and uncertainty in
the result.[46]

       *       *       *       *       *

_I conclude, then, that there is no truth in the 'eccentric projection'
theory_. It is due to the confused assumption that the bodily processes
which cause a sensation must also be its seat.[47] But sensations
have no seat in this sense. They _become_ seats for each other, as
fast as experience associates them together; but that violates no
primitive seat possessed by any one of them. And though our sensations
cannot then so analyze and talk of themselves, yet at their very first
appearance quite as much as at any later date are they cognizant of
all those qualities which we end by extracting and conceiving under
the names of _objectivity, exteriority,_ and _extent_. It is surely
subjectivity and interiority which are the notions _latest_ acquired by
the human mind.[48]

       *       *       *       *       *

[1] Some persons will say that we never have a really simple object or
content. My definition of sensation does not require the simplicity
to be absolutely, but only relatively, extreme. It is worth while in
passing, however, to warn the reader against a couple of inferences
that are often made. One is that because we gradually learn to analyze
so many qualities we ought to conclude that there are no really
indecomposable feelings in the mind. The other is that because the
processes that produce our sensations are multiple, the sensations
regarded as subjective facts must also be compound. To take an example,
to a child the taste of lemonade comes at first as a simple quality. He
later learns both that many stimuli and many nerves are involved in the
exhibition of this taste to his mind, and he also learns to perceive
separately the sourness, the coolness, the sweet, the lemon aroma,
etc., and the several degrees of strength of each and all of these
things,--the experience falling into a large number of aspects, each
of which is abstracted, classed, named, etc., and all of which appear
to be the elementary sensations into which the original 'lemonade
flavor' is decomposed. It is argued from this that the latter never was
the simple thing which it seemed. I have already criticised this sort
of reasoning in Chapter VI (see pp. 170 ff.). The mind of the child
enjoying the simple lemonade flavor and that of the same child grown up
and analyzing it are in two entirely different conditions. Subjectively
considered, the two states of mind are two altogether distinct sorts
of fact. The later mental state says 'this is the _same flavor (or
fluid)_ which that earlier state perceived as simple,' but that does
not make the two states themselves identical. It is nothing but a case
of learning more and more _about_ the same topics of discourse or
things.--Many of these topics, however, must be confessed to resist
all analysis, the various colors for example. He who sees blue and
yellow 'in' a certain green means merely that when green is confronted
with these other colors he sees relations of _similarity_. He who sees
abstract 'color' in it means merely that he sees a similarity between
it and all the other objects known as colors. (Similarity itself
cannot ultimately be accounted for by an identical abstract element
buried in all the similars, as has been already shown, p. 492 ff.)
He who sees abstract paleness, intensity, purity, in the green means
other similarities still. These are all outward determinations of that
special green, knowledges _about_ it, _zufällige Ansichten_, as Herbart
would say, not _elements_ of its composition. Compare the article by
Meinong in the Vierteljahrschrift für wiss. Phil., xii. 324.

[2] See Vol. I, p. 221.

[3] Those who wish a fuller treatment than Martin's Human Body affords
may be recommended to Bernstein's 'Five Senses of Man,' in the
International Scientific Series, or to Ladd's or Wundt's Physiological
Psychology. The completest compendium is L. Hermann's Handbuch der
Physiologie, vol. iii.

[4] "The sensations which we _postulate_ as the signs or occasions
of our perceptions" (A. Seth: Scottish Philosophy, p. 89). "Their
existence is _supposed_ only because, without them, it would be
impossible to account for the complex phenomena which are directly
present in consciousness" (J. Dewey: Psychology, p. 34). Even as
great an enemy of Sensation as T. H. Green has to allow it a sort
of hypothetical existence under protest. "Perception presupposes
feeling" (Contemp. Review, vol. xxxi. p. 747). Cf. also such passages
as those in his Prolegomena to Ethics, §§ 48, 49.--Physiologically,
the sensory and the reproductive or associative processes may wax
and wane independently of each other. Where the part directly due
to stimulation of the sense-organ preponderates, the thought has
a sensational character, and differs from other thoughts in the
sensational direction. Those thoughts which lie farthest in that
direction we call _sensations_, for practical convenience, just as we
call _conceptions_ those which lie nearer the opposite extreme. But we
no more have conceptions pure than we have pure sensations. Our most
rarefied intellectual states involve some bodily sensibility, just
as our dullest feelings have some intellectual scope. Common-sense
and common psychology express this by saying that the mental state is
composed of distinct fractional _parts_, one of which is sensation, the
other conception. We, however, who believe every mental state to be an
integral thing (Vol. I. p. 276) cannot talk thus, but must speak of the
degree of sensational or intellectual character, or function, of the
mental state. Professor Hering puts, as usual, his finger better upon
the truth than any one else. Writing of visual perception, he says: "It
is inadmissible in the present state of our knowledge to assert that
first and last the same retinal picture arouses exactly the same _pure
sensation_, but that this sensation, in consequence of practice and
experience, is differently _interpreted_ the last time, and elaborated
into a different perception from the first. For the only real _data_
are, on the one hand, the physical picture on the retina,--and that is
both times the same; and, on the other hand, the resultant state of
consciousness (_ausgeloste Empfindungscomplex_)--and that is both times
distinct. _Of any third thing, namely, a pure sensation thrust between
the retinal and the mental pictures, we know nothing. We can then, if
we wish to avoid all hypothesis, only say that the nervous apparatus
reacts upon the same stimulus differently the last time from the
first, and that in consequence the consciousness is different too._"
(Hermann's Hdbch., iii. i. 567-8.)

[5] Yet even writers like Prof. Bain will deny, in the most gratuitous
way, that sensations know anything. "It is evident that the lowest
or most restricted form of sensation does not contain an element of
knowledge. The mere state of mind called the sensation of scarlet
is not knowledge, although a necessary preparation for it." 'Is not
knowledge _about_ scarlet' is all that Professor Bain can rightfully
say.

[6] By simple ideas of sensation Locke merely means sensations.

[7] Essay c. H. U., bk. ii. ch. xxiii. § 29; ch. xxv. § 9.

[8] _Op. cit_. bk. ii. ch. ii. § 2.

[9] "So far is it from being true that we necessarily have as many
feelings in consciousness at one time as there are inlets to the sense
then played upon, that it is a fundamental law of pure sensation that
each momentary state of the organism yields but one feeling, however
numerous may be its parts and its exposures.... To this original
Unity of consciousness it makes no difference that the tributaries
to the single feeling are beyond the organism instead of within it,
in an outside object with several sensible properties, instead of in
the living body with its several sensitive functions.... The unity
therefore is not made by 'association' of several components; but the
plurality is formed by _dissociation_ of unsuspected varieties within
the unity; the substantive thing being no product of synthesis, but
the residuum of differentiation." (J. Martineau: A Study of Religion
(1888), p. 193-4.) Compare also F. H. Bradley, Logic, book i. chap. ii.

[10] Such passages as the following abound in anti-sensationalist
literature: "Sense is a kind of dull, confused, and stupid perception
obtruded upon the soul from without, whereby it perceives the
alterations and motions within its own body, and takes cognizance
of individual bodies existing round about it, but does not clearly
comprehend what they are nor penetrate into the nature of them, it
being intended by nature, as Plotinus speaks, not so properly for
_knowledge_ as for the _use of the body_. For the soul suffering under
that which it perceives by way of _passion_ cannot master or _Conquer_
it, that is to say, know or understand it. For so Anaxagoras in
Aristotle very fitly expresses the nature of knowledge and intellection
under the notion of _Conquering_. Wherefore it is necessary, since
the mind understands all things, that it should be free from mixture
and passion, for this end, as Anaxagoras speaks, that it may be able
to _master and conquer_ its objects, that is to say, to _know and
understand_ them. In like manner Plotinus, in his book of Sense and
Memory, makes to _suffer_ and to _be conquered_ all one, as also to
_know_ and to _conquer_; for which reason he concludes that that which
suffers doth not know.... Sense that suffers from external objects
lies as it were prostrate under them, and is overcome by them....
Sense therefore is a certain kind of drowsy and somnolent perception
of that passive part of the soul which is as it were asleep in the
body, and acts concretely with it.... It is an energy arising from the
body and a certain kind of drowsy or sleeping life of the soul blended
together with it. The perceptions of which compound, or of the soul as
it were half asleep and half awake, are confused, indistinct, turbid,
and encumbered cogitations very different from the energies of the
noetical part,... which are free, clear, serene, satisfactory, and
awakened cogitations. That is to say, knowledges." Etc., etc., etc.
(R. Cudworth: Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, bk.
iii. chap. ii.) Similarly Malebranche: "THÉODORE.--Oh, oh, Ariste! God
knows pain, pleasure, warmth, and the rest. But he does not feel these
things. He knows pain, since he knows what that modification of the
soul is in which pain consists. He knows it because he alone causes
it in us (as I shall presently prove), and he knows what he does. In
a word, he knows it because his knowledge has no bounds. But he does
not feel it, for if so he would be unhappy. To know pain, then, is
not to feel it. ARISTE.--That is true. But to feel it is to know it,
is it not? THÉODORE.--No indeed, since God does not feel it in the
least, and yet he knows it perfectly. But in order not to quibble about
terms, if you will have it that to feel pain is to know it, agree at
least that it is not to know it clearly, that it is not to know it by
light and by evidence--in a word, that it is not to know its nature; in
other words and to speak exactly, it is not to know it at all. To feel
pain, for example, is to feel ourselves unhappy without well knowing
either what we are or what is this modality of our being which makes us
unhappy.... Impose silence on your senses, your imagination, and your
passions, and you will hear the pure voice of inner truth, the clear
and evident replies of our common master. Never confound the evidence
which results from the comparison of ideas with the liveliness of the
sensations which touch and thrill you. The livelier our sensations and
feelings (_sentiments_) are, the more darkness do they shed. The more
terrible or agreeable are our phantoms, and the more body and reality
they appear to have, the more dangerous are they and fit to lead us
astray." (Entretiens sur la Métaphysique, 3me Entretien, _ad init._)
Malebranche's Théodore prudently does not try to explain how God's
'infinite felicity' is compatible with his not feeling joy.

[11] Green: Prolegomena, §§ 20, 28.

[12] Introd. to Hume, §§ 146, 188. It is hard to tell just what this
apostolic human being but strenuously feeble writer means by relation.
Sometimes it seems to stand for system of related fact. The ubiquity
of the 'psychologist's fallacy' (see Vol. I p. 196) in his pages, his
incessant leaning on the confusion between the thing known, the thought
that knows it, and the farther things known about that thing and about
that thought by later and additional thoughts, make it impossible to
clear up his meaning. Compare, however, with the utterances in the
text such others as these: "The waking of Self-consciousness from the
sleep of sense is an absolute new beginning, and nothing can come
within the 'crystal sphere' of intelligence except as it is determined
by intelligence. What sense is to sense is nothing for thought. What
sense is to thought, it is as determined _by_ thought. There can,
therefore, be no 'reality' in sensation to which the world of thought
can be referred." (Edward Caird's Philosophy of Kant, 1st ed. pp.
393-4.) "When," says Green again, "feeling a pain or pleasure of heat,
I perceive it to be connected with the action of approaching the fire,
am I not perceiving a relation _of which one constituent, at any rate,
is a simple sensation? The true answer is, No._" "Perception, in its
simplest form...--perception as the first sight or touch of an object
in which nothing but what is seen or touched is recognized--_neither
is nor contains sensation_" (Contemp. Rev., xxxi. pp. 746, 750.) "Mere
sensation is in truth a phrase that represents no reality." "Mere
feeling, then, as a matter unformed by thought, has no place in the
world of facts, in the cosmos of possible experience." (Prolegomena to
Ethics, §§ 46, 50.)--I have expressed myself a little more fully on
this subject in Mind, x. 27 ff.

[13] Stumpf: Tonpsychologie, i. pp. 7, 8. Hobbes's phrase, _sentire
semper idem et non sentire ad idem recidunt_, is generally treated as
the original statement of the relativity doctrine. J. S. Mill (Examn.
of Hamilton, p. 6) and Bain (Senses and Intellect, p. 321; Emotions
and Will, pp. 550, 570-2; Logic, i. p. 2; Body and Mind, p. 81) are
subscribers to this doctrine. Cf. also J. Mill's Analysis, J. S. Mill's
edition, II. 11, 12.

[14] We can steadily hear a note for half an hour. The differences
between the senses are marked. Smell and taste seem soon to get
fatigued.

[15] In the popular mind it is mixed up with that entirely different
doctrine of the 'Relativity of Knowledge' preached by Hamilton and
Spencer. This doctrine says that our knowledge is relative _to us_, and
is not of the object as the latter is in itself. It has nothing to do
with the question which we have been discussing, of whether our objects
of knowledge contain absolute terms or consist altogether of relations.

[16] What follows in brackets, as far as p. 27, is from the pen of my
friend and pupil Mr. E. B. Delabarre.

[17] These phenomena have close analogues in the phenomena of contrast
presented by the temperature-sense (see W. Preyer in Archiv f. d.
ges. Phys., Bd. xxv. p. 79 ff.). Successive contrast here is shown in
the fact that a warm sensation appears warmer if a cold one has just
previously been experienced; and a cold one colder, if the preceding
one was warm. If a finger which has been plunged in hot water, and
another which has been in cold water, be both immersed in lukewarm
water, the same water appears cold to the former finger and warm to the
latter. In simultaneous contrast, a sensation of warmth on any part
of the skin tends to induce the sensation of cold in its immediate
neighborhood; and _vice versâ_. This may be seen if we press with the
palm on two metal surfaces of about an inch and a half square and
three-fourths inch apart; the skin between them appears distinctly
warmer. So also a small object of exactly the temperature of the palm
appears warm if a cold object, and cold if a warm object, touch the
skin near it.

[18] Helmholtz, Physiolog. Optik, p. 392.

[19] _Loc. cit._ p. 407.

[20] _Loc. cit._ p. 408.

[21] _Loc. cit._ p. 406.

[22] E. Hering, in Hermann's Handbuch d. Physiologie, iii. 1, p. 565.

[23] Hering: 'Zur Lehre vom Lichtsinne.'--Of these experiments the
following (found on p. 24 ff.) may be cited as a typical one: "From
dark gray paper cut two strips 3-4 cm. long and 1/2 cm. wide, and lay
them on a background of which one half is white and the other half
deep black, in such a way that one strip lies on each side of the
border-line and parallel to it, and at least 1 cm. distant from it.
Fixate 1/2 to 1 minute a point on the border-line between the strips.
One strip appears much brighter than the other. Close and cover the
eyes, and the negative after-image appears.... The difference in
brightness of the strips in the after-image is in general much greater
than it appeared in direct vision.... This difference in brightness
of the strips by no means always increases and decreases with the
difference in brightness of the two halves of the background.... A
phase occurs in which the difference in brightness of the two halves
of the background entirely disappears, and yet both after-images of
the strips are still very clear, one of them brighter and one darker
than the background, which is equally bright on both halves. Here can
no longer be any question of contrast-effect, because the _conditio
sine quâ non_ of contrast, namely, the differing brightness of the
ground, is no longer present. This proves that the different brightness
of the after-images of the strips must have its ground in a different
state of excitation of the corresponding portions of the retina, and
from this follows further that both these portions of the retina
were differently stimulated during the original observation; for the
different after-effect demands here a different fore-effect.... In
the original arrangement, the objectively similar strips appeared of
different brightness, because both corresponding portions of the retina
were truly differently excited."

[24] Helmholtz, Physiolog. Optik, p. 407.

[25] In Archiv f. d. ges. Physiol., Bd. xli. §. 1 ff.

[26] Helmholtz, _loc. cit._ p. 412.

[27] See Hering: Archiv f. d. ges. Physiol., Bd. xli. S. 358 ff.

[28] Hering: Archiv f. d. ges. Physiol., Bd. xl. S. 172 ff.; Delabarre:
American Journal of Psychology, ii. 636.

[29] Hering: Archiv f. d. ges. Physiol., Bd. xli. S. 91 ff.

[30] Die Gesichtsempfindungen u. ihre Analyse, p. 128.

[31] Mr. Delabarre's contribution ends here.

[32] Physiol. Psych., i. 351, 458-60. The full inanity of the law of
relativity is best to be seen in Wundt's treatment, where the great
'_allgemeiner Gesetz der Beziehung_,' invoked to account for Weber's
law as well as for the phenomena of contrast and many other matters,
can only be defined as a tendency _to feel all things in relation to
each other_! Bless its little soul! But why does it change the things
so, when it thus feels them in relation?

[33] Ladd: Physiol. Psych., p. 348.

[34] Mind, x. 567.

[35] Zwangemässige Lichtempfindung durch Schall (Leipzig, 1881).

[36] Pflüger's Archiv, xlii. 154.

[37] Physiological Psychology, 385, 387. See also such passages as that
in Bain; The Senses and the Intellect, pp. 364-6.

[38] "Especially must we avoid all attempts, whether avowed or
concealed, to account for the _spatial_ qualities of the presentations
of sense by merely describing the qualities of the simple sensations
and the modes of their combination. It is position and extension in
space which constitutes the very peculiarity of the objects as _no
longer_ mere sensations or affections of the mind. As sensations, they
are neither _out_ of ourselves nor possessed of the qualities indicated
by the word spread-out." (Ladd, _op. cit._ p. 391.)

[39] A. Riehl: Der Philosophischer Kriticismus, Bd. ii. Theil ii. p. 64.

[40] On Intelligence, part ii. bk. ii. chap. ii. §§ vii, viii. Compare
such statements as these: "The consequence is that when a sensation has
for its usual condition the presence of an object more or less distant
from our bodies, and experience has once made us acquainted with this
distance, we shall situate our sensation at this distance.--This, in
fact, is the case with sensations of hearing and sight. The peripheral
extremity of the acoustic nerve is in the deep-seated chamber of the
ear. That of the optic nerve is in the most inner recess of the eye.
But still, in our present state, we never situate our sensations
of sound or color in these places, but without us, and often at a
considerable distance from us.... All our sensations of color are thus
projected out of our body, and clothe more or less distant objects,
furniture, walls, houses, trees, the sky, and the rest. This is why,
when we afterwards reflect on them, we cease to attribute them to
ourselves; they are alienated and detached from us, so far as to
appear different from us. Projected from the nervous surface in which
we localize the majority of the others, the tie which connected them
to the others and to ourselves is undone.... Thus, all our sensations
are wrongly situated, and the red color is no more extended on the
arm-chair than the sensation of tingling is situated at my fingers'
ends. They are all situated in the sensory centres of the encephalon;
all appear situated elsewhere, and a common law allots to each of them
its apparent situation." (vol. ii. pp. 47-53.)--Similarly Schopenhauer:
"I will now show the same by the sense of sight. The immediate
_datum_ is here limited to the sensation of the retina which, it is
true, admits of considerable diversity, but at bottom reverts to the
impression of light and dark with their shades, and that of colors.
This sensation is through and through subjective, that is, inside of
the organism and under the skin." (Schopenhauer: Satz vom Grunde, p.
58.) This philosopher then enumerates _seriatim_ what the Intellect
does to make the originally subjective sensation objective: 1) it
turns it bottom side up; 2) it reduces its doubleness to singleness;
3) it changes its flatness to solidity; and 4) it projects it to a
distance from the eye. Again: "_Sensations_ are what we call the
impressions on our senses, in so far as they come to our consciousness
as states of our own body, especially of our nervous apparatus; we
call them _perceptions_ when we form out of them the representation
of outer objects." (Helmholtz: Tonempfindungen, 1870, p. 101.)--Once
more: "Sensation is always accomplished in the psychic centres, but
it manifests itself at the excited part of the periphery. In other
words, one is conscious of the phenomenon in the nervous centres,...
but one perceives it in the peripheric organs. This phenomenon depends
on the experience of the sensations themselves, in which there is a
_reflection_ of the subjective phenomenon and a tendency on the part of
perception to return as it were to the external cause which has roused
the mental state because the latter is connected with the former."
(Sergi: Psychologie Physiologique (Paris, 1888), p. 189.)--The clearest
and best passage I know is in Liebmann: Der Objective Anblick (1869),
pp. 67-72, but it is unfortunately too long to quote.

[41] This is proved by Weber's device of causing the head to be firmly
pressed against a support by another person, whereupon the direction of
traction ceases to be perceived.

[42] Lotze: Med. Psych., 428-433; Lipps: Grundtatsachen des
Seelenlebens, 582.

[43] Injuries to Nerves (Philadelphia, 1872), p. 350 ff.

[44] In reality it probably means only a restless movement of desire,
which he might make even after he had become aware of his impotence to
touch the object.

[45] Revue Philosophique, vii. p. 1 ff., an admirable critical article,
in the course of which M. Janet gives a bibliography of the cases in
question. See also Dunan: _ibid._ xxv. 165-7. They are also discussed
and similarly interpreted by T. K. Abbot: Sight and Touch (1864),
chapter x.

[46] The intermediary and shortened locations of the lost hand and
foot in the amputation cases also show this. It is easy to see why the
phantom foot might continue to follow the position of the artificial
one. But I confess that I cannot explain its half way-positions.

[47] It is from this confused assumption that the time-honored riddle
comes, of how, with an upside-down picture on the retina, we can see
things right-side up. Our consciousness is _naïvely_ supposed to
inhabit the picture and to feel the picture's position as related
to other objects of space. But the truth is that the picture is
non-existent either as a habitat or as anything else, for immediate
consciousness. Our notion of it is an enormously late conception. The
outer object is given immediately with all those qualities which later
are named and determined in relation to other sensations. The 'bottom'
of this object is where we see what by touch we afterwards know as our
_feet_, the 'top' is the place in which we see what we know as other
people's heads, etc., etc. Berkeley long ago made this matter perfectly
clear (see his Essay towards a new Theory of Vision, §§ 93-98, 113-118).

[48] For full justification the reader must see the next chapter.
He may object, against the summary account given now, that in a
babe's immediate field of vision the various things which appear are
located _relatively to each other_ from the outset. I admit that _if
discriminated_, they would appear so located. But they are parts of
the content of one sensation, not sensations separately experienced,
such as the text is concerned with. The fully developed 'world,' in
which all our sensations ultimately find location, is nothing but an
imaginary object framed after the pattern of the field of vision, by
the addition and continuation of one sensation upon another in an
orderly and systematic way. In corroboration of my text I must refer
to pp. 57-60 of Riehl's book quoted above on page 32, and to Uphues:
Wahrnehmung und Empfindung (1888), especially the _Einleitung_ and pp.
51-61.





CHAPTER XVIII.

IMAGINATION.


_Sensations, once experienced, modify the nervous organism, so that
copies of them arise again in the mind after the original outward
stimulus is gone._ No mental copy, however, can arise in the mind,
of any kind of sensation which has never been directly excited from
without.

The blind may dream of sights, the deaf of sounds, for years after they
have lost their vision or hearing;[49] but the man _born_ deaf can
never be made to imagine what sound is like, nor can the man _born_
blind ever have a mental vision. In Locke's words, already quoted, "the
mind can frame unto itself no one new simple idea." The originals of
them all must have been given from without. Fantasy, or Imagination,
are the names given to the faculty of reproducing copies of originals
once felt. The imagination is called 'reproductive' when the copies
are literal; 'productive' when elements from different originals are
recombined so as to make new wholes.

_After-images_ belong to sensation rather than to imagination; so that
the most immediate phenomena of imagination would seem to be those
tardier images (due to what the Germans call _Sinnesgedächtniss_) which
were spoken of in Vol. I, p. 617,--coercive hauntings of the mind by
echoes of unusual experiences for hours after the latter have taken
place. The phenomena ordinarily ascribed to imagination, however, are
those mental pictures of possible sensible experiences, to which the
ordinary processes of associative thought give rise.

When represented with surroundings concrete enough to constitute a
_date_, these pictures, when they revive, form _recollections_. We have
already studied the machinery of recollection in Chapter XVI. When the
mental pictures are of data freely combined, and reproducing no past
combination exactly, we have acts of imagination properly so called.


OUR IMAGES ARE USUALLY VAGUE.


For the ordinary 'analytic' psychology, each sensibly discernible
element of the object imagined is represented by its own separate idea,
and the total object is imagined by a 'cluster' or 'gang' of ideas. We
have seen abundant reason to reject this view (see Vol. I, p. 276 ff.).
An imagined object, however complex, is at any one moment thought in
one idea, which is aware of all its qualities together. If I slip into
the ordinary way of talking, and speak of various ideas 'combining,'
the reader will understand that this is only for popularity and
convenience, and he will not construe it into a concession to the
atomistic theory in psychology.

Hume was the hero of the atomistic theory. Not only were ideas copies
of original impressions made on the sense-organs, but they were,
according to him, completely adequate copies, and were all so separate
from each other as to possess no manner of connection. Hume proves
ideas in the imagination to be completely adequate copies, not by
appeal to observation, but by _a priori_ reasoning, as follows:

 "The mind cannot form any notion of quantity or quality, without
 forming a precise notion of the degrees of each," for "'tis confessed
 that no object can appear to the senses; or in other words, that
 no impression[50] can become present to the mind, without being
 determined in its degrees both of quantity and quality. The confusion
 in which impressions are sometimes involved proceeds only from
 their faintness and unsteadiness, not from any capacity in the
 mind to receive any impression, which in its real existence has no
 particular degree nor proportion. That is a contradiction in terms;
 and even implies the flattest of all contradictions, _viz._, that
 'tis possible for the same thing both to be and not to be. Now since
 all ideas are derived from impressions, and are nothing but copies
 and representations of them, whatever is true of the one must be
 acknowledged concerning the other. Impressions and ideas differ only
 in their strength and vivacity. The foregoing conclusion is not
 founded on any particular degree of vivacity. It cannot therefore be
 affected by any variation in that particular. An idea is a weaker
 impression; and as a strong impression must necessarily have a
 determinate quantity and quality, the case must be the same with its
 copy or representative."[51]

The slightest introspective glance will show to anyone the falsity of
this opinion. Hume surely had images of his own works without seeing
distinctly every word and letter upon the pages which floated before
his mind's eye. His dictum is therefore an exquisite example of the
way in which a man will be blinded by _a priori_ theories to the
most flagrant facts. It is a rather remarkable thing, too, that the
psychologists of Hume's own empiricist school have, as a rule, been
more guilty of this blindness than their opponents. The fundamental
_facts_ of consciousness have been, on the whole, more accurately
reported by the spiritualistic writers. None of Hume's pupils, so far
as I know, until Taine and Huxley, ever took the pains to contradict
the opinion of their master. Prof. Huxley in his brilliant little work
on Hume set the matter straight in the following words:

 "When complex impressions or complex ideas are reproduced as memories,
 it is probable that the copies never give all the details of the
 originals with perfect accuracy, and it is certain that they rarely
 do so. No one possesses a memory so good, that if he has only once
 observed a natural object, a second inspection does not show him
 something that he has forgotten. Almost all, if not all, our memories
 are therefore sketches, rather than portraits, of the originals--the
 salient features are obvious, while the subordinate characters are
 obscure or unrepresented.

 "Now, when several complex impressions which are more or less
 different from one another--let us say that out of ten impressions
 in each, six are the same in all, and four are different from all
 the rest--are successively presented to the mind, it is easy to see
 what must be the nature of the result. The repetition of the six
 similar impressions will strengthen the six corresponding elements of
 the complex idea, which will therefore acquire greater vividness;
 while the four differing impressions of each will not only acquire no
 greater strength than they had at first, but, in accordance with the
 law of association, they will all tend to appear at once, and will
 thus neutralize one another.

 "This mental operation may be rendered comprehensible by considering
 what takes place in the formation of compound photographs--when the
 images of the faces of six sitters, for example, are each received on
 the same photographic plate, for a sixth of the time requisite to take
 one portrait. The final result is that all those points in which the
 six faces agree are brought out strongly, while all those in which
 they differ are left vague; and thus what may be termed a _generic_
 portrait of the six, in contradistinction to a _specific_ portrait of
 any one, is produced.

 "Thus our ideas of single complex impressions are incomplete in one
 way, and those of numerous, more or less similar, complex impressions
 are incomplete in another way; that is to say, they are _generic_, not
 _specific_. And hence it follows that our ideas of the impressions in
 question are not, in the strict sense of the word, copies of those
 impressions; while, at the same time, they may exist in the mind
 independently of language.

 "The generic ideas which are formed from several similar, but not
 identical, complex experiences are what are called _abstract_ or
 _general_ ideas; and Berkeley endeavored to prove that all general
 ideas are nothing but particular ideas annexed to a certain term,
 which gives them a more extensive signification, and makes them
 recall, upon occasion, other individuals which are similar to them.
 Hume says that he regards this as 'one of the greatest and the most
 valuable discoveries that has been made of late years in the republic
 of letters,' and endeavors to confirm it in such a manner that it
 shall be 'put beyond all doubt and controversy.'

 "I may venture to express a doubt whether he has succeeded in his
 object; but the subject is an abstruse one; and I must content myself
 with the remark, that though Berkeley's view appears to be largely
 applicable to such general ideas as are formed after language has
 been acquired, and to all the more abstract sort of conceptions, yet
 that general ideas of sensible objects may nevertheless be produced
 in the way indicated, and may exist independently of language. In
 dreams, one sees houses, trees, and other objects, which are perfectly
 recognizable as such, but which remind one of the actual objects as
 seen 'out of the corner of the eye,' or of the pictures thrown by a
 badly-focussed magic lantern. A man addresses us who is like a figure
 seen in twilight; or we travel through countries where every feature
 of the scenery is vague; the outlines of the hills are ill-marked, and
 the rivers have no defined banks. They are, in short, generic ideas
 of many past impressions of men, hills, and rivers. An anatomist who
 occupies himself intently with the examination of several specimens
 of some new kind of animal, in course of time acquires so vivid a
 conception of its form and structure that the idea may take visible
 shape and become a sort of waking dream. But the figure which thus
 presents itself is generic, not specific. It is no copy of any one
 specimen, but, more or less, a mean of the series; and there seems no
 reason to doubt that the minds of children before they learn to speak,
 and of deaf-mutes, are peopled with similarly generated generic ideas
 of sensible objects."[52]

_Are Vague Images 'Abstract Ideas'?_


The only point which I am tempted to criticise in this account is Prof.
Huxley's _identification of these generic images with 'abstract or
general ideas' in the sense of universal conceptions._ Taine gives the
truer view. He writes:

 "Some years ago I saw in England, in Kew Gardens, for the first time,
 araucarias, and I walked along the beds looking at these strange
 plants, with their rigid bark and compact, short, scaly leaves, of
 a sombre green, whose abrupt, rough, bristling form cut in upon the
 fine softly-lighted turf of the fresh grass-plat. If I now inquire
 what this experience has left in me, I find, first, the sensible
 representation of an araucaria; in fact, I have been able to describe
 almost exactly the form and color of the plant. But there is a
 difference between this representation and the former sensations, of
 which it is the present echo. The internal semblance, from which I
 have just made my description, is vague, and my past sensations were
 precise. For, assuredly, each of the araucarias I saw then excited in
 me a distinct visual sensation; there are no two absolutely similar
 plants in nature; I observed perhaps twenty or thirty araucarias;
 without a doubt each one of them differed from the others in size, in
 girth, by the more or less obtuse angles of its branches, by the more
 or less abrupt jutting out of its scales, by the style of its texture;
 consequently, my twenty or thirty visual sensations were different.
 But no one of these sensations has completely survived in its echo;
 the twenty or thirty revivals have blunted one another; thus upset and
 agglutinated by their resemblance they are confounded together, and
 my present representation is their residue only. This is the product,
 or rather the fragment, which is deposited in us, when we have gone
 through a series of similar facts or individuals. Of our numerous
 experiences there remain on the following day four or five more or
 less distinct recollections, which, obliterated themselves, leave
 behind in us a simple colorless, vague representation, into which
 enter as components various reviving sensations, in an utterly feeble,
 incomplete, and abortive state.--_But this representation is not the
 general and abstract idea. It is but its accompaniment,_ and, if I may
 say so, the ore from which it is extracted. For the representation,
 though badly sketched, is a sketch, the sensible sketch of a distinct
 individual.... But my abstract idea corresponds to the whole class; it
 differs, then, from the representation of an individual.--Moreover, my
 abstract idea is perfectly clear and determinate; now that I possess
 it, I never fail to recognize an araucaria among the various plants
 which may be shown me; it differs then from the confused and floating
 representation I have of some particular araucaria."[53]

In other words, a blurred picture is just as much a single mental fact
as a sharp picture is; and _the use of either picture by the mind to
symbolize a whole class of individuals is a new mental function,_
requiring some other modification of consciousness than the mere
perception that the picture is distinct or not. I may bewail the
indistinctness of my mental image of my absent friend. That does not
prevent my thought from meaning _him_ alone, however. And I may mean
all mankind, with perhaps a very sharp image of one man in my mind's
eye. The meaning is a function of the more 'transitive' parts of
consciousness, the 'fringe' of relations which we feel surrounding the
image, be the latter sharp or dim. This was explained in a previous
place (see Vol. I, p. 473 ff., especially the note to page 477), and
I would not touch upon the matter at all here but for its historical
interest.

Our ideas or images of past sensible experiences may then be either
distinct and adequate or dim, blurred, and incomplete. It is likely
that the different degrees in which different men are able to make
them sharp and complete has had something to do with keeping up such
philosophic disputes as that of Berkeley with Locke over abstract
ideas. Locke had spoken of our possessing 'the general idea of a
triangle' which "must be neither oblique nor rectangle, neither
equilateral, equicrural, nor scalenon, but all and none of these at
once." Berkeley says:

 "If any man has the faculty of framing in his mind such an idea of a
 triangle as is here described, it is in vain to pretend to dispute him
 out of it, nor would I go about it. All I desire is that the reader
 would fully and certainly inform himself whether _he_ has such an idea
 or no."[54]

Until very recent years it was supposed by all philosophers that there
was a typical human mind which all individual minds were like, and
that propositions of universal validity could be laid down about such
faculties as 'the Imagination.' Lately, however, a mass of revelations
have poured in, which make us see how false a view this is. There are
imaginations, not 'the Imagination,' and they must be studied in detail.


INDIVIDUALS DIFFER IN IMAGINATION.


The first breaker of ground in this direction was Fechner, in 1860.
Fechner was gifted with unusual talent for subjective observation, and
in chapter xliv of his 'Psychophysik' he gave the results of a most
careful comparison of his own optical after-images, with his optical
memory-pictures, together with accounts by several other individuals
of their optical memory-pictures.[55] The result was to show a great
personal diversity. "It would be interesting," he writes, "to work up
the subject statistically; and I regret that other occupations have
kept me from fulfilling my earlier intention to proceed in this way."

Flechner's intention was independently executed by Mr. Galton, the
publication of whose results in 1880 may be said to have made an era in
descriptive Psychology.

 "It is not necessary," says Galton, "to trouble the reader with my
 early tentative steps. After the inquiry had been fairly started it
 took the form of submitting a certain number of printed questions to a
 large number of persons. There is hardly any more difficult task than
 that of framing questions which are not likely to be misunderstood,
 which admit of easy reply, and which cover the ground of inquiry. I
 did my best in these respects, without forgetting the most important
 part of all--namely, to tempt my correspondents to write freely in
 fuller explanation of their replies, and on cognate topics as well.
 These separate letters have proved more instructive and interesting by
 far than the replies to the set questions.

 "The first group of the rather long series of queries related to the
 illumination, definition, and coloring of the mental image, and were
 framed thus:

 "'Before addressing yourself to any of the Questions on the
 opposite page, think of some definite object--suppose it is your
 breakfast-table as you sat down to it this morning--and consider
 carefully the picture that rises before your mind's eye.

 "'1. _Illumination._--Is the image dim or fairly clear? Is its
 brightness comparable to that of the actual scene?

 "'2. _Definition._--Are all the objects pretty well defined at the
 same time, or is the place of sharpest definition at any one moment
 more contracted than it is in a real scene?

 "'3. _Coloring._--Are the colors of the china, of the toast,
 bread-crust, mustard, meat, parsley, or whatever may have been on the
 table, quite distinct and natural?'

 "The earliest results of my inquiry amazed me. I had begun by
 questioning friends in the scientific world, as they were the most
 likely class of men to give accurate answers concerning this faculty
 of visualizing, to which novelists and poets continually allude,
 which has left an abiding mark on the vocabularies of every language,
 and which supplies the material out of which dreams and the well-known
 hallucinations of sick people are built.

 "To my astonishment, I found that _the great majority of the men of
 science to whom I first applied protested that mental imagery was
 unknown to them,_ and they looked on me as fanciful and fantastic
 in supposing that the words 'mental imagery' really expressed what
 I believed everybody supposed them to mean. They had no more notion
 of its true nature than a color-blind man, who has not discerned his
 defect, has of the nature of color. They had a mental deficiency of
 which they were unaware, and naturally enough supposed that those who
 affirmed they possessed it were romancing. To illustrate their mental
 attitude it will be sufficient to quote a few lines from the letter of
 one of my correspondents, who writes:

 "'These questions presuppose assent to some sort of a proposition
 regarding the "mind's eye," and the "images" which it sees.... This
 points to some initial fallacy.... It is only by a figure of speech
 that I can describe my recollection of a scene as a "mental image"
 which I can "see" with my "mind's eye."... I do not see it... any
 more than a man sees the thousand lines of Sophocles which under due
 pressure he is ready to repeat. The memory possesses it,' etc.

 "Much the same result followed inquiries made for me by a friend among
 members of the French Institute.

 "On the other hand, when I spoke to persons whom I met _in general
 society_, I found an entirely different disposition to prevail.
 _Many men and a yet larger number of women, and many boys and girls,
 declared that they habitually saw mental imagery, and that it was
 perfectly distinct to them and full of color._ The more I pressed and
 crossed-questioned them, professing myself to be incredulous, the
 more obvious was the truth of their first assertions. They described
 their imagery in minute detail, and they spoke in a tone of surprise
 at my apparent hesitation in accepting what they said. I felt that I
 myself should have spoken exactly as they did if I had been describing
 a scene that lay before my eyes, in broad daylight, to a blind man
 who persisted in doubting the reality of vision. Reassured by this
 happier experience, I recommenced to inquire among scientific men,
 and soon found scattered instances of what I sought, though in by no
 means the same abundance as elsewhere. I then circulated my questions
 more generally among my friends and through their hands, and obtained
 replies... from persons of both sexes, and of various ages, and in the
 end from occasional correspondents in nearly every civilized country.

 "I have also received batches of answers from various educational
 establishments both in England and America, which were made after
 the masters had fully explained the meaning of the questions, and
 interested the boys in them. These have the merit of returns derived
 from a general census, which my other data lack, because I cannot
 for a moment suppose that the writers of the latter are a haphazard
 proportion of those to whom they were sent. Indeed I know of some
 who, disavowing all possession of the power, and of many others who,
 possessing it in too faint a degree to enable them to express what
 their experiences really were, in a manner satisfactory to themselves,
 sent no returns at all. Considerable statistical similarity was,
 however, observed between the sets of returns furnished by the
 schoolboys and those sent by my separate correspondents, and I may
 add that they accord in this respect with the oral information I have
 elsewhere obtained. The conformity of replies from so many different
 sources which was clear from the first, the fact of their apparent
 trustworthiness being on the whole much increased by cross-examination
 (though I could give one or two amusing instances of break-down),
 and the evident effort made to give accurate answers, have convinced
 me that it is a much easier matter than I had anticipated to obtain
 trustworthy replies to psychological questions. Many persons,
 especially women and intelligent children, take pleasure in
 introspection, and strive their very best to explain their mental
 processes. I think that a delight in self-dissection must be a strong
 ingredient in the pleasure that many are said to take in confessing
 themselves to priests.

 "Here, then, are two rather notable results: the one is the proved
 facility of obtaining statistical insight into the processes of other
 persons' minds, whatever _a priori_ objection may have been made
 as to its possibility; and the other is that scientific men, as a
 class, have feeble powers of visual representation. There is no doubt
 whatever on the latter point, however it may be accounted for. My own
 conclusion is that an over-ready perception of sharp mental pictures
 is antagonistic to the acquirement of habits of highly-generalized
 and abstract thought, especially when the steps of reasoning are
 carried on by words as symbols, and that if the faculty of seeing the
 pictures was ever possessed by men who think hard, it is very apt
 to be lost by disuse. The highest minds are probably those in which
 it is not lost, but subordinated, and is ready for use on suitable
 occasions. I am, however, bound to say that the missing faculty seems
 to be replaced so serviceably by other modes of conception, chiefly,
 I believe, connected with the incipient motor sense, not of the
 eyeballs only but of the muscles generally, that _men who declare
 themselves entirely deficient in the power of seeing mental pictures
 can nevertheless give lifelike descriptions_ of what they have seen,
 and can otherwise express themselves as if they were gifted with a
 vivid visual imagination. _They can also become painters of the rank
 of Royal Academicians...._[56]

 "It is a mistake to suppose that sharp sight is accompanied by
 clear visual memory. I have not a few instances in which the
 independence of the two faculties is emphatically commented on; and
 I have at least one clear case where great interest in outlines and
 accurate appreciation of straightness, squareness, and the like, is
 unaccompanied by the power of visualizing. Neither does the faculty go
 with dreaming. I have cases where it is powerful, and at the same time
 where dreams are rare and faint or altogether absent. One friend tells
 me that his dreams have not the hundredth part of the vigor of his
 waking fancies.

 "The visualizing and the identifying powers are by no means
 necessarily combined. A distinguished writer on metaphysical topics
 assures me that he is exceptionally quick at recognizing a face that
 he has seen before, but that he cannot call up a mental image of any
 face with clearness.

 "Some persons have the power of combining in a single perception more
 than can be seen at any one moment by the two eyes....

 "I find that a few persons can, by what they often describe as a kind
 of touch-sight, visualize at the same moment all round the image of
 a solid body. Many can do so nearly, but not altogether round that
 of a terrestrial globe. An eminent mineralogist assures me that he
 is able to imagine simultaneously all the sides of a crystal with
 which he is familiar. I may be allowed to quote a curious faculty
 of my own in respect to this. It is exercised only occasionally and
 in dreams, or rather in nightmares, but under those circumstances
 I am perfectly conscious of embracing an entire sphere in a single
 perception. It appears to lie within my mental eyeball, and to be
 viewed centripetally.

 "This power of comprehension is practically attained in many cases
 by indirect methods. It is a common feat to take in the whole
 surroundings of an imagined room with such a rapid mental sweep as to
 leave some doubt whether it has not been viewed simultaneously. Some
 persons have the habit of viewing objects as though they were partly
 transparent; thus, if they so dispose a globe in their imagination as
 to see both its north and south poles at the same time, they will not
 be able to see its equatorial parts. They can also perceive all the
 rooms of an imaginary house by a single mental glance, the walls and
 floors being as if made of glass. A fourth class of persons have the
 habit of recalling scenes, not from the point of view whence they were
 observed, but from a distance, and they visualize their own selves as
 actors on the mental stage. By one or other of these ways, the power
 of seeing the whole of an object, and not merely one aspect of it, is
 possessed by many persons.

 "The place where the image appears to lie differs much. Most persons
 see it in an indefinable sort of way, others see it in front of the
 eye, others at a distance corresponding to reality. There exists a
 power which is rare naturally, but can, I believe, be acquired without
 much difficulty, of projecting a mental picture upon a piece of paper,
 and of holding it fast there, so that it can be outlined with a
 pencil. To this I shall recur.

 "Images usually do not become stronger by dwelling on them; the first
 idea is commonly the most vigorous, but this is not always the case.
 Sometimes the mental view of a locality is inseparably connected with
 the sense of its position as regards the points of the compass, real
 or imaginary. I have received full and curious descriptions from very
 different sources of this strong geographical tendency, and in one or
 two cases I have reason to think it allied to a considerable faculty
 of geographical comprehension.

 "The power of visualizing is higher in the female sex than in the
 male, and is somewhat, but not much, higher in public-school boys than
 in men. After maturity is reached, the further advance of age does
 not seem to dim the faculty, but rather the reverse, judging from
 numerous statements to that effect; but advancing years are sometimes
 accompanied by a growing habit of hard abstract thinking, and in
 these cases--not uncommon among those whom I have questioned--the
 faculty undoubtedly becomes impaired. There is reason to believe that
 it is very high in some young children, who seem to spend years of
 difficulty in distinguishing between the subjective and objective
 world. Language and book-learning certainly tend to dull it.

 "The visualizing faculty is a natural gift, and, like all natural
 gifts, has a tendency to be inherited. In this faculty the tendency to
 inheritance is exceptionally strong, as I have abundant evidence to
 prove, especially in respect to certain rather rare peculiarities,...
 which, when they exist at all, are usually found among two, three, or
 more brothers and sisters, parents, children, uncles and aunts, and
 cousins.

 "Since families differ so much in respect to this gift, we may suppose
 that races would also differ, and there can be no doubt that such
 is the case. I hardly like to refer to civilized nations, because
 their natural faculties are too much modified by education to allow
 of their being appraised in an off-hand fashion. I may, however,
 speak of the French, who appear to possess the visualizing faculty
 in a high degree. The peculiar ability they show in prearranging
 ceremonials and _fêtes_ of all kinds, and their undoubted genius for
 tactics and strategy, show that they are able to foresee effects with
 unusual clearness. Their ingenuity in all technical contrivances is an
 additional testimony in the same direction, and so is their singular
 clearness of expression. Their phrase 'figurez-vous,' or 'picture to
 yourself,' seems to express their dominant mode of perception. Our
 equivalent of 'imagine' is ambiguous.

       *       *       *       *       *

 "I have many cases of persons mentally reading off scores when
 playing the pianoforte, or manuscript when they are making speeches.
 One statesman has assured me that a certain hesitation in utterance
 which he has at times is due to his being plagued by the image of
 his manuscript speech with its original erasures and corrections. He
 cannot lay the ghost, and he puzzles in trying to decipher it.

 "Some few persons see mentally in print every word that is uttered;
 they attend to the visual equivalent and not to the sound of the
 words, and they read them off usually as from a long imaginary strip
 of paper, such as is unwound from telegraphic instruments."

The reader will find further details in Mr. Galton's 'Inquiries
into Human Faculty,' pp. 83-114.[57] I have myself for many years
collected from each and all of my psychology-students descriptions of
their own visual imagination; and found (together with some curious
idiosyncrasies) corroboration of all the variations which Mr. Galton
reports. As examples, I subjoin extracts from two cases near the
ends of the scale. The writers are first cousins, grandsons of a
distinguished man of science. The one who is a good visualizer says:

 "This morning's breakfast-table is both dim and bright; it is dim if
 I try to think of it when my eyes are open upon any object; it is
 perfectly clear and bright if I think of it with my eyes closed.--All
 the objects are clear at once, yet when I confine my attention to any
 one object it becomes far more distinct.--I have more power to recall
 color than any other one thing: if, for example, I were to recall a
 plate decorated with flowers I could reproduce in a drawing the exact
 tone, etc. The color of anything that was on the table is perfectly
 vivid.--There is very little limitation to the extent of my images:
 I can see all four sides of a room, I can see all four sides of two,
 three, four, even more rooms with such distinctness that if you should
 ask me what was in any particular place in any one, or ask me to count
 the chairs, etc., I could do it without the least hesitation.--The
 more I learn by heart the more clearly do I see images of my pages.
 Even before I can recite the lines I see them so that I could give
 them very slowly word for word, but my mind is so occupied in looking
 at my printed image that I have no idea of what I am saying, of the
 sense of it, etc. When I first found myself doing this I used to think
 it was merely because I knew the lines imperfectly; but I have quite
 convinced myself that I really do see an image. The strongest proof
 that such is really the fact is, I think, the following:

 "I can look down the mentally seen page and see the words that
 _commence_ all the lines, and from any one of these words I can
 continue the line. I find this much easier to do if the words begin
 in a straight line than if there are breaks. Example:

    _Étant fait...._
    _Tous...._
    _A des...._
    _Que fit...._
    _Céres...._
        _Avec...._
    _Un fleur...._
        _Comme...._
    (_La Fontaine_ 8. iv.)"

The poor visualizer says:

 "My ability to form mental images seems, from what I have studied of
 other people's images, to be defective, and somewhat peculiar. The
 process by which I seem to remember any particular event is not by
 a series of distinct images, but a sort of panorama, the faintest
 impressions of which are perceptible through a thick fog.--I cannot
 shut my eyes and get a distinct image of anyone, although I used to
 be able to a few years ago, and the faculty seems to have gradually
 slipped away.--In my most vivid dreams, where the events appear like
 the most real facts, I am often troubled with a dimness of sight which
 causes the images to appear indistinct.--To come to the question of
 the breakfast-table, there is nothing definite about it. Everything
 is vague. I cannot say _what_ I see. I could not possibly count the
 chairs, but I happen to know that there are ten. I see nothing in
 detail.--The chief thing is a general impression that I cannot tell
 exactly what I do see. The coloring is about the same, as far as I can
 recall it, only very much washed out. Perhaps the only color I can see
 at all distinctly is that of the table-cloth, and I could probably see
 the color of the wall-paper if I could remember what color it was."

A person whose visual imagination is strong finds it hard to understand
how those who are without the faculty can think at all. _Some people
undoubtedly have no visual images at all worthy of the name,_[58] and
instead of _seeing_ their breakfast-table, they tell you that they
_remember_ it or _know_ what was on it. This knowing and remembering
takes place undoubtedly by means of verbal images, as was explained
already in Chapter IX, pp. 265-6.

       *       *       *       *       *

_The study of Aphasia_ (see Vol. I, p. 54) _has of late years shown how
unexpectedly great are the differences between individuals in respect
of imagination._ And at the same time the discrepancies between lesion
and symptom in different cases of the disease have been largely cleared
up. In some individuals the habitual 'thought-stuff,' if one may so
call it, is visual; in others it is auditory, articulatory, or motor;
in most, perhaps, it is evenly mixed. The same local cerebral injury
must needs work different practical results in persons who differ in
this way. In one it will throw a much-used brain-tract out of gear;
in the other it may affect an unimportant region. A particularly
instructive case was published by Charcot in 1883.[59] The patient was

 Mr. X., a merchant, born in Vienna, highly educated, master of German,
 Spanish, French, Greek, and Latin. Up to the beginning of the malady
 which took him to Professor Charcot, he read Homer at sight. He
 could, starting from any verse out of the first book of the Iliad,
 repeat the following verses without hesitating, by heart. Virgil
 and Horace were familiar. He also knew enough of modern Greek for
 business purposes. Up to within a year (from the time Charcot saw
 him) he enjoyed an exceptional _visual_ memory. He no sooner thought
 of persons or things, but features, forms, and colors arose with the
 same clearness, sharpness, and accuracy as if the objects stood before
 him. When he tried to recall a fact or a figure in his voluminous
 polyglot correspondence, the letters themselves appeared before him
 with their entire content, irregularities, erasures and all. At school
 he recited from a mentally seen page which he read off line by line
 and letter by letter. In making computations, he ran his mental eye
 down imaginary columns of figures, and performed in this way the most
 varied operations of arithmetic. He could never think of a passage in
 a play without the entire scene, stage, actors, and audience appearing
 to him. He had been a great traveller. Being a good draughtsman, he
 used to sketch views which pleased him; and his memory always brought
 back the entire landscape exactly. If he thought of a conversation, a
 saying, an engagement, the place, the people, the entire scene rose
 before his mind.

 His _auditory memory_ was always deficient, or at least secondary. He
 had no taste for music.

 A year and a half previous to examination, after business-anxieties,
 loss of sleep, appetite, etc., he noticed suddenly one day an
 extraordinary change in himself. After complete confusion, there came
 a violent contrast between his old and his new state. Everything about
 him seemed so new and foreign that at first he thought he must be
 going mad. He was nervous and irritable. Although he saw all things
 distinct, he had entirely lost his memory for forms and colors. On
 ascertaining this, he became reassured as to his sanity. He soon
 discovered that he could carry on his affairs by using his memory in
 an altogether new way. He can now describe clearly the difference
 between his two conditions.

 Every time he returns to A., from which place business often calls
 him, he seems to himself as if entering a strange city. He views the
 monuments, houses, and streets with the same surprise as if he saw
 them for the first time. Gradually, however, his memory returns, and
 he finds himself at home again. When asked to describe the principal
 public place of the town, he answered, "I know that it is there, but
 it is impossible to imagine it, and I can tell you nothing about it."
 He has often drawn the port of A. To-day he vainly tries to trace its
 principal outlines. Asked to draw a minaret, he reflects, says it is a
 square tower, and draws, rudely, four lines, one for ground, one for
 top, and two for sides. Asked to draw an arcade, he says, "I remember
 that it contains semi-circular arches, and that two of them meeting
 at an angle make a vault, but how it _looks_ I am absolutely unable
 to imagine." The profile of a man which he drew by request was as if
 drawn by a little child; and yet he confessed that he had been helped
 to draw it by looking at the bystanders. Similarly he drew a shapeless
 scribble for a tree.

 He can no more remember his wife's and children's faces than he can
 remember the port of A. Even after being with them some time they seem
 unusual to him. He forgets his own face, and once spoke to his image
 in a mirror, taking it for a stranger. He complains of his loss of
 feeling for colors. "My wife has black hair, this I know; but I can no
 more recall its color than I can her person and features." This visual
 amnesia extends to dating objects from his childhood's years--paternal
 mansion, etc., forgotten.

 No other disturbances but this loss of visual images. Now when he
 seeks something in his correspondence, he must rummage among the
 letters like other men, until he meets the passage. He can recall
 only the first few verses of the Iliad, and must _grope_ to read
 Homer, Virgil, and Horace. Figures which he adds he must now whisper
 to himself. He realises clearly that he must help his memory out with
 auditory images, which he does with effort. _The words and expressions
 which he recalls seem now to echo in his ear, an altogether novel
 sensation for him._ If he wishes to learn by heart anything, a series
 of phrases for example, he must _read them several times aloud_, so as
 to impress his ear. When later he repeats the thing in question, the
 sensation of inward hearing which precedes articulation rises up in
 his mind. This feeling was formerly unknown to him. He speaks French
 fluently; but affirms that he can no longer think in French; but must
 get his French words by translating them from Spanish or German, the
 languages of his childhood. He dreams no more in visual terms, but
 only in words, usually Spanish words. A certain degree of verbal
 blindness affects him--he is troubled by the Greek alphabet, etc.[60]

If this patient had possessed the auditory type of imagination from the
start, it is evident that the injury, whatever it was, to his centres
for optical imagination, would have affected his practical life much
less profoundly.

 "_The auditory type_," says M. A. Binet,[61] "_appears to be rarer
 than the visual._ Persons of this type imagine what they think of in
 the language of sound. In order to remember a lesson they impress upon
 their mind, not the look of the page, but the sound of the words. They
 reason, as well as remember, by ear. In performing a mental addition
 they repeat verbally the names of the figures, and add, as it were,
 the sounds, without any thought of the graphic signs. Imagination
 also takes the auditory form. 'When I write a scene,' said Legouvé to
 Scribe, 'I _hear_; but you _see_. In each phrase which I write, the
 voice of the personage who speaks strikes my ear. _Vous, qui êtes le
 théâtre même_, your actors walk, gesticulate before your eyes; I am
 a _listener_, you a _spectator_.'--'Nothing more true,' said Scribe;
 'do you know where I am when I write a piece? In the middle of the
 parterre.' It is clear that the _pure audile_, seeking to develop only
 a single one of his faculties, may, like the pure visualizer, perform
 astounding feats of memory--Mozart, for example, noting from memory
 the _Miserere_ of the Sistine Chapel after two hearings; the deaf
 Beethoven, composing and inwardly repeating his enormous symphonies.
 On the other hand, the man of auditory type, like the visual, is
 exposed to serious dangers; for if he lose his auditory images, he is
 without resource and breaks down completely.

 "It is possible that persons with hallucinations of hearing, and
 individuals afflicted with the mania that they are victims of
 persecution, may all belong to the auditory type; and that the
 predominance of a certain kind of imagination may predispose to a
 certain order of hallucinations, and perhaps of delirium.

       *       *       *       *       *

 "The _motor type_ remains--perhaps the most interesting of all, and
 certainly the one of which least is known. Persons who belong to this
 type [_les moteurs_, in French, _motiles_, as Mr. Galton proposes to
 call them in English] make use, in memory, reasoning, and all their
 intellectual operations, of images derived from movement. In order to
 understand this important point, it is enough to remember that 'all
 our perceptions, and in particular the important ones, those of sight
 and touch, contain as integral elements the movements of our eyes and
 limbs; and that, if movement is ever an essential factor in our really
 seeing an object, it must be an equally essential factor when we see
 the same object in imagination' (Ribot).[62] For example, the complex
 impression of a ball, which is there, in our hand, is the resultant
 of optical impressions of touch, of muscular adjustments of the eye,
 of the movements of our fingers, and of the muscular sensations which
 these yield. When we imagine the ball, its idea must include the
 images of these muscular sensations, just as it includes those of the
 retinal and epidermal sensations. They form so many _motor images_.
 If they were not earlier recognized to exist, that is because our
 knowledge of the muscular sense is relatively so recent. In older
 psychologies it never was mentioned, the number of senses being
 restricted to five.

 "There are persons who remember a drawing better when they have
 followed its outlines with their finger. Lecoq de Boisbaudran used
 this means in his artistic teaching, in order to accustom his pupils
 to draw from memory. He made them follow the outlines of figures with
 a pencil held in the air, forcing them thus to associate muscular with
 visual memory. Galton quotes a curious corroborative fact. Colonel
 Moncrieff often observed in North America young Indians who, visiting
 occasionally his quarters, interested themselves greatly in the
 engravings which were shown them. One of them followed with care with
 the point of his knife the outline of a drawing in the Illustrated
 London News, saying that this was to enable him to carve it out the
 better on his return home. In this ease the motor images were to
 reinforce the visual ones. The young savage was a _motor_....[63]
 When one's motor images are destroyed, one loses one's remembrance of
 movements, and sometimes, more curiously still, one loses the power
 of executing them. Pathology gives us examples in motor aphasia,
 agraphia, etc. Take the case of agraphia. An educated man, knowing how
 to write, suddenly loses this power, as a result of cerebral injury.
 His hand and arm are in no way paralytic, yet he cannot write. Whence
 this loss of power? He tells us himself: he no longer knows how. He
 has forgotten how to set about it to trace the letters, he has lost
 the memory of the movements to be executed, he has no longer the motor
 images which, when formerly he wrote, directed his hand.... Other
 patients, affected with word-blindness, resort to these motor images
 precisely to make amends for their other deficiency.... An individual
 affected in this way cannot read letters which are placed before his
 eyes, even although his sight be good enough for the purpose. This
 loss of the power of reading by sight may, at a certain time, be the
 only trouble the patient has. Individuals thus mutilated succeed in
 reading by an ingenious roundabout way which they often discover
 themselves: it is enough that they should trace the letters with their
 finger to understand their sense. What happens in such a case? How can
 the hand supply the place of the eye? The motor image gives the key to
 the problem. If the patient can read, so to speak, with his fingers,
 it is because in tracing the letters he gives himself a certain number
 of muscular impressions which are those of writing. In one word,
 the patient reads by writing (Charcot): the feeling of the graphic
 movements suggests the sense of what is being written as well as sight
 would."[64]

The imagination of a blind-deaf mute like Laura Bridgman must be
confined entirely to tactile and motor material. _All blind persons
must belong to the 'tactile' and 'motile' types_ of the French authors.
When the young man whose cataracts were removed by Dr. Franz was shown
different geometric figures, he said he "had not been able to form from
them the idea of a square and a disk until he perceived a sensation of
what he saw in the points of his fingers, as if he really touched the
objects."[65]

Professor Stricker of Vienna, who seems to have the motile form of
imagination developed in unusual strength, has given a very careful
analysis of his own case in a couple of monographs with which all
students should become familiar.[66] His recollections both of his
own movements and of those of other things are accompanied invariably
by distinct muscular feelings in those parts of his body which would
naturally be used in effecting or in following the movement. In
thinking of a soldier marching, for example, it is as if he were
helping the image to march by marching himself in his rear. And if he
suppresses this sympathetic feeling in his own legs, and concentrates
all his attention on the imagined soldier, the latter becomes, as it
were, paralyzed. In general his imagined movements, of whatsoever
objects, seem paralyzed the moment no feelings of movement either in
his own eyes or in his own limbs accompany them.[67] The movements of
articulate speech play a predominant part in his mental life.

 "When after my experimental work I proceed to its description, as
 a rule I reproduce in the first instance only words, which I had
 already associated with the perception of the various details of the
 observation whilst the latter was going on. For speech plays in all my
 observing so important a part that I ordinarily clothe phenomena in
 words as fast as I observe them."[68]

Most persons, on being asked _in what sort of terms they imagine
words_, will say 'in terms of hearing.' It is not until their attention
is expressly drawn to the point that they find it difficult to say
whether auditory images or motor images connected with the organs of
articulation predominate. A good way of bringing the difficulty to
consciousness is that proposed by Stricker: Partly open your mouth and
then imagine any word with labials or dentals in it, such as 'bubble,
'toddle.' Is your image under these conditions distinct? To most
people the image is at first 'thick,' as the sound of the word would
be if they tried to pronounce it with the lips parted. Many can never
imagine the words clearly with the mouth open; others succeed after a
few preliminary trials. The experiment proves how dependent our verbal
imagination is on actual feelings in lips, tongue, throat, larynx, etc.

 "When we recall the impression of a word or sentence, if we do not
 speak it out, we feel the twitter of the organs just about to come
 to that point. The articulating parts--the larynx, the tongue, the
 lips--are all sensibly excited; a _suppressed articulation is in fact
 the material of our recollection_, the intellectual manifestation, the
 _idea_ of speech."[69]

The open mouth in Stricker's experiment not only prevents actual
articulation of the labials, but our feeling of its openness keeps
us from imagining their articulation, just as a sensation of glaring
light will keep us from strongly imagining darkness. In persons
whose auditory imagination is weak, the articulatory image seems to
constitute the whole material for verbal thought. Professor Stricker
says that in his own case no auditory image enters into the words of
which he thinks.[70] Like most psychologists, however, he makes of
his personal peculiarities a rule, and says that verbal thinking is
normally and universally an exclusively motor representation. _I_
certainly get auditory images, both of vowels and of consonants, in
addition to the articulatory images or feelings on which this author
lays such stress. And I find that numbers of my students, after
repeating his experiments, come to this conclusion. There is _at first_
a difficulty due to the open mouth. That, however, soon vanishes, as
does also the difficulty of thinking of one vowel whilst continuously
sounding another. What probably remains true, however, is that most men
have a less auditory and a more articulatory verbal imagination than
they are apt to be aware of. Professor Stricker himself has acoustic
images, and can imagine the sounds of musical instruments, and the
peculiar voice of a friend. A statistical inquiry on a large scale,
into the variations of acoustic, tactile, and motor imagination, would
probably bear less fruit than Galton's inquiry into visual images. A
few monographs by competent observers, like Stricker, about their own
peculiarities, would give much more valuable information about the
diversities which prevail.[71]

_Touch-images_ are very strong in some people. The most vivid
touch-images come when we ourselves barely escape local injury, or
when we see another injured. The place may then actually tingle with
the imaginary sensation--perhaps not altogether imaginary, since
goose-flesh, paling or reddening, and other evidences of actual
muscular contraction in the spot may result.

 "An educated man," says a writer who must always be quoted when it
 is question of the powers of imagination,[72] "told me once that on
 entering his house one day he received a shock from crushing the
 finger of one of his little children in the door. At the moment of his
 fright he felt a violent pain in the corresponding finger of his own
 body, and this pain abode with him three days."

The same author makes the following discrimination, which probably most
men could verify:

 "On the skin I easily succeed in bringing out suggested sensations
 wherever I will. But because it is necessary to protract the mental
 effort I can only awaken such sensations as are in their nature
 prolonged, as warmth, cold, pressure. Fleeting sensations, as those
 of a prick, a cut, a blow, etc., I am unable to call up, because I
 cannot imagine them _ex abrupto_ with the requisite intensity. The
 sensations of the former order I can excite upon any part of the skin;
 and they may become so lively that, whether I will or not, I have to
 pass my hand over the place just as if it were a real impression on
 the skin."[73]

_Meyer's account of his own visual images_ is very interesting; and
with it we may close our survey of differences between the normal
powers of imagining in different individuals.

 "With much practice," he says, "I have succeeded in making it possible
 for me to call up subjective visual sensations at will. I tried all
 my experiments by day or at night with closed eyes. At first it was
 very difficult. In the first experiments which succeeded the whole
 picture was luminous, the shadows being given in a somewhat less
 strong bluish light. In later experiments I saw the objects dark, with
 bright outlines, or rather I saw outline drawings of them, bright on
 a dark ground. I can compare these drawings less to chalk drawings on
 a blackboard than to drawings made with phosphorus on a dark wall at
 night, though the phosphorus would show luminous vapors which were
 absent from my lines. If I wished, for example, to see a face, without
 intending that of a particular person, I saw the outline of a profile
 against the dark background. When I tried to repeat an experiment
 of the elder Darwin I saw only the edges of the die as bright lines
 on a dark ground. Sometimes, however, I saw the die really white and
 its edges black; it was then on a paler ground. I could soon at will
 change between a white die with black borders on a light field, and
 a black die with white borders on a dark field; and I can do this at
 any moment now. After long practice ... these experiments succeeded
 better still. I can now call before my eyes almost any object which
 I please, as a subjective appearance, and this in its own natural
 color and illumination. I see them almost always on a more or less
 light or dark, mostly dimly changeable ground. Even known faces I can
 see quite sharp, with the true color of hair and cheeks. It is odd
 that I see these faces mostly in profile, whereas those described [in
 the previous extract] were all full-face. Here are some of the final
 results of these experiments:

 "1) Some time after the pictures have arisen they vanish or change
 into others, without my being able to prevent it.

 "2) When the color does not integrally belong to the object, I cannot
 always control it. A face, e.g., never seems to me blue, but always
 in its natural color; a red cloth, on the other hand, I can sometimes
 change to a blue one.

 "3) I have sometimes succeeded in seeing pure colors without objects;
 they then fill the entire field of view.

 "4) I often fail to see objects which are not known to me, mere
 fictions of my fancy, and instead of them there will appear familiar
 objects of a similar sort; for instance, I once tried to see a brass
 sword-hilt with a brass guard, instead of which the more familiar
 picture of a rapier-guard appeared.

 "5) Most of these subjective appearances, especially when they were
 bright, left after-images behind them when the eyes were quickly
 opened during their presence. For example, I thought of a silver
 stirrup, and after I had looked at it a while I opened my eyes and for
 a long while afterwards saw its after-image.

 "These experiments succeeded best when I lay quietly on my back and
 closed my eyes. I could bear no noise about me, as this kept the
 vision from attaining the requisite intensity. The experiments succeed
 with me now so easily that I am surprised they did not do so at
 first, and I feel as though they ought to succeed with everyone. The
 important point in them is to get the image sufficiently intense by
 the exclusive direction of the attention upon it, and by the removal
 of all disturbing impressions."[74]

_The negative after-images which succeeded upon Meyer's imagination
when he opened his eyes_ are a highly interesting, though rare,
phenomenon. So far as I know there is only one other published report
of a similar experience.[75] It would seem that in such a case the
neural process corresponding to the imagination must be the entire
tract concerned in the actual sensation, even down as far as the
retina. This leads to a new question to which we may now turn--of what
is


THE NEURAL PROCESS WHICH UNDERLIES IMAGINATION?


The commonly-received idea is that it is only a milder degree of the
same process which took place when the thing now imagined was sensibly
perceived. Professor Bain writes:

 "Since a sensation in the first instance diffuses nerve-currents
 through the interior of the brain outwards to the organs of expression
 and movement,--the persistence of that sensation, after the outward
 exciting cause is withdrawn, can be but a continuance of the same
 diffusive currents, perhaps less intense, but not otherwise different.
 The shock remaining in the ear and brain, after the sound of thunder,
 must pass through the same circles, and operate in the same way as
 during the actual sound. We can have no reason for believing that,
 in this self-sustaining condition, the impression changes its seat,
 or passes into some new circles that have the special property of
 retaining it. Every part actuated _after_ the shock must have been
 actuated _by_ the shock, only more powerfully. With this single
 difference of intensity, the mode of existence of a sensation existing
 after the fact is essentially the same as its mode of existence during
 the fact.... Now if this be the case with impressions _persisting_
 when the cause has ceased, what view are we to adopt concerning
 impressions _reproduced_ by mental causes alone, or without the aid
 of the original, as in ordinary recollection? What is the manner of
 occupation of the brain with a resuscitated feeling of resistance,
 a smell or a sound? There is only one answer that seems admissable.
 _The renewed feeling occupies the very same parts, and in the same
 manner, as the original feeling, and no other parts, nor in any other
 assignable manner._ I imagine that if our present knowledge of the
 brain had been present to the earliest speculators, this is the only
 hypothesis that would have occurred to them. For where should a past
 feeling be embodied, if not in the same organs as the feeling when
 present? It is only in this way that its identity can be preserved; a
 feeling differently embodied would be a different feeling."[76]

It is not plain from Professor Bain's text whether by the 'same
parts' he means only the same parts _inside the brain_, or the same
_peripheral_ parts also, as those occupied by the original feeling.
The examples which he himself proceeds to give are almost all cases of
imagination of _movement_, in which the peripheral organs are indeed
affected, for actual movements of a weak sort are found to accompany
the idea. This is what we should expect. All currents tend to run
forward in the brain and discharge into the muscular system; and the
idea of a movement tends to do this with peculiar facility. But the
question remains: Do currents run _backward_, so that if the optical
centres (for example) are excited by 'association' and a visual object
is imagined, a current runs _down to the retina_ also, and excites that
sympathetically with the higher tracts? In other words, _can peripheral
sense-organs be excited from above, or only from without? Are they
excited in imagination?_ Professor Bain's instances are almost silent
as to this point. All he says is this:

 "We might think of a blow on the hand until the skin were actually
 irritated and inflamed. The attention very much directed to any part
 of the body, as the great toe, for instance, is apt to produce a
 distinct feeling in the part, which we account for only by supposing a
 revived nerve-current to flow there, making a sort of false sensation,
 an influence from within mimicking the influences from without in
 sensation proper.--(See the writings of Mr. Braid, of Manchester, on
 Hypnotism, etc.)"

If I may judge from my own experience, all feelings of this sort
are consecutive upon motor currents invading the skin and producing
contraction of the muscles there, the muscles whose contraction gives
'goose-flesh' when it takes place on an extensive scale. I never
get a _feeling_ in the skin, however strongly I _imagine_ it, until
some actual change in the condition of the skin itself has occurred.
The truth seems to be that the cases where peripheral sense-organs
are directly excited in consequence of imagination are exceptional
rarities, if they exist at all. _In common cases of imagination it
would seem more natural to suppose that the seat of the process is
purely cerebral, and that the sense-organ is left out._ Reasons for
such a conclusion would be briefly these:

1) In imagination the _starting-point_ of the process must be in the
brain. Now we know that currents usually flow one way in the nervous
system; and for the peripheral sense-organs to be excited in these
cases, the current would have to flow backward.

2) There is between imagined objects and felt objects a difference of
conscious quality which may be called almost absolute. It is hardly
possible to confound the liveliest image of fancy with the weakest
real sensation. The felt object has a plastic reality and outwardness
which the imagined object wholly lacks. Moreover, as Fechner says, in
imagination the attention feels as if drawn backwards to the brain; in
sensation (even of after-images) it is directed forward towards the
sense-organ.[77] The difference between the two processes feels like
one of kind, and not like a mere 'more' or 'less' of the same.[78] If a
sensation of sound were only a strong imagination, and an imagination
a weak sensation, there ought to be a border-line of experience where
we never could tell whether we were hearing a weak sound or imagining
a strong one. In comparing a present sensation felt with a past one
imagined, it will be remembered that we often judge the imagined one
to _have been the stronger_ (see above, Vol. I p. 500, note). This is
inexplicable if the imagination be simply a weaker excitement of the
sensational process.

To these reasons the following objections may be made:

To 1): The current demonstrably _does_ flow backward down the optic
nerve in Meyer's and Féré's negative after-image. Therefore it _can_
flow backward; therefore it _may_ flow backward in some, however
slight, degree, in all imagination.[79]

To 2): The difference alleged is not absolute, and sensation and
imagination _are_ hard to discriminate where the sensation is so weak
as to be just perceptible. At night hearing a very faint striking of
the hour by a far-off clock, our imagination reproduces both rhythm
and sound, and it is often difficult to tell which was the last real
stroke. So of a baby crying in a distant part of the house, we are
uncertain whether we still hear it, or only imagine the sound. Certain
violin-players take advantage of this in diminuendo terminations.
After the pianissimo has been reached they continue to bow as if still
playing, but are careful not to touch the strings. The listener hears
in imagination a degree of sound fainter still than the preceding
pianissimo. This phenomenon is not confined to hearing:

 "If we slowly approach our finger to a surface of water, we often
 deceive ourselves about the moment in which the wetting occurs. The
 apprehensive patient believes himself to feel the knife of the surgeon
 whilst it is still at some distance."[80]

Visual perception supplies numberless instances in which the same
sensation of vision is perceived as one object or another according
to the interpretation of the mind. Many of these instances will come
before us in the course of the next two chapters; and in Chapter
XIX similar illusions will be described in the other senses. Taken
together, all these facts would force us to admit that _the subjective
difference between imagined and felt objects is less absolute than
has been claimed, and that the cortical processes which underlie
imagination and sensation are not quite as discrete as one at first is
tempted to suppose. That peripheral sensory processes are ordinarily
involved in imagination seems improbable; that they may sometimes be
aroused from the cortex downwards cannot, however, be dogmatically
denied._

       *       *       *       *       *

_The imagination-process_ CAN _then pass over into the
sensation-process._ In other words, genuine sensations _can_ be
centrally originated. When we come to study hallucinations in the
chapter on Outer Perception, we shall see that this is by no
means a thing of rare occurrence. At present, however, we must admit
that _normally the two processes do_ NOT _pass over into each other_;
and we must inquire why. One of two things must be the reason. Either

1. Sensation-processes occupy a different _locality_ from
imagination-processes; or

2. Occupying the same locality, they have an _intensity_ which under
normal circumstances currents from other cortical regions are incapable
of arousing, and to produce which currents from the periphery are
required.

_It seems almost certain_ (after what was said in Chapter II. pp.
49-51) _that the imagination-process differs from the sensation-process
by its intensity rather than by its locality._ However it may be with
lower animals, the assumption that ideational and sensorial centres
are locally distinct appears to be supported by no facts drawn from
the observation of human beings. After occipital destruction, the
hemianopsia which results in man is sensorial blindness, not mere
loss of optical ideas. Were there centres for crude optical sensation
below the cortex, the patients in these cases would still feel light
and darkness. Since they do not preserve even this impression on the
lost half of the field, we must suppose that there are no centres for
vision of any sort whatever below the cortex, and that the corpora
quadrigemina and other lower optical ganglia are organs for reflex
movement of eye-muscles and not for conscious sight. Moreover there are
no facts which oblige us to think that, within the occipital cortex,
one part is connected with sensation and another with mere ideation
or imagination. The pathological cases assumed to prove this are all
better explained by disturbances of conduction between the optical and
other centres (see p. 50). In bad cases of hemianopsia the patient's
images depart from him together with his sensibility to light. They
depart so completely that he does not even know what is the matter
with him. To perceive that one is blind to the right half of the field
of view one must have an idea of that part of the field's possible
existence. But the defect in these patients has to be revealed to them
by the doctor, they themselves only knowing that there is 'something
wrong' with their eyes. What you have no idea of you cannot miss; and
their not definitely missing this great region out of their sight seems
due to the fact that their very idea and memory of it is lost along
with the sensation. A man blind of his eyes merely, sees _darkness_.
A man blind of his visual brain-centres can no more see darkness out
of the parts of his retina which are connected with the brain-lesion
than he can see it out of the skin of his back. He cannot see at all in
that part of the field; and he cannot think of the light which he ought
to be feeling _there_, for the very notion of the existence of that
particular 'there' is cut out of his mind.[81]

Now if we admit that sensation and imagination are due to the activity
of the same centres in the cortex, we can see a very good teleological
reason why they should correspond to discrete kinds of process in these
centres, and why the process which gives the sense that the object is
really there ought normally to be arousable only by currents entering
from the periphery and not by currents from the neighboring cortical
parts. We can see, in short, why _the sensational process_ OUGHT TO _be
discontinuous with all normal ideational processes, however intense_.
For, as Dr. Münsterberg justly observes:

 "Were there not this peculiar arrangement we should not distinguish
 reality and fantasy, our conduct would not be accommodated to the
 facts about us, but would be inappropriate and senseless, and we could
 not keep ourselves alive.... That our thoughts and memories should
 be copies of sensations with their intensity greatly reduced is thus
 a consequence deducible logically from the natural adaptation of the
 cerebral mechanism to its environment."[82]

Mechanically the discontinuity between the ideational and the
sensational kinds of process must mean that when the greatest
ideational intensity has been reached, an order of _resistance_
presents itself which only a new order of force can break through. The
current from the periphery is the new order of force required; and what
happens after the resistance is overcome is the sensational process. We
may suppose that the latter consists in some new and more violent sort
of disintegration of the neural matter, which now explodes at a deeper
level than at other times.

Now how shall we conceive of the 'resistance' which prevents this
sort of disintegration from taking place, this sort of intensity in
the process from being attained, so much of the time? It must be
either an intrinsic resistance, some force of cohesion in the neural
molecules themselves; or an extrinsic influence, due to other cortical
cells. When we come to study the process of hallucination we shall
see that both factors must be taken into account. There is a degree
of inward molecular cohesion in our brain-cells which it probably
takes a sudden inrush of destructive energy to spring apart. Incoming
peripheral currents possess this energy from the outset. Currents
from neighboring cortical regions might attain to it if they could
_accumulate_ within the centre which we are supposed to be considering.
But since during waking hours every centre communicates with others
by association-paths, no such accumulation can take place. The
cortical currents which run in run right out again, awakening the next
ideas; the level of tension in the cells does not rise to the higher
explosion-point; and the latter must be gained by a sudden current from
the periphery or not at all.

       *       *       *       *       *

[49] Prof. Jastrow has ascertained by statistical inquiry among the
blind that if their blindness have occurred before a period embraced
between the fifth and seventh years the visual centres seem to decay,
and visual dreams and images are gradually outgrown. If sight is lost
after the seventh year, visual imagination seems to survive through
life. See Prof. J.'s interesting article on the Dreams of the Blind, in
the New Princeton Review for January 1888.

[50] Impression means sensation for Hume.

[51] Treatise on Human Nature, part i. § vii.

[52] Huxley's Hume, pp. 92-94.

[53] On Intelligence (N. Y.), vol. ii. p. 139.

[54] Principles, Introd. § 13. Compare also the passage quoted above,
vol. I, p. 469.

[55] The differences noted by Fechner between after-images and images
of imagination proper are as follows:

_After Images._                          _Imagination-images._

Feel coercive;                          Feel subject to our spontaneity;

Seem unsubstantial, vaporous;           Have, as it were, more body;

Are sharp in outline;                   Are blurred;

Are bright;                             Are darker than even the darkest
                                        black of the after-images;

Are almost colorless;                   Have lively coloration;

Are continuously enduring;              Incessantly disappear, and have to
                                        be renewed by an effort of will.
                                        At last even this fails to revive
                                        them.

Cannot be voluntarily changed.          Can be exchanged at will for
                                        others.

Are exact copies of originals.          Cannot violate the necessary laws
                                        of appearance of their
                                        originals--e.g., a man cannot be
                                        imagined from in front and behind
                                        at once. The imagination must walk
                                        round him, so to speak;

Are more easily got with shut than      Are more easily had with open than
with open eyes;                         with shut eyes;

Seem to move when the head or eyes      Need not follow movements of head
move;                                   or eyes.

The field within which they appear      The field is extensive in three
(with closed eyes) is dark, contracted, dimensions, and objects can be
flat, close to the eyes, in             imagined in it above or behind
front, and the images have no           almost as easily as in front.
perspective;

The attention seems directed forwards   In imagining, the attention feels
towards the sense-organ, in             as if drawn backwards towards the
observing after-images.                 brain.


Finally, Fechner speaks of the impossibility of attending to both
after-images and imagination-images at once, even when they are of the
same object and might be expected to combine. All these differences are
true of Fechner; but many of them would be untrue of other persons. I
quote them as a type of observation which any reader with sufficient
patience may repeat. To them may be added, as a universal proposition,
that after-images seem larger if we project them on a distant screen,
and smaller if we project them on a near one, whilst no such change
takes place in mental pictures.

[56] [I am myself a good draughtsman, and have a very lively interest
in pictures, statues, architecture and decoration, and a keen
sensibility to artistic effects. But I am an extremely poor visualizer,
and find myself often unable to reproduce in my mind's eye pictures
which I have most carefully examined.--W. J.]

[57] See also McCosh and Osborne, Princeton Review, Jan. 1884. There
are some good examples of high development of the Faculty in the London
Spectator, Dec. 28, 1878, pp. 1631, 1634, Jan. 4, 11, 25, and March 18,
1879.

[58] Take the following report from one of my students: "I am unable
to form in my mind's eye any visual likeness of the table whatever.
After many trials, I can only get a hazy surface, with nothing on it or
about it. I can see no variety in color, and no positive limitations
in extent, while I cannot see what I see well enough to determine its
position in respect to my eye, or to endow it with any quality of size.
I am in the same position as to the word _dog_. I cannot see it in my
mind's eye at all; and so cannot tell whether I should have to run my
eye along it, if I did see it."

[59] Progrès Médical, 21 juillet. I abridge from the German report of
the case in Wilbrand: Die Seelenblindheit (188).

[60] In a letter to Charcot this interesting patient adds that his
character also is changed: "I was formerly receptive, easily made
enthusiastic, and possessed a rich fancy. Now I am quiet and cold, and
fancy never carries my thoughts away.... I am much less susceptible
than formerly to anger or sorrow. I lately lost my dearly-beloved
mother; but felt far less grief at the bereavement than if I had been
able to see in my mind's eye her physiognomy and the phases of her
suffering, and especially less than if I had been able to witness in
imagination the outward effects of her untimely loss upon the members
of the family."

[61] Psychologie du Raisonnement (1886), p. 25.

[62] [I am myself a very poor visualizer, and find that I can seldom
call to mind even a single letter of the alphabet in purely retinal
terms. I must trace the letter by running my mental eye over its
contour in order that the image of it shall have any distinctness at
all. On questioning a large number of other people, mostly students,
I find that perhaps half of them say they have no such difficulty in
seeing letters mentally. Many affirm that they can see an entire word
at once, especially a short one like 'dog,' with no such feeling of
creating the letters successively by tracing them with the eye.--W. J.]

[63] It is hardly needful to say that in modern primary education, in
which the blackboard is so much used, the children are taught their
letters, etc., by all possible channels at once, sight, hearing, and
movement.

[64] See an interesting case of a similar sort, reported by Farges, in
l'Encéphale, 7me Année, p. 545.

[65] Philosophical Transactions, 1841, p. 65.

[66] Studien über die Sprachvorstellungen (1880), and Studien über die
Bewegungsvorstellungen (1882).

[67] Prof. Stricker admits that by practice he has succeeded in making
his eye-movements 'act vicariously' for his leg-movements in imagining
men walking.

[68] Bewegungsvorstellungen, p. 6.

[69] Bain: Senses and Intellect, p. 339.

[70] Studien über Sprachvorstellungen, 28, 31, etc. Cf. pp. 49-50,
etc. Against Stricker, see Stumpf, Tonpsychol., 155-162, and Revue
Philosophique, xx. 617. See also Paulhan, Rev. Philosophique, xvi.
405. Stricker replies to Paulhan in vol. xviii. p. 685. P. retorts in
vol. xix p. 118. Stricker reports that out of 100 persons questioned
he found only _one_ who had _no_ feeling in his lips when silently
thinking the letters M, B, P; and out of 60 only _two_ who were
conscious of no internal articulation whilst reading (pp. 59-60).

[71] I think it must be admitted that some people have no vivid
substantive images in _any_ department of their sensibility. One of my
students, an intelligent youth, denied so pertinaciously that there
was _anything_ in his mind _at all_ when he thought, that I was much
perplexed by his case. I myself certainly have no such vivid play of
nascent movements or motor images as Professor Stricker describes. When
I seek to represent a row of soldiers marching, all I catch is a view
of stationary legs first in one phase of movement and then in another,
and these views are extremely imperfect and momentary. Occasionally
(especially when I try to stimulate my imagination, as by repeating
Victor Hugo's lines about the regiment,

    "Leur pas est si correct, sans tarder ni courir,
    Qu'on croit voir des ciseaux se fermer et s'ouvrir,")

I seem to get an instantaneous glimpse of an actual movement, but it is
to the last degree dim and uncertain. All these images seem at first as
if purely retinal. I think, however, that rapid eye-movements accompany
them, though these latter give rise to such slight feelings that they
are almost impossible of detection. Absolutely no leg-movements of my
own are there; in fact, to call such up arrests my imagination of the
soldiers. My optical images are in general very dim, dark, fugitive,
and contracted. It would be utterly impossible to _draw_ from them, and
yet I perfectly well distinguish one from the other. My auditory images
are excessively inadequate reproductions of their originals. I have
_no_ images of taste or smell. Touch-imagination is fairly distinct,
but comes very little into play with most objects thought of. Neither
is all my thought verbalized; for I have shadowy schemes of relation,
as apt to terminate in a nod of the head or an expulsion of the breath
as in a definite word. On the whole, vague images or sensations of
movement inside of my head towards the various parts of space in which
the terms I am thinking of either lie or are momentarily symbolized
to lie together with movements of the breath through my pharynx and
nostrils, form a by no means inconsiderable part of my _thought-stuff_.
I doubt whether my difficulty in giving a clearer account is wholly
a matter of inferior power of introspective attention, though that
doubtless plays its part. Attention, _ceteris paribus_, must always be
inferior in proportion to the feebleness of the internal images which
are offered it to hold on to.

[72] Geo. Herm. Meyer, Untersuchungen üb. d. Physiol. d. Nervenfaser
(1843), p. 233. For other cases see Tuke's Influence of Mind upon Body,
chaps. ii. and vii.

[73] Meyer, _op. cit._ p. 238.

[74] Meyer, _op. cit._ pp. 238-41.

[75] That of Dr. Ch. Féré in the Revue Philosophique, xx. 364. Johannes
Müller's account of hypnagogic hallucinations floating before the eyes
for a few moments after these had been opened, seems to belong more to
the category of spontaneous hallucinations (see his Physiology, London,
1843, p. 1394). It is impossible to tell whether the words in Wundt's
Vorlesungen, i. 387, refer to a personal experience of his own or not;
probably not. _Il va sans dire_ that an inferior visualizer like myself
can get no such after-images. Nor have I as yet succeeded in getting
report of any from my students.

[76] Senses and Intellect, p. 338.

[77] See above, note 55.

[78] V. Kandinsky (Kritische u. klinische Betrachtungen im Gebiete der
Sinnestäuschungen (Berlin, 1885), p. 135 ff.) insists that in even the
liveliest pseudo-hallucinations (see below, Chapter XX), which may be
regarded as the intensest possible results of the imaginative process,
there is no outward objectivity perceived in the thing represented, and
that a _ganzer Abgrund_ separates these 'ideas' from true hallucination
and objective perception.

[79] It seems to also flow backwards in certain hypnotic
hallucinations. Suggest to a 'Subject' in the hypnotic trance that a
sheet of paper has a red cross upon it, then pretend to remove the
imaginary cross, whilst you tell the Subject to look fixedly at a
dot upon the paper, and he will presently tell you that he sees a
'bluish-green' cross. The genuineness of the result has been doubted,
but there seems no good reason for rejecting M. Binet's account (Le
Magnetisme Animal, 1887, p. 188). M. Binet, following M. Parinaud,
and on the faith of a certain experiment, at one time believed, the
optical brain-centres and not the retina to be the seat of ordinary
negative after-images. The experiment is this: Look fixedly, with one
eye open, at a colored spot on a white background. Then close that eye
and look fixedly with the _other_ eye at a plain surface. A negative
after-image of the colored spot will presently appear. (Psychologie
du Raisonnement, 1886, p. 45.) But Mr. Delabarre has proved (American
Journal of Psychology, ii. 326) that this after-image is due, not to a
higher cerebral process, but to the fact that the retinal process in
the _closed_ eye affects consciousness at certain moments, and that its
object is then projected into the field seen by the eye which is open.
M. Binet informs me that he is converted by the proofs given by Mr.
Delabarre.

The fact remains, however, that the negative after-images of Herr
Meyer, M. Féré, and the hypnotic subjects, form an exception to
all that we know of nerve-currents, if they are due to a refluent
centrifugal current to the retina. It may be that they will hereafter
be explained in some other way. Meanwhile we can only write them down
as a paradox. Sig. Sergi's theory that there is _always_ a refluent
wave in perception hardly merits serious consideration (Psychologie
Physiologique, pp. 99, 189). Sergi's theory has recently been
reaffirmed with almost incredible crudity by Lombroso and Ottolenghi in
the Revue Philosophique, xxix. 70 (Jan. 1890).

[80] Lotze, Med. Psych. p. 509.

[81] See an important article by Binet in the Revue Philosophique,
xxvi. 481 (1888); also Dufour, in Revue Méd. de la Suisse Romande,
1889. No. 8, cited in the Neurologisches Centralblatt, 1890. p. 48.

[82] Die Willenshandlung (1888), pp. 129-40.




CHAPTER XIX.

THE PERCEPTION OF 'THINGS.'

PERCEPTION AND SENSATION COMPARED.


A pure sensation we saw above, p. 7, to be an abstraction never
realized in adult life. Any quality of a thing which affects our
sense-organs does also more than that: it arouses processes in the
hemispheres which are due to the organization of that organ by past
experiences, and the result of which in consciousness are commonly
described as ideas which the sensation suggests. The first of these
ideas is that of the _thing_ to which the sensible quality belongs.
_The consciousness of particular material things present to sense_ is
nowadays called _perception_.[83] The consciousness of such things
may be more or less complete; it may be of the mere name of the thing
and its other essential attributes, or it may be of the thing's
various remoter relations. It is impossible to draw any sharp line of
distinction between the barer and the richer consciousness, because the
moment we get beyond the first crude sensation all our consciousness
is a matter of suggestion, and the various suggestions shade gradually
into each other, being one and all products of the same psychological
machinery of association. In the directer consciousness fewer, in the
remoter more, associative processes are brought into play.

_Perception thus differs from sensation by the consciousness of farther
facts associated with the object of the sensation:_

 "When I lift my eyes from the paper on which I am writing I see the
 chairs and tables and walls of my room, each of its proper shape and
 at its proper distance. I see, from my window, trees and meadows, and
 horses and oxen, and distant hills. I see each of its proper size, of
 its proper form, and at its proper distance; and these particulars
 appear as immediate informations of the eye, as the colors which I
 see by means of it. Yet philosophy has ascertained that we derive
 nothing from the eye whatever but sensations of color.... How, then,
 is it that we receive accurate information, by the eye, of size and
 shape and distance? By association merely. The colors upon a body
 are different, according to its figure, its shape, and its size. But
 the sensations of color and what we may here, for brevity, call the
 sensations of extension, of figure, of distance, have been so often
 united, felt in conjunction, that the sensation of the color is never
 experienced without raising the ideas of the extension, the figure,
 the distance, in such intimate union with it, that they not only
 cannot be separated, but are actually supposed to be seen. The sight,
 as it is called, of figure, or distance, appearing as it does a simple
 sensation, is in reality a complex state of consciousness--a sequence
 in which the antecedent, a sensation of color, and the consequent,
 a number of ideas, are so closely combined by association that they
 appear not one idea, but one sensation."

This passage from James Mill[84] gives a clear statement of the
doctrine which Berkeley in his Theory of Vision made for the first time
an integral part of Psychology. Berkeley compared our visual sensations
to the words of a language, which are but signs or occasions for our
intellects to pass to what the speaker means. As the sounds called
words have no inward affinity with the ideas they signify, so neither
have our visual sensations, according to Berkeley, any inward affinity
with the things of whose presence they make us aware. Those things
are _tangibles;_ their real properties, such as shape, size, mass,
consistency, position, reveal themselves only to touch. But the visible
signs and the tangible significates are by long custom so "closely
twisted, blended, and incorporated together, and the prejudice is so
confirmed and riveted in our thoughts by a long tract of time, by the
use of language, and want of reflection,"[85] that we think we _see_
the whole object, tangible and visible alike, in one simple indivisible
act.

_Sensational and reproductive brain-processes combined, then, are what
give us the content of our perceptions._ Every concrete particular
material thing is a conflux of sensible qualities, with which we have
become acquainted at various times. Some of these qualities, since
they are more constant, interesting, or practically important, we
regard as essential constituents of the thing. In a general way, such
are the tangible shape, size, mass, etc. Other properties, being more
fluctuating, we regard as more or less accidental or inessential. We
call the former qualities the reality, the latter its appearances.
Thus, I hear a sound, and say 'a horse-car'; but the sound is not the
horse-car, it is one of the horse-car's least important manifestations.
The real horse-car is a feelable, or at most a feelable and visible,
thing which in my imagination the sound calls up. So when I get, as
now, a brown eye-picture with lines not parallel, and with angles
unlike, and call it my big solid rectangular walnut library-table, that
picture is not the table. It is not even like the table as the table
is for vision, when rightly seen. It is a distorted perspective view
of three of the sides of what I mentally _perceive_ (more or less) in
its totality and undistorted shape. The back of the table, its square
corners, its size, its heaviness, are features of which I am conscious
when I look, almost as I am conscious of its name. The suggestion of
the name is of course due to mere custom. But no less is that of the
back, the size, weight, squareness, etc.

Nature, as Reid says, is frugal in her operations, and will not be at
the expense of a particular instinct to give us that knowledge which
experience and habit will soon produce. Reproduced sights and contacts
tied together with the present sensation in the unity of a _thing_ with
a name, these are the complex objective stuff out of which my actually
perceived table is made. Infants must go through a long education of
the eye and ear before they can perceive the realities which adults
perceive. _Every perception is an acquired perception._[86]

_Perception may then be defined_, in Mr. Sully's words, as that process
by which the mind

 "supplements a sense-impression by an accompaniment or escort of
 revived sensations, the whole aggregate of actual and revived
 sensations being solidified or 'integrated' into the form of a
 percept, that is, an apparently immediate apprehension or cognition of
 an object now present in a particular locality or region of space."[87]

Every reader's mind will supply abundant examples of the process here
described; and to write them down would be therefore both unnecessary
and tedious. In the chapter on Space we have already discussed some of
the more interesting ones; for in our perceptions of shape and position
it is really difficult to decide how much of our sense of the object is
due to reproductions of past experience, and how much to the immediate
sensations of the eye. I shall accordingly confine myself in the rest
of this chapter to certain additional generalities connected with the
perceptive process.

       *       *       *       *       *

The first point is relative to that 'solidification' or 'integration,'
whereof Mr. Sully speaks, of the present with the absent and merely
represented sensations. Cerebrally taken, these words mean no more
than this, that the process aroused in the sense-organ has shot into
various paths which habit has already organized in the hemispheres,
and that instead of our having the sort of consciousness which would
be correlated with the simple sensorial process, we have that which is
correlated with this more complex process. This, as it turns out, is
the consciousness of that more complex 'object,' the whole 'thing,'
instead of being the consciousness of that more simple object, the few
qualities or attributes which actually impress our peripheral nerves.
This consciousness must have the unity which every 'section' of our
stream of thought retains so long as its objective content does not
sensibly change. More than this we cannot say; we certainly ought not
to say what usually is said by psychologists, and treat the perception
as a sum of distinct psychic entities, the present sensation namely,
_plus_ a lot of images from the past, all 'integrated' together in a
way impossible to describe. The perception is one state of mind or
nothing--as I have already so often said.

In many cases it is easy to compare the psychic results of the
sensational with those of the perceptive process. We then see a marked
difference in the way in which the impressed portions of the object
are felt, in consequence of being cognized along with the reproduced
portion, in the higher state of mind. Their sensible quality changes
under our very eye. Take the already-quoted catch, _Pas de lieu Rhône
que nous_: one may read this over and over again without recognizing
the sounds to be identical with those of the words _paddle your own
canoe_. As we seize the English meaning the sound itself appears to
change. Verbal sounds are usually perceived with their meaning at the
moment of being heard. Sometimes, however, the associative irradiations
are inhibited for a few moments (the mind being preoccupied with other
thoughts) whilst the words linger on the ear as mere echoes of acoustic
sensation. Then, usually, their interpretation suddenly occurs. But at
that moment one may often surprise a change in the very _feel_ of the
word. Our own language would sound very different to us if we heard it
without understanding, as we hear a foreign tongue. Rises and falls of
voice, odd sibilants and other consonants, would fall on our ear in
a way of which we can now form no notion. Frenchmen say that English
sounds to them like the _gazouillement des oiseaux_--an impression
which it certainly makes on no native ear. Many of us English would
describe the sound of Russian in similar terms. All of us are conscious
of the strong inflections of voice and explosives and gutturals of
German speech in a way in which no German can be conscious of them.

This is probably the reason why, if we look at an isolated printed word
and repeat it long enough, it ends by assuming an entirely unnatural
aspect. Let the reader try this with any word on this page. He will
soon begin to wonder if it can possibly be the word he has been using
all his life with that meaning. It stares at him from the paper like
a glass eye, with no speculation in it. Its body is indeed there, but
its soul is fled. It is reduced, by this new way of attending to it,
to its sensational nudity. We never before attended to it in this
way, but habitually got it clad with its meaning the moment we caught
sight of it, and rapidly passed from it to the other words of the
phrase. We apprehended it, in short, with a cloud of associates, and
thus perceiving it, we felt it quite otherwise than as we feel it now
divested and alone.

Another well-known change is when we look at a landscape with our
head upside down. Perception is to a certain extent baffled by this
manœuvre; gradations of distance and other space-determinations are
made uncertain; the reproductive or associative processes, in short,
decline; and, simultaneously with their diminution, the colors grow
richer and more varied, and the contrasts of light and shade more
marked. The same thing occurs when we turn a painting bottom upward. We
lose much of its meaning, but, to compensate for the loss, we feel more
freshly the value of the mere tints and shadings, and become aware of
any lack of purely sensible harmony or balance which they may show.[88]
Just so, if we lie on the floor and look up at the mouth of a person
talking behind us. His lower lip here takes the habitual place of the
upper one upon our retina, and seems animated by the most extraordinary
and unnatural mobility, a mobility which now strikes us because (the
associative processes being disturbed by the unaccustomed point of
view) we get it as a naked sensation and not as part of a familiar
object perceived.

On a later page other instances will meet us. For the present these are
enough to prove our point. Once more we find ourselves driven to admit
that when qualities of an object impress our sense and we thereupon
perceive the object, the sensation as such of those qualities does not
still exist inside of the perception and form a constituent thereof.
The sensation is one thing and the perception another, and neither can
take place at the same time with the other, because their cerebral
conditions are not the same. They may _resemble_ each other, but in no
respect are they identical states of mind.


PERCEPTION IS OF DEFINITE AND PROBABLE THINGS.


The chief cerebral conditions of perception are the paths of
association irradiating from the sense-impression, which may have been
already formed. If a certain sensation be strongly associated with
the attributes of a certain thing, that thing is almost sure to be
perceived when we get the sensation. Examples of such things would be
familiar people, places, etc., which we recognize and name at a glance.
But _where the sensation is associated with more than one reality_, so
that either of two discrepant sets of residual properties may arise,
the perception is doubtful and vacillating, and _the most that can then
be said of it is that it will be of a_ PROBABLE _thing_, of the thing
which would most usually have given us that sensation.

In these ambiguous cases it is interesting to note that perception is
rarely abortive; _some_ perception takes place. The two discrepant sets
of associates do not neutralize each other or mix and make a blur. What
we more commonly get is first one object in its completeness, and then
the other in its completeness. In other words, _all brain-processes
are such as give rise to what we may call_ FIGURED _consciousness_. If
paths are irradiated at all, they are irradiated in consistent systems,
and occasion thoughts of definite objects, not mere hodge-podges of
elements. Even where the brain's functions are half thrown out of gear,
as in aphasia or dropping asleep, this law of figured consciousness
holds good. A person who suddenly gets sleepy whilst reading aloud will
read wrong; but instead of emitting a mere broth of syllables, he will
make such mistakes as to read 'supper-time' instead of 'sovereign,'
'overthrow' instead of 'opposite,' or indeed utter entirely imaginary
phrases, composed of several definite words, instead of phrases of the
book. So in aphasia: where the disease is mild the patient's mistakes
consist in using entire wrong words instead of right ones. Only in
the gravest lesions does he become quite inarticulate. These facts
show how subtle is the associative link; how delicate yet how strong
that connection among brain-paths which makes any number of them, once
excited together, thereafter tend to vibrate as a systematic whole. A
small group of elements, '_this_,' common to two systems, A and B, may
touch off A or B according as accident decides the next step (see Fig.
47). If it happen that a single point leading from '_this_' to B is
momentarily a little more pervious than any leading from '_this_' to A,
then that little advantage will upset the equilibrium in favor of the
entire system B. The currents will sweep first through that point and
thence into all the paths of B, each increment of advance making A more
and more impossible. The thoughts correlated with A and B, in such a
case, will have objects different, though similar. The similarity will,
however, consist in some very limited feature if the 'this' be small.

[Illustration: FIG. 47.]

_Thus the faintest sensations will give rise to the perception of
definite things if only they resemble those which the things are wont
to arouse._ In fact, a sensation must be strong and distinct in order
not to suggest an object and, if it is a nondescript feeling, really to
seem one. The auræ of epilepsy, globes of light, fiery vision, roarings
in the ears, the sensations which electric currents give rise to when
passed through the head, these are unfigured because they are strong.
Weaker feelings of the same sort would probably suggest objects. Many
years ago, after reading Maury's book, _Le Sommeil et les Rêves_, I
began for the first time to observe those ideas which faintly flit
through the mind at all times, words, visions, etc., disconnected with
the main stream of thought, but discernible to an attention on the
watch for them. A horse's head, a coil of rope, an anchor, are, for
example, ideas which have come to me unsolicited whilst I have been
writing these latter lines. They can often be explained by subtle
links of association, often not at all. But I have not a few times
been surprised, after noting some such idea, to find, on shutting
my eyes, an after-image left on the retina by some bright or dark
object recently looked at, and which had evidently suggested the idea.
'Evidently,' I say, because the general shape, size, and position of
object thought-of and of after-image were the same, although the idea
had details which the retinal image lacked. We shall probably never
know just what part retinal after-images play in determining the train
of our thoughts. Judging by my own experiences I should suspect it of
being not insignificant.[89]


ILLUSIONS.


Let us now, for brevity's sake, treat A and B in Fig. 47 as if they
stood for objects instead of brain-processes. And let us furthermore
suppose that A and B are, both of them, objects which might probably
excite the sensation which I have called '_this_,' but that on the
present occasion A and not B is the one which actually does so. If,
then, on this occasion '_this_' suggests A and not B, the result is a
_correct perception_. But if, on the contrary, 'this' suggests B and
not A, the result is a _false perception_, or, as it is technically
called, an _illusion_. But the _process_ is the same, whether the
perception be true or false.

Note that in every illusion what is false is what is inferred, not what
is immediately given. The 'this,' if it were felt by itself alone,
would be all right, it only becomes misleading by what it suggests.
If it is a sensation of sight, it may suggest a tactile object, for
example, which later tactile experiences prove to be not there. _The
so-called 'fallacy of the senses,' of which the ancient sceptics made
so much account, is not fallacy of the senses proper, but rather of the
intellect, which interprets wrongly what the senses give._[90]

       *       *       *       *       *

So much premised, let us look a little closer at these illusions. They
are due to two main causes. _The wrong object is perceived either
because_

1) _Although not on this occasion the real cause, it is yet the
habitual, inveterate, or most probable cause of 'this;'_ or because

2) _The mind is temporarily full of the thought of that object, and
therefore 'this' is peculiarly prone to suggest it at this moment._

I will give briefly a number of examples under each head. The first
head is the more important, because it includes a number of constant
illusions to which all men are subject, and which can only be dispelled
by much experience.


_Illusions of the First Type._


[Illustration: FIG. 48.]

One of the oldest instances dates from Aristotle. Cross two fingers
and roll a pea, pen-holder, or other small object between them. It
will seem double. Professor Croom Robertson has given the clearest
analysis of this illusion. He observes that if the object be brought
into contact first with the forefinger and next with the second finger,
the two contacts seem to come in at different points of space. The
forefinger-touch seems higher, though the finger is really lower; the
second-finger-touch seems lower, though the finger is really higher.
"We perceive the contacts as double because we refer them to two
distinct parts of space." The touched sides of the two fingers are
normally not together in space, and customarily never do touch one
thing; the one thing which now touches them, therefore, seems in two
places, i.e. seems two things.[91]

There is a whole batch of illusions which come from optical sensations
interpreted by us in accordance with our usual rule, although they are
now produced by an unusual object. The _stereoscope_ is an example. The
eyes see a picture apiece, and the two pictures are a little disparate,
the one seen by the right eye being a view of the object taken from a
point slightly to the right of that from which the left eye's picture
is taken. Pictures thrown on the two eyes by solid objects present this
identical disparity. Whence we react on the sensation in our usual way,
and perceive a solid. If the pictures be exchanged we perceive a hollow
mould of the object, for a hollow mould would cast just such disparate
pictures as these. Wheatstone's instrument, the _pseudoscope_, allows
us to look at solid objects and see with each eye the other eye's
picture. We then perceive the solid object hollow, _if it be an object
which might probably be hollow,_ but not otherwise. A human face,
e.g., never appears hollow to the pseudoscope. In this irregularity
of reaction on different objects, some seem hollow, others not; the
perceptive process is true to its law, which is _always to react on the
sensation in a determinate and figured fashion if possible, and in as
probable a fashion as the case admits_. To couple faces and hollowness
violates all our habits of association. For the same reason it is very
easy to make an intaglio cast of a face, or the painted inside of a
pasteboard mask, look convex, instead of concave as they are.

Our sense of the _position_ of things with respect to our eye
consists in suggestions of how we must move our hand to touch them.
Certain places of the image on the retina, certain actively-produced
positions of the eyeballs, are normally linked with the sense of
every determinate position which an outer thing may come to occupy.
Hence we perceive the usual position, even if the optical sensation
be artificially brought from a different part of space. Prisms warp
the light-rays in this way, and throw upon the retina the image of
an object situated, say, at spot _a_ of space in the same manner in
which (without the prisms) an object situated at spot _b_ would cast
its image. Accordingly we feel for the object at _b_ instead of _a_.
If the prism be before one eye only we see the object at _b_ with that
eye, and in its right position _a_ with the other--in other words,
we see it double. If both eyes be armed with prisms with their angle
towards the right, we pass our hand to the right of all objects when we
try rapidly to touch them. And this illusory sense of their position
lasts until a new association is fixed, when on removing the prisms a
contrary illusion at first occurs. Passive or unintentional changes in
the position of the eyeballs seem to be no more kept account of by the
mind than prisms are; so we spontaneously make no allowance for them
in our perception of distance and movements. Press one of the eyeballs
into a strained position with the finger, and objects move and are
translocated accordingly, just as when prisms are used.

Curious _illusions of movement_ in objects occur whenever the eyeballs
move without our intending it. We shall learn in the following
chapter that the original visual feeling of movement is produced
by any image passing over the retina. Originally, however, this
sensation is definitely referred neither to the object nor to the
eyes. Such definite reference grows up later, and obeys certain simple
laws. We believe objects to move: 1) whenever we get the retinal
movement-feeling, but think our eyes are still; and 2) whenever we
think that our eyes move, but fail to get the retinal movement-feeling.
We believe objects to be still, on the contrary, 1) whenever we get
the retinal movement-feeling, but think our eyes are moving; and 2)
whenever we neither think our eyes are moving, nor get the retinal
movement-feeling. Thus the perception of the object's state of motion
or rest depends on the notion we frame of our own eye's movement. Now
many sorts of stimulation make our eyes move without our knowing it.
If we look at a waterfall, river, railroad train, or any body which
continuously passes in front of us in the same direction, it carries
our eyes with it. This movement can be noticed in our eyes by a
bystander. If the object keep passing towards our left, our eyes keep
following whatever moving bit of it may have caught their attention at
first, until that bit disappears from view. Then they jerk back to the
right again, and catch a new bit, which again they follow to the left,
and so on indefinitely. This gives them an oscillating demeanor, slow
involuntary rotations leftward alternating with rapid voluntary jerks
rightward. But _the oscillations continue_ for a while after the object
has come to a standstill, or the eyes are carried to a new object,
and this produces the illusion that things now move in the opposite
direction. For we are unaware of the slow leftward automatic movements
of our eyeballs, and think that the retinal movement-sensations thereby
aroused must be due to a rightward motion of the object seen; whilst
the rapid voluntary rightward movements of our eyeballs we interpret as
attempts to pursue and catch again those parts of the object which have
been slipping away to the left.

Exactly similar oscillations of the eyeballs are produced in
_giddiness_, with exactly similar results. Giddiness is easiest
produced by whirling on our heels. It is a feeling of the movement of
our own head and body through space, and is now pretty well understood
to be due to the irritation of the semi-circular canals of the inner
ear.[92] When, after whirling, we stop, we seem to be spinning in
the reverse direction for a few seconds, and then objects appear to
continue whirling in the same direction in which, a moment previous,
our body actually whirled. The reason is that our _eyes normally
tend to maintain_ their field of view. If we suddenly turn our head
leftwards it is hard to make the eyes follow. They roll in their
orbits rightwards, by a sort of compensating inertia. Even though we
_falsely think_ our head to be moving leftwards, this consequence
occurs, and our eyes move rightwards--as may be observed in any one
with vertigo after whirling. As these movements are unconscious, the
retinal movement-feelings which they occasion are naturally referred
to the objects seen. And the intermittent voluntary twitches of the
eyes towards the left, by which we ever and anon recover them from the
extreme rightward positions to which the reflex movement brings them,
simply confirm and intensify our impression of a leftward-whirling
field of view: we seem to ourselves to be periodically pursuing and
overtaking the objects in their leftward flight. The whole phenomenon
fades out after a few seconds. And it often ceases if we voluntarily
fix our eyes upon a given point.[93]

_Optical vertigo,_ as these illusions of objective movement are called,
results sometimes from brain-trouble, intoxications, paralysis, etc. A
man will awaken with a weakness of one of his eye-muscles. An intended
orbital rotation will then not produce its expected result in the way
of retinal movement-feeling--whence false perceptions, of which one of
the most interesting cases will fall to be discussed in later chapters.

       *       *       *       *       *

There is an illusion of movement of the opposite sort, with which every
one is familiar at _railway stations_. Habitually, when we ourselves
move forward, our entire field of view glides backward over our retina.
When our movement is due to that of the windowed carriage, car, or
boat in which we sit, all stationary objects visible through the
window give us a sensation of gliding in the opposite direction. Hence,
whenever we get this sensation, of a window with _all_ objects visible
through it moving in one direction, we react upon it in our customary
way, and perceive a stationary field of view, over which the window,
and we ourselves inside of it, are passing by a motion of our own.
Consequently when another train comes alongside of ours in a station,
and fills the entire window, and, after standing still awhile, begins
to glide away, we judge that it is _our_ train which is moving, and
that the other train is still. If, however, we catch a glimpse of any
part of the station through the windows, or between the cars, of the
other train, the illusion of our own movement instantly disappears, and
we perceive the other train to be the one in motion. This, again, is
but making the usual and probable inference from our sensation.[94]

_Another illusion due to movement_ is explained by Helmholtz. Most
wayside objects, houses, trees, etc., look small when seen out of the
windows of a swift train. This is because we perceive them in the first
instance unduly near. And we perceive them unduly near because of their
extraordinarily rapid parallactic flight backwards. When we ourselves
move forward all objects glide backwards, as aforesaid; but the nearer
they are, the more rapid is this apparent translocation. Relative
rapidity of passage backwards is thus so familiarly associated with
nearness that when we feel it we perceive nearness. But with a given
size of retinal image the nearer an object is, the smaller do we judge
its actual size to be. Hence in the train, the faster we go, the nearer
do the trees and houses seem, and the nearer they seem, the smaller do
they look.[95]

       *       *       *       *       *

_Other illusions are due to the feeling of convergence_ being
wrongly interpreted. When we converge our eyeballs we perceive an
_approximation_ of whatever thing we may be looking at. Whatever things
do approach whilst we look at them oblige us, so long as they are not
very distant, to converge our eyes. Hence approach of the thing is
the _probable_ objective fact when we feel our eyes converging. Now
in most persons the internal recti muscles, to which convergence is
due, are weaker than the others; and the entirely passive position of
the eyeballs, the position which they assume when covered and looking
at nothing in particular, is either that of parallelism or of slight
divergence. Make a person look with both eyes at some near object, and
then screen the object from _one_ of his eyes by a card or book. The
chances are that you will see the eye thus screened turn just a little
outwards. Remove the screen, and you will now see it turn in as it
catches sight of the object again. The other eye meanwhile keeps as it
was at first. To most persons, accordingly, all objects seem to _come
nearer_ when, after looking at them with one eye, both eyes are used;
and they seem to _recede_ during the opposite change. With persons
whose external recti muscles are insufficient, the illusions may be of
the contrary kind.

       *       *       *       *       *

_The size of the retinal image_ is a fruitful source of illusions.
Normally, the retinal image grows larger as the object draws near. But
the sensation yielded by this enlargement is also given by any object
which really grows in size without changing its distance. Enlargement
of retinal image is therefore an ambiguous sign. An opera-glass
enlarges the moon. But most persons will tell you that she looks
smaller through it, only a great deal nearer and brighter. They read
the enlargement as a sign of approach; and the perception of approach
makes them actually reverse the sensation which suggests it--by an
exaggeration of our habitual custom of making allowance of the apparent
enlargement of whatever object approaches us, and reducing it in
imagination to its natural size. Similarly, in the theatre the glass
brings the stage near, but hardly seems to magnify the people on it.

The well-known increased _apparent size of the moon on the horizon_ is
a result of association and probability. It is seen through vaporous
air, and looks dimmer and duskier than when it rides on high; and it is
seen over fields, trees, hedges, streams, and the like, which break
up the intervening space and make us the better realize the latter's
extent. Both these causes make the moon seem more distant from us when
it is low; and as its visual angle grows no less, we deem that it must
be a larger body, and we so perceive it. It looks particularly enormous
when it comes up directly behind some well-known large object, as a
house or tree, distant enough to subtend an angle no larger than that
of the moon itself.[96]

       *       *       *       *       *

_The feeling of accommodation_ also gives rise to false perceptions of
size. Usually we accommodate our eyes for an object as it approaches
us. Usually under these circumstances the object throws a larger
retinal image. But believing the object to remain the same, we
make allowance for this and treat the entire eye-feeling which we
receive as significant of nothing but _approach_. When we relax our
accommodation and at the same time the retinal image grows smaller,
the probable cause is always a _receding_ object. The moment we put on
convex glasses, however, the accommodation relaxes, but the retinal
image grows larger instead of less. This is what would happen if our
object, whilst receding, grew. Such a probable object we accordingly
perceive, though with a certain vacillation as to the recession, for
the growth in apparent size is also a probable sign of approach,
and is at moments interpreted accordingly.--Atropin paralyzes the
muscles of accommodation. It is possible to get a dose which will
weaken these muscles without laming them altogether. When a known near
object is then looked at we have to make the same voluntary strain to
accommodate, as if it were a great deal nearer; but as its retinal
image is not enlarged in proportion to this suggested approach, we deem
that it must have grown smaller than usual. In consequence of this
so-called _micropsy_, Aubert relates that he saw a man apparently no
larger than a photograph. But the small size again made the man seem
farther off. The real distance was two or three feet, and he seemed
against the wall of the room.[97] Of these vacillations we shall have
to speak again in the ensuing chapter.[98]

       *       *       *       *       *

[Illustration: FIG. 49.]

Mrs. C. L. Franklin has recently described and explained with rare
acuteness an illusion of which the most curious thing is that it was
never noticed before. Take a single pair of crossed lines (Fig. 49),
hold them in a horizontal plane before the eyes, and look along them,
at such a distance that with the right eye shut, 1, and with the
left eye shut, 2, looks like the projection of a vertical line. Look
steadily now at the point of intersection of the lines with both eyes
open, and you will see a third line sticking up like a pin through
the paper at right angles to the plane of the two first lines. The
explanation of this illusion is very simple, but so circumstantial that
I must refer for it to Mrs. Franklin's own account.[99] Suffice it
that images of the two lines fall on 'corresponding' rows of retinal
points, and that the illusory vertical line is the only object capable
of throwing such images. A variation of the experiment is this:

 "In Fig. 50 the lines are all drawn so as to pass through a common
 point. With a little trouble one eye can be put into the position of
 this point--it is only necessary that the paper be held so that, with
 one eye shut, the other eye sees all the lines leaning neither to
 the right nor to the left. After a moment one can fancy the lines to
 be vertical staffs standing out of the plane of the paper.'... This
 illusion [says Mrs. Franklin] I take to be of purely mental origin.
 When a line lies anywhere in a plane passing through the apparent
 vertical meridian of one eye, and is looked at with that eye only...
 we have no very good means of knowing how it is directed in that
 plane.... Now of the lines in nature which lie anywhere within such
 a plane, by far the greater number are vertical lines. Hence we are
 peculiarly inclined to think that a line which we perceive to be in
 such a plane is a vertical line. But to see a whole lot of lines at
 once, all ready to throw their images upon the vertical meridian, is a
 thing that has hardly ever happened to us, except when they all have
 been vertical lines. Hence when that happens we have a still stronger
 tendency to think that what we see before us is a group of vertical
 lines."

[Illustration: FIG. 50.]

In other words, we see, as always, the most probable object.

       *       *       *       *       *

The foregoing may serve as examples of the first type of illusions
mentioned on page 86. I could cite of course many others, but it
would be tedious to enumerate all the thaumatropes and zoetropes,
dioramas, and juggler's tricks in which they are embodied. In the
chapter on Sensation we saw that many illusions commonly ranged
under this type are, physiologically considered, of another sort
altogether, and that associative processes, strictly so called, have
nothing to do with their production.


_Illusions of the Second Type._


We may now turn to illusions of the second of the two types
discriminated on page 86. In this type we perceive a wrong object
because our mind is full of the thought of it at the time, and any
sensation which is in the least degree connected with it touches off,
as it were, a train already laid, and gives us a sense that the object
is really before us. Here is a familiar example:

 "If a sportsman, while shooting woodcock in cover, sees a bird about
 the size and color of a woodcock get up and fly through the foliage,
 not having time to see more than that it is a bird of such a size
 and color, he immediately supplies by inference the other qualities
 of a woodcock, and is afterwards disgusted to find that he has shot
 a thrush. I have done so myself, and could hardly believe that
 the thrush was the bird I had fired at, so complete was my mental
 supplement to my visual perception."[100]

As with game, so with enemies, ghosts, and the like. Anyone waiting
in a dark place and expecting or fearing strongly a certain object
will interpret any abrupt sensation to mean that object's presence.
The boy playing 'I spy,' the criminal skulking from his pursuers, the
superstitious person hurrying through the woods or past the churchyard
at midnight, the man lost in the woods, the girl who tremulously
has made an evening appointment with her swain, all are subject to
illusions of sight and sound which make their hearts beat till they are
dispelled. Twenty times a day the lover, perambulating the streets with
his preoccupied fancy, will think he perceives his idol's bonnet before
him.

_The Proof-reader's Illusion_. I remember one night in Boston, whilst
waiting for a 'Mount Auburn' car to bring me to Cambridge, reading
most distinctly that name upon the signboard of a car on which (as I
afterwards learned) 'North Avenue' was painted. The illusion was so
vivid that I could hardly believe my eyes had deceived me. All reading
is more or less performed in this way.

 "Practised novel- or newspaper-readers could not possibly get on so
 fast if they had to see accurately every single letter of every word
 in order to perceive the words. More than half of the words come out
 of their mind, and hardly half from the printed page. Were this not
 so, did we perceive each letter by itself, typographic errors in
 well-known words would never be overlooked. Children, whose ideas
 are not yet ready enough to perceive words at a glance, read them
 wrong if they are printed wrong, that is, right according to the
 way of printing. In a foreign language, although it may be printed
 with the same letters, we read by so much the more slowly as we do
 not understand, or are unable promptly to perceive the words. But
 we notice misprints all the more readily. For this reason Latin and
 Greek and, still better, Hebrew works are more correctly printed,
 because the proofs are better corrected, than in German works. Of two
 friends of mine, one knew much Hebrew, the other little; the latter,
 however, gave instruction in Hebrew in a gymnasium; and when he
 called the other to help correct his pupils' exercises, it turned out
 that he could find out all sorts of little errors better than his
 friend, because the latter's perception of the words as totals was too
 swift."[101]

_Testimony to personal identity is proverbially fallacious_ for similar
reasons. A man has witnessed a rapid crime or accident, and carries
away his mental image. Later he is confronted by a prisoner whom he
forthwith perceives in the light of that image, and recognizes or
'identifies' as a participant, although he may never have been near
the spot. Similarly at the so-called 'materializing séances' which
fraudulent mediums give: in a dark room a man sees a gauze-robed
figure who in a whisper tells him she is the spirit of his sister,
mother, wife, or child, and falls upon his neck. The darkness, the
previous forms, and the expectancy have so filled his mind with
premonitory images that it is no wonder he perceives what is suggested.
These fraudulent 'séances' would furnish most precious documents to
the psychology of perception, if they could only be satisfactorily
inquired into. In the hypnotic trance any suggested object is sensibly
perceived. In certain subjects this happens more or less completely
after waking from the trance. It would seem that under favorable
conditions a somewhat similar susceptibility to suggestion may exist in
certain persons who are not otherwise entranced at all.

This suggestibility is greater in the lower senses than in the higher.
A German observer writes:

 "We know that a weak smell or taste may be very diversely interpreted
 by us, and that the same sensation will now be named as one thing and
 the next moment as another. Suppose an agreeable smell of flowers
 in a room: A visitor will notice it, seek to recognize what it is,
 and at last perceive more and more distinctly that it is the perfume
 of roses--until after all he discovers a bouquet of violets. Then
 suddenly he recognizes the violet-smell, and wonders how he could
 possibly have hit upon the roses.--Just so it is with taste. Try
 some meat whose visible characteristics are disguised by the mode of
 cooking, and you will perhaps begin by taking it for venison, and end
 by being quite certain that it is venison, until you are told that it
 is mutton; whereupon you get distinctly the mutton flavor.--In this
 wise one may make a person taste or smell what one will, if one only
 makes sure that he shall conceive it beforehand as we wish, by saying
 to him: 'Doesn't that taste just like, etc.?' or 'Doesn't it smell
 just like, etc.?' One can cheat whole companies in this way; announce,
 for instance, at a meal, that the meat tastes 'high,' and almost every
 one who is not animated by a spirit of opposition will discover a
 flavor of putrescence which in reality is not there at all.

 "In the sense of _feeling_ this phenomenon is less prominent,
 because we get so close to the object that our sensation of it is
 never incomplete. Still, examples may be adduced from this sense. On
 superficially feeling of a cloth, one may confidently declare it for
 velvet, whilst it is perhaps a long-haired cloth; or a person may
 perhaps not be able to decide whether he has put on woolen or cotton
 stockings, and, trying to ascertain this by the feeling on the skin of
 the feet, he may become aware that he gets the feeling of cotton or
 wool according as he thinks of the one or the other. When the feeling
 in our fingers is somewhat blunted by cold, we notice many such
 phenomena, being then more exposed to confound objects of touch with
 one another."[102]

High authorities have doubted this power of imagination to falsify
present impressions of sense.[103] Yet it unquestionably exists.
Within the past fortnight I have been annoyed by a smell, faint but
unpleasant, in my library. My annoyance began by an escape of gas from
the furnace below stairs. This seemed to get lodged in my imagination
as a sort of standard of perception; for, several days after the
furnace had been rectified, I perceived the 'same smell' again. It
was traced this time to a new pair of India rubber shoes which had
been brought in from the shop and laid on a table. It persisted in
coming to me for several days, however, in spite of the fact that no
other member of the family or visitor noticed anything unpleasant. My
impression during part of this time was one of uncertainty whether
the smell was imaginary or real; and at last it faded out. Everyone
must be able to give instances like this from the smell-sense. When we
have paid the faithless plumber for pretending to mend our drains, the
intellect inhibits the nose from perceiving the same unaltered odor,
until perhaps several days go by. As regards the ventilation or heating
of rooms, we are apt to feel for some time as we think we ought to
feel. If we believe the ventilator is shut, we feel the room close. On
discovering it open, the oppression disappears.

An extreme instance is given in the following extract:

 "A patient called at my office one day in a state of great excitement
 from the effects of an offensive odor in the horse-car she had come
 in, and which she declared had probably emanated from some very sick
 person who must have been just carried in it. There could be no doubt
 that something had affected her seriously, for she was very pale,
 with nausea, difficulty in breathing, and other evidences of bodily
 and mental distress. I succeeded, after some difficulty and time,
 in quieting her, and she left, protesting that the smell was unlike
 anything she had ever before experienced and was something dreadful.
 Leaving my office soon after, it so happened that I found her at the
 street-corner, waiting for a car: we thus entered the car together.
 She immediately called my attention to the same sickening odor which
 she had experienced in the other car, and began to be affected the
 same as before, when I pointed out to her that the smell was simply
 that which always emanates from the straw which has been in stables.
 She quickly recognized it as the same, when the unpleasant effects
 which arose while she was possessed with another perception of its
 character at once passed away."[104]

It is the same with touch. Everyone must have felt the sensible quality
change under his hand, as sudden contact with something moist or hairy,
in the dark, awoke a shock of disgust or fear which faded into calm
recognition of some familiar object? Even so small a thing as a crumb
of potato on the table-cloth, which we pick up, thinking it a crumb of
bread, feels horrible for a few moments to our fancy, and different
from what it is.

Weight or muscular feeling is a sensation; yet who has not heard the
anecdote of some one to whom Sir Humphry Davy showed the metal sodium
which he had just discovered? "Bless me, how heavy it is!" said the
man; showing that his idea of what metals as a class ought to be had
falsified the sensation he derived from a very light substance.

In the sense of hearing, similar mistakes abound. I have already
mentioned the hallucinatory effect of mental images of very faint
sounds, such as distant clock-strokes (above, p. 71). But even when
stronger sensations of sound have been present, everyone must recall
some experience in which they have altered their acoustic character as
soon as the intellect referred them to a different source. The other
day a friend was sitting in my room, when the clock, which has a rich
low chime, began to strike. "Hollo!" said he, "hear that hand-organ in
the garden," and was surprised at finding the real source of the sound.
I had myself some years ago a very striking illusion of the sort.
Sitting reading late one night, I suddenly heard a most formidable
noise proceeding from the upper part of the house, which it seemed to
fill. It ceased, and in a moment renewed itself. I went into the hall
to listen, but it came no more. Resuming my seat in the room, however,
there it was again, low, mighty, alarming, like a rising flood or
the _avant-courier_ of an awful gale. It came from all space. Quite
startled, I again went into the hall, but it had already ceased once
more. On returning a second time to the room, I discovered that it was
nothing but the breathing of a little Scotch terrier which lay asleep
on the floor. The noteworthy thing is that as soon as I recognized what
it was, I was compelled to think it a different sound, and could not
then _hear_ it as I had heard it a moment before.

In the anecdotes given by Delbœuf and Reid, this was probably also the
case, though it is not so stated. Reid says:

 "I remember that once lying abed, and having been put into a fright, I
 heard my own heart beat; but I took it to be one knocking at the door,
 and arose and opened the door oftener than once, before I discovered
 that the sound was in my own breast." (Inquiry, chap. iv. § 1.)

Delbœuf's story is as follows:

 "The illustrious P. J. van Beneden, senior, was walking one evening
 with a friend along a woody hill near Chaudfontaine. 'Don't you
 hear,' said the friend, 'the noise of a hunt on the mountain?' M. van
 Beneden listens and distinguishes in fact the giving-tongue of the
 dogs. They listen some time, expecting from one moment to another to
 see a deer bound by; but the voice of the dogs seems neither to recede
 nor approach. At last a countryman comes by, and they ask him who it
 is that can be hunting at this late hour. But he, pointing to some
 puddles of water near their feet, replies: 'Yonder little animals are
 what you hear.' And there there were in fact a number of toads of the
 species _Bombinator igneus_.... This batrachian emits at the pairing
 season a silvery or rather crystalline note.... Sad and pure, it is a
 voice in nowise resembling that of hounds giving chase."[105]

The sense of sight, as we have seen in studying Space, is pregnant with
illusions of both the types considered. No sense gives such fluctuating
impressions of the same object as sight does. With no sense are we
so apt to treat the sensations immediately given as mere signs; with
none is the invocation from memory of a _thing_, and the consequent
perception of the latter, so immediate. The 'thing' which we perceive
always resembles, as we have seen, the object of some absent sensation,
usually another optical figure which in our mind has come to be the
standard of reality; and it is this incessant reduction of our optical
objects to more 'real' forms which has led some authors into the
mistake of thinking that the sensations which first apprehend them are
originally and natively of no form at all.[106]

Of accidental and occasional illusions of sight many amusing examples
might be given. Two will suffice. One is a reminiscence of my own. I
was lying in my berth in a steamer listening to the sailors holystone
the deck outside; when, on turning my eyes to the window, I perceived
with perfect distinctness that the chief-engineer of the vessel had
entered my state-room, and was standing looking through the window
at the men at work upon the guards. Surprised at his intrusion, and
also at his intentness and immobility, I remained watching him and
wondering how long he would stand thus. At last I spoke; but getting no
reply, sat up in my berth, and then saw that what I had taken for the
engineer was my own cap and coat hanging on a peg beside the window.
The illusion was complete; the engineer was a peculiar-looking man; and
I saw him unmistakably; but after the illusion had vanished I found it
hard voluntarily to make the cap and coat look like him at all.

The following story, which I owe to my friend Prof. Hyatt, is of a
probably not uncommon class:

 "During the winter of 1858, while in Venice, I had the somewhat
 peculiar illusion which you request me to relate. I remember the
 circumstances very accurately because I have often repeated the story,
 and have made an effort to keep all the attendant circumstances clear
 of exaggeration. I was travelling with my mother, and we had taken
 rooms at a hotel which had been located in an old palace. The room
 in which I went to bed was large and lofty. The moon was shining
 brightly, and I remember standing before a draped window, thinking
 of the romantic nature of the surroundings, remnants of old stories
 of knights and ladies, and the possibility that even in that room
 itself love-scenes and sanguinary tragedies might have taken place.
 The night was so lovely that many of the people were strolling through
 the narrow lanes or so-called streets, singing as they went, and I
 laid awake for some time listening to these patrols of serenaders,
 and of course finally fell asleep. I became aware that some one
 was leaning over me closely, and that my own breathing was being
 interfered with; a decided feeling of an unwelcome presence of some
 sort awakened me. As I opened my eyes I saw, as distinctly as I ever
 saw any living person, a draped head about a foot or eighteen inches
 to the right, and just above my bed. The horror which took possession
 of my young fancy was beyond anything I have ever experienced. The
 head was covered by a long black veil which floated out into the
 moonlight, the face itself was pale and beautiful, and the lower
 part swathed in the white band commonly worn by the nuns of Catholic
 orders. My hair seemed to rise up, and a profuse perspiration attested
 the genuineness of the terror which I felt. For a time I lay in this
 way, and then gradually gaining more command over my superstitious
 terrors, concluded to try to grapple with the apparition. It remained
 perfectly distinct until I reached at it sharply with my hand, and
 then disappeared, to return again, however, as soon as I sank back
 into the pillow. The second or third grasp which I made at the head
 was not followed by a reappearance, and I then saw that the ghost was
 not a real presence, but depended upon the position of my head. If I
 moved my eyes either to the left or right of the original position
 occupied by my head when I awakened, the ghost disappeared, and by
 returning to about the same position, I could make it reappear with
 nearly the same intensity as at first. I presently satisfied myself
 by these experiments that the illusion arose from the effect of the
 imagination, aided by the actual figure made by a visual section of
 the moonbeams shining through the lace curtains of the window. If
 I had given way to the first terror of the situation and covered
 up my head, I should probably have believed in the reality of the
 apparition, since I have not by the slightest word, so far as I know,
 exaggerated the vividness of my feelings."


THE PHYSIOLOGICAL PROCESS IN PERCEPTION.


Enough, has now been said to prove the general law of perception, which
is this, that _whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses
from the object before us, another part_ (and it may be the larger
part) _always comes_ (in Lazarus's phrase) _out of our own head_.

At bottom this is only one case (and that the simplest case) of the
general fact that our nerve-centres are an organ for reacting on
sense-impressions, and that our hemispheres, in particular, are given
us in order that records of our private past experience may co-operate
in the reaction. Of course such a general way of stating the fact
is vague; and all those who follow the current theory of ideas will
be prompt to throw this vagueness at it as a reproach. Their way of
describing the process goes much more into detail. The sensation,
they say, awakens 'images' of other sensations associated with it in
the past. These images 'fuse,' or are 'combined' by the Ego with the
present sensation into a new product, the percept, etc., etc. Something
so indistinguishable from this in practical outcome is what really
occurs, that one may seem fastidious in objecting to such a statement,
specially if have no rival theory of the elementary processes to
propose. And yet, if this notion of images rising and flocking and
fusing _be_ mythological (and we have all along so considered it), why
should we entertain it unless confessedly as a mere figure of speech?
As such, of course, it is convenient and welcome to pass. But if we try
to put an exact meaning into it, all we find is that the brain reacts
by paths which previous experiences have worn, and makes us usually
perceive the probable thing, i.e., the thing by which on previous
occasions the reaction was most frequently aroused.

But we can, I think, without danger of being too speculative, be a
little more exact than this, and conceive of a physiological reason
why the felt quality of an object changes when, instead of being
apprehended in a mere sensation, the object is perceived as a thing.
All consciousness seems to depend on a certain slowness of the process
in the cortical cells. The rapider currents are, the less feeling they
seem to awaken. If a region A, then, be so connected with another
region B that every current which enters A immediately drains off into
B, we shall not be very strongly conscious of the sort of object that
A can make us feel. If B, on the contrary, has no such copious channel
of discharge, the excitement will linger there longer ere it diffuses
itself elsewhere, and our consciousness of the sort of object that B
makes us feel will be strong. Carrying this to an ideal maximum, we
may say that if A offer _no_ resistance to the transmission forward
of the current, and if the current _terminate_ in B, then, no matter
what causes may initiate the current, we shall get no consciousness
of the object peculiar to A, but on the contrary a vivid sensation
of the object peculiar to B. And this will be true though at other
times the connection between A and B might lie less open, and every
current _then_ entering A might give us a strong consciousness of A's
peculiar object. In other words, just in proportion as associations are
habitual, will the qualities of the suggested thing tend to substitute
themselves in consciousness for those of the thing immediately there;
or, more briefly, _just in proportion as an experience is probable will
it tend to be directly felt._ In all such experiences the paths lie
wide open from the cells first affected to those concerned with the
suggested ideas. A circular after-image on the receding wall or ceiling
is actually _seen_ as an ellipse, a square after-image of a cross there
is seen as slant-legged, etc., because only in the process correlated
with the vision of the latter figures do the inward currents find a
pause (see the next chapter).

We must remember this when, in dealing with the eye, we come to point
out the erroneousness of the principle laid down by Reid and Helmholtz
that true sensations can never be changed by the suggestions of
experience.

       *       *       *       *       *

A certain illusion of which I have not yet spoken affords an additional
illustration of this. _When we will to execute a movement and the
movement for some reason does not occur, unless the sensation of the
part's_ NOT _moving is a strong one, we are apt to feel as if the
movement had actually taken place._ This seems habitually to be the
case in anæsthesia of the moving parts. Close the patient's eyes,
hold his anæsthetic arm still, and tell him to raise his hand to his
head; and when he opens his eyes he will be astonished to find that
the movement has not taken place. All reports of anæsthetic cases
seem to mention this illusion. Sternberg who wrote on the subject in
1885,[107] lays it down as a law that the intention to move is the same
thing as the feeling of the motion. We shall later see that this is
false (Chapter XXV); but it certainly may _suggest_ the feeling of
the motion with hallucinatory intensity. Sternberg gives the following
experiment, which I find succeeds with at least half of those who
try it: Rest your palm on the edge of the table with your forefinger
hanging over in a position of extreme flexion, and then exert your
will to flex it still more. The position of the other fingers makes
this impossible, and yet if we do not look to see the finger, we think
we feel it move. He quotes from Exner a similar experiment with the
jaws: Put some hard rubber or other unindentable obstacle between
your back teeth and bite hard: you think you feel the jaw move and the
front teeth approach each other, though in the nature of things no
movement can occur.[108]--The visual suggestion of the path traversed
by the finger-tip as the _locus_ of the movement-feeling in the
joint, which we discussed on page 41, is another example of this
semi-hallucinatory power of the suggested thing. Amputated people, as
we have learned, still feel their lost feet, etc. This is a necessary
consequence of the law of specific energies, for if the central region
correlated with the foot give rise to any feeling at all it must give
rise to the feeling of a foot.[109] But the curious thing is that many
of these patients can _will the foot to move_, and when they have done
so, distinctly _feel the movement to occur_. They can, to use their own
language, 'work' or 'wiggle' their lost toes.[110]

Now in all these various cases we are dealing with data which in normal
life are inseparably joined. Of all possible experiences, it is hard
to imagine any pair more uniformly and incessantly coupled than the
volition to move, on the one hand, and the feeling of the changed
position of the parts, on the other. From the earliest ancestors of
ours which had feet, down to the present day, the movement of the
feet must always have accompanied the will to move them; and here,
if anywhere, habit's consequences ought to be found. The process
of the willing ought, then, to pour into the process of feeling the
command effected, and ought to awaken that feeling in a maximal degree
provided no other positively contradictory sensation come in at the
same time. In most of us, when the will fails of its effect there is
a contradictory sensation. We discern a resistance or the unchanged
position of the limb. But neither in anæsthesia nor in amputation can
there be any contradictory sensation in the foot to correct us; so
imagination has all the force of fact.


'APPERCEPTION.'


In Germany since Herbart's time Psychology has always had a great
deal to say about a process called _Apperception_.[111] The incoming
ideas or sensations are said to be 'apperceived' by 'masses' of
ideas already in the mind. It is plain that the process we have been
describing as perception is, at this rate, an apperceptive process.
So are all recognition, classing, and naming; and passing beyond
these simplest suggestions, all farther thoughts about our percepts
are apperceptive processes as well. I have myself not used the word
apperception because it has carried very different meanings in the
history of philosophy,[112] and 'psychic reaction,' 'interpretation,'
'conception,' 'assimilation,' 'elaboration,' or simply 'thought,'
are perfect synonyms for its Herbartian meaning, widely taken. It
is, moreover, hardly worth while to pretend to analyze the so-called
apperceptive performances beyond the first or perceptive stage, because
their variations and degrees are literally innumerable. 'Apperception'
is a name for the sum-total of the effects of what we have studied
as association; and it is obvious that the things which a given
experience will suggest to a man depend on what Mr. Lewes calls his
entire psychostatical conditions, his nature and stock of ideas, or,
in other words, his character, habits, memory, education, previous
experience, and momentary mood. We gain no insight into what really
occurs either in the mind or in the brain by calling all these things
the 'apperceiving mass,' though of course this may upon occasion be
convenient. On the whole I am inclined to think Mr. Lewes's term of
'assimilation' the most fruitful one yet used.[113]

Professor H. Steinthal has analyzed apperceptive processes with a sort
of detail which is simply burdensome.[114] His introduction of the
matter may, however, be quoted. He begins with an anecdote from a comic
paper.

 "In the compartment of a railway-carriage six persons unknown to
 each other sit in lively conversation. It becomes a matter of regret
 that one of the company must alight at the next station. One of
 the others says that he of all things prefers such a meeting with
 entirely unknown persons, and that on such occasions he is accustomed
 neither to ask who or what his companions may be nor to tell who or
 what he is. Another thereupon says that he will undertake to decide
 this question, if they each and all will answer him an entirely
 disconnected question. They began. He drew five leaves from his
 note-book, wrote a question on each, and gave one to each of his
 companions with the request that he write the answer below. When the
 leaves were returned to him, he turned, after reading them, without
 hesitation to the others, and said to the first, 'You are a man of
 science'; to the second, 'You are a soldier'; to the third, 'You are a
 philologer'; to the fourth, 'You are a journalist'; to the fifth, 'You
 are a farmer.' All admitted that he was right, whereupon he got out
 and left the five behind. Each wished to know what question the others
 had received; and behold, he had given the same question to each. It
 ran thus:

 "'What being destroys what it has itself brought forth?'

 "To this the naturalist had answered, 'vital force'; the soldier,
 'war'; the philologist, 'Kronos'; the publicist, 'revolution'; the
 farmer, 'a boar'. This anecdote, methinks, if not true, is at least
 splendidly well invented. Its narrator makes the journalist go on to
 say: 'Therein consists the joke. Each one answers the first thing that
 occurs to him,[115] and that is whatever is most newly related to his
 pursuit in life. Every question is a hole-drilling experiment, and the
 answer is an opening through which one sees into our interiors.'... So
 do we all. We are all able to recognize the clergyman, the soldier,
 the scholar, the business man, not only by the cut of their garments
 and the attitude of their body, but by what they say and how they
 express it. We guess the place in life of men by the interest which
 they show and the way in which they show it, by the objects of which
 they speak, by the point of view from which they regard things, judge
 them, conceive them, in short by their mode of _apperceiving_....

 "Every man has one group of ideas which relate to his own person
 and interests, and another which is connected with society. Each
 has his group of ideas about plants, religion, law, art, etc., and
 more especially about the rose, epic poetry, sermons, free trade,
 and the like. Thus the mental content of every individual, even of
 the uneducated and of children, consists of masses or circles of
 knowledge of which each lies within some larger circle, alongside
 of others similarly included, and of which each includes smaller
 circles within itself.... The perception of a thing like a horse...
 is a process between the present horse's picture before our eyes, on
 the one hand, and those fused or interwoven pictures and ideas of
 all the horses we have ever seen, on the other;... a process between
 two factors or momenta, of which one existed before the process and
 was an old possession of the mind (the group of ideas, or concept,
 namely), whilst the other is but just presented to the mind, and is
 the immediately supervening factor (the sense-impression). The former
 apperceives the latter; the latter is apperceived by the former. Out
 of their combination an apperception-product arises: the knowledge of
 the perceived being as a horse. The earlier factor is relatively to
 the later one active and _a priori_; the supervening factor is given,
 _a posteriori_, passive.... We may then define Apperception as the
 movement of two masses of consciousness (Vorstellungsmassen) against
 each other so as to produce a cognition.

 "The _a priori_ factor we called active, the _a posteriori_ factor
 passive, but this is only relatively true.... Although the _a
 priori_ moment commonly shows itself to be the more powerful,
 apperception-processes can perfectly well occur in which the new
 observation transforms or enriches the apperceiving group of ideas. A
 child who hitherto has seen none but four-cornered tables apperceives
 a round one as a table; but by this the apperceiving mass ('table') is
 enriched. To his previous knowledge of tables comes this new feature
 that they need not be four-cornered, but may be round. In the history
 of science it has happened often enough that some discovery, at the
 same time that it was apperceived, i.e. brought into connection
 with the system of our knowledge, transformed the whole system. In
 principle, however, we must maintain that, although either factor is
 both active and passive, the _a priori_ factor is almost always the
 more active of the two."[116]

This account of Steinthal's brings out very clearly the _difference
between our psychological conceptions and what are called concepts
in logic_. In logic a concept is unalterable; but what are popularly
called our 'conceptions of things' alter by being used. The aim of
'Science' is to attain conceptions so adequate and exact that we shall
never need to change them. There is an everlasting struggle in every
mind between the tendency to keep unchanged, and the tendency to
renovate, its ideas. Our education is a ceaseless compromise between
the conservative and the progressive factors. Every new experience must
be disposed of under _some_ old head. The great point is to find the
head which has to be least altered to take it in. Certain Polynesian
natives, seeing horses for the first time, called them pigs, that being
the nearest head. My child of two played for a week with the first
orange that was given him, calling it a 'ball.' He called the first
whole eggs he saw 'potatoes,' having been accustomed to see his 'eggs'
broken into a glass, and his potatoes without the skin. A folding
pocket-corkscrew he unhesitatingly called 'bad-scissors.' Hardly any
one of us can make new heads easily when fresh experiences come. Most
of us grow more and more enslaved to the stock conceptions with which
we have once become familiar, and less and less capable of assimilating
impressions in any but the old ways. Old-fogyism, in short, is the
inevitable terminus to which life sweeps us on. Objects which violate
our established habits of 'apperception' are simply not taken account
of at all; or, if on some occasion we are forced by dint of argument to
admit their existence, twenty-four hours later the admission is as if
it were not, and every trace of the unassimilable truth has vanished
from our thought. Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty
of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

On the other hand, nothing is more congenial, from babyhood to the
end of life, than to be able to assimilate the new to the old, to
meet each threatening violator or burster of our well-known series of
concepts, as it comes in, see through its unwontedness, and ticket
it off as an old friend in disguise. This victorious assimilation of
the new is in fact the type of all intellectual pleasure. The lust
for it is curiosity. The relation of the new to the old, before the
assimilation is performed, is wonder. We feel neither curiosity nor
wonder concerning things so far beyond us that we have no concepts to
refer them to or standards by which to measure them.[117] The Fuegians,
in Darwin's voyage, wondered at the small boats, but took the big ship
as a 'matter of course.' Only what we partly know already inspires us
with a desire to know more. The more elaborate textile fabrics, the
vaster works in metal, to most of us are like the air, the water, and
the ground, absolute existences which awaken no ideas. It is a matter
of course that an engraving or a copper-plate inscription should
possess that degree of beauty. But if we are shown a _pen_-drawing of
equal perfection, our personal sympathy with the difficulty of the
task makes us immediately wonder at the skill. The old lady admiring
the Academician's picture, says to him: "And is it really all done _by
hand_?"


IS PERCEPTION UNCONSCIOUS INFERENCE?


A widely-spread opinion (which has been held by such men as
Schopenhauer, Spencer, Hartmann, Wundt, Helmholtz, and lately
interestingly pleaded for by M. Binet)[118] will have it that
_perception should be called a sort of reasoning operation, more or
less unconsciously and automatically performed_. The question seems at
first a verbal one, depending on how broadly the term reasoning is to
be taken. If, every time a present sign suggests an absent reality to
our mind, we make an inference; and if every time we make an inference
we reason; then perception is indubitably reasoning. Only one sees no
room in it for any unconscious part. Both associates, the present sign
and the contiguous things which it suggests, are above-board, and no
intermediary ideas are required. Most of those who have upheld the
thesis in question have, however, made a more complex supposition. What
they have meant is that perception is a _mediate_ inference, and that
the middle term is unconscious. When the sensation which I have called
'this' (p. 83, _supra_) is felt, they think that some process like
the following runs through the mind:

    'This' is M;
    but M is A;
    therefore 'this' is A.[119]

Now there seem no good grounds for supposing this additional wheelwork
in the mind. The classification of '_this_' as M is itself an act of
perception, and should, if all perception were inference, require a
still earlier syllogism for its performance, and so backwards _in
infinitum_. The only extrication from this coil would be to represent
the process in altered guise, thus:

    'This' is _like those_;
    _Those_ are A;
    Therefore 'this' is A.

The major premise here involves no association by contiguity, no
_naming_ of _those_ as M, but only a suggestion of unnamed similar
images, a recall of analogous past sensations with which the characters
that make up A were habitually conjoined. But here again, what grounds
of fact are there for admitting this recall? We are quite unconscious
of any such images of the past. And the conception of all the forms of
association as resultants of the elementary fact of habit-worn paths
in the brain makes such images entirely superfluous for explaining
the phenomena in point. Since the brain-process of 'this,' the sign
of A, has repeatedly been aroused in company with the process of the
full object A, direct paths of irradiation from the one to the other
must be already established. And although roundabout paths may also
be possible, as from 'this' to 'those,' and then from 'those' to 'A'
(paths which would lead to practically the same conclusion as the
straighter ones), yet there is no ground whatever for assuming them to
be traversed now, especially since appearances point the other way. In
_explicit_ reasoning, such paths are doubtless traversed; in perception
they are in all probability closed. So far, then, from perception
being a species of reasoning properly so called, both it and reasoning
are co-ordinate varieties of that deeper sort of process known
psychologically as the association of ideas, and physiologically as the
law of habit in the brain. _To call perception unconscious reasoning is
thus either a useless metaphor, or a positively misleading confusion
between two different things._

       *       *       *       *       *

One more point and we may leave the subject of Perception. _Sir Wm.
Hamilton thought that he had discovered a 'great law'_ which had been
wholly overlooked by psychologists, and which, 'simple and universal,'
is this: "Knowledge and Feeling,--Perception and Sensation, though
always coexistent, are always in the inverse ratio of each other."
Hamilton wrote as if perception and sensation were two coexistent
elements entering into a single state of consciousness. Spencer refines
upon him by contending that they are two mutually exclusive _states_
of consciousness, not two elements of a single state. If sensation be
taken, as both Hamilton and Spencer mainly take it in this discussion,
to mean the feeling of _pleasure_ or _pain_, there is no doubt that the
law, however expressed, is true; and that the mind which is strongly
conscious of the pleasantness or painfulness of an experience is _ipso
facto_ less fitted to observe and analyze its outward cause.[120] Apart
from pleasure and pain, however, the law seems but a corollary of the
fact that the more concentrated a state of consciousness is, the more
vivid it is. When feeling a color, or listening to a tone _per se_,
we get it more intensely, notice it better, than when we are aware of
it merely as one among many other properties of a total object. The
more diffused cerebral excitement of the perceptive state is probably
incompatible with quite as strong an excitement of separate parts as
the sensational state comports. So we come back here to our own earlier
discrimination between the perceptive and the sensational processes,
and to the examples which we gave on pp. 80, 81.[121]

HALLUCINATIONS.


Between normal perception and illusion we have seen that there is no
break, the _process_ being identically the same in both. The last
illusions we considered might fairly be called hallucinations. We
must now consider the false perceptions more commonly called by that
name.[122] In ordinary parlance hallucination is held to differ from
illusion in that, whilst there is an object really there in illusion,
_in hallucination there is no objective stimulus at all_. We shall
presently see that this supposed absence of objective stimulus in
hallucination is a mistake, and that hallucinations are often only
_extremes_ of the perception process, in which the secondary cerebral
reaction is out of all normal proportion to the peripheral stimulus
which occasions the activity. Hallucinations usually appear abruptly
and have the character of being forced upon the subject. But they
possess various degrees of apparent _objectivity_. One mistake _in
limine_ must be guarded against. They are often talked of as mental
_images_ projected outwards by mistake. But where an hallucination
is complete, it is much more than a mental image. _An hallucination
is a strictly sensational form of consciousness, as good and true a
sensation as if there were a real object there._ The object happens not
to be there, that is all.

The milder degrees of hallucination have been designated as
_pseudo-hallucinations_. Pseudo-hallucinations and hallucinations have
been sharply distinguished from each other only within a few years.
Dr. Kandinsky writes of their difference as follows:

 "In carelessly questioning a patient we may confound his
 pseudo-hallucinatory perceptions with hallucinations. But to the
 unconfused consciousness of the patient himself, even though he be
 imbecile, the identification of the two phenomena is impossible,
 at least in the sphere of vision. At the moment of having a
 pseudo-hallucination of sight, the patient feels himself in an
 entirely different relation to this subjective sensible appearance,
 from that in which he finds himself whilst subject to a true visual
 hallucination. The latter is reality itself; the former, on the
 contrary, remains always a subjective phenomenon which the individual
 commonly regards either as sent to him as a sign of God's grace, or
 as artificially induced by his secret persecutors.... If he knows by
 his _own experience_ what a genuine hallucination is, it is quite
 impossible for him to mistake the pseudo-hallucination for it.... A
 concrete example will make the difference clear:

 "Dr. N. L.... heard one day suddenly amongst the voices of his
 persecutors ('coming from a hollow space in the midst of the wall') a
 rather loud voice impressively saying to him: 'Change your national
 allegiance.' Understanding this to mean that his only hope consisted
 in ceasing to be subject to the Czar of Russia, he reflected a moment
 what allegiance would be better, and resolved to become an English
 subject. At the same moment he saw a pseudo-hallucinatory lion of
 natural size, which appeared and quickly laid its fore-paws on his
 shoulders. He had a lively feeling of these paws as a tolerably
 painful local pressure (complete hallucination of touch). Then the
 same voice from the wall said: 'Now you have a lion--now you will
 rule,' whereupon the patient recollected that the lion was the
 national emblem of England. The lion appeared to L. very distinct
 and vivid, but he nevertheless remained conscious, as he afterwards
 expressed it, that he saw the animal, not with his bodily but with
 his mental eyes. (After his recovery he called analogous apparitions
 by the name of 'expressive-plastic ideas.') Accordingly he felt no
 terror, even though he felt the contact of the claws.... Had the lion
 been a complete hallucination, the patient, as he himself remarked
 after recovery, would have felt great fear, and very likely screamed
 or taken to flight. Had it been a simple image of the fancy he would
 not have connected it with the voices, of whose objective reality he
 was at the time quite convinced."[123]

From ordinary images of memory and fancy, pseudo-hallucinations
differ in being much more vivid, minute, detailed, steady, abrupt,
and spontaneous, in the sense that all feeling of our own activity
in producing them is lacking. Dr. Kandinsky had a patient who, after
taking opium or haschisch, had abundant pseudo-hallucinations and
hallucinations. As he also had strong visualizing power and was an
educated physician, the three sorts of phenomena could be easily
compared. Although projected outwards (usually not farther than the
limit of distinctest vision, a foot or so) the pseudo-hallucinations
_lacked the character of objective reality_ which the hallucinations
possessed, but, unlike the pictures of imagination, it was almost
impossible to produce them at will. Most of the 'voices' which
people hear (whether they give rise to delusions or not) are
pseudo-hallucinations. They are described as '_inner_' voices, although
their character is entirely unlike the inner speech of the subject
with himself. I know two persons who hear such inner voices making
unforeseen remarks whenever they grow quiet and listen for them. They
are a very common incident of delusional insanity, and at last grow
into vivid hallucinations. The latter are comparatively frequent
occurrences in sporadic form; and certain individuals are liable to
have them often. From the results of the 'Census of Hallucinations,'
which was begun by Edmund Gurney, it would appear that, roughly
speaking, one person at least in every ten is likely to have had a
vivid hallucination at some time in his life.[124] The following cases
from healthy people will give an idea of what these hallucinations are:

 "When a girl of eighteen, I was one evening engaged in a very
 painful discussion with an elderly person. My distress was so great
 that I took up a thick ivory knitting-needle that was lying on the
 mantelpiece of the parlor and broke it into small pieces as I talked.
 In the midst of the discussion I was very wishful to know the opinion
 of a brother with whom I had an unusually close relationship. I turned
 round and saw him sitting at the further side of a centre-table, with
 his arms folded (an unusual position with him), but, to my dismay, I
 perceived from the sarcastic expression of his mouth that he was not
 in sympathy with me, was not 'taking my side,' as I should then have
 expressed it. The surprise cooled me, and the discussion was dropped.

 "Some minutes after, having occasion to speak to my brother, I turned
 towards him, but he was gone. I inquired when he left the room,
 and was told that he had not been in it, which I did not believe,
 thinking that he had come in for a minute and had gone out without
 being noticed. About an hour and a half afterwards he appeared, and
 convinced me, with some trouble, that he had never been near the house
 that evening. He is still alive and well."

Here is another case:

 "One night in March 1873 or '74, I cannot recollect which year, I
 was attending on the sick-bed of my mother. About eight o'clock in
 the evening I went into the dining-room to fix a cup of tea, and on
 turning from the sideboard to the table, on the other side of the
 table before the fire, which was burning brightly, as was also the
 gas, I saw standing with his hand clasped to his side in true military
 fashion a soldier of about thirty years of age, with dark, piercing
 eyes looking directly into mine. He wore a small cap with standing
 feather; his costume was also of a soldierly style. He did not strike
 me as being a spirit, ghost, or anything uncanny, only a living man;
 but after gazing for fully a minute I realized that it was nothing
 of earth, for he neither moved his eyes nor his body, and in looking
 closely I could see the fire beyond. I was of course startled, and yet
 did not run out of the room. I felt stunned. I walked out rapidly,
 however, and turning to the servant in the hall asked her if she saw
 anything. She said not. I went into my mother's room and remained
 talking for about an hour, but never mentioned the above subject for
 fear of exciting her, and finally forgot it altogether, returning to
 the dining-room, still in forgetfulness of what had occurred, but
 repeating, as above, the turning from sideboard to table in act of
 preparing more tea. I looked casually towards the fire, and there I
 saw the soldier again. This time I was entirely alarmed, and fled from
 the room in haste. I called to my father, but when he came he saw
 nothing."

Sometimes more than one sense is affected. The following is a case:

 "In response to your request to write out my experience of Oct. 30,
 1886, I will inflict on you a letter.

 "On the day above mentioned, Oct. 30, 1886, I was in ----, where I
 was teaching. I had performed my regular routine work for the day,
 and was sitting in my room working out trigonometrical formulæ. I
 was expecting every day to hear of the confinement of my wife, and
 naturally my thoughts for some time had been more or less with her.
 She was, by the way, in B----, some fifty miles from me.

 "At the time, however, neither she nor the expected event was in my
 mind; as I said, I was working out trigonometrical formulæ, and I had
 been working on trigonometry the entire evening. About eleven o'clock,
 as I sat there buried in sines, cosines, tangents, cotangents,
 secants, and cosecants, I felt very distinctly upon my left shoulder
 a touch, and a slight shake, as if somebody had tried to attract my
 attention by other means and had failed. Without rising I turned my
 head, and there between me and the door stood my wife, dressed exactly
 as I last saw her, some five weeks before. As I turned she said: 'It
 is a little Herman; he has come.' Something more was said, but this
 is the only sentence I can recall. To make sure that I was not asleep
 and dreaming, I rose from the chair, pinched myself and walked toward
 the figure, which disappeared immediately as I rose. I can give no
 information as to the length of time occupied by this episode, but
 I know I was awake, in my usual good health. The touch was very
 distinct, the figure was absolutely perfect, stood about three feet
 from the door, which was closed, and had not been opened during the
 evening. The sound of the voice was unmistakable, and I should have
 recognized it as my wife's voice even if I had not turned and had not
 seen the figure at all. The tone was conversational, just as if she
 would have said the same words had she been actually standing there.

 "In regard to myself, I would say, as I have already intimated, I was
 in my usual good health; I had not been sick before, nor was I after
 the occurrence, not so much as a headache having afflicted me.

 "Shortly after the experience above described, I retired for the night
 and, as I usually do, slept quietly until morning. I did not speculate
 particularly about the strange appearance of the night before, and
 though I thought of it some, I did not tell anybody. The following
 morning I rose, not conscious of having dreamed anything, but I was
 very firmly impressed with the idea that there was something for me
 at the telegraph-office. I tried to throw off the impression, for so
 far as I knew there was no reason for it. Having nothing to do, I went
 out for a walk; and to help throw off the impression above noted, I
 walked away from the telegraph-office. As I proceeded, however, the
 impression became a conviction, and I actually turned about and went
 to the very place I had resolved not to visit, the telegraph-office.
 The first person I saw on arriving at said office was the
 telegraph-operator, who being on terms of intimacy with me, remarked:
 'Hello, papa, I've got a telegram for you.' The telegram announced the
 birth of a boy, weighing nine pounds, and that all were doing well.
 Now, then, I have no theory at all about the events narrated above;
 I never had any such experience before nor since; I am no believer
 in spiritualism, am not in the least superstitious, know very little
 about 'thought-transference,' 'unconscious cerebration,' etc., etc.,
 but I am absolutely certain about what I have tried to relate.

 "In regard to the remark which I heard, 'It is a little Herman,' etc.;
 I would add that we had previously decided to call the child, if a
 boy, _Herman_--my own name, by the way."[125]

The hallucination sometimes carries a change of the general
consciousness with it, so as to appear more like a sudden lapse into a
dream. The following case was given me by a man of 43, who had never
anything resembling it before:

 "While sitting at my desk this A. M. reading a circular of the Loyal
 Legion a very curious thing happened to me, such as I have never
 experienced. It was perfectly real, so real that it took some minutes
 to recover from. It seems to me like a direct intromission into
 some other world. I never had anything approaching it before save
 when dreaming at night. I was wide awake, of course. But this was
 the feeling. I had only just sat down and become interested in the
 circular, when I seemed to lose myself for a minute and then found
 myself in the top story of a high building very white and shining and
 clean, with a noble window immediately at the right of where I sat.
 Through this window I looked out upon a marvellous reach of landscape
 entirely new. I never had before such a sense of infinity in nature,
 such superb stretches of light and color and _cleanness_. I know that
 for the space of three minutes I was entirely lost, for when I began
 to come to, so to speak,--sitting in that other world, I debated
 for three or four minutes more as to which was dream and which was
 reality. Sitting there I got a faint sense of C.... [the town in which
 the writer was], away off and dim at first. Then I remember thinking
 'Why, I used to live in C....; perhaps I am going back.' Slowly
 C.... did come back, and I found myself at my desk again. For a few
 minutes the process of determining where I was was very funny. But the
 whole experience was perfectly delightful, there was such a sense of
 brilliancy and clearness and lightness about it. I suppose it lasted
 in all about seven minutes or ten minutes."

The hallucinations of fever-delirium are a mixture of
pseudo-hallucination, true hallucination, and illusion. Those of opium,
hasheesh, and belladonna resemble them in this respect. The following
vivid account of a fit of hasheesh-delirium has been given me by a
friend:

 "I was reading a newspaper, and the indication of the approaching
 delirium was an inability to keep my mind fixed on the narrative.
 Directly I lay down upon a sofa there appeared before my eyes several
 rows of human hands, which oscillated for a moment, revolved and
 then changed to spoons. The same motions were repeated, the objects
 changing to wheels, tin soldiers, lamp-posts, brooms, and countless
 other absurdities. This stage lasted about ten minutes, and during
 that time it is safe to say that I saw at least a thousand different
 objects. These whirling images did not appear like the realities of
 life, but had the character of the secondary images seen in the eye
 after looking at some brightly-illuminated object. A mere suggestion
 from the person who was with me in the room was sufficient to call
 up an image of the thing suggested, while without suggestion there
 appeared all the common objects of life and many unreal monstrosities,
 which it is absolutely impossible to describe, and which seemed to be
 creations of the brain.

 "The character of the symptoms changed rapidly. A sort of wave seemed
 to pass over me, and I became aware of the fact that my pulse was
 beating rapidly. I took out my watch, and by exercising considerable
 will-power managed to time the heart-beats, 135 to the minute.

 "I could feel each pulsation through my whole system, and a curious
 twitching commenced, which no effort of the mind could stop.

 "There were moments of apparent lucidity, when it seemed as if I could
 see within myself, and watch the pumping of my heart. A strange fear
 came over me, a certainty that I should never recover from the effects
 of the opiate, which was as quickly followed by a feeling of great
 interest in the experiment, a certainty that the experience was the
 most novel and exciting that I had ever been through.

 "My mind was in an exceedingly impressionable state. Any place
 thought of or suggested appeared with all the distinctness of the
 reality. I thought of the Giant's Causeway in Staffa, and instantly
 I stood within the portals of Fingal's Cave. Great basaltic columns
 rose on all sides, while huge waves rolled through the chasm and
 broke in silence upon the rocky shore. Suddenly there was a roar and
 blast of sound, and the word 'Ishmaral' was echoing up the cave.
 At the enunciation of this remarkable word the great columns of
 basalt changed into whirling clothes pins and I laughed aloud at the
 absurdity.

 "(I may here state that the word 'Ishmaral' seemed to haunt my other
 hallucinations, for I remember that I heard it frequently thereafter.)
 I next enjoyed a sort of metempsychosis. Any animal or thing that
 I thought of could be made the being which held my mind. I thought
 of a fox, and instantly I was transformed into that animal. I could
 distinctly feel myself a fox, could see my long ears and bushy tail,
 and by a sort of introvision felt that my complete anatomy was that
 of a fox. Suddenly the point of vision changed. My eyes seemed to be
 located at the back of my mouth; I looked out between the parted lips,
 saw the two rows of pointed teeth, and, closing my mouth with a snap,
 saw--nothing.

 "I was next transformed into a bombshell, felt my size, weight, and
 thickness, and experienced the sensation of being shot up out of a
 giant mortar, looking down upon the earth, bursting and falling back
 in a shower of iron fragments.

 "Into countless other objects was I transformed, many of them so
 absurd that I am unable to conceive what suggested them. For example,
 I was a little china doll, deep down in a bottle of olive oil, next
 moment a stick of twisted candy, then a skeleton inclosed in a
 whirling coffin, and so on _ad infinitum_.

 "Towards the end of the delirium the whirling images appeared
 again, and I was haunted by a singular creation of the brain, which
 reappeared every few moments. It was an image of a double-faced doll,
 with a cylindrical body running down to a point like a peg-top.

 "It was always the same, having a sort of crown on its head, and
 painted in two colors, green and brown, on a background of blue. The
 expression of the Janus-like profiles was always the same, as were the
 adornments of the body. After recovering from the effects of the drug
 I could not picture to myself exactly how this singular monstrosity
 appeared, but in subsequent experiences I was always visited by this
 phantom, and always recognized every detail of its composition. It was
 like visiting some long-forgotten spot and seeing some sight that had
 faded from the memory, but which appeared perfectly familiar as soon
 as looked upon.

 "The effects of the drug lasted about an hour and a half, leaving me a
 trifle tipsy and dizzy; but after a ten-hour sleep I was myself again,
 save for a slight inability to keep my mind fixed on any piece of work
 for any length of time, which remained with me during most of the next
 day."


THE NEURAL PROCESS IN HALLUCINATION.


Examples of these singular perversions of perception might be
multiplied indefinitely, but I have no more space. Let us turn to the
question of what the physiological process may be to which they are
due. It must, of course, consist of an excitement from within of those
centres which are active in normal perception, identical in kind and
degree with that which real external objects are usually needed to
induce. The particular process which currents from the sense-organs
arouse would seem under normal circumstances to be arousable in no
other way. On p. 72 ff. above, we saw that the centres aroused by
incoming peripheral currents are probably identical with the centres
used in mere imagination; and that the vividness of the sensational
kind of consciousness is probably correlated with a discrete degree of
_intensity_ in the process therein aroused. Referring the reader back
to that passage and to what was more lately said on p. 103 ff., I now
proceed to complete my theory of the perceptive process by an analysis
of what may most probably be believed to take place in hallucination
strictly so called.

We have seen (p. 75) that the free discharge of cells into each
other through associative paths is a likely reason why the maximum
intensity of function is not reached when the cells are excited by
their neighbors in the cortex. At the end of Chapter XXV we shall
return to this conception, and whilst making it still more precise,
use it for explaining certain phenomena connected with the will.
The idea is that the leakage forward along these paths is too rapid
for the inner tension in any centre to accumulate to the maximal
explosion-point, unless the exciting currents are greater than those
which the various portions of the cortex supply to each other. Currents
from the periphery are (as it seems) the only currents whose energy
can vanquish the supra-ideational resistance (so to call it) of the
cells, and cause the peculiarly intense sort of disintegration with
which the sensational quality is linked. _If, however, the leakage
forward were to stop,_ the tension inside certain cells might reach
the explosion-point, even though the influence which excited them came
only from neighboring cortical parts. Let an empty pail with a leak
in its bottom, tipped up against a support so that if it ever became
full of water it would upset, represent the resting condition of the
centre for a certain sort of feeling. Let water poured into it stand
for the currents which are its natural stimulus; then the hole in its
bottom will, of course, represent the 'paths' by which it transmits its
excitement to other associated cells. Now let two other vessels have
the function of supplying it with water. One of these vessels stands
for the neighboring cortical cells, and can pour in hardly any more
water than goes out by the leak. The pail consequently never upsets in
consequence of the supply from this source. A current of water passes
through it and does work elsewhere, but in the pail itself nothing but
what stands for _ideational_ activity is aroused. The other vessel,
however, stands for the peripheral sense-organs, and supplies a stream
of water so copious that the pail promptly fills up in spite of the
leak, and presently _upsets_; in other words, _sensational_ activity is
aroused. But it is obvious that if the leak were plugged, the slower
stream of supply would also end by upsetting the pail.

To apply this to the brain and to thought, if we take a series of
processes A B C D E, associated together in that order, and suppose
that the current through them is very fluent, there will be little
intensity anywhere until, perhaps, a pause occurs at E. But the moment
the current is blocked anywhere, say between C and D, the process in C
must grow more intense, and might even be conceived to explode so as to
produce a sensation in the mind instead of an idea.

It would seem that some hallucinations are best to be explained in
this way. We have in fact a regular series of facts which can all
be formulated under the single law that _the substantive strength
of a state of consciousness bears an inverse proportion to its
suggestiveness_. It is the halting-places of our thought which are
occupied with distinct imagery. Most of the words we utter have no
time to awaken images at all; they simply awaken the following words.
But when the sentence _stops_, an image dwells for awhile before the
mental eye (see Vol. I. p. 243). Again, whenever the associative
processes are reduced and impeded by the approach of unconsciousness,
as in falling asleep, or growing faint, or becoming narcotized, we
find a concomitant increase in the intensity of whatever partial
consciousness may survive. In some people what M. Maury has called
'hypnagogic' hallucinations[126] are the regular concomitant of the
process of falling asleep. Trains of faces, landscapes, etc., pass
before the mental eye, first as fancies, then as pseudo-hallucinations,
finally as full-fledged hallucinations forming dreams. If we regard
association-paths as paths of drainage, then the shutting off of one
after another of them as the encroaching cerebral paralysis advances
ought to act like the plugging of the hole in the bottom of the pail,
and make the activity more intense in those systems of cells that
retain any activity at all. The level rises because the currents are
not drained away, until at last the full sensational explosion may
occur.

The usual explanation of hypnagogic hallucinations is that they are
ideas deprived of their ordinary _reductives_. In somnolescence,
sensations being extinct, the mind, it is said, then having no stronger
things to compare its ideas with, ascribes to these the fulness of
reality. At ordinary times the objects of our imagination are reduced
to the _status_ of subjective facts by the ever-present contrast of
our sensations with them. Eliminate the sensations, however, this
view supposes, and the 'images' are forthwith 'projected' into the
outer world and appear as realities. Thus is the illusion of dreams
also explained. This, indeed, after a fashion gives an account of the
facts.[127] And yet it certainly fails to explain the extraordinary
vivacity and completeness of so many of our dream-fantasms. The process
of 'imagining' must (in these cases at least[128]) be not merely
relatively, but absolutely and in itself more intense than at other
times. The fact is, it is not a process of imagining, but a genuine
sensational process; and the theory in question is therefore false as
far as that point is concerned.

Dr. Hughlings Jackson's explanation of the epileptic seizure is
acknowledged to be masterly. It involves principles exactly like
those which I am bringing forward here. The 'loss of consciousness'
in epilepsy is due to the most highly organized brain-processes being
exhausted and thrown out of gear. The less organized (more instinctive)
processes, ordinarily inhibited by the others, are then exalted, so
that we get as a mere consequence of relief from the inhibition, the
meaningless or maniacal action which so often follows the attack.[129]

Similarly the _subsultus tendinorum_ or jerking of the muscles which so
often startles us when we are on the point of falling asleep, may be
interpreted as due to the rise (in certain lower motor centres) of the
ordinary 'tonic' tension to the explosion-point, when the inhibition
commonly exerted by the higher centres falls too suddenly away.

       *       *       *       *       *

One possible condition of hallucination then stands revealed,
whatever other conditions there may be. _When the normal paths of
association between a centre and other centres are thrown out of
gear, any activity which may exist in the first centre tends to
increase in intensity until finally the point may be reached at which
the last inward resistance is overcome, and the full sensational
process explodes._[130] Thus it will happen that causes of an amount
of activity in brain-cells which would ordinarily result in a weak
consciousness may produce a very strong consciousness when the overflow
of these cells is stopped by the torpor of the rest of the brain.
A slight peripheral irritation, then, if it reaches the centres of
consciousness at all during sleep, will give rise to the dream of a
violent sensation. All the books about dreaming are full of anecdotes
which illustrate this. For example, M. Maury's nose and lips are
tickled with a feather while he sleeps. He dreams he is being tortured
by having a pitch-plaster applied to his face, torn off, lacerating the
skin of nose and lips. Descartes, on being bitten by a flea, dreams of
being run through by a sword. A friend tells me, as I write this, of
his hair changing its position in his forehead just as he 'dozed off'
in his chair a few days since. Instantly he dreamed that some one had
struck him a blow. Examples can be quoted _ad libitum_, but these are
enough.[131]

We seem herewith to have an explanation for a certain number
of hallucinations. _Whenever the normal forward irradiation of
intra-cortical excitement through association-paths is checked, any
accidental spontaneous activity or any peripheral stimulation (however
inadequate at other times) by which a brain-centre may be visited, sets
up a process of full sensational intensity therein._

       *       *       *       *       *

In the hallucinations artificially produced in hypnotic subjects, some
degree of peripheral excitement seems usually to be required. The brain
is asleep as far as its own spontaneous thinking goes, and the words
of the 'magnetizer' then awaken a cortical process which drafts off
into itself any currents of a related sort which may come in from the
periphery, resulting in a vivid objective perception of the suggested
thing. Thus, point to a dot on a sheet of paper, and call it 'General
Grant's photograph,' and your subject will see a photograph of the
General there instead of the dot. The dot gives objectivity to the
appearance, and the suggested notion of the General gives it form.
Then magnify the dot by a lens; double it by a prism or by nudging the
eyeball; reflect it in a mirror; turn it upside down; or wipe it out;
and the subject will tell you that the 'photograph' has been enlarged,
doubled, reflected, turned about, or made to disappear. In M. Binet's
language,[132] the dot is the outward _point de repère_ which is
needed to give objectivity to your suggestion, and without which the
latter will only produce a _conception_ in the subject's mind.[133]
M. Binet has shown that such a peripheral _point de repère_ is used
in an enormous number, not only of hypnotic hallucinations, but of
hallucinations of the insane. These latter are often _unilateral_;
that is, the patient hears the voices always on one side of him, or
sees the figure only when a certain one of his eyes is open. In many
of these cases it has been distinctly proved that a morbid irritation
in the internal ear, or an opacity in the humors of the eye, was the
starting point of the current which the patient's diseased acoustic
or optical centres clothed with their peculiar products in the way of
ideas. _Hallucinations produced in this way are_ 'ILLUSIONS' _and M.
Binet's theory, that all hallucinations must start in the periphery,
may be called an attempt to reduce hallucination and illusion to one
physiological type,_ the type, namely, to which normal perception
belongs. In every case, according to M. Binet, whether of perception,
of hallucination, or of illusion, we get the sensational vividness
by means of a current from the peripheral nerves. It may be a mere
trace of a current. But that trace is enough to kindle the maximal
or supra-ideational process so that the object perceived will have
the character of _externality_. What the _nature_ of the object shall
be will depend wholly on the particular system of paths in which the
process is kindled. Part of the thing in all cases comes from the
sense-organ, the rest is furnished by the mind. But we cannot by
introspection distinguish between these parts; and our only formula for
the result is that the brain has _reacted on_ the impression in the
normal way. Just so in the dreams which we have considered, and in the
hallucinations of which M. Binet tells, we can only say that the brain
has _reacted_ in an abnormal way.

_M. Binet's theory accounts indeed for a multitude of cases, but
certainly not for all._ The prism does not always double the false
appearance,[134] nor does the latter always disappear when the eyes
are closed. Dr. Hack Tuke[135] gives several examples in sane people
of well-exteriorized hallucinations which did not respond to Binet's
tests; and Mr. Edmund Gurney[136] gives a number of reasons why
intensity in a cortical process may be expected to result from local
pathological activity just as much as its peculiar nature does. For
Binet, an abnormally or exclusively active part of the cortex gives
the _nature_ of what shall appear, whilst a peripheral sense-organ
alone can give the _intensity_ sufficient to make it appear projected
into real space. But since this intensity is after all but a matter
of degree, one does not see why, under rare conditions, the degree
in question _might_ not be attained by inner causes exclusively. In
that case we should have certain hallucinations centrally initiated
alongside of the peripherally initiated hallucinations, which are
the only sort that M. Binet's theory allows. _It seems probable on
the whole, therefore, that centrally initiated hallucinations can
exist._ How often they do exist is another question. The existence of
hallucinations which affect more than one sense is an argument for
central initiation. For grant that the thing seen may have its starting
point in the outer world, the voice which it is heard to utter must be
due to an influence from the visual region, i.e. must be of central
origin.

Sporadic cases of hallucination, visiting people only once in a
lifetime (which seem to be by far the most frequent type), are on any
theory hard to understand in detail. They are often extraordinarily
complete; and the fact that many of them are reported as _veridical_,
that is, as coinciding with real events, such as accidents, deaths,
etc., of the persons seen, is an additional complication of the
phenomenon. The first really scientific study of hallucination in
all its possible bearings, on the basis of a large mass of empirical
material, was begun by Mr. Edmund Gurney and is continued by other
members of the Society for Psychical Research; and the 'Census' is
now being applied to several countries under the auspices of the
International Congress of Experimental Psychology. It is to be hoped
that out of these combined labors something solid will eventually
grow. The facts shade off into the phenomena of motor automatism,
trance, etc.; and nothing but a wide comparative study can give really
instructive results.[137]

_The part played by the peripheral sense-organ_ in hallucination is
just as obscure as we found it in the case of imagination. The things
seen often seem opaque and hide the background upon which they are
projected. It does not follow from this, however, that the retina
is actually involved in the vision. A contrary process going on in
the visual centres would prevent the retinal impression made by the
outer realities from being felt, and this would in mental terms be
equivalent to the hiding of them by the imaginary figure. The negative
after-images of mental pictures reported by Meyer and Féré, and the
negative after-images of hypnotic hallucinations reported by Binet and
others so far constitute the only evidence there is for the retina
being involved. But until these after-images are explained in some
other way we must admit the possibility of a centrifugal current from
the optical centres downwards into the peripheral organ of sight,
paradoxical as the course of such a current may appear.

'PERCEPTION-TIME.'

_The time which the perceptive process occupies_ has been inquired
into by various experimenters. Some call it perception-time, some
choice-time, some discrimination-time. The results have been already
given in Chapter XIII (vol. I, p. 523 ff.), to which the reader is
consequently referred.

Dr. Romanes gives an interesting variation of these time-measurements.
He found[138]

 "an astonishing difference between different individuals with respect
 to the rate at which they are able to _read_. Of course reading
 implies enormously intricate processes of perception both of the
 sensuous and of the intellectual order; but if we choose for these
 observations persons who have been accustomed to read much, we may
 consider that they are all very much on a par with respect to the
 amount of practice which they have had, so that the differences in
 their rates of reading may fairly be attributed to real differences in
 their rates of forming complex perceptions in rapid succession, and
 not to any merely accidental differences arising from greater or less
 facility acquired by special practice.

 "My experiments consisted in marking a brief printed paragraph in a
 book which had never been read by any of the persons to whom it was
 to be presented. The paragraph, which contained simple statements of
 simple facts, was marked on the margin with pencil. The book was then
 placed before the reader open, the page, however, being covered with
 a sheet of paper. Having pointed out to the reader upon this sheet of
 paper what part of the underlying page the marked paragraph occupied,
 I suddenly removed the sheet of paper with one hand, while I started a
 chronograph with the other. Twenty seconds being allowed for reading
 the paragraph (ten lines octavo), as soon as the time was up I again
 suddenly placed the sheet of paper over the printed page, passed the
 book on to the next reader, and repeated the experiment as before.
 Meanwhile, the first reader, the moment after the book had been
 removed, wrote down all that he or she could remember having read. And
 so on with all the other readers.

 "Now the results of a number of experiments conducted on this method
 were to show, as I have said, astonishing differences in the _maximum_
 rate of reading which is possible to different individuals, all of
 whom have been accustomed to extensive reading. That is to say, the
 difference may amount to 4 to 1; or, otherwise stated, in a given time
 one individual may be able to read four times as much as another.
 Moreover, it appeared that there was no relationship between slowness
 of reading and power of assimilation; on the contrary, when all the
 efforts are directed to assimilating as much as possible in a given
 time, the rapid readers (as shown by their written notes) usually give
 a better account of the portions of the paragraph which have been
 compassed by the slow readers than the latter are able to give; and
 the most rapid reader I have found is also the best at assimilating. I
 should further say that there is no relationship between rapidity of
 perception as thus tested and intellectual activity as tested by the
 general results of intellectual work; for I have tried the experiment
 with several highly distinguished men in science and literature, most
 of whom I found to be slow readers."[139]

       *       *       *       *       *

[83] The word Perception, however, has been variously used. For
historical notices, see Hamilton's Lectures on Metaphysics, ii. 96. For
Hamilton perception is 'the consciousness of external objects' (_ib._
28). Spencer defines it oddly enough as "a discerning of the relation
or relations between _states of consciousness_ partly presentative and
partly representative; which states of consciousness must be themselves
known to the extent involved in the knowledge of their relations"
(Psychol., § 355).

[84] Analysis, i. 97.

[85] Theory of Vision, 51.

[86] The educative process is particularly obvious in the case of the
ear, for all sudden sounds seem alarming to babies. The familiar noises
of house and street keep them in constant trepidation until such time
as they have either learned the objects which emit them, or have become
blunted to them by frequent experience of their innocuity.

[87] Outlines, p. 153.

[88] Cf. Helmholtz, Optik, pp. 433, 723, 728, 772; and Spencer,
Psychology, vol. ii. p. 249, note.

[89] The more or less geometrically regular phantasms which are
produced by pressure on the eyeballs, congestion of the head,
inhalation of anæsthetics, etc., might again be cited to prove that
faint and vague excitements of sense-organs are transformed into
figured objects by the brain, only the facts are not quite clearly
interpretable; and the figuring may possibly be due to some retinal
peculiarity, as yet unexplored. Beautiful patterns, which would do for
wall-papers, succeed each other when the eyeballs are long pressed.
Goethe's account of his own phantasm of a flower is well known. It
came in the middle of his visual field whenever he closed his eyes
and depressed his head, "unfolding itself and developing from its
interior new flowers, formed of colored or sometimes green leaves,
not natural but of fantastic forms, and symmetrical as the rosettes
of sculptors," etc. (quoted in Müller's Physiology, Baly's tr., p.
1397). The fortification- and zigzag-patterns, which are well-known
appearances in the field of view in certain functional disorders,
have characteristics (steadiness, coerciveness, blotting out of other
objects) suggestive of a retinal origin--this is why the entire class
of phenomena treated of in this note seem to me still doubtfully
connected with the cerebral factor in perception of which the text
treats.--I copy from Taine's book on Intelligence (vol. i. p. 61) the
translation of an interesting observation by Prof. M. Lazarus, in which
the same effect of an after-image is seen. Lazarus himself proposes the
name of 'visionary illusions' for such modifications of ideal pictures
by peripheral stimulations (Lehre von den Sinnestäuschungen, 1867, p.
19). "I was on the Kaltbad terrace at Rigi, on a very clear afternoon,
and attempting to make out the Waldbruder, a rock which stands out from
the midst of the gigantic wall of mountains surrounding it, on whose
summits we see like a crown the glaciers of Titlis, Uri-Rothsdock, etc.
I was looking alternately with the naked eye and with a spy-glass; but
could not distinguish it with the naked eye. For the space of six to
ten minutes I had gazed steadfastly upon the mountains, whose color
varied according to their several altitudes or declivities between
violet, brown, and dark green, and I had fatigued myself to no purpose,
when I ceased looking and turned away. At that moment I saw before me
(I cannot recollect whether my eyes were shut or open) the figure of an
absent friend, like a corpse.... I asked myself at once how I had come
to think of my absent friend.--In a few seconds I regained the thread
of my thoughts, which my looking for the Waldbruder had interrupted,
and readily found that the idea of my friend had by a very simple
necessity introduced itself among them. My recollecting him was thus
naturally accounted for.--But in addition to this, he had appeared as
a corpse. How was this?--At this moment, whether through fatigue or in
order to think, I closed my eyes, and found at once the whole field of
sight, over a considerable extent, covered with the same corpse-like
hue, a greenish-yellow gray. I thought at once that I had here the
principle of the desired explanation, and attempted to recall to memory
the forms of other persons. And, in fact, these forms too appeared like
corpses; standing or sitting, as I wished, all had a corpse-like tint.
The persons whom I wished to see did not all appear to me as sensible
phantoms; and again, when my eyes were open. I did not see phantoms,
or at all events only saw them faintly, of no determined color.--I
then inquired how it was that phantoms of persons were affected by and
colored like the visual field surrounding them, how their outlines
were traced, and if their faces and clothes were of the same color.
But it was then too late, or perhaps the influence of reflection and
examination had been too powerful. All grew suddenly pale, and the
subjective phenomenon, which might have lasted some minutes longer, had
disappeared.--It is plain that here an inward reminiscence, arising in
accordance with the laws of association, had combined with an optical
after-image. The excessive excitation of the periphery of the optic
nerve, I mean the long-continued preceding sensation of my eyes when
contemplating the color of the mountain, had indirectly provoked a
subjective and durable sensation, that of the complementary color; and
my reminiscence, incorporating itself with this subjective sensation,
became the corpse-like phantom I have described."

[90] Cf. Th. Reid's Intellectual Powers, essay ii. chap. xxii, and A.
Binet, in Mind, ix. 206. M. Binet points out the fact that what is
fallaciously inferred is always an object of some other sense than the
'this.' 'Optical illusions' are generally errors of touch and muscular
sensibility, and the fallaciously perceived object and the experiences
which correct it are both tactile in these cases.

[91] The converse illusion is hard to bring about. The points _a_ and
_b_, being normally in contact, mean to us the same space, and hence
it might be supposed that when simultaneously touched, as by a pair
of callipers, we should feel but one object, whilst us a matter of
fact we feel two. It should be remarked in explanation of this that
an object placed between the two fingers in their normal uncrossed
position always awakens the sense of _two contacts_. When the fingers
are _pressed together_ we feel _one object_ to be between them. And
when the fingers are crossed, and their corresponding points _a_ and
_b_ simultaneously _pressed_, we do get something like the illusion of
singleness--that is, we get a very doubtful doubleness.

[92] Purkinje, Mach, and Breuer are the authors to whom we mainly owe
the explanation of the feeling of vertigo. I have found (American
Journal of Otology, Oct. 1882) that in deaf-mutes (whose semi-circular
canals or entire auditory nerves must often be disorganized) there very
frequently exists no susceptibility to giddiness or whirling.

[93] The involuntary continuance of the eye's motions is not the only
cause of the false perception in these cases. There is also a true
negative after-image of the original retinal movement-sensations, as we
shall see in Chapter XX.

[94] We never, so far as I know, get the converse illusion at a
railroad station and believe the other train to move when it is still.

[95] Helmholtz: Physiol. Optik, 365.

[96] Cf. Berkeley's Theory of Vision, §§ 67-79; Helmholtz:
Physiologische Optik, pp. 630-1; Lechalas in Revue Philosophique, xxvi.
49.

[97] Physiol. Optik, p. 602.

[98] It seems likely that the strains in the _recti_ muscles have
something to do with the vacillating judgment in these atropin cases.
The internal recti contract whenever we accommodate. They squint
and produce double vision when the innervation for accommodation is
excessive. To see singly, when straining the atropinized accommodation,
the contraction of our internal _recti_ must be neutralized by a
correspondingly excessive contraction of the external _recti_. But this
is a sign of the object's recession, etc.

[99] American Journal of Psychology, i. 101 ff.

[100] Romanes, Mental Evolution in Animals, p. 324.

[101] M. Lazarus: Das Leben d. Seele, ii (1857), p. 32. In the ordinary
hearing of speech half the words we seem to hear are supplied out
of our own head. A language with which we are perfectly familiar is
understood, even when spoken in low tones and far off. An unfamiliar
language is unintelligible under these conditions. If we do not get a
very good seat at a foreign theatre, we fail to follow the dialogue;
and what gives trouble to most of us when abroad is not only that the
natives speak so fast, but that they speak so indistinctly and so low.
The verbal objects for interpreting the sounds by are not alert and
ready made in our minds, as they are in our familiar mother-tongue, and
do not start up at so faint a cue.

[102] G. H. Meyer, Untersuchungen, etc., pp. 242-8.

[103] Helmholtz, P. O. 438. The question will soon come before us again
in the chapter on the Perception of Space.

[104] C. F. Taylor, Sensation and Pain, p. 37 (N. Y., 1882).

[105] Examen Critique de la Loi Psychophysique (1883), p. 61.

[106] Compare A. W Volkmann's essay 'Ueber Ursprüngliches und
Erworbenes in den Raumanschauungen,' on p. 139 of his Untersuchungen
im Gebiete der Optik; and Chapter xiii of Hering's contribution to
Hermann's Handbuch der Physiologie, vol. iii.

[107] In the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical
Research, pp. 253-4, I have tried to account for some of the variations
in this consciousness. Out of 140 persons whom I found to feel
their lost foot, some did so _dubiously_. "Either they only feel it
occasionally, or only when it pains them, or only when they try to
move it; or they only feel it when they 'think a good deal about it'
and make an effort to conjure it up. When they 'grow inattentive,'
the feeling 'flies back' or 'jumps back,' to the stump. Every degree
of consciousness, from complete and permanent hallucination down to
something hardly distinguishable from ordinary fancy, seems represented
in the sense of the missing extremity which these patients say they
have. Indeed I have seldom seen a more plausible lot of evidence
for the view that imagination and sensation are but differences of
vividness in an identical process than these confessions, taking them
altogether, contain. Many patients say they can hardly tell whether
they feel or fancy the limb."

[108] Pflüger's Archiv, xxxvii. 1.

[109] Not all patients have this additional illusion.

[110] I ought to say that in _almost_ all cases the volition is
followed by actual contraction of muscles in the _stump_.

[111] Cf. Herbart, Psychol. als. Wissenschaft, § 125.

[112] Compare the historical reviews by K. Lange: Ueber Apperception
(Plauen, 1879), pp. 12-14; by Staude in Wundt's Philosophische Studien,
i. 149; and by Marty in Vierteljsch. f. wiss. Phil., x. 347 ff.

[113] Problems, vol. i. p. 118 ff.

[114] See his Einleitung in die Psychologie u. Sprachwissenschaft
(1881) p. 166 ff.

[115] One of my colleagues, asking himself the question after reading
the anecdote, tells me that he replied 'Harvard College,' the faculty
of that body having voted, a few days previously, to keep back the
degrees of members of the graduating class who might be disorderly on
class-day night. W. J.

[116] _Op. cit._ pp. 166-171.

[117] The great maxim in pedagogy is to knit every new piece of
knowledge on to a pre-existing curiosity--i.e., to assimilate its
matter in some way to what is already known. Hence the advantage of
"comparing all that is far off and foreign to something that is near
home, of making the unknown plain by the example of the known, and of
connecting all the instruction with the personal experience of the
pupil.... If the teacher is to explain the distance of the sun from
the earth, let him ask.... 'If anyone there in the sun fired off a
cannon straight at you, what should you do?' 'Get out of the way' would
be the answer. 'No need of that,' the teacher might reply. 'You may
quietly go to sleep in your room, and get up again, you may wait till
your confirmation-day, you may learn a trade, and grow as old as I
am,--_then_ only will the cannon-ball be getting near, _then_ you may
jump to one side! See, so great as that is the sun's distance!'" (K.
Lange, Ueber Apperception, 1879, p. 76--a charming though prolix little
work.)

[118] A. Schopenhauer, Satz vom Grunde, chap. iv. H. Spencer, Psychol.,
part vi. chaps. ix, x. E. v. Hartmann, Phil. of the Unconscious (B),
chaps. vii, viii. W. Wundt, Beiträge, pp. 422 ff.; Vorlesungen, iv,
xiii. H. Helmholtz, Physiol. Optik, pp. 430, 447. A. Binet, Psychol.
du Raisonnement, chaps. iii, v. Wundt and Helmholtz have more recently
'recanted.' See above, vol i. p. 169 note.

[119] When not all M, but only some M, is A, when, in other words, M is
'undistributed' the conclusion is liable to error. Illusions would thus
be _logical fallacies_, if true perceptions were valid syllogisms. They
would draw false conclusions from undistributed middle terms.

[120] See Spencer, Psychol., ii. p. 250, note, for a physiological
hypothesis to account for this fact.

[121] Here is another good example, taken from Helmholtz's Optics, p.
435: "The sight of a man walking is a familiar spectacle to us. We
perceive it as a connected whole, and at most notice the most striking
of its peculiarities. Strong attention is required, and a special
choice of the point of view, in order to feel the perpendicular and
lateral oscillations of such a walking figure. We must choose fitting
points or lines in the background with which to compare the positions
of its head, but if a distant walking man be looked at through an
astronomical telescope (which inverts the object), what a singular
hopping and rocking appearance he presents! No difficulty now in seeing
the body's oscillations, and many other details of the gait.... But, on
the other hand, its total character, whether light or clumsy, dignified
or graceful, is harder to perceive than in the upright position."

[122] Illusions and hallucinations must both be distinguished from
_delusions_. A delusion is a false opinion about a matter of fact,
which need not necessarily involve, though it often does involve, false
perceptions of sensible things. We may, for example, have religious
delusions, medical delusions, delusions about our own importance,
about other peoples' characters, etc., _ad libitum_. The delusions of
the insane are apt to affect certain typical forms, often very hard
to explain. But in many cases they are certainly theories which the
patients invent to account for their abnormal bodily sensations. In
other cases they are due to hallucinations of hearing and of sight. Dr.
Clouston (Clinical Lectures on Mental Disease, lecture iii _ad fin._)
gives the following special delusions as having been found in about
a hundred melancholy female patients who were afflicted in this way.
There were delusions of

general persecution;               being destitute;
general suspicion;                 being followed by the police;
being poisoned;                    being very wicked;
being killed;                      impending death;
being conspired against;           impending calamity;
being defrauded;                   the soul being lost;
being preached against in church;  having no stomach;
being pregnant;                    having no inside;
having a bone in the throat;       having neither stomach nor brains;
having lost much money;            being covered with vermin;
being unfit to live;               letters being written about her;
that she will not recover;         property being stolen;
that she is to be murdered;        her children being killed;
that she is to be boiled alive;    having committed theft;
that she is to be starved;         the legs being made of glass;
that the flesh is boiling;         having horns on the head;
that the head is severed from      being chloroformed;
  the body;                        having committed murder;
that children are burning;         fear of being hanged;
that murders take place around;    being called names by person;
that it is wrong to take food;     being acted on by spirits;
being in hell;                     being a man;
being tempted of the devil;        the body being transformed;
being possessed of the devil;      insects coming from the body;
having committed an                rape being practised on her;
  unpardonable sin;                having a venereal disease;
unseen agencies working;           being a fish;
her own identity;                  being dead;
being on fire;                     having committed suicide of the soul.


[123] V. Kandinsky: Kritische u. Klinische Betrachtungen im Gebiete d.
Sinnestäuschungen (1886), p. 42.

[124] See Proceedings of Soc. for Psych. Research, Dec. 1889, pp. 7,
183. The International Congress for Experimental Psychology has now
charge of the Census, and the present writer is its agent for America.

[125] This case is of the class which Mr. Myers terms 'veridical.' In a
subsequent letter the writer informs me that his vision occurred some
five hours _before_ the child was born.

[126] Le Sommeil et les Rêves (1865), chaps. iii, iv.

[127] This theory of incomplete rectification of the inner images by
their usual reductives is most brilliantly stated by M. Taine in his
work on Intelligence, book ii. chap. i.

[128] Not, of course, in all cases, because the cells remaining active
are themselves on the way to be overpowered by the general (unknown)
condition to which sleep is due.

[129] For a full account of Jackson's theories, see his 'Croonian
Lectures' published in the Brit. Med. Journ. for 1884. Cf. also his
remarks in the Discussion of Dr. Mercier's paper on Inhibition in
'Brain,' xi. 361.

The loss of vivacity in the images in the process of waking, as well as
the gain of it in falling asleep, are both well described by M. Taine,
who writes (on Intelligence, i. 50, 58) that often in the daytime, when
fatigued and seated in a chair, it is sufficient for him to close one
eye with a handkerchief, when, "by degrees, the sight of the other eye
becomes vague, and it closes. All external sensations are gradually
effaced, or cease, at all events, to be remarked; the internal images,
on the other hand, feeble and rapid during the state of complete
wakefulness, become intense, distinct, colored, steady, and lasting:
there is a sort of ecstasy, accompanied by a feeling of expansion and
of comfort. Warned by frequent experience, I know that sleep is coming
on, and that I must not disturb the rising vision; I remain passive,
and in a few minutes it is complete. Architecture, landscapes, moving
figures, pass slowly by, and sometimes remain, with incomparable
clearness of form and fulness of being; sleep comes on, and I know
no more of the real world I am in. Many times, like M. Maury, I have
caused myself to be gently roused at different moments of this state,
and have thus been able to mark its characters.--The intense image
which seems an external object is but a more forcible continuation of
the feeble image which an instant before I recognized as internal; some
scrap of a forest, some house, some person which I vaguely imagined on
closing my eyes, has in a minute become present to me with full bodily
details, so as to change into a complete hallucination. Then, waking
up on a hand touching me, I feel the figure decay, lose color, and
evaporate: what had appeared a substance is reduced to a shadow.... In
such a case, I have often seen, for a passing moment, the image _grow
pale_, waste away, and evaporate; sometimes, on opening the eyes, a
fragment of landscape or the skirt of a dress appears still to float
over the fire-irons or on the black hearth." This persistence of
dream-objects for a few moments after the eyes are opened seems to be
no extremely rare experience. Many cases of it have been reported to me
directly. Compare Müller's Physiology, Baly's tr., p. 945.

[130] I say the 'normal' paths, because hallucinations are not
incompatible with _some_ paths of association being left. Some hypnotic
patients will not only have hallucinations of objects suggested
to them, but will amplify them and act out the situation. But the
paths here seem excessively narrow, and the reflections which ought
to make the hallucination incredible do not occur to the subject's
mind. In general, the narrower a train of 'ideas' is, the vivider
the consciousness is of each. Under ordinary circumstances, the
entire brain probably plays a part in draining any centre which may
be ideationally active. When the drainage is reduced in any way it
probably makes the active process more intense.

[131] M. A. Maury gives a number: _op. cit._ pp. 126-8.

[132] M. Binet's highly important experiments, which were first
published in vol. XVII of the Revue Philosophique (1884), are also
given in full in chapter ix of his and Féré's work on 'Animal
Magnetism' in the International Scientific Series. Where there is no
dot on the paper, nor any other visible mark, the subject's judgment
about the 'portrait' would seem to be guided by what he sees happening
to the entire sheet.

[133] It is a difficult thing to distinguish in a hypnotic patient
between a genuine sensorial hallucination of something suggested and a
conception of it merely, coupled with belief that it is there. I have
been surprised at the vagueness with which such subjects will often
trace upon blank paper the outlines of the pictures which they say they
'see' thereupon. On the other hand, you will hear them say that they
find no difference between a real flower which you show them and an
imaginary flower which you tell them is beside it. When told that one
is imaginary and that they must pick out the real one, they sometimes
say the choice is impossible, and sometimes they point to the imaginary
flower.

[134] Only the other day, to three hypnotized girls, I failed to
double a hallucination with a prism. Of course it may not have been a
fully-developed hallucination.

[135] Brain, xi. 441.

[136] Mind, x. 161, 316; and Phantasms of the Living (1886), i. 470-488.

[137] In Mr. Gurney's work, just cited, a very large number of
veridical cases are critically discussed.

[138] Mental Evolution in Animals, p. 186.

[139] _Literature._ The best treatment of perception with which I am
acquainted is that in Mr. James Sully's book on 'Illusions' in the
International Scientific Series. On hallucinations the literature is
large. Gurney, Kandinsky (as already cited), and some articles by
Kraepelin in the Vierteljahrschrift für Wissenschaftliche Philosophie,
vol. v (1881), are the most systematic studies recently made. All
works on Insanity treat of them. Dr. W. W. Ireland's works, 'The Blot
upon the Brain' (1886) and 'Through the Ivory Gate' (1890) have much
information on the subject. Gurney gives pretty complete references
to older literature. The most important thing on the subject from the
point of view of theory is the article by Mr. Myers on the Demon of
Socrates in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research for
1889, p. 522.




CHAPTER XX.

THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE.[140]

THE FEELING OF CRUDE EXTENSITY.


_In the sensations of hearing, touch, sight, and pain we are
accustomed to distinguish from among the other elements the element
of voluminousness._ We call the reverberations of a thunderstorm more
voluminous than the squeaking of a slate-pencil; the entrance into a
warm bath gives our skin a more massive feeling than the prick of a
pin; a little neuralgic pain, fine as a cobweb, in the face, seems less
extensive than the heavy soreness of a boil or the vast discomfort
of a colic or a lumbago; and a solitary star looks smaller than the
noonday sky. In the sensation of dizziness or subjective motion, which
recent investigation has proved to be connected with stimulation of
the semi-circular canals of the ear, the spatial character is very
prominent. Whether the 'muscular sense' directly yields us knowledge
of space is still a matter of litigation among psychologists. Whilst
some go so far as to ascribe our entire cognition of extension to its
exclusive aid, others deny to it all extensive quality whatever. Under
these circumstances we shall do better to adjourn its consideration;
admitting, however, that it seems at first sight as if we felt
something decidedly more voluminous when we contract our thigh-muscles
than when we twitch an eyelid or some small muscle in the face. It
seems, moreover, as if this difference lay in the feeling of the
thigh-muscles themselves.

In the sensations of smell and taste this element of varying vastness
seems less prominent but not altogether absent. Some tastes and smells
appear less extensive than complex flavors, like that of roast meat or
plum pudding, on the one hand, or heavy odors like musk or tuberose,
on the other. The epithet _sharp_ given to the acid class would seem
to show that to the popular mind there is something narrow and, as it
were, streaky, in the impression they make, other flavors and odors
being bigger and rounder.

The sensations derived from the inward organs are also distinctly more
or less voluminous. Repletion and emptiness, suffocation, palpitation,
headache, are examples of this, and certainly not less spatial is
the consciousness we have of our general bodily condition in nausea,
fever, heavy drowsiness, and fatigue. Our entire cubic content seems
then sensibly manifest to us as such, and feels much larger than any
local pulsation, pressure, or discomfort. Skin and retina are, however,
the organs in which the space-element plays the most active part. Not
only does the maximal vastness yielded by the retina surpass that
yielded by any other organ, but the intricacy with which our attention
can subdivide this vastness and perceive it to be composed of lesser
portions simultaneously coexisting alongside of each other is without
a parallel elsewhere.[141] The ear gives a greater vastness than the
skin, but is considerably less able to subdivide it.[142]

       *       *       *       *       *

_Now my first thesis is that this element, discernible in each and
every sensation, though more developed in some than in others, is the
original sensation of space,_ out of which all the exact knowledge
about space that we afterwards come to have is woven by processes
of discrimination, association, and selection. 'Extensity,' as Mr.
James Ward calls it,[143] on this view, becomes an element in each
sensation just as intensity is. The latter every one will admit to
be a distinguishable though not separable ingredient of the sensible
quality. In like manner extensity, being an entirely peculiar kind
of feeling indescribable except in terms of itself, and inseparable
in actual experience from some sensational quality which it must
accompany, can itself receive no other name than that of _sensational
element_.

It must now be noted that _the vastness hitherto spoken of is as great
in one direction as in another_. Its dimensions are so vague that in it
there is no question as yet of surface as opposed to depth; 'volume'
being the best short name for the sensation in question. _Sensations
of different orders are roughly comparable, inter se, with respect
to their volumes._ This shows that the spatial quality in each is
identical wherever found, for different qualitative elements, e.g.
warmth and odor, are incommensurate. Persons born blind are reported
surprised at the largeness with which objects appear to them when their
sight is restored. Franz says of his patient cured of cataract: "He
saw everything much larger than he had supposed from the idea obtained
by his sense of touch. Moving, and especially living, objects appeared
very large."[144] Loud sounds have a certain enormousness of feeling.
It is impossible to conceive of the explosion of a cannon as filling
a small space. In general, sounds seem to occupy all the room between
us and their source; and in the case of certain ones, the cricket's
song, the whistling of the wind, the roaring of the surf, or a distant
railway train, to have no definite starting point.

In the sphere of vision we have facts of the same order. 'Glowing'
bodies, as Hering says, give us a perception "which seems _roomy_
(_raumhaft_) in comparison with that of strictly surface color.
A glowing iron looks luminous through and through, and so does a
flame."[145] A luminous fog, a band of sunshine, affect us in the same
way. As Hering urges:

 "We must distinguish _roomy_ from superficial, as well as distinctly
 from indistinctly bounded, sensations. The dark which with closed eyes
 one sees before one is, for example, a roomy sensation. We do not
 see a black surface like a wall in front of us, but a space filled
 with darkness, and even when we succeed in seeing this darkness as
 terminated by a black wall there still remains in front of this wall
 the dark space. The same thing happens when we find ourselves with
 open eyes in an absolutely dark room. This sensation of darkness
 is also vaguely bounded. An example of a distinctly bounded roomy
 sensation is that of a clear and colored fluid seen in a glass; the
 yellow of the wine is seen not only on the bounding surface of the
 glass; the yellow sensation fills the whole interior of the glass. By
 day the so-called empty space between us and objects seen appears very
 different from what it is by night. The increasing darkness settles
 not only upon the things but also _between_ us and the things, so as
 at last to cover them completely and fill the space alone. If I look
 into a dark box I find it _filled_ with darkness, and this is seen
 not merely as the dark-colored sides or walls of the box. A shady
 corner in an otherwise well-lighted room is full of a darkness which
 is not only _on_ the walls and floor but _between_ them in the space
 they include. Every sensation is there where I experience it, and if
 I have it at once at every point of a certain roomy space, it is then
 a voluminous sensation. A cube of transparent green glass gives us a
 spatial sensation; an opaque cube painted green, on the contrary, only
 sensations of surface."[146]

_There are certain quasi-motor sensations in the head_ when we change
the direction of the attention, which equally seem to involve three
dimensions. If with closed eyes we think of the top of the house and
then of the cellar, of the distance in front of us and then of that
behind us, of space far to the right and then far to the left, we have
something far stronger than an idea,--an actual feeling, namely, as
if something in the head moved into another direction. Fechner was, I
believe, the first to publish any remarks on these feelings. He writes
as follows:

 "When we transfer the attention from objects of one sense to those
 of another we have an indescribable feeling (though at the same time
 one perfectly determinate and reproducible at pleasure) of altered
 direction, or differently localized tension (_Spannung_). We feel
 a strain forward in the eyes, one directed sideways in the ears,
 increasing with the degree of our attention, and changing according as
 we look at an object carefully, or listen to something attentively;
 wherefore we speak of _straining the attention_. The difference is
 most plainly felt when the attention vibrates rapidly between eye
 and ear. This feeling localizes itself with most decided difference
 in regard to the various sense-organs according as we wish to
 discriminate a thing delicately by touch, taste, or smell.

 "But now I have, when I try to vividly recall a picture of memory
 or fancy, a feeling perfectly analogous to that which I experience
 when I seek to grasp a thing keenly by eye or ear; and this analogous
 feeling is very differently localized. While in sharpest possible
 attention to real objects (as well as to after-images) the strain is
 plainly forwards, and, when the attention changes from one sense to
 another, only alters its direction between the sense-organs, leaving
 the rest of the head free from strain, the case is different in memory
 or fancy; for here the feeling withdraws entirely from the external
 sense-organs, and seems rather to take refuge in that part of the
 head which the brain fills. If I wish, for example, to recall a place
 or person, it will arise before me with vividness, not according as
 I strain my attention forwards, but rather in proportion as I, so to
 speak, retract it backwards."[147]

It appears probable that the feelings which Fechner describes are in
part constituted by imaginary semi-circular canal sensations.[148]
These undoubtedly convey the most delicate perception of change in
direction; and when, as here, the changes are not perceived as taking
place in the external world, they occupy a vague internal space located
within the head.[149]

In the skin itself there is a vague form of projection into the third
dimension to which Hering has called attention.

 "Heat is not felt only against the cutaneous surface, but when
 communicated through the air may appear extending more or less out
 from the surface into the third dimension of surrounding space....
 We can determine in the dark the place of a radiant body by moving
 the hand to and fro, and attending to the fluctuation of our feeling
 of warmth. The feeling itself, however, is not projected fully into
 the spot at which we localize the hot body, but always remains in the
 neighborhood of the hand."

The interior of one's mouth-cavity feels larger when explored by the
tongue than when looked at. The crater of a newly-extracted tooth, and
the movements of a loose tooth in its socket, feel quite monstrous.
A midge buzzing against the drum of the ear will often seem as big
as a butterfly. The spatial sensibility of the tympanic membrane has
hitherto been very little studied, though the subject will well repay
much trouble. If we approach it by introducing into the outer ear some
small object like the tip of a rolled-up tissue-paper lamplighter, we
are surprised at the large radiating sensation which its presence gives
us, and at the sense of clearness and openness which comes when it is
removed. It is immaterial to inquire whether the far-reaching sensation
here be due to actual irradiation upon distant nerves or not. We are
considering now, not the objective causes of the spatial feeling,
but its subjective varieties, and the experiment shows that the same
object gives more of it to the inner than to the outer cuticle of the
ear. The pressure of the air in the tympanic cavity upon the membrane
gives an astonishingly large sensation. We can increase the pressure
by holding our nostrils and closing our mouth and forcing air through
our Eustachian tubes by an expiratory effort; and we can diminish it
by either inspiring or swallowing under the same conditions of closed
mouth and nose. In either case we get a large round tridimensional
sensation inside of the head, which seems as if it must come from the
affection of an organ much larger than the tympanic membrane, whose
surface hardly exceeds that of one's little-finger-nail.

The tympanic membrane is furthermore able to render sensible
differences in the pressure of the external atmosphere, too slight to
be felt either as noise or in this more violent way. If the reader will
sit with closed eyes and let a friend approximate some solid object,
like a large book, noiselessly to his face, he will immediately become
aware of the object's presence and position--likewise of its departure.
A friend of the writer, making the experiment for the first time,
discriminated unhesitatingly between the three degrees of solidity of a
board, a lattice-frame, and a sieve, held close to his ear. Now as this
sensation is never used by ordinary persons as a means of perception,
we may fairly assume that its felt quality, in those whose attention
is called to it for the first time, belongs to it _quâ_ sensation, and
owes nothing to educational suggestions. But this felt quality is most
distinctly and unmistakably one of vague spatial vastness in three
dimensions--quite as much so as is the felt quality of the retinal
sensation when we lie on our back and fill the entire field of vision
with the empty blue sky. When an object is brought near the ear we
immediately feel shut in, contracted; when the object is removed, we
suddenly feel as if a transparency, clearness, openness, had been made
outside of us. And the feeling will, by any one who will take the pains
to observe it, be acknowledged to involve the third dimension in a
vague, unmeasured state.[150]

The reader will have noticed, in this enumeration of facts, that
_voluminousness of the feeling seems to bear very little relation
to the size of the organ that yields it_. The ear and eye are
comparatively minute organs, yet they give us feelings of great volume.
The same lack of exact proportion between size of feeling and size of
organ affected obtains within the limits of particular sensory organs.
An object appears smaller on the lateral portions of the retina than
it does on the fovea, as may be easily verified by holding the two
forefingers parallel and a couple of inches apart, and transferring the
gaze of one eye from one to the other. Then the finger not directly
looked at will appear to shrink, and this whatever be the direction of
the fingers. On the tongue a crumb, or the calibre of a small tube,
appears larger than between the fingers. If two points kept equidistant
(blunted compass- or scissors-points, for example) be drawn across the
skin so as really to describe a pair of parallel lines, the lines will
appear farther apart in some spots than in others. If, for example,
we draw them horizontally across the face, so that the mouth falls
between them, the person experimented upon will feel as if they began
to diverge near the mouth and to include it in a well-marked ellipse.
In like manner, if we keep the compass-points one or two centimetres
apart, and draw them down the forearm over the wrist and palm, finally
drawing one along one finger, the other along its neighbor, the
appearance will be that of a single line, soon breaking into two, which
become more widely separated below the wrist, to contract again in
the palm, and finally diverge rapidly again towards the finger-tips.
The dotted lines in Figs. 51 and 52 represent the true path of the
compass-points; the full lines their apparent path.

[Illustration: FIG. 51 (after Weber).]

The same length of skin, moreover, will convey a more extensive
sensation according to the manner of stimulation. If the edge of a
card be pressed against the skin, the distance between its extremities
will seem shorter than that between two compass-tips touching the same
terminal points.[151]

[Illustration: FIG. 52 (after Weber).]

In the eye, intensity of nerve-stimulation seems to increase the
_volume_ of the feeling as well as its brilliancy. If we raise and
lower the gas alternately, the whole room and all the objects in it
seem alternately to enlarge and contract. If we cover half a page
of small print with a gray glass, the print seen through the glass
appears decidedly smaller than that seen outside of it, and the darker
the glass the greater the difference. When a circumscribed opacity in
front of the retina keeps off part of the light from the portion which
it covers, objects projected on that portion may seem but half as
large as when their image falls outside of it.[152] The inverse effect
seems produced by certain drugs and anæsthetics. Morphine, atropine,
daturine, and cold blunt the sensibility of the skin, so that distances
upon it seem less. Haschish produces strange perversions of the general
sensibility. Under its influence one's body may seem either enormously
enlarged or strangely contracted. Sometimes a single member will alter
its proportion to the rest; or one's back, for instance, will appear
entirely absent, as if one were hollow behind. Objects comparatively
near will recede to a vast distance, a short street assume to the eye
an immeasurable perspective. Ether and chloroform occasionally produce
not wholly dissimilar results. Panum, the German physiologist, relates
that when, as a boy, he was etherized for neuralgia, the objects in
the room grew extremely small and distant, before his field of vision
darkened over and the roaring in his ears began. He also mentions that
a friend of his in church, struggling in vain to keep awake, saw the
preacher grow smaller and smaller and more and more distant. I myself
on one occasion observed the same recession of objects during the
beginning of chloroformization. In various cerebral diseases we find
analogous disturbances.

_Can we assign the physiological conditions which make the elementary
sensible largeness of one sensation vary so much from that of another?_
Only imperfectly. One factor in the result undoubtedly is the number
of nerve-terminations simultaneously excited by the outward agent
that awakens the sensation. When many skin-nerves are warmed, or
much retinal surface illuminated, our feeling is larger than when a
lesser nervous surface is excited. The single sensation yielded by two
compass-points, although it seems simple, is yet felt to be much bigger
and blunter than that yielded by one. The touch of a single point may
always be recognized by its quality of sharpness. This page looks
much smaller to the reader if he closes one eye than if both eyes are
open. So does the moon, which latter fact shows that the phenomenon
has nothing to do with parallax. The celebrated boy couched for the
cataract by Chesselden thought, after his first eye was operated,
"all things he saw extremely large," but being couched of his second
eye, said "that objects at first appeared large to this eye, but not
so large as they did at first to the other; and looking upon the same
object with both eyes, he thought it looked about twice as large as
with the first couched eye only, but not double, that we can anyways
discover."

The greater extensiveness that the feeling of certain parts of the same
surface has over other parts, and that one order of surface has over
another (retina over skin, for example), may also to a certain extent
be explained by the operation of the same factor. It is an anatomical
fact that the most spatially sensitive surfaces (retina, tongue,
finger-tips, etc.) are supplied by nerve-trunks of unusual thickness,
which must supply to every unit of surface-area an unusually large
number of terminal fibres. But the variations of felt extension obey
probably only a very rough law of numerical proportion to the number of
fibres. A sound is not twice as voluminous to two ears as to one; and
the above-cited variations of feeling, when the same surface is excited
under different conditions, show that the feeling is a resultant of
several factors of which the anatomical one is only the principal.
Many ingenious hypotheses have been brought forward to assign the
co-operating factors where different conditions give conflicting
amounts of felt space. Later we shall analyze some of these cases in
detail, but it must be confessed here in advance that many of them
resist analysis altogether.[153]


THE PERCEPTION OF SPATIAL ORDER.


So far, all we have established or sought to establish is the existence
of the vague form or _quale_ of spatiality as an inseparable element
bound up with the other peculiarities of each and every one of our
sensations. The numerous examples we have adduced of the variations of
this extensive element have only been meant to make clear its strictly
sensational character. In very few of them will the reader have been
able to explain the variation by an added intellectual element, such as
the suggestion of a recollected experience. In almost all it has seemed
to be the immediate psychic effect of a peculiar sort of nerve-process
excited; and all the nerve-processes in question agree in yielding
what space they do yield, to the mind, in the shape of a simple total
vastness, in which, _primitively_ at least, no _order of parts_ or of
_subdivisions_ reigns.

Let no one be surprised at this notion of a space without order. There
may be a space without order just as there may be an order without
space.[154] And the primitive perceptions of space are certainly of an
unordered kind. The order which the spaces first perceived potentially
include must, before being distinctly apprehended by the mind, be woven
into those spaces by a rather complicated set of intellectual acts. The
primordial largenesses which the sensations yield must be _measured and
subdivided_ by consciousness, and _added_ together, before they can
form by their synthesis what we know as the real Space of the objective
world. In these operations, imagination, association, attention, and
selection play a decisive part; and although they nowhere add any new
material to the space-data of sense, they so shuffle and manipulate
these data and hide present ones behind imagined ones that it is no
wonder if some authors have gone so far as to think that the sense-data
have no spatial worth at all, and that the intellect, since it makes
the subdivisions, also gives the spatial quality to them out of
resources of its own.

       *       *       *       *       *

As for ourselves, having found that all our sensations (however as
yet unconnected and undiscriminated) are of extensive objects, _our
next problem, is: How do we_ ARRANGE _these at first chaotically given
spaces into the one regular and orderly 'world of space' which we now
know?_

To begin with, there is no reason to suppose that the several
sense-spaces of which a sentient creature may become conscious, each
filled with its own peculiar content, should tend, simply _because
they are many_, to enter into any definite spatial intercourse with
each other, or lie in any particular order of positions. Even in
ourselves we can recognize this. Different feelings may coexist in us
without assuming any particular spatial order. The sound of the brook
near which I write, the odor of the cedars, the comfort with which my
breakfast has filled me, and my interest in this paragraph, all lie
distinct in my consciousness, but in no sense outside or alongside
of each other. Their spaces are interfused and at most fill the
same vaguely objective world. Even where the qualities are far less
disparate, we may have something similar. If we take our subjective and
corporeal sensations alone, there are moments when, as we lie or sit
motionless, we find it very difficult to feel distinctly the length of
our back or the direction of our feet from our shoulders. By a strong
effort we can succeed in dispersing our attention impartially over our
whole person, and then we feel the real shape of our body in a sort
of unitary way. But in general a few parts are strongly emphasized
to consciousness and the rest sink out of notice; and it is then
remarkable how vague and ambiguous our perception of their relative
order of location is. Obviously, for the orderly arrangement of a
multitude of sense-spaces in consciousness, something more than their
mere separate existence is required. What is this further condition?

_If a number of sensible extents are to be perceived alongside of
each other and in definite order they must appear as parts in a vaster
sensible extent which can enter the mind simply and all at once_. I
think it will be seen that the difficulty of estimating correctly
the form of one's body by pure feeling arises from the fact that it
is very hard to feel its totality as a unit at all. The trouble is
similar to that of thinking forwards and backwards simultaneously. When
conscious of our head we tend to grow unconscious of our feet, and
there enters thus an element of time-succession into our perception
of ourselves which transforms the latter from an act of intuition to
one of construction. This element of constructiveness is present in a
still higher degree, and carries with it the same consequences, when
we deal with objective spaces too great to be grasped by a single
look. The relative positions of the shops in a town, separated by many
tortuous streets, have to be thus constructed from data apprehended in
succession, and the result is a greater or less degree of vagueness.

That a sensation _be discriminated as a part_ from out of a larger
enveloping space is then the _conditio sine quâ non_ of its being
apprehended in a definite spatial order. The problem of ordering
our feelings in space is then, in the first instance, a problem of
discrimination, but not of discrimination pure and simple; for then not
only coexistent sights but coexistent sounds would necessarily assume
such order, which they notoriously do not. Whatever is discriminated
will appear as a small space within a larger space, it is true, but
this is but the very rudiment of order. For the location of it within
that space to become precise, other conditions still must supervene;
and the best way to study what they are will be to pause for a little
and _analyze what the expression 'spatial order' means_.

       *       *       *       *       *

Spatial order is an abstract term. The concrete perceptions which it
covers are figures, directions, positions, magnitudes, and distances.
To single out any one of these things from a total vastness is
partially to introduce order into the vastness. To subdivide the
vastness into a multitude of these things is to apprehend it in a
completely orderly way. Now what are these things severally? To begin
with, no one can for an instant hesitate to say that some of them
are qualities of sensation, just as the total vastness is in which
they lie. Take figure: a square, a circle, and a triangle appear in
the first instance to the eye simply as three different kinds of
impressions, each so peculiar that we should recognize it if it were to
return. When Nunnely's patient had his cataracts removed, and a cube
and a sphere were presented to his notice, he could at once perceive a
difference in their shapes; and though he could not say which was the
cube and which the sphere, he saw they were not of the same figure.
So of lines: if we can notice lines at all in our field of vision, it
is inconceivable that a vertical one should not affect us differently
from an horizontal one, and should not be recognized as affecting us
similarly when presented again, although we might not yet know the name
'vertical,' or any of its connotations, beyond this peculiar affection
of our sensibility. So of angles: an obtuse one affects our feeling
immediately in a different way from an acute one. Distance-apart, too,
is a simple sensation--the sensation of a line joining the two distant
points: lengthen the line, you alter the feeling and with it the
distance felt.


_Space-relations._


But with distance and direction we pass to the category of
space-_relations_, and are immediately confronted by an opinion which
makes of all relations something _toto cœlo_ different from all facts
of feeling or imagination whatsoever. A relation, for the Platonizing
school in psychology, is an energy of pure thought, and, as such, is
quite incommensurable with the data of sensibility between which it may
be perceived to obtain.

We may consequently imagine a disciple of this school to say to us at
this point: "Suppose you _have_ made a separate specific sensation
of each line and each angle, what boots it? You have still the order
of directions and of distances to account for; you have still the
relative magnitudes of all these felt figures to state; you have their
respective positions to define before you can be said to have brought
order into your space. And not one of these determinations can be
effected except through an act of relating thought, so that your
attempt to give an account of space in terms of pure sensibility breaks
down almost at the very outset. _Position_, for example, can never be
a sensation, for it has nothing intrinsic about it; it can only obtain
_between_ a spot, line, or other figure and _extraneous co-ordinates_,
and can never be an element of the sensible datum, the line or the
spot, in itself. Let us then confess that Thought alone can unlock
the riddle of space, and that Thought is an adorable but unfathomable
mystery."

Such a method of dealing with the problem has the merit of shortness.
Let us, however, be in no such hurry, but see whether we cannot get a
little deeper by patiently considering what these space-relations are.

'Relation' is a very slippery word. It has so many different concrete
meanings that the use of it as an abstract universal may easily
introduce bewilderment into our thought. We must therefore be careful
to avoid ambiguity by making sure, wherever we have to employ it,
what its precise meaning is in that particular sphere of application.
At present we have to do with space-relations, and no others. Most
'relations' are feelings of an entirely different order from the terms
they relate. The relation of similarity, e.g., may equally obtain
between jasmine and tuberose, or between Mr. Browning's verses and Mr.
Story's; it is itself neither odorous nor poetical, and those may well
be pardoned who have denied to it all sensational content whatever. But
just as, in the field of quantity, the relation between two numbers is
another number, so _in the field of space the relations are facts of
the same order with the facts they relate. If these latter be patches
in the circle of vision, the former are certain other patches between
them._ When we speak of the relation of direction of two points toward
each other, we mean simply the sensation of the line that joins the
two points together. _The line is the relation;_ feel it and you
feel the relation, see it and you see the relation; nor can you in
any conceivable way think the latter except by imagining the former
(however vaguely), or describe or indicate the one except by pointing
to the other. And the moment you have imagined the line, the relation
stands before you in all its completeness, with nothing further to
be done. Just so the relation of _direction_ between two lines is
identical with the peculiar sensation of shape of the space enclosed
between them. This is commonly called an angular relation.

If these relations are sensations, no less so are the relations of
position. _The relation of position between the top and bottom points
of a vertical line is that line,_ and nothing else. The relations of
position between a point and a horizontal line below it are potentially
numerous. There is one more important than the rest, called its
distance. This is the sensation, ideal or actual, of a perpendicular
drawn from the point to the line.[155] Two lines, one from each
extremity of the horizontal to the point, give us a peculiar sensation
of triangularity. This feeling may be said to constitute the _locus_ of
all the relations of position of the elements in question. _Rightness
and leftness, upness and downness, are again pure sensations_ differing
specifically from each other, and generically from everything else.
Like all sensations, they can only be indicated, not described. If
we take a cube and label one side _top_, another _bottom_, a third
_front_, and a fourth _back_, there remains no form of words by which
we can describe to another person which of the remaining sides is
_right_ and which _left_. We can only point and say _here_ is right and
_there_ is left, just as we should say _this_ is red and _that_ blue.
Of two points seen beside each other at all, one is always affected by
one of these feelings, and the other by the opposite; the same is true
of the extremities of any line.[156]

Thus it appears indubitable that all space-relations except those of
magnitude are nothing more or less than pure sensational objects. But
_magnitude_ appears to outstep this narrow sphere. We have relations
of muchness and littleness between times, numbers, intensities, and
qualities, as well as spaces. It is impossible, then, that such
relations should form a particular kind of simply spatial feeling.
This we must admit: the relation of quantity is generic and occurs in
many categories of consciousness, whilst the other relations we have
considered are specific and occur in space alone. When our attention
passes from a shorter line to a longer, from a smaller spot to a
larger, from a feebler light to a stronger, from a paler blue to a
richer, from a march tune to a galop, the transition is accompanied
in the synthetic field of consciousness by a peculiar feeling of
difference which is what we call the sensation of _more_,--more length,
more expanse, more light, more blue, more motion. This transitional
sensation of _more_ must be identical with itself under all these
different accompaniments, or we should not give it the same name in
every case. We get it when we pass from a short vertical line to a long
horizontal one, from a small square to a large circle, as well as when
we pass between those figures whose shapes are congruous. But when the
shapes are congruous our consciousness of the relation is a good deal
more distinct, and it is most distinct of all when, in the exercise
of our analytic attention, we notice, first, a _part_, and then the
_whole_, of a _single_ line or shape. Then the _more_ of the whole
actually sticks out, as a separate piece of space, and is so envisaged.
The same exact sensation of it is given when we are able to superpose
one line or figure on another. This indispensable condition of exact
measurement of the _more_ has led some to think that the feeling
itself arose in every case from original experiences of superposition.
This is probably not an absolutely true opinion, but for our present
purpose that is immaterial. So far as the subdivisions of a sense-space
are to be _measured_ exactly against each other, objective forms
occupying one subdivision must directly or indirectly be superposed
upon the other, and the mind must get the immediate feeling of an
outstanding _plus_. And even where we only feel one subdivision to be
vaguely larger or less, the mind must pass rapidly between it and the
other subdivision, and receive the immediate sensible shock of the
_more_.

       *       *       *       *       *

_We seem thus to have accounted for all space-relations, and made
them clear to our understanding. They are nothing but sensations of
particular lines, particular angles, particular forms of transition,
or_ (in the case of a _distinct more) of particular outstanding
portions of space after two figures have been superposed._ These
relation-sensations may actually be produced as such, as when a
geometer draws new lines across a figure with his pencil to demonstrate
the relations of its parts, or they may be ideal representations of
lines, not really drawn. But in either case their entrance into the
mind is equivalent to a more detailed subdivision, cognizance, and
measurement of the space considered. _The bringing of subdivisions to
consciousness constitutes, then, the entire process by which we pass
from our first vague feeling of a total vastness to a cognition of
the vastness in detail._ The more numerous the subdivisions are, the
more elaborate and perfect the cognition becomes. But inasmuch as all
the subdivisions are themselves sensations, and even the feeling of
'more' or 'less' is, where not itself a figure, at least a sensation
of transition between two sensations of figure, it follows, for aught
we can as yet see to the contrary, that _all spatial knowledge is
sensational at bottom_, and that, as the sensations lie together in the
unity of consciousness, no new material element whatever comes to them
from a supra-sensible source.[157]

_The bringing of subdivisions to consciousness! This, then, is our next
topic._ They may be brought to consciousness under three aspects in
respect of their _locality_, in respect of their _size_, in respect of
their _shape_.


_The Meaning of Localization._


_Confining ourselves to the problem of locality_ for the present,
let us begin with the simple case of a sensitive surface, only two
points of which receive stimulation from without. How, first, are
these two points felt as alongside of each other with an interval of
space between them? We must be conscious of two things for this: of
the duality of the excited points, and of the extensiveness of the
unexcited interval. The duality alone, although a necessary, is not a
sufficient condition of the spatial separation. We may, for instance,
discern two sounds in the same place, sweet and sour in the same
lemonade, warm and cold, round and pointed contact in the same place
on the skin, etc.[158] In all discrimination the recognition of the
duality of two feelings by the mind is the easier the more strongly the
feelings are contrasted in quality. If our two excited points awaken
identical qualities of sensation, they must, perforce, appear to the
mind as one; and, not distinguished at all, they are, _a fortiori_, not
localized apart. Spots four centimetres distant on the back have no
qualitative contrast at all, and fuse into a single sensation. Points
less than three thousandths of a millimetre apart awaken on the retina
sensations so contrasted that we apprehend them immediately as two. Now
these unlikenesses which arise so slowly when we pass from one point to
another in the back, so much faster on the tongue and finger-tips, but
with such inconceivable rapidity on the retina, what are they? Can we
discover anything about their intrinsic nature?

The most natural and immediate answer to make is that they are
unlikeness of _place_ pure and simple. In the words of a German
physiologist,[159] to whom psychophysics owes much:

 "The sensations are from the outset (_von vornherein_) localized....
 Every sensation as such is from the very beginning affected with the
 spatial quality, so that this quality is nothing like an external
 attribute coming to the sensation from a higher faculty, but must be
 regarded as something immanently residing in the sensation itself."

And yet the moment we reflect on this answer an insuperable logical
difficulty seems to present itself. No single _quale_ of sensation can,
by itself, amount to a consciousness of _position_. Suppose no feeling
but that of a single point ever to be awakened. Could that possibly be
the feeling of any special _whereness_ or _thereness_? Certainly not.
_Only when a second point is felt to arise can the first one acquire
a determination of up, down, right or left, and these determinations
are all relative to that second point._ Each point, so far as it is
_placed, is_ then only by virtue of what it _is not,_ namely, by virtue
of another point. This is as much as to say that position has nothing
_intrinsic_ about it; and that, although a feeling of absolute bigness
may, _a feeling of place cannot, possibly form an immanent element in
any single isolated sensation._ The very writer we have quoted has
given heed to this objection, for he continues (p. 335) by saying that
the sensations thus originally localized "are only so _in themselves_,
but not in the representation of consciousness, which is not yet
present.... They are, in the first instance, devoid of all mutual
relations with each other." But such a localization of the sensation
'in itself' would seem to mean nothing more than the susceptibility or
_potentiality_ of being distinctly localized when the time came and
other conditions became fulfilled. Can we now discover anything about
such susceptibility in itself before it has borne its ulterior fruits
in the developed consciousness?


_'Local Signs.'_


To begin with, every sensation of the skin and every visceral sensation
seems to derive from its topographic seat a peculiar shade of feeling,
which it would not have in another place. And this feeling _per se_
seems quite another thing from the perception of the place. Says
Wundt[160]:

 "If with the finger we touch first the cheek and then the palm,
 exerting each time precisely the same pressure, the sensation shows
 notwithstanding a distinctly marked difference in the two cases.
 Similarly, when we compare the palm with the back of the hand, the
 nape of the neck with its anterior surface, the breast with the
 back; in short, any two distant parts of the skin with each other.
 And moreover, we easily remark, by attentively observing, that spots
 even tolerably close together differ in respect of the quality of
 their feeling. If we pass from one point of our cutaneous surface to
 another, we find a perfectly gradual and continuous alteration in
 our feeling, notwithstanding the objective nature of the contact has
 remained the same. Even the sensations of corresponding points on
 opposite sides of the body, though similar, are not identical. If,
 for instance, we touch first the back of one hand and then of the
 other, we remark a qualitative unlikeness of sensation. It must not
 be thought that such differences are mere matters of imagination, and
 that we take the sensations to be different because we represent each
 of them to ourselves as occupying a different place. With sufficient
 sharpening of the attention, we may, confining ourselves to the
 quality of the feelings alone, entirely abstract from their locality,
 and yet notice the differences quite as markedly."

Whether these local contrasts shade into each other with absolutely
continuous gradations, we cannot say. But we know (continues Wundt) that

 "they change, when we pass from one point of the skin to its neighbor,
 with very different degrees of rapidity. On delicately-feeling parts,
 used principally for touching, such as the finger-tips, the difference
 of sensation between two closely approximate points is already
 strongly pronounced; whilst in parts of lesser delicacy, as the arm,
 the back, the legs, the disparities of sensation are observable only
 between distant spots."

The internal organs, too, have their specific _qualia_ of sensation. An
inflammation of the kidney is different from one of the liver; pains in
joints and muscular insertions are distinguished. Pain in the dental
nerves is wholly unlike the pain of a burn. But very important and
curious similarities prevail throughout these differences. Internal
pains, whose seat we cannot see, and have no means of knowing unless
the character of the pain itself reveal it, are felt _where_ they
belong. Diseases of the stomach, kidney, liver, rectum, prostate,
etc., of the bones, of the brain and its membranes, are referred
to their proper position. Nerve-pains describe the length of the
nerve. Such localizations as those of vertical, frontal, or occipital
headache of intracranial origin force us to conclude that parts which
are neighbors, whether inner or outer, may possess by mere virtue of
that fact a common peculiarity of feeling, a respect in which their
sensations agree, and which serves as a token of their proximity. These
_local_ colorings are, moreover, so strong that we cognize them as the
same, throughout all contrasts of sensible quality in the accompanying
perception. Cold and heat are wide as the poles asunder; yet if both
fall on the cheek, there mixes with them something that makes them in
_that respect_ identical; just as, contrariwise, despite the identity
of cold with itself wherever found, when we get it first on the palm
and then on the cheek, some difference comes, which keeps the two
experiences for ever asunder.[161]

And now let us revert to the query propounded a moment since: _Can
these differences of mere quality in feeling, varying according to
locality yet having each sensibly and intrinsically and by itself
nothing to do with position, constitute the 'susceptibilities' we
mentioned, the conditions of being perceived in position, of the
localities to which they belong?_ The numbers on a row of houses, the
initial letters of a set of words, have no intrinsic kinship with
points of space, and yet they are the conditions of our knowledge of
where any house is in the row, or any word in the dictionary. Can the
modifications of feeling in question be tags or labels of this kind
which in no wise originally reveal the position of the spot to which
they are attached, but guide us to it by what Berkeley would call
a 'customary tie'? Many authors have unhesitatingly replied in the
affirmative; Lotze, who in his Medizinische Psychologie[162] first
described the sensations in this way, designating them, thus conceived,
as _local-signs_. This term has obtained wide currency in Germany, and
_in speaking of the_ 'LOCAL-SIGN THEORY' _hereafter, I shall always
mean the theory which denies that there can be in a sensation any
element of actual locality, of inherent spatial order,_ any tone as
it were which cries to us immediately and without further ado, 'I am
_here_,' or 'I am _there_.'

If, as may well be the case, we by this time find ourselves tempted
to accept the Local-sign theory in a general way, we have to clear
up several farther matters. If a sign is to lead us to _the thing_
it means, we must have some other source of knowledge of that thing.
Either the thing has been given in a previous experience of which the
sign also formed part--they are _associated_; or it is what Reid calls
a 'natural' sign, that is, a feeling which, the first time it enters
the mind, evokes from the native powers thereof a cognition of the
thing that hitherto had lain dormant. In both cases, however, the sign
is one thing, and the thing another. In the instance that now concerns
us, _the sign is a quality of feeling and the thing is a position_.
Now we have seen that the position of a point is not only revealed,
but created, by the existence of other points to which it stands in
determinate _relations. If the sign can by any machinery which it sets
in motion evoke a consciousness either of the other points, or of the
relations, or of both, it would seem to fulfil its function, and reveal
to us the position we seek._

But such a machinery is already familiar to us. It is neither more nor
less than the law of habit in the nervous system. When any point of the
sensitive surface has been frequently excited simultaneously with, or
immediately before or after, other points, and afterwards comes to be
excited alone, there will be a tendency for its perceptive nerve-centre
to irradiate into the nerve-centres of the other points. Subjectively
considered, this is the same as if we said that _the peculiar feeling
of the first point_ SUGGESTS _the feeling of the entire region with
whose stimulation its own excitement has been habitually_ ASSOCIATED.

Take the case of the stomach. When the epigastrium is heavily pressed,
when certain muscles contract, etc., the stomach is squeezed, and its
peculiar local sign awakes in consciousness simultaneously with the
local signs of the other squeezed parts. There is also a sensation of
total vastness aroused by the combined irritation, and _somewhere_
in this the stomach-feeling seems to lie. Suppose that later a pain
arises in the stomach from some non-mechanical cause. It will be
tinged by the gastric local sign, and the nerve-centre supporting
this latter feeling will excite the centre supporting the dermal and
muscular feelings habitually associated with it when the excitement was
mechanical. From the combination the same peculiar vastness will again
arise. In a word, 'something' in the stomach-sensation 'reminds' us of
a total space, of which the diaphragmatic and epigastric sensations
also form a part, or, to express it more briefly still, suggests the
neighborhood of these latter organs.[163]

Revert to the case of two excited points on a surface with an unexcited
space between them. The general result of previous experience has
been that when either point was impressed by an outward object, the
same object also touched the immediately neighboring parts. Each
point, together with its local sign, is thus associated with a circle
of surrounding points, the association fading in strength as the
circle grows larger. Each will revive its own circle; but when both
are excited together, the strongest revival will be that due to the
_combined_ irradiation. Now the tract _joining the two excited points_
is the only part common to the two circles. And the feelings of this
whole tract will therefore awaken with considerable vividness in the
imagination when its extremities are touched by an outward irritant.
The mind receives with the impression of the two distinct points the
vague idea of a line. The twoness of the points comes from the contrast
of their local signs: the line comes from the associations into which
experience has wrought these latter. If no ideal line arises we have
duality without sense of interval; if the line be excited actually
rather than ideally, we have the interval given with its ends, in
the form of a single extended object felt. E. H. Weber, in the famous
article in which he laid the foundations of all our accurate knowledge
of these subjects, _laid it down as the logical requisite for the
perception of two separated points, that the mind should, along with
its consciousness of them, become aware of an unexcited interval as
such. I have only tried to show how the known laws of experience may
cause this requisite to be fulfilled._ Of course, if the local signs of
the entire region offer but little qualitative contrast _inter se_, the
line suggested will be but dimly defined or discriminated in length or
direction from other possible lines in its neighborhood. This is what
happens in the back, where consciousness can sunder two spots, whilst
only vaguely apprehending their distance and direction apart.

The relation of position of the two points _is_ the suggested interval
or line. Turn now to the simplest case, that of _a single excited spot.
How can it suggest its position?_ Not by recalling any particular
line unless experience have constantly been in the habit of marking
or tracing some one line from it towards some one neighboring point.
Now on the back, belly, viscera, etc., no such tracing habitually
occurs. The consequence is that the only suggestion is that of the
whole neighboring circle; i.e., _the spot simply recalls the general
region in which it happens to lie._ By a process of successive
construction, it is quite true that we can also get the feeling of
distance between the spot and some other particular spot. Attention,
by reinforcing the local sign of one part of the circle, can awaken a
new circle round this part, and so _de proche en proche_ we may slide
our feeling down from our cheek, say, to our foot. But when we first
touched our cheek we had no consciousness of the foot at all.[164] In
the extremities, the lips, the tongue and other mobile parts, the case
is different. We there have an instinctive tendency, when a part of
lesser discriminative sensibility is touched, to move the member so
that the touching object glides along it to the place where sensibility
is greatest. If a body touches our hand we move the hand over it
till the finger-tips are able to explore it. If the sole of our foot
touches anything we bring it towards the toes, and so forth. There
thus arise lines of habitual passage from all points of a member to
its sensitive tip. These are the lines most readily recalled when any
point is touched, and their recall is identical with the consciousness
of the distance of the touched point from the 'tip.' I think anyone
must be aware when he touches a point of his hand or wrist that it is
the relation to the finger-tips of which he is usually most conscious.
Points on the forearm suggest either the finger-tips or the elbow (the
latter being a spot of greater sensibility[165]). In the foot it is the
toes, and so on. A point can only be cognized in its relations to the
entire body at once by awakening a _visual_ image of the whole body.
Such awakening is even more obviously than the previously considered
cases a matter of pure association.

       *       *       *       *       *

_This leads us to the eye._ On the retina the fovea and the yellow spot
about it form a focus of exquisite sensibility, towards which every
impression falling on an outlying portion of the field is moved by an
instinctive action of the muscles of the eyeball. Few persons, until
their attention is called to the fact, are aware how almost impossible
it is to keep a conspicuous visible object in the margin of the field
of view. The moment volition is relaxed we find that without our
knowing it our eyes have turned so as to bring it to the centre. This
is why most persons are unable to keep the eyes steadily converged upon
a point in space with nothing in it. The objects against the walls of
the room invincibly attract the foveæ to themselves. If we contemplate
a blank wall or sheet of paper, we always observe in a moment that we
are directly looking at some speck upon it which, unnoticed at first,
ended by 'catching our eye.' Thus _whenever an image falling on the
point P of the retina excites attention, it more habitually moves
from that point towards the fovea than in any one other direction._
The line traced thus by the image is not always a straight line. When
the direction of the point from the fovea is neither vertical nor
horizontal but oblique, the line traced is often a curve, with its
concavity directed upwards if the direction is upwards, downwards if
the direction is downwards. This may be verified by anyone who will
take the trouble to make a simple experiment with a luminous body like
a candle-flame in a dark enclosure, or a star. Gazing first at some
point remote from the source of light, let the eye be suddenly turned
full upon the latter. The luminous image will necessarily fall in
succession upon a continuous series of points, reaching from the one
first affected to the fovea. But by virtue of the slowness with which
retinal excitements die away, the entire series of points will for an
instant be visible as an after-image, displaying the above peculiarity
of form according to its situation.[166] These radiating lines are
neither regular nor invariable in the same person, nor, probably,
equally curved in different individuals. We are incessantly drawing
them between the fovea and every point of the field of view. Objects
remain in their peripheral indistinctness only so long as they are
unnoticed. The moment we attend to them they grow distinct through one
of these motions--which leads to the idea prevalent among uninstructed
persons that we see distinctly all parts of the field of view at once.
_The result of this incessant tracing of radii is that whenever a local
sign P is awakened by a spot of light falling upon it, it recalls
forthwith, even though the eyeball be unmoved, the local signs of all
the other points which lie between P and the fovea._ It recalls them in
imaginary form, just as the normal reflex movement would recall them
in vivid form; and with their recall is given a consciousness more or
less faint of the whole line on which they lie. In other words, no
ray of light can fall on any retinal spot without the local sign of
that spot revealing to us, by recalling the line of its most habitual
associates, its direction and distance from the centre of the field.
The fovea acts thus as the origin of a system of polar co-ordinates,
in relation to which each and every retinal point has through an
incessantly-repeated process of association its distance and direction
determined. Were _P_ alone illumined and all the rest of the field dark
we should still, even with motionless eyes, know whether _P_ lay high
or low, right or left, through the _ideal streak_, different from all
other streaks, which _P_ alone has the power of awakening.[167]

And with this we can close the first great division of our subject. We
have shown that, within the range of every sense, experience takes
_ab initio_ the spatial form. We have also shown that in the cases
of the retina and skin every sensible total may be subdivided by
discriminative attention into sensible parts, which are also spaces,
and into relations between the parts, these being sensible spaces
too. Furthermore, we have seen (in note 167) that different parts,
once discriminated, necessarily fall into a determinate order, both
by reason of definite gradations in their quality, and by reason of
the fixed order of time-succession in which movements arouse them. But
in all this nothing has been said of the comparative _measurement_ of
one sensible space-total against another, or of the way in which, by
summing our divers simple sensible space-experiences together, we end
by constructing what we regard as the unitary, continuous, and infinite
objective Space of the real world. To this more difficult inquiry we
next pass.


THE CONSTRUCTION OF 'REAL' SPACE.


The problem breaks into two subordinate problems.

(1) _How is the subdivision and measurement of the several sensorial
spaces completely effected?_ and

(2) _How do their mutual addition and fusion and reduction to the same
scale, in a word, how does their synthesis, occur?_

I think that, as in the investigation just finished, we found ourselves
able to get along without invoking any data but those that pure
sensibility on the one hand, and the ordinary intellectual powers of
discrimination and recollection on the other, were able to yield;
so here we shall emerge from our more complicated quest with the
conviction that all the facts can be accounted for on the supposition
that no other mental forces have been at work save those we find
everywhere else in psychology: sensibility, namely, for the data; and
discrimination, association, memory, and choice for the rearrangements
and combinations which they undergo.


1. _The Subdivision of the Original Sense-spaces._


How are spatial subdivisions brought to consciousness? in other
words, How does spatial discrimination occur? The general subject of
discrimination has been treated in a previous chapter. Here we need
only inquire what are the conditions that make spatial discrimination
so much finer in sight than in touch, and in touch than in hearing,
smell, or taste.

_The first great condition is, that different points of the surface
shall differ in the quality of their immanent sensibility,_ that
is, that each shall carry its special local-sign. If the skin felt
everywhere exactly alike, a foot-bath could be distinguished from a
total immersion, as being smaller, but never distinguished from a
wet face. The local-signs are indispensable; two points which have
the same local-sign will always be felt as the same point. We do
not judge them two unless we have discerned their sensations to be
different.[168] Granted none but homogeneous irritants, that organ
would then distinguish the greatest multiplicity of irritants--would
count most stars or compass-points, or best compare the size of two
wet surfaces--whose local sensibility was the least even. A skin whose
sensibility shaded rapidly off from a focus, like the apex of a boil,
would be better than a homogeneous integument for spatial perception.
The retina, with its exquisitely sensitive fovea, has this peculiarity,
and undoubtedly owes to it a great part of the minuteness with which
we are able to subdivide the total bigness of the sensation it yields.
On its periphery the local differences do not shade off very rapidly,
and we can count there fewer subdivisions.

_But these local differences of feeling, so long as the surface is
unexcited from without, are almost null._ I cannot feel them by a pure
mental act of attention unless they belong to quite distinct parts
of the body, as the nose and the lip, the finger-tip and the ear;
their contrast needs the reinforcement of outward excitement to be
felt. In the spatial muchness of a colic--or, to call it by the more
spacious-sounding vernacular, of a 'bellyache'--one can with difficulty
distinguish the north-east from the south-west corner, but can do
so much more easily if, by pressing one's finger against the former
region, one is able to make the pain there more intense.

_The local differences require then an adventitious sensation,
superinduced upon them, to awaken the attention._ After the attention
has once been awakened in this way, it may continue to be conscious of
the unaided difference; just as a sail on the horizon may be too faint
for us to notice until someone's finger, placed against the spot, has
pointed it out to us, but may then remain visible after the finger has
been withdrawn. But all this is true only on condition that separate
points of the surface may be _exclusively_ stimulated. If the whole
surface at once be excited from without, and homogeneously, as, for
example, by immersing the body in salt water, local discrimination
is not furthered. The local-signs, it is true, all awaken at once;
but in such multitude that no one of them, with its specific quality,
stands out in contrast with the rest. If, however, a single extremity
be immersed, the contrast between the wet and dry parts is strong,
and, at the surface of the water especially, the local-signs attract
the attention, giving the feeling of a ring surrounding the member.
Similarly, two or three wet spots separated by dry spots, or two
or three hard points against the skin, will help to break up our
consciousness of the latter's bigness. In cases of this sort, where
points receiving an identical kind of excitement are, nevertheless,
felt to be locally distinct, and the objective irritants are also
judged multiple,--e.g., compass-points on skin or stars on retina,--the
ordinary explanation is no doubt just, and we judge the outward causes
to be multiple because we have discerned the local feelings of their
sensations to be different.

_Capacity for partial stimulation is thus the second condition favoring
discrimination._ A sensitive surface which has to be excited in all its
parts at once can yield nothing but a sense of undivided largeness.
This appears to be the case with the olfactory, and to all intents and
purposes with the gustatory, surfaces. Of many tastes and flavors, even
simultaneously presented, each affects the totality of its respective
organ, each appears with the whole vastness given by that organ, and
appears interpenetrated by the rest.[169]

I should have been willing some years ago to name without hesitation a
third condition of discrimination--saying it would be most developed
in that organ which is susceptible of the _most various qualities_ of
feeling. The retina is unquestionably such an organ. The colors and
shades it perceives are infinitely more numerous than the diversities
of skin-sensation. And it can feel at once white and black, whilst the
ear can in nowise so feel sound and silence. But the late researches
of Donaldson, Blix, and Goldscheider,[170] on specific points for
heat, cold, pressure, and pain in the skin; the older ones of Czermak
(repeated later by Klug in Ludwig's laboratory), showing that a hot and
a cold compass-point are no more easily discriminated as two than two
of equal temperature; and some unpublished experiments of my own--all
disincline me to make much of this condition now.[171] There is,
however, one quality of sensation which is particularly exciting, and
that is the _feeling of motion over any of our surfaces_. The erection
of this into a separate elementary quality of sensibility is one of the
most recent of psychological achievements, and is worthy of detaining
us a while at this point.


_The Sensation of Motion over Surfaces._


_The feeling of motion_ has generally been assumed by physiologists to
be impossible until the positions of _terminus a quo_ and _terminus
ad quem_ are severally cognized, and the successive occupancies of
these positions by the moving body are perceived to be separated by
a distinct interval of time.[172] As a matter of fact, however, we
cognize only the very slowest motions in this way. Seeing the hand
of a clock at XII and afterwards at VI, we judge that it has moved
through the interval. Seeing the sun now in the east and again in the
west, I infer it to have passed over my head. But we can only _infer_
that which we already generically know in some more direct fashion,
and it is experimentally certain that we have the feeling of motion
given us as a direct and simple _sensation_. Czermak long ago pointed
out the difference between seeing the motion of the second-hand of a
watch, when we look directly at it, and noticing the fact of its having
altered its position when we fix our gaze upon some other point of the
dial-plate. In the first case we have a specific quality of sensation
which is absent in the second. If the reader will find a portion of
his skin--the arm, for example--where a pair of compass-points an inch
apart are felt as one impression, and if he will then trace lines
a tenth of an inch long on that spot with a pencil-point, he will
be distinctly aware of the point's motion and vaguely aware of the
direction of the motion. The perception of the motion here is certainly
not derived from a pre-existing knowledge that its starting and ending
points are separate positions in space, because positions in space ten
times wider apart fail to be discriminated as such when excited by
the dividers. It is the same with the retina. One's fingers when cast
upon its peripheral portions cannot be counted--that is to say, the
five retinal tracts which they occupy are not distinctly apprehended
by the mind as five separate positions in space--and yet the slightest
_movement_ of the fingers is most vividly perceived as movement and
nothing else. It is thus certain that our sense of movement, being
so much more delicate than our sense of position, cannot possibly be
derived from it. _A curious observation by Exner_[173] completes the
proof that movement is a primitive form of sensibility, by showing it
to be much more delicate than our sense of succession in time. This
very able physiologist caused two electric sparks to appear in rapid
succession, one beside the other. The observer had to state whether
the right-hand one or the left-hand one appeared first. When the
interval was reduced to as short a time as 0.044'' the discrimination
of temporal order in the sparks became impossible. But Exner found
that if the sparks were brought so close together in space that their
irradiation-circles overlapped, the eye then felt their flashing as if
it were the motion of a single spark from the point occupied by the
first to the point occupied by the second, and the time-interval might
then be made as small as 0.015'' before the mind began to be in doubt
as to whether the apparent motion started from the right or from the
left. On the skin similar experiments gave similar results.

_Vierordt, at almost the same time,_[174] _called attention to certain
persistent illusions, amongst which are these:_ If another person
gently trace a line across our wrist or finger, the latter being
stationary, it will feel to us as if the member were moving in the
opposite direction to the tracing point. If, on the contrary, we
move our limb across a fixed point, it will be seen as if the point
were moving as well. If the reader will touch his forehead with his
forefinger kept motionless, and then rotate the head so that the skin
of the forehead passes beneath the finger's tip, he will have an
irresistible sensation of the latter being itself in motion in the
opposite direction to the head. So in abducting the fingers from each
other; some may move and the rest be still still, but the still ones
will feel as if they were actively separating from the rest. These
illusions, according to Vierordt, are survivals of a primitive form of
perception, when motion was felt as such, but ascribed to the whole
content of consciousness, and not yet distinguished as belonging
exclusively to one of its parts. When our perception is fully developed
we go beyond the mere relative motion of thing and ground, and can
ascribe absolute motion to one of these components of our total
object, and absolute rest to another. When, in vision for example,
the whole background moves together, we think that it is ourselves or
our eyes which are moving; and any object in the foreground which may
move relatively to the background is judged by us to be still. But
primitively this discrimination cannot be perfectly made. The sensation
of the motion spreads over all that we see and infects it. Any relative
motion of object and retina both makes the object seem to move, and
makes us feel ourselves in motion. Even now when our whole object moves
we still get giddy; and we still see an apparent motion of the entire
field of view, whenever we suddenly jerk our head and eyes or shake
them quickly to and fro. Pushing our eyeballs gives the same illusion.
We _know_ in all these cases what really happens, but the conditions
are unusual, so our primitive sensation persists unchecked. So it does
when clouds float by the moon. We _know_ the moon is still; but we
_see_ it move even faster than the clouds. Even when we slowly move our
eyes the primitive sensation persists under the victorious conception.
If we notice closely the experience, we find that any object towards
which we look appears moving to meet our eye.

But the most valuable contribution to the subject is the paper of G.
H. Schneider,[175] who takes up the matter zoologically, and shows by
examples from every branch of the animal kingdom that movement is the
quality by which animals most easily attract each other's attention.
The instinct of 'shamming death' is no shamming of death at all, but
rather a paralysis through fear, which saves the insect, crustacean,
or other creature from being _noticed at all_ by his enemy. It is
parallelled in the human race by the breath-holding stillness of the
boy playing 'I spy,' to whom the seeker is near; and its obverse side
is shown in our involuntary waving of arms, jumping up and down, and
so forth, when we wish to attract someone's attention at a distance.
Creatures 'stalking' their prey and creatures hiding from their
pursuers alike show how immobility diminishes conspicuity. In the
woods, if we are quiet, the squirrels and birds will actually touch us.
Flies will light on stuffed birds and stationary frogs.[176] On the
other hand, the tremendous shock of feeling the thing we are sitting
on begin to move, the exaggerated start it gives us to have an insect
unexpectedly pass over our skin, or a cat noiselessly come and snuffle
about our hand, the excessive reflex effects of tickling, etc., show
how exciting the sensation of motion is _per se_. A kitten cannot help
pursuing a moving ball. Impressions too faint to be cognized at all are
immediately felt if they move. A fly sitting is unnoticed,--we feel it
the moment it crawls. A shadow may be too faint to be perceived. As
soon as it moves, however, we see it. Schneider found that a shadow,
with distinct outline, and directly fixated, could still be perceived
when moving, although its objective strength might be but half as great
as that of a stationary shadow so faint as just to disappear. With a
blurred shadow in indirect vision the difference in favor of motion was
much greater--namely, 13.3:40.7. If we hold a finger between our closed
eyelid and the sunshine we shall not notice its presence. The moment we
move it to and fro, however, we discern it. Such visual perception as
this reproduces the conditions of sight among the radiates.[177]

Enough has now been said to show that _in the education of spatial
discrimination the motions of impressions across sensory surfaces must
have been the principal agent_ in breaking up our consciousness of the
surfaces into a consciousness of their parts. Even to-day the main
function of the peripheral regions of our retina is that of sentinels,
which, when beams of light move over them, cry 'Who goes there?' and
call the fovea to the spot. Most parts of the skin do but perform
the same office for the finger-tips. Of course finger-tips and fovea
leave _some_ power of direct perception to marginal retina and skin
respectively. But it is worthy of note that such perception is best
developed on the skin of the most movable parts (the labors of Vierordt
and his pupils have well shown this); and that in the blind, whose skin
is exceptionally discriminative, it seems to have become so through
the inveterate habit which most of them possess of twitching and
moving it under whatever object may touch them, so as to become better
acquainted with the conformation of the same. Czermak was the first to
notice this. It may be easily verified. Of course _movement of surface
under object is (for purposes of stimulation) equivalent to movement
of object over surface._ In exploring the shapes and sizes of things
by either eye or skin the movements of these organs are incessant and
unrestrainable. Every such movement draws the points and lines of the
object across the surface, imprints them a hundred times more sharply,
and drives them home to the attention. The immense part thus played by
movements in our perceptive activity is held by many psychologists[178]
to prove that the muscles are themselves the space-perceiving organ.
Not surface-sensibility, but 'the muscular sense,' is for these writers
the original and only revealer of objective extension. But they have
all failed to notice with what peculiar intensity muscular contractions
call surface-sensibilities into play, and that the mere discrimination
of impressions (quite apart from any question of measuring the space
between them) largely depends on the mobility of the surface upon which
they fall.[179]


2. _The Measurement of the sense-spaces against each other._


What precedes is all we can say in answer to the problem of
discrimination. Turn now to that of measurement of the several spaces
against each other, that being the first step in our constructing out
of our diverse space-experiences the one space we believe in as that of
the real world.

The first thing that seems evident is that we have no _immediate_
power of comparing together with any accuracy the extents revealed by
different sensations. Our mouth-cavity feels indeed to itself smaller,
and to the tongue larger, than it feels to the finger or eye, our
tympanic membrane feels larger than our finger-tip, our lips feel
larger than a surface equal to them on our thigh. So much comparison is
immediate; but it is vague; and for anything exact we must resort to
other help.

_The great agent in comparing the extent felt by one sensory surface
with that felt by another, is superposition--superposition of one
surface upon another, and superposition of one outer thing upon many
surfaces._ Thus are exact equivalencies and common measures introduced,
and the way prepared for numerical results.

Could we not superpose one part of our skin upon another, or one object
on both parts, we should hardly succeed in coming to that knowledge of
our own form which we possess. The original differences of bigness of
our different parts would remain vaguely operative, and we should have
no certainty as to how much lip was equivalent to so much forehead, how
much finger to so much back.

But with the power of exploring one part of the surface by another
we get a direct perception of cutaneous equivalencies. The primitive
differences of bigness are overpowered when we feel by an immediate
sensation that a certain length of thigh-surface is in contact with
the entire palm and fingers. And when a motion of the opposite
finger-tips draws a line first along this same length of thigh and
then along the whole of the hand in question, we get a new manner of
measurement, less direct but confirming the equivalencies established
by the first. In these ways, by superpositions of parts and by tracing
lines on different parts by identical movements, a person deprived of
sight can soon learn to reduce all the dimensions of his body to a
homogeneous scale. By applying the same methods to objects of his own
size or smaller, he can with equal ease make himself acquainted with
their extension stated in terms derived from his own bulk, palms, feet,
cubits, spans, paces, fathoms (armspreads), etc. In these reductions it
is to be noticed that _when the resident sensations of largeness of two
opposed surfaces conflict, one of the sensations is chosen as the true
standard and the other treated as illusory. Thus an empty tooth-socket
is believed to be_ really smaller than the finger-tip which it will not
admit, although it may _feel_ larger; and in general it may be said
that the hand, as the almost exclusive organ of palpation, gives its
own magnitude to the other parts, instead of having its size determined
by them. In general, it is, as Fechner says, the extent felt by the
more sensitive part to which the other extents are reduced.[180]

But even though exploration of one surface by another were impossible,
we could always measure our various surfaces against each other by
applying the same extended object first to one and then to another.
We should of course have the alternative of supposing that the object
itself waxed and waned as it glided from one place to another (cf.
above, p. 141); but the principle of simplifying as much as possible
our world would soon drive us out of that assumption into the easier
one that objects as a rule keep their sizes, and that most of our
sensations are affected by errors for which a constant allowance must
be made.

In the retina there is no reason to suppose that the bignesses of
two impressions (lines or blotches) falling on different regions are
primitively felt to stand in any exact mutual ratio. It is only when
the impressions come from the _same object_ that we judge their sizes
to be the same. And this, too, only when the relation of the object
to the eye is believed to be on the whole unchanged. When the object
by moving changes its relations to the eye the sensation excited by
its image even on the same retinal region becomes so fluctuating
that we end by ascribing no absolute import whatever to the retinal
space-feeling which at any moment we may receive. So complete does
this overlooking of retinal magnitude become that it is next to
impossible to compare the visual magnitudes of objects at different
distances without making the experiment of superposition. We cannot
say beforehand how much of a distant house or tree our finger will
cover. The various answers to the familiar question, How large is the
moon?--answers which vary from a cartwheel to a wafer--illustrate
this most strikingly. The hardest part of the training of a young
draughtsman is his learning to feel directly the retinal (i.e.
primitively sensible) magnitudes which the different objects in the
field of view subtend. To do this he must recover what Ruskin calls
the 'innocence of the eye'--that is, a sort of childish perception of
stains of color merely as such, without consciousness of what they mean.

With the rest of us this innocence is lost. _Out of all the visual
magnitudes of each known object we have selected one as the_ REAL _one
to think of, and degraded all the others to serve as its signs_. This
'real' magnitude is determined by æsthetic and practical interests.
It is that which we get when the object is at the distance most
propitious for exact visual discrimination of its details. This is
the distance at which we hold anything we are examining. Farther than
this we see it too small, nearer too large. And the larger and the
smaller feeling vanish in the act of suggesting this one, their more
important _meaning_. As I look along the dining-table I overlook the
fact that the farther plates and glasses _feel_ so much smaller than
my own, for I _know_ that they are all equal in size; and the feeling
of them, which is a present sensation, is eclipsed in the glare of the
knowledge, which is a merely imagined one.

If the inconsistencies of sight-spaces _inter se_ can thus be reduced,
of course there can be no difficulty in equating sight-spaces
with spaces given to touch. In this equation it is probably the
touch-feeling which prevails as real and the sight which serves as
sign--a reduction made necessary not only by the far greater constancy
of felt over seen magnitudes, but by the greater practical interest
which the sense of touch possesses for our lives. As a rule, things
only benefit or harm us by coming into direct contact with our skin:
sight is only a sort of anticipatory touch; the latter is, in Mr.
Spencer's phrase, the 'mother-tongue of thought,' and the handmaid's
idiom must be translated into the language of the mistress before it
can speak clearly to the mind.[181]

Later on we shall see that the feelings excited in the joints when a
limb moves are used as signs of the path traversed by the extremity.
But of this more anon. As for the equating of sound-, smell-, and
taste-volumes with those yielded by the more discriminative senses,
they are too vague to need any remark. It may be observed of pain,
however, that its size has to be reduced to that of the normal tactile
size of the organ which is its seat. A finger with a felon on it, and
the pulses of the arteries therein, both 'feel' larger than we believe
they really 'are.'

It will have been noticed in the account given that _when two sensorial
space-impressions, believed to come from the same object, differ, then_
THE ONE MOST INTERESTING, _practically or æsthetically_, IS JUDGED
TO BE THE TRUE ONE. This law of interest holds throughout--though
a permanent interest, like that of touch, may resist a strong but
fleeting one like that of pain, as in the case just given of the felon.


3. _The Summation of the Sense-spaces._


Now for the next step in our construction of real space: _How are the
various sense-spaces added together into a consolidated and unitary
continuum?_ For they are, in man at all events, incoherent at the start.

       *       *       *       *       *

Here again the first fact that appears is that _primitively our
space-experiences form a chaos, out of which we have no immediate
faculty for extricating them. Objects of different sense-organs,
experienced together, do not in the first instance appear either inside
or alongside or far outside of each other, neither spatially continuous
nor discontinuous, in any definite sense of these words._ The same
thing is almost as true of objects felt by different parts of the same
organ before discrimination has done its finished work. The most we
can say is that all our space-experiences together form an _objective
total_ and that this _objective total_ is vast.

Even now the space inside our mouth, which is so intimately known and
accurately measured by its inhabitant the tongue, can hardly be said
to have its internal directions and dimensions known in any exact
relation to those of the larger world outside. It forms almost a little
world by itself. Again, when the dentist excavates a small cavity in
one of our teeth, we feel the hard point of his instrument scraping,
in distinctly differing directions, a surface which seems to our
sensibility vaguely larger than the subsequent use of the mirror tells
us it 'really' is. And though the directions of the scraping differ
so completely _inter se_, not one of them can be identified with the
particular direction in the outer world to which it corresponds. The
space of the tooth-sensibility is thus really a little world by itself,
which can only become congruent with the outer space-world by farther
experiences which shall alter its bulk, identify its directions, fuse
its margins, and finally imbed it as a definite part within a definite
whole. And even though every joint's rotations should be felt to vary
_inter se_ as so many differences of direction in a common room;
even though the same were true of diverse tracings on the skin, and
of diverse tracings on the retina respectively, it would still not
follow that feelings of direction, on these different surfaces, are
intuitively comparable among each other, or with the other directions
yielded by the feelings of the semi-circular canals. It would not
follow that we should immediately judge the relations of them all to
each other in one space-world.

If with the arms in an unnatural attitude we 'feel' things, we are
perplexed about their shape, size, and position. Let the reader lie on
his back with his arms stretched above his head, and it will astonish
him to find how ill able he is to recognize the geometrical relations
of objects placed within reach of his hands. But the geometrical
relations here spoken of are nothing but identities recognized between
the directions and sizes perceived in this way and those perceived in
the more usual ways. The two ways do not fit each other intuitively.

How lax the connection between the system of visual and the system
of tactile directions is in man, appears from the facility with
which microscopists learn to reverse the movements of their hand in
manipulating things on the stage of the instrument. To move the slide
to the _seen_ left they must draw it to the _felt_ right. But in a very
few days the habit becomes a second nature. So in tying our cravat,
shaving before a mirror, etc., the right and left sides are inverted,
and the directions of our hand movements are the opposite of what they
seem. Yet this never annoys us. Only when by accident we try to tie
the cravat of another person do we learn that there are two ways of
combining sight and touch perceptions. Let any one try for the first
time to write or draw while looking at the image of his hand and paper
in a mirror, and he will be utterly bewildered. But a very short
training will teach him to undo in this respect the associations of his
previous lifetime.

Prisms show this in an even more striking way. If the eyes be armed
with spectacles containing slightly prismatic glasses with their bases
turned, for example, towards the right, every object looked at will be
apparently translocated to the left; and the hand put forth to grasp
any such object will make the mistake of passing beyond it on the left
side. But less than an hour of practice in wearing such spectacles
rectifies the judgment so that no more mistakes are made. In fact the
new-formed associations are already so strong, that when the prisms are
first laid aside again the opposite error is committed, the habits of a
lifetime violated, and the hand now passed to the right of every object
which it seeks to touch.

The primitive chaos thus subsists to a great degree through life so
far as our immediate sensibility goes. We feel our various objects
and their bignesses, together or in succession; but so soon as it
is a question of the order and relations of many of them at once
our intuitive apprehension remains to the very end most vague and
incomplete. Whilst we are attending to one, or at most to two or
three objects, all the others _lapse_, and the most we feel of them
is that they still linger on the outskirts and can be caught again by
turning in a certain way. Nevertheless _throughout all this confusion
we conceive of a world spread out in a perfectly fixed and orderly
fashion, and we believe in its existence. The question is: How do
this conception and this belief arise? How is the chaos smoothed and
straightened out?_

       *       *       *       *       *

Mainly by two operations: Some of the experiences are apprehended to
exist out- and alongside of each other, and others are apprehended
to interpenetrate each other, and to occupy the same room. In this
way what was incoherent and irrelative ends by being coherent and
definitely related; nor is it hard to trace the principles, by which
the mind is guided in this arrangement of its perceptions, in detail.

In the first place, following the great intellectual law of economy,
we simplify, unify, and identify as much as we possibly can. _Whatever
sensible data can be attended to together we locate together. Their
several extents seem one extent. The place at which each appears is
held to be the same with the place at which the others appear. They
become, in short, so many properties of_ ONE AND THE SAME REAL THING.
This is the first and great commandment, the fundamental 'act' by which
our world gets spatially arranged.

In this _coalescence in a 'thing_,' one of the coalescing sensations
is held to _be_ the thing, the other sensations are taken for its more
or less accidental _properties_, or modes of appearance.[182] The
sensation chosen to be the thing essentially is the most constant and
practically important of the lot; most often it is hardness or weight.
But the hardness or weight is never without tactile bulk; and as we
can always see something in our hand when we feel something there, we
equate the bulk felt with the bulk seen, and thenceforward this common
bulk is also apt to figure as of the essence of the 'thing.' Frequently
a shape so figures, sometimes a temperature, a taste, etc.; but for the
most part temperature, smell, sound, color, or whatever other phenomena
may vividly impress us simultaneously with the bulk felt or seen,
figure among the accidents. Smell and sound impress us, it is true,
when we neither see nor touch the thing; but they are strongest when we
see or touch, so we locate the _source_ of these properties within the
touched or seen space, whilst the properties themselves we regard as
overflowing in a weakened form into the spaces filled by other things.
_In all this, it will be observed, the sense-data whose spaces coalesce
into one are yielded by different sense-organs._ Such data have no
tendency to displace each other from consciousness, but can be attended
to together all at once. Often indeed they vary concomitantly and
reach a maximum together. We may be sure, therefore, that the general
rule of our mind is to locate IN _each other all_ sensations which are
associated in simultaneous experience, and do not interfere with each
other's perception.[183]

_Different impressions on the same sense-organ_ do interfere with each
other's perception, and cannot well be attended to at once. Hence _we
do not locate them in each other's spaces, but arrange them in a serial
order of exteriority, each alongside of the rest, in a space larger
than that which any one sensation brings._ This larger space, however,
is an object of conception rather than of direct intuition, and bears
all the marks of being constructed piecemeal by the mind. The blind
man forms it out of tactile, locomotor, and auditory experiences,
the seeing man out of visual ones almost exclusively. As the visual
construction is the easiest to understand, let us consider that first.

       *       *       *       *       *

Every single visual sensation or 'field of view' is limited. To get a
new field of view for our object the old one must disappear. But the
disappearance may be only partial. Let the first field of view be A B
C. If we carry our attention to the limit C, it ceases to be the limit,
and becomes the centre of the field, and beyond it appear fresh parts
where there were none before:[184] A B C changes, in short, to C D E.
But although the parts A B are lost to sight, yet their image abides in
the memory; and if we think of our first object A B C as having existed
or as still existing at all, we must think of it as it was originally
presented, namely, as spread out from C in one direction just as C D E
is spread out in another. A B and D E can never coalesce in one place
(as they could were they objects of different senses) because they can
never be perceived at once: we must lose one to see the other. So (the
letters standing now for 'things') we get to conceive of the successive
fields of things after the analogy of the several things which we
perceive in a single field. They must be out- and alongside of each
other, and we conceive that their juxtaposed spaces must make a larger
space. A B C + C D E must, in short, be imagined to exist in the form of
A B C D E or not imagined at all.

We can usually recover anything lost from sight by moving our attention
and our eyes back in its direction; and through these constant changes
every field of seen things comes at last to be thought of as always
having a fringe of _other things possible to be seen_ spreading in all
directions round about it. Meanwhile the movements concomitantly with
which the various fields alternate are also felt and remembered; and
gradually (through association) this and that movement come in our
thought to suggest this or that extent of fresh objects introduced.
Gradually, too, since the objects vary indefinitely in kind, we
abstract from their several natures and think separately of their mere
extents, of which extents the various movements remain as the only
constant introducers and associates. More and more, therefore, do we
think of movement and seen extent as mutually involving each other,
until at last (with Bain and J. S. Mill) we may get to regard them
as synonymous, and say, "What is the _meaning of the word extent_,
unless it be possible movement?"[185] We forget in this conclusion that
(whatever intrinsic extensiveness the movements may appear endowed
with), that seen spreadoutness which is the pattern of the abstract
extensiveness which we imagine came to us originally from the retinal
sensation.

The muscular sensations of the eyeball _signify_ this sort of visible
spreadoutness, just as this visible spreadoutness may come in later
experience to _signify_ the 'real' bulks, distances, lengths and
breadths known to touch and locomotion.[186] To the very end, however,
in us seeing men, the quality, the nature, the _sort of thing we mean_
by extensiveness, would seem to be the sort of feeling which our
retinal stimulations bring.

       *       *       *       *       *

In one deprived of sight the principles by which the notion of real
space is constructed are the same. Skin-feelings take in him the place
of retinal feelings in giving the quality of lateral spreadoutness,
as our attention passes from one extent of them to another, awakened
by an object sliding along. Usually the moving object is our hand; and
feelings of movement in our joints invariably accompany the feelings
in the skin. But the feeling of the skin is what the blind man _means_
by his skin; so the size of the skin-feelings stands as the absolute
or real size, and the size of the joint-feelings becomes a sign of
these. Suppose, for example, a blind baby with (to make the description
shorter) a blister on his toe, exploring his leg with his finger-tip
and feeling a pain shoot up sharply the instant the blister is touched.
The experiment gives him four different kinds of sensation--two of
them protracted, two sudden. The first pair are the movement-feeling
in the joints of the upper limb, and the movement-feeling on the skin
of the leg and foot. These, attended to together, have their extents
identified as one objective space--the hand moves through the same
space in which the leg lies. The second pair of objects are the pain
in the blister, and the peculiar feeling the blister gives to the
finger. Their spaces also fuse; and as each marks the end of a peculiar
movement-series (arm moved, leg stroked), the movement-spaces are
_emphatically_ identified with each other at _that_ end. Were there
other small blisters distributed down the leg, there would be a number
of these emphatic points; the movement-spaces would be identified, not
only as totals, but point for point.[187]

Just so with spaces beyond the body's limits. Continuing the
joint-feeling beyond the toe, the baby hits another object, which he
can still think of when he brings his hand back to its blister again.
That object at the end of that joint-feeling means a new place for him,
and the more such objects multiply in his experience the wider does the
space of his conception grow. If, wandering through the woods to-day by
a new path, I find myself suddenly in a glade which affects my senses
exactly as did another I reached last week at the end of a different
walk, I believe the two identical affections to present the same
persisting glade, and infer that I have attained it by two differing
roads. The spaces walked over grow congruent by their extremities;
though apart from the common sensation which those extremities give me,
I should be under no necessity of connecting one walk with another at
all. The case in no whit differs when shorter movements are concerned.
If, moving first one arm and then another, the blind child gets the
same kind of sensation upon the hand, and gets it again as often as he
repeats either process, he judges that he has touched the same object
by both motions, and concludes that the motions terminate in a common
place. From place to place marked in this way he moves, and adding the
places moved through, one to another, he builds up his notion of the
extent of the outer world. The seeing man's process is identical; only
his units, which may be successive bird's-eye views, are much larger
than in the case of the blind.


FEELINGS IN JOINTS AND FEELINGS IN MUSCLES.

1. _Feelings of Movement in Joints._


I have been led to speak of feelings which arise in joints. As these
feelings have been too much neglected in Psychology hitherto, in
entering now somewhat minutely into their study I shall probably at the
same time freshen the interest of the reader, which under the rather
dry abstractions of the previous pages may presumably have flagged.

When, by simply flexing my right forefinger on its metacarpal joint,
I trace with its tip an inch on the palm of my left hand, is my
feeling of the size of the inch purely and simply a feeling in the
skin of the palm, or have the muscular contractions of the right hand
and forearm anything to do with it? In the preceding pages I have
constantly assumed spatial sensibility to be an affair of surfaces.
At first starting, the consideration of the 'muscular sense' as a
space-measurer was postponed to a later stage. Many writers, of whom
the foremost was Thomas Brown, in his _Lectures on the Philosophy of
the Human Mind_, and of whom the latest is no less a Psychologist than
Prof. Delbœuf,[188] hold that the consciousness of active muscular
motion, aware of its own amount, is the _fons et origo_ of all spatial
measurement. It would seem to follow, if this theory were true, that
two skin-feelings, one of a large patch, one of a small one, possess
their difference of spatiality, not as an immediate element, but
solely by virtue of the fact that the large one, to get its points
_successively_ excited, demands more muscular contraction than the
small one does. Fixed associations with the several amounts of muscular
contraction required in this particular experience would thus explain
the apparent sizes of the skin-patches, which sizes would consequently
not be primitive data but derivative results.

_It seems to me that no evidence of the muscular measurements
in question exists;_ but that all the facts may be explained by
surface-sensibility, provided we take that of the joint-surfaces also
into account.

The most striking argument, and the most obvious one, which an
upholder of the muscular theory is likely to produce is undoubtedly
this fact: if, with closed eyes, we trace figures in the air with the
extended forefinger (the motions may occur from the metacarpal-, the
wrist-, the elbow-, or the shoulder-joint indifferently), what we are
_conscious of_ in each case, and indeed most acutely conscious of,
is the geometric path described by the finger-tip. Its angles, its
subdivisions, are all as distinctly felt as if seen by the eye; and yet
the surface of the finger-tip receives no impression at all.[189] But
with each variation of the figure, the muscular contractions vary, and
so do the feelings which these yield. Are not these latter the sensible
data that make us aware of the lengths and directions we discern in the
traced line?

Should we be tempted to object to this supposition of the advocate of
perception by muscular feelings, that we have _learned_ the spatial
significance of these feelings by reiterated experiences of _seeing_
what figure is drawn when each special muscular grouping is felt, so
that in the last resort the muscular space feelings would be derived
from retinal-surface feelings, our opponent might immediately hush us
by pointing to the fact that in persons born blind the phenomenon in
question is even more perfect than in ourselves.

If we suggest that the blind may have originally traced the figures on
the cutaneous surface of cheek, thigh, or palm, and may now remember
the specific figure which each present movement formerly caused the
skin-surface to perceive, he may reply that the delicacy of the motor
perception far exceeds that of most of the cutaneous surfaces; that,
in fact, we can feel a figure traced only in its differentials, so to
speak,--a figure which we merely _start_ to trace by our finger-tip, a
figure which, traced in the same way _on_ our finger-tip by the hand of
another, is almost if not wholly unrecognizable.

       *       *       *       *       *

The champion of the muscular sense seems likely to be triumphant
_until we invoke the articular cartilages_, as internal surfaces whose
sensibility is called in play by every movement we make, however
delicate the latter may be.

To establish the part they play in our geometrizing, it is necessary
to review a few facts. It has long been known by medical practitioners
that, in patients with cutaneous anæsthesia of a limb, whose muscles
also are insensible to the thrill of the faradic current, a very
accurate sense of the way in which the limb may be flexed or extended
by the hand of another may be preserved.[190] On the other hand, we
may have this sense of movement impaired when the tactile sensibility
is well preserved. That the pretended feeling of outgoing innervation
can play in these cases no part, is obvious from the fact that the
movements by which the limb changes its position are passive ones,
imprinted on it by the experimenting physician. The writers who have
sought a _rationale_ of the matter have consequently been driven by way
of exclusion to assume the articular surfaces to be the seat of the
perception in question.[191]

_That the joint-surfaces are sensitive_ appears evident from the fact
that in inflammation they become the seat of excruciating pains, and
from the perception by everyone who lifts weights or presses against
resistance, that every increase of the force opposing him betrays
itself to his consciousness principally by the starting-out of new
feelings or the increase of old ones, in or about the joints. If the
structure and mode of mutual application of two articular surfaces be
taken into account, it will appear that, granting the surfaces to _be_
sensitive, no more favorable mechanical conditions could be possible
for the delicate calling of the sensibility into play than are realized
in the minutely graduated rotations and firmly resisted variations of
pressure involved in every act of extension or flexion. Nevertheless it
is a great pity that we have as yet no direct testimony, no expressions
from patients with healthy joints accidentally laid open, of the
impressions they experience when the cartilage is pressed or rubbed.

The first approach to direct evidence, so far as I know, is contained
in the paper of Lewinski,[192] published in 1879. This observer had a
patient the inner half of whose leg was anæsthetic. When this patient
stood up, he had a curious illusion about the position of his limb,
which disappeared the moment he lay down again: he thought himself
_knock-kneed_. If, as Lewinski says, we assume the inner half of the
joint to share the insensibility of the corresponding part of the
skin, then he _ought_ to feel, when the joint-surfaces pressed against
each other in the act of standing, the outer half of the joint most
strongly. But this is the feeling he would also get whenever it was
by any chance sought to force his leg into a knock-kneed attitude.
Lewinski was led by this case to examine the feet of certain ataxic
patients with imperfect sense of position. He found in every instance
that when the toes were flexed _and drawn upon_ at the same time (the
joint-surfaces drawn asunder) all sense of the amount of flexion
disappeared. On the contrary, when he pressed a toe _in_, whilst
flexing it, the patient's appreciation of the amount of flexion was
much improved, evidently because the artificial increase of articular
pressure made up for the pathological insensibility of the parts.

Since Lewinski's paper an important experimental research by A.
Goldscheider[193] has appeared, which completely establishes our
point. This patient observer caused his fingers, arms, and legs
to be passively rotated upon their various joints in a mechanical
apparatus which registered both the velocity of movement impressed
and the amount of angular rotation. No active muscular contraction
took place. The minimal felt amounts of rotation were in all cases
surprisingly small, being much less than a single angular degree in
all the joints except those of the fingers. Such displacements as
these, the author says (p. 490), can hardly be detected by the eye.
The point of application of the force which rotated the limb made no
difference in the result. Rotations round the hip-joint, for example,
were as delicately felt when the leg was hung by the heel as when it
was hung by the thigh whilst the movements were performed. Anæsthesia
of the skin produced by induction-currents also had no disturbing
effect on the perception, nor did the various degrees of pressure of
the moving force upon the skin affect it. It became, in fact, all
the more distinct in proportion as the concomitant pressure-feelings
were eliminated by artificial anæsthesia. When the joints themselves,
however, were made artificially anæsthetic the perception of the
movement grew obtuse and the angular rotations had to be much increased
before they were perceptible. All these facts prove according to Herr
Goldscheider, that _the joint surfaces and these alone are the starting
point of the impressions by which the movements of our members are
immediately perceived._

Applying this result, which seems invulnerable, to the case of the
tracing finger-tip, we see that our perception of the latter gives
no countenance to the theory of the muscular sense. _We indubitably
localize the finger-tip at the successive points of its path by means
of the sensations which we receive from our joints._ But if this is so,
it may be asked, why do we feel the figure to be traced, not within the
joint itself, but in such an altogether different place? And why do we
feel it so much larger than it really is?

I will answer these questions by asking another: Why do we move our
joints at all? Surely to gain something more valuable than the insipid
joint-feelings themselves. And these more interesting feelings are in
the main produced upon the _skin_ of the moving part, or of some other
part over which it passes, or upon the eye. With movements of the
fingers we explore the configuration of all real objects with which
we have to deal, our own body as well as foreign things. Nothing
that interests us is located in the joint; everything that interests
us either _is_ some part of our skin, or is something that we see as
we handle it. The cutaneously felt and the seen extents come thus to
figure as the important things for us to concern ourselves with. Every
time the joint moves, even though we neither see, nor feel cutaneously,
the reminiscence of skin-events and sights which formerly coincided
with that extent of movement, ideally awaken as the movement's import,
and the mind drops the present sign to attend to the import alone. The
joint-sensation itself, as such, does not disappear in the process. A
little attention easily detects it, with all its fine peculiarities,
hidden beneath its vaster suggestions; so that really the mind has
two space-perceptions before it, congruent in form but different in
scale and place, either of which exclusively it may notice, or both at
once,--the joint-space which it _feels_ and the real space which it
_means_.

The joint-spaces serve so admirably as signs because of their capacity
for _parallel variation_ to all the peculiarities of external motion.
There is not a direction in the real world nor a ratio of distance
which cannot be matched by some direction or extent of joint-rotation.
Joint-feelings, like all feelings, are roomy. Specific ones are
contrasted _inter se_ as different directions are contrasted within
the same extent. If I extend my arm straight out at the shoulder, the
rotation of the shoulder-joint will give me one feeling of movement;
if then I sweep the arm forward, the same joint will give me another
feeling of movement. Both these movements are felt to happen in space,
and differ in specific quality. Why shall not the specificness of the
quality just consist in the feeling of a peculiar _direction?_[194] Why
may not the several joint-feelings _be_ so many perceptions of movement
in so many different directions? That we cannot explain why they
_should_ is no presumption that they _do_ not, for we never can explain
why any sense-organ should awaken the sensation it does.

But if the joint-feelings are directions and extents, standing in
relation to each other, the task of association in interpreting their
import in eye- or skin-terms is a good deal simplified. Let the
movement _bc_, of a certain joint, derive its absolute space-value
from the cutaneous feeling it is always capable of engendering;
then the longer movement _abcd_ of the same joint will be judged to
have a greater space-value, even though it may never have wholly
merged with a skin-experience. So of differences of direction: so
much joint-difference = so much skin-difference; therefore, more
joint-difference = more skin-difference. _In fact, the joint-feeling
can excellently serve as a map on a reduced scale, of a reality which
the imagination can identify at its pleasure with this or that sensible
extension simultaneously known in some other way._

When the joint-feeling in itself acquires an emotional interest,--which
happens whenever the joint is inflamed and painful,--the secondary
suggestions fail to arise, and the movement is felt where it is, and in
its intrinsic scale of magnitude.[195]

The localization of the joint-feeling in a space simultaneously known
otherwise (i.e. to eye or skin), is what is commonly called the
_extradition or eccentric projection of the feeling_. In the preceding
chapter I said a good deal on this subject; but we must now see a
little more closely just what happens in this instance of it. The
content of the joint-feeling, to begin with, is an object, and _is_ in
itself a place. For it to be _placed_, say _in the elbow_, the elbow as
seen or handled must already have become another object for the mind,
and with its place as thus known, the place which the joint-feeling
fills must coalesce. That the latter should be felt 'in the elbow' is
therefore a 'projection' of it into the place of another object as
much as its being felt in the finger-tip or at the end of a cane can
be. But when we say 'projection' we generally have in our mind the
notion of a _there_ as contrasted with a _here_. What is the _here_
when we say that the joint-feeling is _there_? The 'here' seems to be
the spot which the mind has chosen for its own post of observation,
usually some place within the head, but sometimes within the throat or
breast--not a rigorously fixed spot, but a region from any portion of
which it may send forth its various acts of attention. Extradition from
either of _these_ regions is the common law under which we perceive the
whereabouts of the north star, of our own voice, of the contact of our
teeth with each other, of the tip of our finger, of the point of our
cane on the ground, or of a movement in our elbow-joint.

But _for the distance between the 'here' and the 'there' to be felt,
the entire intervening space must be itself an object of perception._
The consciousness of this intervening space is the _sine quâ non_ of
the joint-feeling's projection to the farther end of it. When it is
filled by our own bodily tissues (as where the projection only goes as
far as the elbow or finger-tip) we are sensible of its extent alike by
our eye, by our exploring movements, and by the resident sensations
which fill its length. When it reaches beyond the limits of our body,
the resident sensations are lacking, but limbs and hand and eye suffice
to make it known. Let me, for example, locate a feeling of motion
coming from my elbow-joint in the point of my cane a yard beyond my
hand. Either I see this yard as I flourish the cane, and the seen end
of it then absorbs my sensation just as my seen elbow might absorb
it, or I am blind and imagine the cane as an object continuing my
arm, either because I have explored both arm and cane with the other
hand, or because I have pressed them both along my body and leg. If I
project my joint-feeling farther still, it is by a conception rather
than a distinct imagination of the space. I _think_: 'farther,' 'thrice
as far,' etc.; and thus get a symbolic image of a distant path at
which I point.[196] But the 'absorption' of the joint-feeling by the
distant spot, in whatever terms the latter may be apprehended, is
never anything but that coalescence into one 'thing' already spoken
of on page 184, of whatever different sensible objects interest our
attention at once.


2. _Feelings of Muscular Contraction._


Readers versed in psychological literature will have missed, in our
account thus far, the usual invocation of 'the muscular sense.' This
word is used with extreme vagueness to cover all resident sensations,
whether of motion or position, in our members, and even to designate
the supposed feeling of efferent discharge from the brain. We shall
later see good reason to deny the existence of the latter feeling. We
have accounted for the better part at least of the resident feelings of
motion in limbs by the sensibility of the articular surfaces. The skin
and ligaments also must have feelings awakened as they are stretched
or squeezed in flexion or extension. And I am inclined to think that
_the sensations of our contracting muscles themselves probably play
as small a part in building up our exact knowledge of space as any
class of sensations which we possess._ The muscles, indeed, play an
all-important part, but it is through the remote effect of their
contractions on other sensitive parts, not through their own resident
sensations being aroused. In other words, _muscular contraction is only
indirectly instrumental, in giving us space-perceptions, by its effects
on surfaces._ In skin and retina it produces a motion of the stimulus
upon the surface; in joints it produces a motion of the surfaces upon
each other--such motion being by far the most delicate manner of
exciting the surfaces in question. One is tempted to doubt whether the
muscular sensibility as such plays even a subordinate part as _sign_ of
these more immediately geometrical perceptions which are so uniformly
associated with it as effects of the contraction objectively viewed.

For this opinion many reasons can be assigned. First, it seems _a
priori_ improbable that such organs as muscles should give us feelings
whose variations bear any exact proportion to the spaces traversed
when they contract. As G. E. Müller says,[197] their sensory nerves
must be excited either chemically or by mechanical compression whilst
the contractions last, and in neither case can the excitement be
proportionate to the position into which the limb is thrown. The
chemical state of the muscle depends on the _previous_ work more
than on the actually present contraction; and the internal pressure
of it depends on the resistance offered more than on the shortening
attained. _The intrinsic muscular sensations are likely therefore to
be merely those of massive strain or fatigue, and to carry no accurate
discrimination with them of lengths of path moved through._

Empirically we find this probability confirmed by many facts. The
judicious A. W. Volkmann observes[198] that:

 "Muscular feeling gives tolerably fine evidence as to the _existence_
 of movement, but hardly any direct information about its extent or
 direction. We are not aware that the contractions of a _supinator
 longus_ have a wider range than those of a _supinator brevis_;
 and that the fibres of a bipenniform muscle contract in opposite
 directions is a fact of which the muscular feeling itself gives not
 the slightest intimation. Muscle-feeling belongs to that class of
 general sensations which tell us of our inner states, but not of outer
 relations; it does not belong among the space-perceiving senses."

E. H. Weber in his article Tastsinn called attention to the fact that
muscular movements as large and strong as those of the diaphragm go on
continually without our perceiving them as motion.

G. H. Lewes makes the same remark. When we think of our muscular
sensations as movements in space, it is because we have ingrained with
them in our imagination a movement on a surface simultaneously felt.

 "Thus whenever we breathe there is a contraction of the muscles of
 the ribs and the diaphragm. Since we _see_ the chest expanding, we
 know it as a movement and can only think of it as such. But the
 diaphragm itself is not seen, and consequently by no one who is not
 physiologically enlightened on the point is this diaphragm thought of
 in movement. Nay, even when told by a physiologist that the diaphragm
 moves at each breathing, every one who has not seen it moving
 downward pictures it as an upward movement, because the chest moves
 upward."[199]

A personal experience of my own seems strongly to corroborate this
view. For years I have been familiar, during the act of gaping, with a
large, round, smooth sensation in the region of the throat, a sensation
characteristic of gaping and nothing else, but which, although I had
often wondered about it, never suggested to my mind the motion of
anything. The reader probably knows from his own experience exactly
what feeling I mean. It was not till one of my students told me, that I
learned its objective cause. If we look into the mirror while gaping,
we see that at the moment we have this feeling the hanging palate
_rises_ by the contraction of its intrinsic muscles. The contraction of
these muscles and the compression of the palatine mucous membrane are
what occasion the feeling; and I was at first astonished that, coming
from so small an organ, it could appear so voluminous. Now the curious
point is this--that no sooner had I learned by the eye its objective
space-significance, than I found myself enabled mentally to _feel_ it
as a movement upwards of a body in the situation of the uvula. When I
now have it, my fancy _injects_ it, so to speak, with the image of the
rising uvula; and it _absorbs_ the image easily and naturally. In a
word, a muscular contraction gave me a sensation whereof I was unable
during forty years to interpret a motor meaning, of which two glances
of the eye made me permanently the master. To my mind no further proof
is needed of the fact that muscular contraction, merely as such, need
not be perceived directly as so much motion through space.

Take again the contractions of the muscles which make the eyeball
rotate. The feeling of these is supposed by many writers to play the
chief part in our perceptions of extent. The space seen between two
things _means_, according to these authors, nothing but the amount
of contraction which is needed to carry the _fovea_ from the first
thing to the second. But close the eyes and note the contractions in
themselves (even when coupled as they still are with the delicate
surface sensations of the eyeball rolling under the lids), and we
are surprised at finding how vague their space-import appears. Shut
the eyes and roll them, and you can with no approach to accuracy
tell the outer object which shall first be seen when you open them
again.[200] Moreover, if our eye-muscle-contractions had much to do
with giving us our sense of seen extent, we ought to have a natural
illusion of which we find no trace. Since the feeling in the muscles
grows disproportionately intense as the eyeball is rolled into an
extreme eccentric position, all places on the extreme _margin_ of
the field of view ought to appear farther from the centre than they
really are, for the fovea cannot get to them without an amount of this
feeling altogether in excess of the amount of actual rotation.[201]
When we turn to the muscles of the body at large we find the same
vagueness. Goldscheider found that the minimal perceived rotation
of a limb about a joint was no less when the movement was 'active'
or produced by muscular contraction than when it was 'passively'
impressed.[202] The consciousness of active movement became so blunt
when the joint (alone!) was made anæsthetic by faradization, that it
became evident that the feeling of contraction could never be used for
_fine_ discrimination of extents. And that it was not used for coarse
discriminations appeared clear to Goldscheider from certain other
results which are too circumstantial for me to quote in detail.[203]
His general conclusion is that we feel our movements exclusively in
our articular surfaces, and that our muscular contractions in all
probability hardly occasion this sort of perception at all.[204]

My conclusion is that the 'muscular sense' must fall back to the humble
position from which Charles Bell raised it, and no longer figure in
Psychology as the leading organ in space-perception which it has been
so long 'cracked up' to be.

       *       *       *       *       *

Before making a minuter study of Space as apprehended by the eye,
we must turn to see what we can discover of space as known to the
blind. But as we do so, let us cast a glance upon the results of
the last pages, and ask ourselves once more whether the building up
of orderly space-perceptions out of primitive incoherency requires
any mental powers beyond those displayed in ordinary intellectual
operations. I think it is obvious--granting the spacial _quale_ to
exist in the primitive sensations--that discrimination, association,
addition, multiplication, and division, blending into generic images,
substitution of similars, selective emphasis, and abstraction from
uninteresting details, are quite capable of giving us all the
space-perceptions we have so far studied, without the aid of any
mysterious 'mental chemistry' or power of 'synthesis' to create
elements absent from the original data of feeling. It cannot be too
strongly urged in the face of mystical attempts, however learned,
that there is not a landmark, not a length, not a point of the
compass in real space which _is_ not some _one_ of our feelings,
either experienced directly as a presentation or ideally suggested
by another feeling which has come to serve as its sign. In degrading
some sensations to the rank of signs and exalting others to that of
realities signified, we smooth out the wrinkles of our first chaotic
impressions and make a continuous order of what was a rather incoherent
multiplicity. But the _content_ of the order remains identical with
that of the multiplicity--sensational both, through and through.


HOW THE BLIND PERCEIVE SPACE.


The blind man's construction of real space differs from that of the
seeing man most obviously in the larger part which synthesis plays
in it, and the relative subordination of analysis. The seeing baby's
eyes take in the whole room at once, and discriminative attention
must arise in him before single objects are visually discerned. The
blind child, on the contrary, must form his mental image of the room
by the addition, piece to piece, of parts which he learns to know
successively. With our eyes we may apprehend instantly, in an enormous
bird's-eye view, a landscape which the blind man is condemned to build
up bit by bit after weeks perhaps of exploration. We are exactly in
his predicament, however, for spaces which exceed our visual range. We
think the ocean as a whole by multiplying mentally the impression we
get at any moment when at sea. The distance between New York and San
Francisco is computed in days' journeys; that from earth to sun is so
many times the earth's diameter, etc.; and of longer distances still
we may be said to have no adequate mental image whatever, but only
numerical verbal symbols.

But the symbol will often give us the emotional effect of the
perception. Such expressions as the abysmal vault of heaven, the
endless expanse of ocean, etc., summarize many computations to the
imagination, and give the sense of an enormous horizon. So it seems
with the blind. They multiply mentally the amount of a distinctly felt
freedom to move, and gain the immediate sense of a vaster freedom
still. Thus it is that blind men are never without the consciousness of
their horizon. They all enjoy travelling, especially with a companion
who can describe to them the objects they pass. On the prairies they
feel the great openness; in valleys they feel closed in; and one has
told me that he thought few seeing people could enjoy the view from
a mountain-top more than he. A blind person on entering a house or
room immediately receives, from the reverberations of his voice and
steps, an impression of its dimensions, and to a certain extent of its
arrangement. The tympanic sense noticed on p. 140, _supra_, comes
in to help here, and possibly other forms of tactile sensibility not
yet understood. Mr. W. Hanks Levy, the blind author of 'Blindness and
the Blind' (London), gives the following account of his powers of
perception:

 "Whether within a house or in the open air, whether walking or
 standing still, I can tell, although quite blind, when I am opposite
 an object, and can perceive whether it be tall or short, slender
 or bulky. I can also detect whether it be a solitary object or a
 continuous fence; whether it be a close fence or composed of open
 rails; and often whether it be a wooden fence, a brick or stone wall,
 or a quick-set hedge. I cannot usually perceive objects if much lower
 than my shoulder, but sometimes very low objects can be detected.
 This may depend on the nature of the objects, or on some abnormal
 state of the atmosphere. The currents of air can have nothing to do
 with this power, as the state of the wind does not directly affect
 it; the sense of hearing has nothing to do with it, as when snow
 lies thickly on the ground objects are more distinct, although the
 footfall cannot be heard. I seem to perceive objects through the skin
 of my face, and to have the impressions immediately transmitted to
 the brain. The only part of my body possessing this power is my face;
 this I have ascertained by suitable experiments. Stopping my ears
 does not interfere with it, but covering my face with a thick veil
 destroys it altogether. None of the five senses have anything to do
 with the existence of this power, and the circumstances above named
 induce me to call this unrecognized sense by the name of 'facial
 perception.'... When passing along a street I can distinguish shops
 from private houses, and even point out the doors and windows, etc.,
 and this whether the doors be shut or open. When a window consists
 of one entire sheet of glass, it is more difficult to discover than
 one composed of a number of small panes. From this it would appear
 that glass is a bad conductor of sensation, or at any rate of the
 sensation specially connected with this sense. When objects below the
 face are perceived, the sensation seems to come in an oblique line
 from the object to the upper part of the face. While walking with a
 friend in Forest Lane, Stratford, I said, pointing to a fence which
 separated the road from a field, 'Those rails are not quite as high
 as my shoulder.' He looked at them, and said they were higher. We,
 however, measured, and found them about three inches lower than my
 shoulder. At the time of making this observation I was about four feet
 from the rails. Certainly in this instance facial perception was more
 accurate than sight. When the lower part of a fence is brickwork, and
 the upper part rails, the fact can be detected, and the line where the
 two meet easily perceived. Irregularities in height, and projections
 and indentations in walls, can also be discovered."

According to Mr. Levy, this power of seeing with the face is diminished
by a fog, but not by ordinary darkness. At one time he could tell when
a cloud obscured the horizon, but he has now lost that power, which
he has known several persons to possess who are totally blind. These
effects of aqueous vapor suggest immediately that fluctuations in the
heat radiated by the objects may be the source of the perception. One
blind gentleman, Mr. Kilburne, an instructor in the Perkins Institution
in South Boston, who has the power spoken of in an unusual degree,
proved, however, to have no more delicate a sense of temperature in
his face than ordinary persons. He himself supposed that his ears had
nothing to do with the faculty until a complete stoppage of them,
not only with cotton but with putty on top of it, by abolishing the
perception entirely, proved his first impression to be erroneous. Many
blind men say immediately that their ears are concerned in the matter.

Sounds certainly play a far more prominent part in the mental life
of the blind than in our own. In taking a walk through the country,
the mutations of sound, far and near, constitute their chief delight.
And to a great extent their imagination of distance and of objects
moving from one distant spot to another seems to consist in thinking
how a certain sonority would be modified by the change of place. It is
unquestionable that the semi-circular-canal feelings play a great part
in defining the points of the compass and the direction of distant
spots, in the blind as in us. We _start_ towards them by feelings
of this sort; and so many directions, so many different-feeling
starts.[205]

The only point that offers any theoretic difficulty is the prolongation
into space of the direction, after the start. We saw, ten pages back,
that for extradition to occur beyond the skin, the portion of skin
in question _and_ the space beyond must form a common object for
some other sensory surface. The eyes are for most of us this sensory
surface; for the blind it can only be other parts of the skin, coupled
or not with motion. But the mere gropings of the hands in every
direction must end by surrounding the whole body with a sphere of
felt space. And this sphere must become enlarged with every movement
of locomotion, these movements gaining their space-values from the
semi-circular-canal feelings which accompany them, and from the
farther and farther parts of large fixed objects (such as the bed, the
wainscoting, or a fence) which they bring within the grasp. It might
be supposed that a knowledge of space acquired by so many successive
discrete acts would always retain a somewhat jointed and so to speak,
granulated character. When we who are gifted with sight think of a
space too large to come into a single field of view, we are apt to
imagine it as composite, and filled with more or less jerky stoppings
and startings (think, for instance, of the space from here to San
Francisco), or else we reduce the scale symbolically and imagine how
much larger on a map the distance would look than others with whose
totality we are familiar.

I am disposed to believe, after interrogating many blind persons, that
the use of imaginary maps on a reduced scale is less frequent with them
than with the rest of us. Possibly the extraordinary changeableness
of the visual magnitudes of things makes this habit natural to us,
while the fixity of tactile magnitudes keeps them from falling into
it. (When the blind young man operated on by Dr. Franz was shown a
portrait in a locket, he was vastly surprised that the face could be
put into so small a compass: it would have seemed to him, he said,
as impossible as to put a bushel into a pint.) Be this as it may,
however, the space which each blind man feels to extend beyond his body
is felt by him as one smooth continuum--all trace of those muscular
startings and stoppings and reversals which presided over its formation
having been eliminated from the memory. It seems, in other words, a
generic image of the space-element common to all these experiences,
with the unessential particularities of each left out. In truth,
_where_ in this space a start or a stop may have occurred was quite
accidental. It may never occur just there again, and so the attention
lets it drops altogether. Even as long a space as that traversed in a
several-mile walk will not necessarily appear to a blind man's thought
in the guise of a series of locomotor acts. Only where there is some
distinct locomotor difficulty, such as a step to ascend, a difficult
crossing, or a disappearance of the path, will distinct locomotor
images constitute the idea. Elsewhere the space seems continuous, and
its parts may even all seem coexistent; though, as a very intelligent
blind friend once remarked to me, 'To think of such distances involves
probably more mental wear and tear and brain-waste in the blind than
in the seeing.' This seems to point to a greater element of successive
addition and construction in the blind man's idea.

Our own visual explorations go on by means of innumerable stoppings
and startings of the eyeballs. Yet these are all effaced from the
final space-sphere of our visual imagination. They have neutralized
each other. We can even distribute our attention to the right and left
sides simultaneously, and think of those two quarters of space as
coexistent. Does the smoothing out of the locomotor interruptions from
the blind man's tactile space-sphere offer any greater paradox? Surely
not. And it is curious to note that both in him and in us there is one
particular locomotor feeling that is apt to assert itself obstinately
to the last. We and he alike spontaneously imagine space as lying _in
front_ of us, for reasons too obvious to enumerate. If we think of the
space behind us, we, as a rule, have to _turn round_ mentally, and
in doing so the front space vanishes. But in this, as in the other
things of which we have been talking, individuals differ widely.
Some, in imagining a room, can think of all its six surfaces at once.
Others mentally turn round, or, at least, imagine the room in several
successive and mutually exclusive acts (cf. p. 54, above).

       *       *       *       *       *

Sir William Hamilton, and J. S. Mill after him, have quoted approvingly
an opinion of Platner (an eighteenth-century philosopher) regarding the
space-perceptions of the blind. Platner says:

 "The attentive observation of a person born blind... has convinced
 me that the sense of touch by itself is altogether incompetent to
 afford us the representation of extension and space.... In fact, to
 those born blind, time serves instead of space. Vicinity and distance
 mean in their mouths nothing more than the shorter or longer time ...
 necessary to attain from some one feeling to some other."

After my own observation of blind people, I should hardly have
considered this as anything but an eccentric opinion, worthy to pair
off with that other belief that color is primitively seen without
extent, had it not been for the remarkable Essay on Tactile and Visual
Space by M. Ch. Dunan, which appeared in the Revue Philosophique for
1888. This author quotes[206] three very competent witnesses, all
officials in institutions for the blind [it does not appear from the
text that more than one of them was blind himself], who say that blind
people _only live in time_. M. Dunan himself does not share exactly
this belief, but he insists that the blind man's and the seeing
man's representation of space have _absolutely naught_ in common,
and that we are deceived into believing that what they mean by space
is analogous to what we mean, by the fact that so many of them are
but semi-blind and still think in visual terms, and from the farther
fact that they all _talk_ in visual terms just like ourselves. But
on examining M. Dunan's reasons one finds that they all rest on the
groundless logical assumption that the perception of a geometrical
form which we get with our eyes, and that which a blind man gets with
his fingers, must either be absolutely identical or absolutely unlike.
They cannot be similar in diversity, "for they are simple notions,
and it is of the essence of such to enter the mind or leave it all at
once, so that one who has a simple notion at all, possesses it in all
its completeness.... Therefore, since it is impossible that the blind
should have of the forms in question ideas _completely identical_
with our seeing ones, it follows that their ideas must be _radically
different from and wholly irreducible to our own_."[207] Hereupon M.
Dunan has no difficulty in finding a blind man who still preserves a
crude sensation of diffused light, and who says when questioned that
_this light has no extent_. Having 'no extent' appears, however, on
farther questioning, to signify merely not enveloping any particular
tactile objects, nor being located within their outline; so that
(allowing for latitude of expression) the result tallies perfectly
with our own view. A relatively stagnant retinal sensation of diffused
light, not varying when different objects are handled, would naturally
remain an object quite apart. If the word 'extent' were habitually used
to denote tactile extent, this sensation, having no tactile associates
whatever, would naturally have 'extent' denied of it. And yet all the
while it would be _analogous_ to the tactile sensations in having
the quality of bigness. Of course it would have no _other_ tactile
qualities, just as the tactile objects have no other optical qualities
than bigness. All sorts of analogies obtain between the spheres of
sensibility. Why are 'sweet' and 'soft' used so synonymously in most
languages? and why are both these adjectives applied to objects of so
many sensible kinds? Rough sounds, heavy smells, hard lights, cold
colors, are other examples. Nor does it follow from such analogies as
these that the sensations compared need be composite and have some
of their parts identical. We saw in Chapter XIII that likeness and
difference are an elementary relation, not to be resolved in every
case into a mixture of absolute identity and absolute heterogeneity of
content (cf. Vol. I, pp. 492-3).

I conclude, then, that although in its more superficial determinations
the blind man's space is very different from our space, yet a deep
analogy remains between the two. 'Big' and 'little,' 'far' and
'near,' are similar contents of consciousness in both of us. But the
_measure_ of the bigness and the farness is very different in him and
in ourselves. He, for example, can have no notion of what we mean by
objects appearing smaller as they move away, because he must always
conceive of them as of their constant tactile size. Nor, whatever
analogy the two extensions involve, should we expect that a blind man
receiving sight for the first time should recognize his new-given
optical objects by their familiar tactile names. Molyneux wrote to
Locke:

 "Suppose a man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to
 distinguish between a cube and a sphere,... so as to tell, when he
 felt one and the other, which is the cube, which the sphere. Suppose
 then the cube and sphere placed on a table and the blind man to be
 made to see; query, whether by his sight, before he touched them, he
 could now distinguish and tell which is the globe, which the cube?"

This has remained in literature as 'Molyneux's query.' Molyneux
answered 'No.' And Locke says:[208]

 "I agree with this thinking gentleman whom I am proud to call my
 friend, and am of opinion that the blind man at first sight would not
 be able to say which was the globe, which the cube, whilst he only saw
 them; though he could unerringly name them by his touch and certainly
 distinguish them by the difference of their figures felt."

This opinion has not lacked experimental confirmation. From
Chesselden's case downwards, patients operated for congenital cataract
have been unable to name at first the things they saw. "So, Puss, I
shall know you another time," said Chesselden's patient, after catching
the cat, looking at her steadfastly, and setting her down. Some of
this incapacity is unquestionably due to general mental confusion at
the new experience, and to the excessively unfavorable conditions for
perception which an eye with its lens just extirpated affords. That the
analogy of inner nature between the retinal and tactile sensations goes
beyond mere extensity is proved by the cases where the patients were
the most intelligent, as in the young man operated on by Dr. Franz,
who named circular, triangular, and quadrangular figures at first
sight.[209]


VISUAL SPACE.


It is when we come to analyze minutely the conditions of _visual_
perception that difficulties arise which have made psychologists appeal
to new and _quasi_-mythical mental powers. But I firmly believe that
even here exact investigation will yield the same verdict as in the
cases studied hitherto. This subject will close our survey of the
facts; and if it give the result I foretell, we shall be in the best of
positions for a few final pages of critically historical review.

If a common person is asked how he is enabled to see things as they
are, he will simply reply, by opening his eyes and looking. This
innocent answer has, however, long since been impossible for science.
There are various paradoxes and irregularities about _what_ we appear
to perceive under seemingly identical optical conditions, which
immediately raise questions. To say nothing now of the time-honored
conundrums of why we see upright with an inverted retinal picture,
and why we do not see double; and to leave aside the whole field of
color-contrasts and ambiguities, as not directly relevant to the
space-problem,--it is certain that the same retinal image makes
us see quite differently-sized and differently-shaped objects at
different times, and it is equally certain that the same ocular
movement varies in its perceptive import. It ought to be possible,
were the act of perception completely and _simply_ intelligible, to
assign for every distinct judgment of size, shape, and position a
distinct optical modification of some kind as its occasion. And the
connection between the two ought to be so constant that, given the
same modification, we should always have the same judgment. But if
we study the facts closely _we soon find no such constant connection
between either judgment and retinal modification, or judgment and
muscular modification, to exist._ The judgment seems to result from the
combination of retinal, muscular and intellectual factors with each
other; and any one of them may occasionally overpower the rest in a way
which seems to leave the matter subject to no simple law.

The scientific study of the subject, if we omit Descartes, began with
Berkeley, and the particular perception he analyzed in his New Theory
of Vision was that of distance or depth. Starting with the physical
assumption that a difference in the distance of a point can make no
difference in the nature of its retinal image, since "distance being
a line directed endwise to the eye, it projects only one point in the
fund of the eye--which point remains invariably the same, whether
the distance be longer or shorter," he concluded that distance could
not possibly be a visual sensation, but must be an intellectual
'suggestion' from 'custom' of some non-visual experience. According
to Berkeley this experience was tactile. His whole treatment of the
subject was excessively vague,--no shame to him, as a breaker of fresh
ground,--but as it has been adopted and enthusiastically hugged in all
its vagueness by nearly the whole line of British psychologists who
have succeeded him, it will be well for us to begin our study of vision
by refuting his notion that depth cannot possibly be perceived in terms
of purely visual feeling.


_The Third Dimension._


Berkeleyans unanimously assume that no retinal sensation can
primitively be of volume; if it be of extension at all (which they
are barely disposed to admit), it can be only of two-, not of three-,
dimensional extension. At the beginning of the present chapter we
denied this, and adduced facts to show that all objects of sensation
are voluminous in three dimensions (cf. p. 136 ff.). It is impossible
to lie on one's back on a hill, to let the empty abyss of blue fill
one's whole visual field, and to sink deeper and deeper into the merely
sensational mode of consciousness regarding it, without feeling that
an indeterminate, palpitating, circling depth is as indefeasibly one
of its attributes as its breadth. We may artificially exaggerate this
sensation of depth. Rise and look from the hill-top at the distant
view; represent to yourself as vividly as possible the distance of the
uttermost horizon; and then _with inverted head_ look at the same.
There will be a startling increase in the perspective, a most sensible
recession of the maximum distance; and as you raise the head you can
actually see the horizon-line again draw near.[210]

Mind, I say nothing as yet about our estimate of the 'real' amount
of this depth or distance. I only want to confirm its existence as
a natural and inevitable optical consort of the two other optical
dimensions. The field of view is always a _volume-unit_. Whatever be
supposed to be its absolute and 'real' size, the relative sizes of its
dimensions are functions of each other. Indeed, it happens perhaps most
often that the breadth- and height-feeling take their absolute measure
from the depth-feeling. If we plunge our head into a wash-basin, the
felt nearness of the bottom makes us feel the lateral expanse to be
small. If, on the contrary, we are on a mountain-top, the distance of
the horizon carries with it in our judgment a proportionate height
and length in the mountain-chains that bound it to our view. But as
aforesaid, let us not consider the question of absolute size now,--it
must later be taken up in a thorough way. Let us confine ourselves to
the way in which the three dimensions which are seen, get their values
fixed _relatively to each other_.

Reid, in his Inquiry into the Human Mind, has a section 'Of the
Geometry of Visibles,' in which he assumes to trace what the
perceptions would be of a race of 'Idomenians' reduced to the sole
sense of sight. Agreeing with Berkeley that sight alone can give
no knowledge of the third dimension, he humorously deduces various
ingenious absurdities in their interpretations of the material
appearances before their eyes.

Now I firmly believe, on the contrary, that one of Reid's Idomenians
would frame precisely the same conception of the external world that we
do, if he had our intellectual powers.[211] Even were his very eyeballs
fixed and not movable like ours, that would only retard, not frustrate,
his education. For the _same object_, by alternately covering in its
lateral movements different parts of his retina, would determine the
mutual equivalencies of the first two dimensions of the field of view;
and by exciting the physiological cause of his perception of depth in
various degrees, it would establish a scale of equivalency between the
first two and the third.

First of all, one of the sensations given by the object is chosen to
represent its 'real' size and shape, in accordance with the principles
laid down on pp. 178 and 179. _One sensation measures the 'thing'
present, and the 'thing' then measures the other sensations._ The
peripheral parts of the retina are equated with the central by
receiving the image of the same object. This needs no elucidation
in case the object does not change its distance or its front. But
suppose, to take a more complicated case, that the object is a stick,
seen first in its whole length, and then rotated round one of its
ends; let this fixed end be the one near the eye. In this movement the
stick's image will grow progressively shorter; its farther end will
appear less and less separated laterally from its fixed near end; soon
it will be screened by the latter, and then reappear on the opposite
side, and finally on that side resume its original length. Suppose this
movement to become a familiar experience; the mind will presumably
react upon it after its usual fashion (which is that of unifying all
data which it is in any way possible to unify), and consider it the
movement of a constant object rather than the transformation of a
fluctuating one. Now, the _sensation of depth_ which it receives during
the experience is awakened more by the far than by the near end of
the object. But how much depth? What shall measure its amount? Why,
at the moment the far end is ready to be eclipsed, the difference of
its distance from the near end's distance must be judged equal to the
stick's whole length; but that length has already been judged equal
to a certain optical sensation of breadth. _Thus we find that given
amounts of the visual depth-feeling become signs of fixed amounts
of the visual breadth-feeling. The measurement of distance is, as
Berkeley truly said, a result of suggestion and experience. But visual
experience alone is adequate to produce it, and this he erroneously
denied._

Suppose a colonel in front of his regiment at dress-parade, and suppose
he walks at right angles towards the midmost man of the line. As he
advances, and surveys the line in either direction, he looks more and
more _down_ it and less and less _at_ it, until, when abreast of the
midmost man, he feels the end men to be _most_ distant; then when the
line casts hardly any lateral image on his retina at all, what distance
shall he judge to be that of the end men? Why, half the length of the
regiment as it was originally seen, of course; but this length was a
moment ago a retinal object spread out laterally before his sight.
He has now merely equated a retinal depth-feeling with a retinal
breadth-feeling. If the regiment moved, and the colonel stood still,
the result would be the same. In such ways as these a creature endowed
with eyes alone could hardly fail of measuring out all three dimensions
of the space he inhabited. And we ourselves, I think, although we _may_
often 'realize' distance in locomotor terms (as Berkeley says we must
always do), yet do so no less often in terms of our retinal map, and
always in this way the more spontaneously. Were this not so, the three
visual dimensions could not possibly feel to us as homogeneous as they
do, nor as commensurable _inter se_.

_Let us then admit distance to be at least as genuinely optical a
content of consciousness as either height or breadth. The question
immediately returns, Can any of them be said in any strictness to be
optical sensations?_ We have contended all along for the affirmative
reply to this question, but must now cope with difficulties greater
than any that have assailed us hitherto.


_Helmholtz and Reid on Sensations_.


A sensation is, as we have seen in Chapter XVII, the mental affection
that follows most immediately upon the stimulation of the sense-tract.
Its antecedent is directly physical, no psychic links, no acts of
memory, inference, or association intervening. Accordingly, if we
suppose the nexus between neural process in the sense-organ, on the one
hand, and conscious affection, on the other, to be by nature uniform,
_the same process ought always to give the same sensation;_ and
conversely, _if what seems to be a sensation varies whilst the process
in the sense-organ remains unchanged, the reason is presumably that
it is really not a sensation but a higher mental product, whereof the
variations depend on events occurring in the system of higher cerebral
centres._

Now the _size_ of the field of view varies enormously in all three
dimensions, without our being able to assign with any definiteness the
process in the visual tract on which the variation depends. We just
saw how impossible such assignment was in the case where turning down
the head produces the enlargement. In general, the maximum feeling of
depth or distance seems to take the lead in determining the apparent
magnitude of the whole field, and the two other dimensions seem to
follow. If, to use the former instance, I look close into a wash-basin,
the lateral extent of the field shrinks proportionately to its
nearness. If I look from a mountain, the things seen are vast in height
and breadth, in proportion to the farness of the horizon. But _when we
ask what changes in the eye determine how great this maximum feeling of
depth or distance_ (which is undoubtedly felt as a unitary vastness)
_shall be, we find ourselves unable to point to any one of them as
being its absolutely regular concomitant._ Convergence, accommodation,
double and disparate images, differences in the parallactic
displacement when we move our head, faintness of tint, dimness of
outline, and smallness of the retinal image of objects named and known,
are all processes that have _something to do_ with the perception of
'far' and of 'near'; but the effect of each and any one of them in
determining such a perception at one moment may at another moment be
reversed by the presence of some other sensible quality in the object,
that makes us, evidently by reminding us of past experience, judge it
to be at a different distance and of another shape. If we paint the
inside of a pasteboard-mask like the outside, and look at it with one
eye, the accommodation- and parallax-feelings are there, but fail to
make us see it hollow, as it is. Our mental knowledge of the fact that
human faces are always convex overpowers them, and we directly perceive
the nose to be nearer to us than the cheek instead of farther of.

The other organic tokens of farness and nearness are proved by similar
experiments (of which we shall ere long speak more in detail) to have
an equally fluctuating import. They lose all their value whenever the
collateral circumstances favor a strong intellectual conviction that
the object presented to the gaze is _improbable_--cannot be either
_what_ or _where_ they would make us perceive it to be.

Now the query immediately arises: _Can the feelings of these processes
in the eye, since they are so easily neutralized and reversed by
intellectual suggestions, ever have been direct sensations of distance
at all_? Ought we not rather to assume, since the distances which
we see _in spite_ of them are conclusions from past experience,
that the distances which we see _by means_ of them are equally
such conclusions? Ought we not, in short, to say unhesitatingly
that distance must be an intellectual and not a sensible content of
consciousness? and that each of these eye-feelings serves as a mere
signal to awaken this content, our intellect being so framed that
sometimes it notices one signal more readily and sometimes another?

Reid long ago (Inquiry, c. vi. sec. 17) said:

 "It may be taken for a general rule that things which are produced by
 custom may be undone or changed by disuse or by contrary custom. On
 the other hand, it is a strong argument that an effect is not owing to
 custom, but to the constitution of nature, when a contrary custom is
 found neither to change nor to weaken it."

More briefly, a way of seeing things that can be unlearned was
presumably learned, and only what we cannot unlearn is instinctive.

This seems to be Helmholtz's view, for he confirms Reid's maxim by
saying in emphatic print:

 "No elements in our perception can be sensational which may be
 overcome or reversed by factors of demonstrably experimental origin.
 Whatever can be overcome by suggestions of experience must be regarded
 as itself a product of experience and custom. If we follow this rule
 it will appear that only _qualities_ are sensational, whilst almost
 all _spatial_ attributes are results of habit and experience."[212]

This passage of Helmholtz's has obtained, it seems to me, an almost
deplorable celebrity. The reader will please observe its very radical
import. Not only would he, and does he, for the reasons we have just
been ourselves considering, deny distance to be an optical sensation;
but, extending the same method of criticism to judgments of size,
shape, and direction, and finding no single retinal or muscular process
in the eyes to be indissolubly linked with any one of these, he goes
so far as to say that all optical space-perceptions whatsoever must
have an intellectual origin, and a content that no items of visual
sensibility can account for.[213]

As Wundt and others agree with Helmholtz here, and as their
conclusions, if true, are irreconcilable with all the sensationalism
which I have been teaching hitherto, it clearly devolves upon me to
defend my position against this new attack. But as this chapter on
Space is already so overgrown with episodes and details, I think it
best to reserve the refutation of their general principle for the
next chapter, and simply to assume at this point its untenability.
This has of course an arrogant look; but if the reader will bear with
me for not very many pages more, I shall hope to appease his mind.
Meanwhile I affirm confidently that _the same outer objects actually_
FEEL _different to us according as our brain reacts on them in one
way or another by making us perceive them as this or as that sort of
thing._ So true is this that one may well, with Stumpf,[214] reverse
Helmholtz's query, and ask: "What would become of our sense-perceptions
in case experience were _not_ able so to transform them?" Stumpf adds:
"All wrong perceptions that depend on peculiarities in the organs
are more or less perfectly corrected by the influence of imagination
following the guidance of experience."

If, therefore, among the facts of optical space-perception (which we
must now proceed to consider in more detail) we find instances of an
identical organic eye-process, giving us different perceptions at
different times, in consequence of different collateral circumstances
suggesting different objective facts to our imagination, we must
not hastily conclude, with the school of Helmholtz and Wundt, that
the organic eye-process pure and simple, without the collateral
circumstances, is incapable of giving us any sensation of a spatial
kind at all. We must rather seek to discover _by what means_ the
circumstances can so have transformed a space-sensation, which, but for
their presence, would probably have been felt in its natural purity.
And I may as well say now in advance that we shall find the means
to be nothing more or less than association--_the suggestion to the
mind of optical objects not actually present,_ but more habitually
associated with the 'collateral circumstances' than the sensation which
they now displace and being imagined now with a quasi-hallucinatory
strength. But before this conclusion emerges, it will be necessary to
have reviewed the most important facts of optical space-perception,
in relation to the organic conditions on which they depend. Readers
acquainted with German optics will excuse what is already familiar to
them in the following section.[215]

Let us begin the long and rather tedious inquiry by the most important
case. Physiologists have long sought for a simple law by which to
connect the seen direction and distance of objects with the retinal
impressions they produce. Two principal theories have been held of
this matter, the 'theory of identical points,' and the 'theory of
projection,'--each incompatible with the other, and each beyond certain
limits becoming inconsistent with the facts.


_The Theory of Identical Points_.


[Illustration: FIG. 54.]

This theory starts from the truth that on both retinæ an impression on
the upper half makes us perceive an object as below, on the lower half
as above, the horizon; and on the right half an object to the left, on
the left half one to the right, of the median line. Thus each quadrant
of one retina corresponds as a whole to the _similar_ quadrant of the
other; and within two similar quadrants, _al_ and _ar_ for example,
there should, if the correspondence were consistently carried out, be
geometrically similar points which, if impressed at the same time by
light emitted from the same object, should cause that object to appear
in the same direction to either eye. Experiment verifies this surmise.
If we look at the starry vault with parallel eyes, the stars all seem
single; and the laws of perspective show that under the circumstances
the parallel light-rays coming from each star must impinge on points
within either retina which _are_ geometrically similar to each other.
The same result may be more artificially obtained. If we take two
exactly similar pictures, smaller, or at least no larger, than those on
an ordinary stereoscopic slide, and if we look at them as stereoscopic
slides are looked at, that is, at one with each eye (a median partition
confining the view of either eye to the picture opposite it), we
shall see but one flat picture, all of whose parts appear sharp and
single.[216] Identical points being impressed, both eyes see their
object in the same direction, and the two objects consequently coalesce
into one.

The same thing may be shown in still another way. With fixed head
converge the eyes upon some conspicuous objective point behind a pane
of glass; then close either eye alternately and make a little ink-mark
on the glass, 'covering' the object as seen by the eye which is
momentarily open. On looking now with both eyes the ink-marks will seem
single, and in the same direction as the objective point. Conversely,
let the eyes converge on a single ink-spot on the glass, and then by
alternate shutting of them let it be noted what objects behind the
glass the spot covers to the right and left eye respectively. Now with
both eyes open, both these objects and the spot will appear in the same
place, one or other of the three becoming more distinct according to
the fluctuations of retinal attention.[217]

Now what is the direction of this common place? The only way of
defining the direction of an object is by _pointing to it_. Most
people, if asked to look at an object over the horizontal edge of a
sheet of paper which conceals their hand and arm, and then to point
their finger at it (raising the hand gradually so that at last a
finger-tip will appear above the sheet of paper), are found to place
the finger not between either eye and the object, but between the
latter and the root of the nose, and this whether both eyes or either
alone be used. Hering and Helmholtz express this by saying that we
judge of the direction of objects as they would appear to an imaginary
cyclopean eye, situated between our two real eyes, and with its optical
axis bisecting the angle of convergence of the latter. Our two retinæ
act, according to Hering, as if they were superposed in the place of
this imaginary double-eye; we see by the corresponding points of each,
situated far asunder as they really are, just as we _should_ see if
they were superposed and could both be excited together.

The judgment of objective singleness and that of identical direction
seem to hang necessarily together. And that of identical direction
seems to carry with it the necessity of a common origin, between the
eyes or elsewhere, from which all the directions felt may seem to be
estimated. This is why the cyclopean eye is really a fundamental part
of the formulation of the theory of identical retinal points, and why
Hering, the greatest champion of this theory, lays so much stress upon
it.

_It is an immediate consequence of the law of identical_ _projection
of images on geometrically similar points that images which fall upon
geometrically_ DISPARATE _points of the two retinæ should be projected
in_ DISPARATE _directions, and that their objects should consequently
appear in_ TWO _places, or_ LOOK DOUBLE. Take the parallel rays from
a star falling upon two eyes which converge upon a near object, O,
instead of being parallel, as in the previously instanced case. If SL
and SR in Fig. 55 be the parallel rays, each of them will fall upon the
nasal half of the retina which it strikes.

[Illustration: FIG. 55.]

But the two nasal halves are disparate, geometrically _symmetrical_,
not geometrically _similar_. The image on the left one will therefore
appear as if lying in a direction leftward of the cyclopean eye's
line of sight; the image of the right one will appear far to the
right of the same direction. The star will, in short, be seen
double,--'homonymously' double.

Conversely, if the star be looked at directly with parallel axes, O
will be seen double, because its images will affect the outer or cheek
halves of the two retinæ, instead of one outer and one nasal half. The
position of the images will here be reversed from that of the previous
case. The right eye's image will now appear to the left, the left
eye's to the right--the double images will be 'heteronymous.'

The same reasoning and the same result ought to apply where the
object's place with respect to the direction of the two optic axes is
such as to make its images fall not on non-similar retinal halves, but
on non-similar parts of similar halves. Here, of course, the directions
of projection will be less widely disparate than in the other case, and
the double images will appear to lie less widely apart.

Careful experiments made by many observers according to the so-called
haploscopic method confirm this law, and show that _corresponding
points, of single visual direction,_ exist upon the two retinæ. For the
detail of these one must consult the special treatises.

Note now an important consequence. If we take a stationary object
and allow the eyes to vary their direction and convergence, a purely
geometrical study will show that there will be some positions in which
its two images impress corresponding retinal points, but more in which
they impress disparate points. The former constitute the so-called
horopter, and their discovery has been attended with great mathematical
difficulty. Objects or parts of objects which lie in the eyes' horopter
at any given time cannot appear double. _Objects lying out of the
horopter would seem, if the theory of identical points were strictly
true, necessarily and always to appear double._

Here comes the first great conflict of the identity-theory with
experience. Were the theory true, we ought all to have an intuitive
knowledge of the horopter as the line of distinctest vision. Objects
placed elsewhere ought to seem, if not actually double, at least
blurred. And yet no living man makes any such distinction between the
parts of his field of vision. To most of us the whole field appears
single, and it is only by rare accident or by special education that
we ever catch a glimpse of a double image. In 1838, Wheatstone, in his
truly classical memoir on binocular vision and the stereoscope,[218]
showed that the disparateness of the points on which the two images
of an object fall does not within certain limits affect its seen
singleness at all, but rather the _distance_ at which it shall appear.
Wheatstone made an observation, moreover, which subsequently became the
bone of much hot contention, in which he strove to show that not only
might disparate images fuse, but images on corresponding or identical
points might be seen double.[219]

I am unfortunately prevented by the weakness of my own eyes from
experimenting enough to form a decided personal opinion on the matter.
It seems to me, however, that the balance of evidence is against the
Wheatstonian interpretation, and that disparate points may fuse,
without identical points for that reason ever giving double images. The
two questions, "Can we see single with disparate points?" and "Can we
see double with identical points?" although at the first blush they may
appear, as to Helmholtz they appear, to be but two modes of expressing
the same inquiry, are in reality distinct. The first may quite well be
answered affirmatively and the second negatively.

Add to this that the experiment quoted from Helmholtz above by no
means always succeeds, but that many individuals place their finger
between the object and _one_ of their eyes, oftenest the right;[220]
finally, observe that the identity-theory, with its Cyclopean starting
point for all lines of direction, gives by itself no ground for the
_distance_ on any line at which an object shall appear, and has to
be helped out in this respect by subsidiary hypotheses, which, in
the hands of Hering and others, have become so complex as easily to
fall a prey to critical attacks; and it will soon seem as if _the
law of identical seen directions by corresponding points, although a
simple formula for expressing concisely many fundamental phenomena,
is by no means an adequate account of the whole matter of retinal
perception._[221]


_The Projection-Theory_.


Does the theory of projection fare any better? This theory admits that
each eye sees the object in a different direction from the other,
along the line, namely, passing from the object through the middle of
the pupil to the retina. A point directly fixated is thus seen on the
optical axes of both eyes. There is only one point, however, which
these two optical axes have in common, and that is the point to which
they converge. Everything directly looked at is seen at this point, and
is thus seen both single and at its proper distance. It is easy to show
the incompatibility of this theory with the theory of identity. Take an
objective point (like O in Fig. 50, when the star is looked at) casting
its images R' and L' on geometrically dissimilar parts of the two
retinæ and affecting the outer half of each eye. On the identity-theory
it ought necessarily to appear double, whilst on the projection-theory
there is no reason whatever why it should not appear single, provided
only it be located by the judgment on each line of visible direction,
neither nearer nor farther than its point of intersection with the
other line.

_Every point in the field of view ought, in truth, if the
projection-theory were uniformly valid, to appear single,_ entirely
irrespective of the varying positions of the eyes, for from every
point of space two lines of visible direction pass to the two retinæ;
and at the intersection of these lines, or just where the point is,
there, according to the theory, it should appear. _The objection to
this theory is thus precisely the reverse of the objection to the
identity-theory. If the latter ruled, we ought to see most things
double all the time. If the projection-theory ruled, we ought never to
see anything double. As a matter of fact we get too few double images
for the identity-theory, and too many for the projection-theory._

The partisans of the projection-theory, beginning with Aguilonius, have
always explained double images as the result of an erroneous judgment
of the _distance_ of the object, the images of the latter being
projected by the imagination along the two lines of visible direction
either nearer or farther than the point of intersection of the latter.
A diagram will make this clear.

[Illustration: FIG. 56.]

Let O be the point looked at, M an object farther, and N an object
nearer, than it. Then M and N will send the lines of visible direction
MM and NN to the two retinæ. If N be judged as far as O, it must
necessarily lie where the two lines of visible direction NN intersect
the plane of the arrow, or in two places, at N' and at N''. If M be
judged as near as O, it must for the same reason form two images at M'
and M''.

It is, as a matter of fact, true that we often misjudge the distance in
the way alleged. If the reader will hold his forefingers, one beyond
the other, in the median line, and fixate them alternately, he will see
the one not looked at, double; and he will also notice that it appears
nearer to the plane of the one looked at, whichever the latter may be,
than it really is. Its changes of apparent size, as the convergence
of the eyes alter, also prove the change of apparent distance. The
distance at which the axes converge seems, in fact, to exert a sort of
attraction upon objects situated elsewhere. Being the distance of which
we are most acutely sensible, it invades, so to speak, the whole field
of our perception. If two half-dollars be laid on the table an inch
or two apart, and the eyes fixate steadily the point of a pen held in
the median line at varying distances between the coins and the face,
there will come a distance at which the pen stands between the left
half-dollar and the right eye, and the right half-dollar and the left
eye. The two half-dollars will then coalesce into one; and this one
will show its apparent approach to the pen-point by seeming suddenly
much reduced in size.[222]

Yet, in spite of this tendency to inaccuracy, we are never actually
mistaken about the half-dollar being behind the pen-point. It may not
seem far enough off, but still it is farther than the point. In general
it may be said that where the objects are known to us, no such illusion
of distance occurs in any one as the theory would require. And in some
observers, Hering for example, it seems hardly to occur at all. If I
look into infinite distance and get my finger in double images, they do
not seem infinitely far off. To make objects at different distances
seem equidistant, careful precautions must be taken to have them alike
in appearance, and to exclude all outward reasons for ascribing to the
one a different location from that ascribed to the other. Thus Donders
tries to prove the law of projection by taking two similar electric
sparks, one behind the other on a dark ground, one seen double; or
an iron rod placed so near to the eyes that its double images seem
as broad as that of a fixated stove-pipe, the top and bottom of the
objects being cut off by screens, so as to prevent all suggestions of
perspective, etc. The three objects in each experiment seem in the same
plane.[223]

Add to this the impossibility, recognized by _all_ observers, of ever
seeing double with the _fovea_, and the fact that authorities as able
as those quoted in the note on Wheatstone's observation deny that
they can see double then with identical points, and we are forced to
conclude that _the projection-theory, like its predecessor, breaks
down. Neither formulates exactly or exhaustively a law for all our
perceptions._


_Ambiguity of Retinal Impressions_.


[Illustration: FIG. 57.]

_What does each theory try to do? To make of seen location a fixed
function of retinal impression. Other facts may be brought forward
to show how far from fixed are the perceptive functions of retinal
impressions._ We alluded a while ago to the extraordinary ambiguity of
the retinal image as a revealer of magnitude. Produce an after-image of
the sun and look at your finger-tip: it will be smaller than your nail.
Project it on the table, and it will be as big as a strawberry; on the
wall, as large as a plate; on yonder mountain, bigger than a house. And
yet it is an unchanged retinal impression. Prepare a sheet with the
figures shown in Fig. 57 strongly marked upon it, and get by direct
fixation a distinct after-image of each.

[Illustration: FIGS. 58 & 59.]

Project the after-image of the cross upon the upper left-hand part of
the wall, it will appear as in Fig. 58; on the upper right-hand it will
appear as in Fig. 59. The circle similarly projected will be distorted
into two different ellipses. If the two parallel lines be projected
upon the ceiling or floor far in front, the farther ends will diverge;
and if the three parallel lines be thrown on the same surfaces, the
upper pair will seem farther apart than the lower.

[Illustration: FIG. 60.]

[Illustration: FIG. 61.]

Adding certain lines to others has the same distorting effect. In
what is known as Zöllner's pattern (Fig. 60), the long parallels tip
towards each other the moment we draw the short slanting lines over
them yet their retinal images are the same they always were. A similar
distortion of parallels appears in Fig 61.

[Illustration: FIG. 62.]

[Illustration: FIG. 63.]

Drawing a square inside the circle (Fig. 62) gives to the outline of
the latter an indented appearance where the square's corners touch
it. Drawing the radii inside of one of the right angles in the same
figure makes it seem larger than the other. In Fig. 63, the retinal
image of the space between the extreme dots is in all three lines the
same, yet it seems much larger the moment it is filled up with other
dots.

In the stereoscope certain pairs of lines which look single under
ordinary circumstances immediately seem double when we add certain
other lines to them.[224]

_Ambiguous Import of Eye-movements_.


These facts show the indeterminateness of the space-import of various
_retinal impressions_. Take now the _eye's movements_, and we find a
similar vacillation. When we follow a moving object with our gaze, the
motion is 'voluntary'; when our eyes oscillate to and fro after we have
made ourselves dizzy by spinning around, it is 'reflex'; and when the
eyeball is pushed with the finger, it is 'passive.' Now, in all three
of these cases we get a feeling from the movement as it effects itself.
But the objective perceptions to which the feeling assists us are by no
means the same. In the first case we may see a stationary field of view
with one moving object in it; in the second, the total field swimming
more or less steadily in one direction; in the third, a sudden jump or
twist of the same total field.

_The feelings of convergence_ of the eyeballs permit of the same
ambiguous interpretation. When objects are near we converge strongly
upon them in order to see them; when far, we set our optic axes
parallel. But the exact degree of convergence fails to be felt; or
rather, being felt, fails to tell us the absolute distance of the
object we are regarding. Wheatstone arranged his stereoscope in such
a way that the size of the retinal images might change without the
convergence altering; or conversely, the convergence might change
without the retinal image altering. Under these circumstances, he
says,[225] the object seemed to approach or recede in the first
case, without altering its size, in the second, to change its size
without altering its distance--just the reverse of what might have
been expected. Wheatstone adds, however, that 'fixing the attention'
converted each of these perceptions into its opposite. The same
perplexity occurs in looking through prismatic glasses, which alter the
eyes' convergence. We cannot decide whether the object has come nearer,
or grown larger, or both, or neither; and our judgment vacillates in
the most surprising way. We may even make our eyes diverge, and the
object will none the less appear at a finite distance. When we look
through the stereoscope, the picture seems at no determinate distance.
These and other facts have led Helmholtz to deny that the feeling of
convergence has any very exact value as a distance-measurer.[226]

With _the feelings of accommodation_ it is very much the same. Donders
has shown[227] that the apparent magnifying power of spectacles of
moderate convexity hardly depends at all upon their enlargement of the
retinal image, but rather on the relaxation they permit of the muscle
of accommodation. This suggests an object farther off, and consequently
a much larger one, since its retinal size rather increases than
diminishes. But in this case the same vacillation of judgment as in the
previously mentioned case of convergence takes place. The recession
made the object seem larger, but the apparent growth in size of the
object now makes it look as if it came nearer instead of receding. The
effect thus contradicts its own cause. Everyone is conscious, on first
putting on a pair of spectacles, of a doubt whether the field of view
draws near or retreats.[228]

There is still _another deception, occurring in persons who have had
one eye-muscle suddenly paralyzed._ This deception has led Wundt to
affirm that the eyeball-feeling proper, the incoming sensation of
effected rotation, tells us only of the direction of our eye-movements,
but not of their whole extent.[229] For this reason, and because
not only Wundt, but many other authors, think the phenomena in
these partial paralyses demonstrate the existence of a feeling of
innervation, a feeling of the outgoing nervous current, opposed to
every afferent sensation whatever, it seems proper to note the facts
with a certain degree of detail.

Suppose a man wakes up some morning with the external rectus muscle
of his right eye half paralyzed, what will be the result? He will be
enabled only with great effort to rotate the eye so as to look at
objects lying far off to the right. Something in the effort he makes
will make him feel as if the object lay much farther to the right than
it really is. If the left and sound eye be closed, and he be asked to
touch rapidly with his finger an object situated towards his right, he
will point the finger to the right of it. The current explanation of
the 'something' in the effort which causes this deception is that it
is the sensation of the outgoing discharge from the nervous centres,
the 'feeling of innervation,' to use Wundt's expression, requisite for
bringing the open eye with its weakened muscle to bear upon the object
to be touched. If that object be situated 20 degrees to the right, the
patient has now to innervate as powerfully to turn the eye those 20
degrees as formerly he did to turn the eye 30 degrees. He consequently
believes as before that he _has_ turned it 30 degrees; until, by a
newly-acquired custom, he learns the altered spatial import of all the
discharges his brain makes into his right abducens nerve. The 'feeling
of innervation,' maintained to exist by this and other observations,
plays an immense part in the space-theories of certain philosophers,
especially Wundt. I shall elsewhere try to show that the observations
by no means warrant the conclusions drawn from them, and that the
feeling in question is probably a wholly fictitious entity.[230]
Meanwhile it suffices to point out that even those who set most store
by it are compelled, by the readiness with which the translocation
of the field of view becomes corrected and further errors avoided,
to admit that the precise space-import of _the supposed sensation of
outgoing energy is as ambiguous and indeterminate as that of any other
of the eye-feelings we have considered hitherto._

       *       *       *       *       *

I have now given what no one will call an understatement of the facts
and arguments by which it is sought to banish the credit of directly
revealing space from each and every kind of eye-sensation taken by
itself. The reader will confess that they make a very plausible show,
and most likely wonder whether my own theory of the matter can rally
from their damaging evidence. But the case is far from being hopeless;
and the introduction of a discrimination hitherto unmade will, if I
mistake not, easily vindicate the view adopted in these pages, whilst
at the same time it makes ungrudging allowance for all the ambiguity
and illusion on which so much stress is laid by the advocates of the
intellectualist-theory.


_The Choice of the Visual Reality._


We _have_ native and fixed optical space-sensations; _but experience
leads us to select certain ones from among them to be the exclusive
bearers of reality: the rest become mere signs and suggesters of
these._ The factor of _selection_, on which we have already laid so
much stress, here as elsewhere is the solving word of the enigma. If
Helmholtz, Wundt, and the rest, with an ambiguous retinal sensation
before them, meaning now one size and distance, and now another, had
not contented themselves with merely saying:--The size and distance
are not this sensation, they are something beyond it which it merely
calls up, and whose own birthplace is afar--in 'synthesis' (Wundt) or
in 'experience' (Helmholtz) as the case may be; if they had gone on
definitely to ask and definitely to answer the question, What are the
size and distance in their proper selves? they would not only have
escaped the present deplorable vagueness of their space-theories, but
they would have seen that the objective spatial attributes 'signified'
are simply and solely _certain other optical sensations now absent_,
but which the present sensations suggest.

What, for example, is the slant-legged cross which we think we see on
the wall when we project the rectangular after-image high up towards
our right or left (Figs. 58 and 59)? Is it not in very sooth a retinal
sensation itself? An imagined sensation, not a felt one, it is true,
but none the less essentially and originally sensational or retinal
for that,--the sensation, namely, which we should receive if a 'real'
slant-legged cross stood on the wall _in front of us_ and threw its
image on our eye. That image is not the one our retina now holds.
Our retina now holds the image which a cross of square shape throws
when in front, but which a cross of the slant-legged pattern _would_
throw, provided it were actually on the wall in the distant place at
which we look. Call this actual retinal image the 'square' image. The
square image is then one of the innumerable images the slant-legged
cross can throw. Why should another one, and that an absent one, of
those innumerable images be picked out to represent exclusively the
slant-legged cross's 'true' shape? Why should that absent and imagined
slant-legged image displace the present and felt square image from our
mind? Why, when the objective cross gives us so many shapes, as it
varies its position, should we think we feel the true shape only when
the cross is directly in front? And when that question is answered,
how can the absent and represented feeling of a slant-legged figure so
successfully intrude itself into the place of a presented square one?

Before answering either question, let us be doubly sure about our
facts, and see how true it is that _in our dealings with objects we
always do pick out one of the visual images they yield, to constitute
the real form or size._

The matter of size has been already touched upon, so that no more need
be said of it here. As regards shape, almost all the retinal shapes
that objects throw are perspective 'distortions.' Square table-tops
constantly present two acute and two obtuse angles; circles drawn on
our wall-papers, our carpets, or on sheets of paper, usually show
like ellipses; parallels approach as they recede; human bodies are
foreshortened; and the transitions from one to another of these
altering forms are infinite and continual. Out of the flux, however,
one phase always stands prominent. It is the form the object has when
we see it easiest and best: and that is when our eyes and the object
both are in what may be called _the normal position_. In this position
our head is upright and our optic axes either parallel or symmetrically
convergent; the plane of the object is perpendicular to the visual
plane; and if the object is one containing many lines it is turned so
as to make them, as far as possible, either parallel or perpendicular
to the visual plane. In this situation it is that we compare all shapes
with each other; here every exact measurement and decision is made.[231]

_It is very easy to see why the normal situation should have this
extraordinary pre-eminence._ First, it is the position in which we
easiest hold anything we are examining in our hands; second, it is a
turning-point between all right- and all left-hand perspective views
of a given object; third, it is the only position in which symmetrical
figures seem symmetrical and equal angles seem equal; fourth, it is
often that starting-point of movements from which the eye is least
troubled by axial rotations, by which _superposition_[232] of the
retinal images of different lines and different parts of the same line
is easiest produced, and consequently by which the eye can make the
best comparative measurements in its sweeps. All these merits single
the normal position out to be chosen. No other point of view offers
so many æsthetic and practical advantages. Here we believe we see
the object as it _is_; elsewhere, only as it seems. Experience and
custom soon teach us, however, that the seeming appearance passes into
the real one by continuous gradations. They teach us, moreover, that
seeming and being may be strangely interchanged. Now a real circle may
slide into a seeming ellipse; now an ellipse may, by sliding in the
same direction, become a seeming circle; now a rectangular cross grows
slant-legged; now a slant-legged one grows rectangular.

Almost any form in oblique vision may be thus a derivative of almost
any other in 'primary' vision; and we must learn, when we get one of
the former appearances, to translate it into the appropriate one of
the latter class; we must learn of what optical 'reality' it is one
of the optical signs. Having learned this, we do but obey that law
of economy or simplification which dominates our whole psychic life,
when we attend exclusively to the 'reality' and ignore as much as our
consciousness will let us the 'sign' by which we came to apprehend it.
The signs of each probable real thing being multiple and the thing
itself one and fixed, we gain the same mental relief by abandoning the
former for the latter that we do when we abandon mental images, with
all their fluctuating characters, for the definite and unchangeable
_names_ which they suggest. The selection of the several 'normal'
appearances from out of the jungle of our optical experiences, to
serve as the real sights of which we shall think, is psychologically a
parallel phenomenon to the habit of thinking in words, and has a like
use. Both are substitutions of terms few and fixed for terms manifold
and vague.


_Sensations which we Ignore._


This service of sensations as mere signs, to be ignored when they have
evoked the other sensations which are their significates, was noticed
first by Berkeley and remarked in many passages, as the following:

 "Signs, being little considered in themselves, or for their own sake,
 but only in their relative capacity and for the sake of those things
 whereof they are signs, it comes to pass that the mind overlooks them,
 so as to carry its attention immediately on to the things signified ...
 which in truth and strictness are not _seen_, but only _suggested_ and
 _apprehended_ by means of the proper objects of sight which alone are
 seen." (Divine Visual Language, § 12.)

Berkeley of course erred in supposing that the thing suggested was not
even _originally_ an object of sight, as the sign now is which calls it
up. Reid expressed Berkeley's principle in yet clearer language:

 "The visible appearances of objects are intended by nature only as
 signs or indications, and the mind passes instantly to the things
 signified, without making the least reflection upon the sign, or even
 perceiving that there is any such thing.... The mind has acquired a
 confirmed and inveterate habit of inattention to them (the signs). For
 they no sooner appear than, quick as lightning, the thing signified
 succeeds and engrosses all our regard. They have no name in language;
 and although we are conscious of them when they pass through the mind,
 yet their passage is so quick and so familiar that it is absolutely
 unheeded; nor do they leave any footsteps of themselves, either in the
 memory or imagination." (Inquiry, chap. v. §§ 2, 3.)

If we review the facts we shall find every grade of non-attention
between the extreme form of overlooking mentioned by Reid (or forms
even more extreme still) and complete conscious perception of the
sensation present. Sometimes it is literally impossible to become aware
of the latter. Sometimes a little artifice or effort easily leads us to
discern it together, or in alternation, with the 'object' it reveals.
Sometimes the present sensation is held to _be_ the object or to
reproduce its features in undistorted shape, and _then_, of course, it
receives the mind's full glare.

The deepest inattention is to subjective optical sensations, strictly
so called, or those which are not signs of outer objects at all.
Helmholtz's treatment of these phenomena, _muscæ volitantes_, negative
after-images, double images, etc., is very satisfactory. He says:

 "We only attend with any ease and exactness to our sensations in
 so far forth as they can be utilized for the knowledge of outward
 things; and we are accustomed to neglect all those portions of them
 which have no significance as regards the external world. So much is
 this the case that for the most part special artifices and practice
 are required for the observation of these latter more subjective
 feelings. Although it might seem that nothing should be easier than
 to be conscious of one's own sensations, experience nevertheless
 shows that often enough either a special talent like that showed in
 eminent degree by Purkinje, or accident or theoretic speculation,
 are necessary conditions for the discovery of subjective phenomena.
 Thus, for example, the blind spot on the retina was discovered by
 Mariotte by the theoretic way; similarly by me the existence of
 'summation'-tones in acoustics. In the majority of cases accident is
 what first led observers whose attention was especially exercised
 on subjective phenomena to discover this one or that; only where
 the subjective appearances are so intense that they interfere with
 the perception of objects are they noticed by all men alike. But
 if they have once been discovered it is for the most part easy for
 subsequent observers who place themselves in proper conditions and
 bend their attention in the right direction to perceive them. But
 in many cases--for example, in the phenomena of the blind spot,
 in the discrimination of over-tones and combination-tones from the
 ground-tone of musical sounds, etc.--such a strain of the attention
 is required, even with appropriate instrumental aids, that most
 persons fail. The very after-images of bright objects are by most
 men perceived only under exceptionally favorable conditions, and it
 takes steady practice to see the fainter images of this kind. It
 is a commonly recurring experience that persons smitten with some
 eye-disease which impairs vision suddenly remark for the first time
 the _muscæ volitantes_ which all through life their vitreous humor
 has contained, but which they now firmly believe to have arisen since
 their malady; the truth being that the latter has only made them
 more observant of all their visual sensations. There are also cases
 where one eye has gradually grown blind, and the patient lived for
 an indefinite time without knowing it, until, through the accidental
 closure of the healthy eye alone, the blindness of the other was
 brought to attention.

 "Most people, when first made aware of binocular double images, are
 uncommonly astonished that they should never have noticed them before,
 although all through their life they had been in the habit of seeing
 singly only those few objects which were about equally distant with
 the point of fixation, and the rest, those nearer and farther, which
 constitute the great majority, had always been double.

 "We must then _learn_ to turn our attention to our particular
 sensations, and we learn this commonly only for such sensations
 as are means of cognition of the outer world. Only so far as they
 serve this end have our sensations any importance for us in ordinary
 life. Subjective feelings are mostly interesting only to scientific
 investigators; were they remarked in the ordinary use of the
 senses, they could only cause disturbance. Whilst, therefore, we
 reach an extraordinary degree of firmness and security in objective
 observation, we not only do not reach this where subjective phenomena
 are concerned, but we actually attain in a high degree the faculty
 of overlooking these altogether, and keeping ourselves independent
 of their influence in judging of objects, even in cases where their
 strength might lead them easily to attract our attention." (Physiol.
 Optik, pp. 431-2.)

Even where the sensation is not merely subjective, as in the cases of
which Helmholtz speaks, but is a sign of something outward, we are also
liable, as Reid says, to overlook its intrinsic quality and attend
exclusively to the image of the 'thing' it suggests. But here everyone
_can_ easily notice the sensation itself if he will. Usually we see
a sheet of paper as uniformly white, although a part of it may be in
shadow. But we can in an instant, if we please, notice the shadow as
local color. A man walking towards us does not usually seem to alter
his size; but we can, by setting our attention in a peculiar way
make him appear to do so. The whole education of the artist consists
in his learning to see the presented signs as well as the represented
things. No matter what the field of view _means_, he sees it also
as it _feels_--that is, as a collection of patches of color bounded
by lines--the whole forming an optical diagram of whose intrinsic
proportions one who is not an artist has hardly a conscious inkling.
The ordinary man's attention passes _over_ them to their import; the
artist's turns back and dwells _upon_ them for their own sake. 'Don't
draw the thing as it _is_, but as it _looks_!' is the endless advice
of every teacher to his pupil; forgetting that what it 'is' is what
it would also 'look,' provided it were placed in what we have called
the 'normal' situation for vision. In this situation the sensation as
'sign' and the sensation as 'object' coalesce into one, and there is no
contrast between them.


_Sensations which seem Suppressed._


But a great difficulty has been made of certain peculiar cases which
we must now turn to consider. They are _cases in which a present
sensation, whose existence is supposed to be proved by its outward
conditions being there, seems absolutely suppressed or changed by the
image of the 'thing' it suggests._

This matter carries us back to what was said on p. 218. The passage
there quoted from Helmholtz refers to these cases. He thinks they
conclusively disprove the original and intrinsic spatiality of any of
our retinal sensations; for if such a one, actually present, had an
immanent and essential space-determination of its own, that might well
be added to and overlaid or even momentarily eclipsed by suggestions of
its signification, but how could it possibly be altered or completely
_suppressed_ thereby? Of actually present sensations, he says, being
_suppressed_ by suggestions of experience--

 "We have not a single well-attested example. In all those illusions
 which are provoked by _sensations_ in the absence of their usually
 exciting objects, the mistake never vanishes by the better
 understanding of the object really present, and by insight into the
 cause of deception. Phosphenes provoked by pressure on the eyeball,
 by traction on the entrance of the optic nerve, after-images, etc.,
 remain projected into their apparent place in the field of vision,
 just as the image projected from a mirror's surface continues to
 be seen _behind_ the mirror, although we _know_ that to all these
 appearances no outward reality corresponds. True enough, we can remove
 our attention, and keep it removed, from sensations that have no
 reference to the outer world, those, e.g., of the weaker after-images,
 and of entoptic objects, etc.... But what would become of our
 perceptions at all if we had the power not only of ignoring, but of
 _transforming into their opposites_, any part of them that differed
 from that outward experience, the image of which, as that of a present
 reality, accompanies them in the mind?"[233]

And again:

 "On the analogy of all other experience, we should expect that the
 conquered feelings would persist to our perception, even if only in
 the shape of recognized illusions. But this is not the case. One
 does not see how the assumption of originally spatial sensations can
 explain our optical cognitions, when in the last resort those who
 believe in these very sensations find themselves obliged to assume
 that they are _overcome_ by our better judgment, based on experience."

These words, coming from such a quarter, necessarily carry great
weight. But the authority even of a Helmholtz ought not to shake one's
critical composure. And the moment one abandons abstract generalities
and comes to close quarters with the particulars, I think one easily
sees that no such conclusions as those we have quoted follow from the
latter. But profitably to conduct the discussion _we must divide the
alleged instances into groups._

       *       *       *       *       *

(a) With Helmholtz, _color-perception_ is equally with space-perception
an intellectual affair. The so-called simultaneous color-contrast, by
which one color modifies another alongside of which it is said, is
explained by him as an unconscious inference. In Chapter XVII we
discussed the color-contrast problem; the principles which applied to
its solution will prove also applicable to part of the present problem.
In my opinion, Hering has definitively proved that, when one color is
laid beside another, it modifies the sensation of the latter, not by
virtue of any mere mental suggestion, as Helmholtz would have it, but
by actually exciting a new nerve-process, to which the modified feeling
of color immediately corresponds. The explanation is physiological,
not psychological. The transformation of the original color by the
inducing color is due to the disappearance of the physiological
conditions under which the first color was produced, and to the
induction, under the new conditions, of a genuine new sensation, with
which the 'suggestions of experience' have naught to do.

[Illustration: FIG. 64.]

That processes in the visual apparatus propagate themselves laterally,
if one may so express it, is also shown by the _phenomena of contrast
which occur after looking upon motions_ of various kinds. Here are a
few examples. If, over the rail of a moving vessel, we look at the
water rushing along the side, and then transfer our gaze to the deck,
a band of planks will appear to us, moving in the opposite direction
to that in which, a moment previously, we had been seeing the water
move, whilst on either side of this band another band of planks will
move as the water did. Looking at a waterfall, or at the road from out
of a car-window in a moving tram, produces the same illusion, which may
be easily verified in the laboratory by a simple piece of apparatus.
A board with a window five or six inches wide and of any convenient
length is supported upright on two feet. On the back side of the board,
above and below the window, are two rollers, one of which is provided
with a crank. An endless band of any figured stuff is passed over these
rollers (one of which can be so adjusted on its bearings as to keep the
stuff always taut and not liable to slip), and the surface of the front
board is also covered with stuff or paper of a nature to catch the
eye. Turning the crank now sets the central band in continuous motion,
whilst the margins of the field remain really at rest, but after a
while appear moving in the contrary way. Stopping the crank results in
an illusory appearance of motion in reverse directions all over the
field.

A disk with an Archimedean spiral drawn upon it, whirled round on an
ordinary rotating machine, produces still more startling effects.

[Illustration: FIG. 65.]

 "If the revolution is in the direction in which the spiral line
 approaches the centre of the disk the entire surface of the latter
 seems to expand during revolution and to contract after it has ceased;
 and _vice versâ_ if the movement of revolution is in the opposite
 direction. If in the former case the eyes of the observers are turned
 from the rotating disk towards any familiar object--e.g. the face of a
 friend--the latter seems to contract or recede in a somewhat striking
 manner, and to expand or approach after the opposite motion of the
 spiral."[234]

[Illustration: FIG. 66.]

An elementary form of these motor illusions seems to be the one
described by Helmholtz on pp. 568-571 of his Optik. The motion of
anything in the field of vision along an acute angle towards a straight
line sensibly distorts that line. Thus in Fig. 66: Let AB be a line
drawn on paper, CDE the tracing made over this line by the point of a
compass steadily followed by the eye, as it moves. As the compass-point
passes from C to D, the line appears to move downwards; as it passes
from D to E, the line appears to move upwards; at the same time the
whole line seems to incline itself in the direction FG during the first
half of the compass's movement; and in the direction HI during its last
half; the change from one inclination to another being quite distinct
as the compass-point passes over D.

Any line across which we draw a pencil-point appears to be animated by
a rapid movement of its own towards the pencil-point. This apparent
movement of both of two things in relative motion to each other, even
when one of them is absolutely still, reminds us of the instances
quoted from Vierordt on page 188, and seems to take us back to a
primitive stage of perception, in which the discriminations we now
make when we feel a movement have not yet been made. If we draw the
point of a pencil through 'Zöllner's pattern' (Fig. 60, p. 232), and
follow it with the eye, the whole figure becomes the scene of the most
singular apparent unrest, of which Helmholtz has very carefully noted
the conditions. The illusion of Zöllner's figure vanishes entirely,
or almost so, with most people, if they steadily look at one point
of it with an unmoving eye; and the same is the case with many other
illusions.

_Now all these facts taken together seem to show_--vaguely it is true,
but certainly--_that present excitements and after-effects of former
excitements may alter the result of processes occurring simultaneously
at a distance from them in the retina_ or other portions of the
apparatus for optical sensation. In the cases last considered, the
moving eye, as it sweeps the fovea over certain parts of the figure,
seems thereby to determine a modification in the feeling which the
_other_ parts confer, which modification is the figure's 'distortion.'
It is true that this statement explains nothing. It only keeps the
cases to which it applies from being explained spuriously. _The
spurious account of these illusions is that they are intellectual, not
sensational, that they are secondary, not primary, mental facts._ The
distorted figure is said to be one which the mind is led to _imagine_,
by falsely drawing an unconscious inference from certain premises of
which it is not distinctly aware. And the imagined figure is supposed
to be strong enough to suppress the perception of whatever real
sensations there may be. But Helmholtz, Wundt, Delbœuf, Zöllner, and
all the advocates of unconscious inference are at variance with each
other when it comes to the question what these unconscious premises and
inferences may be.

[Illustration: FIG. 67.]

[Illustration: FIG. 68.]

That small angles look proportionally larger than larger ones is, in
brief, the fundamental illusion to which almost all authors would
reduce the peculiarity of Fig. 67, as of Figs. 60, 61, 62 (p. 232).
This peculiarity of small angles is by Wundt treated as the
case of a filled space seeming larger than an empty one, as in Fig.
68; and this, according to both Delbœuf and Wundt, is owing to the
fact that more muscular innervation is needed for the eye to traverse
a filled space than an empty one, because the points and lines in
the filled space inevitably arrest and constrain the eye, and this
makes us feel as if it were doing more work, i.e. traversing a longer
distance.[235] When, however, we recollect that muscular movements
are positively proved to have _no_ share in the waterfall and
revolving-spiral illusions, and that it is hard to see how Wundt's and
Delbœuf's particular form of muscle-explanation can possibly apply to
the compass-point illusion considered a moment ago, we must conclude
that these writers have probably exaggerated, to say the least, the
reach of their muscle-explanation in the case of the subdivided angles
and lines. Never do we get such strong muscular feelings as when,
against the course of nature, we oblige our eyes to be still; but
fixing the eyes on one point of the figure, so far from making that
part of the latter seem larger, dispels, in most persons, the illusion
of these diagrams altogether.

As for Helmholtz, he invokes, to explain the enlargement of small
angles,[236] what he calls a '_law of contrast_' between directions
and distances of lines, analogous to that between colors and
intensities of light. Lines cutting another line make the latter seem
more inclined away from them than it really is. Moreover, clearly
recognizable magnitudes appear greater than equal magnitudes which
we but vaguely apprehend. But this is surely a sensationalistic law,
a native function of our seeing-apparatus. Quite as little as the
negative after-image of the revolving spiral could such contrast be
deduced from any association of ideas or recall of past objects. The
principle of contrast is criticised by Wundt,[237] who says that by it
small spaces ought to appear to us smaller, and not larger, than they
really are. Helmholtz might have retorted (had not the retort been as
fatal to the uniformity of his own principle as to Wundt's) that if
the muscle-explanation were true, it ought not to give rise to just
the opposite illusions in the skin. We saw on p. 141 that subdivided
spaces appear shorter than empty ones upon the skin. To the instances
there given add this: Divide a line on paper into equal halves,
puncture the extremities, and make punctures all along one of the
halves; then, with the finger-tip on the opposite side of the paper,
follow the line of punctures; the empty half will seem much longer than
the punctured half. This seems to bring things back to unanalyzable
laws, by reason of which our feeling of size is determined differently
in the skin and in the retina, even when the objective conditions are
the same. Hering's explanation of Zöllner's figure is to be found in
Hermann's Handb. d. Physiologie, iii. 1. p. 579. Lipps[238] gives
another reason why lines cutting another line make the latter seem to
bend away from them more than is really the case. If, he says, we draw
(Fig. 69) the line _pm_ upon the line _ab_, and follow the latter with
our eye, we shall, on reaching the point _m_, tend for a moment to slip
off _ab_ and to follow _mp_, without distinctly realizing that we are
not still on the main line. This makes us feel as if the remainder _mb_
of the main line were bent a little away from its original direction.
The illusion is apparent in the shape of a seeming approach of the
ends _b, b,_ of the two main lines. This to my mind would be a more
satisfactory explanation of this class of illusions than any of those
given by previous authors, were it not again for what happens in the
skin.

[Illustration: FIG. 69.]

_Considering all the circumstances, I feel justified in discarding
his entire batch of illusions as irrelevant to our present inquiry._
Whatever they may prove, they do not prove that our visual percepts of
form and movement may not be sensations strictly so called. They much
more probably fall into line with the phenomena of irradiation and of
color-contrast, and with Vierordt's primitive illusions of movement.
They show us, if anything, a realm of sensations in which our habitual
experience has not yet made traces, and which persist in spite of
our better knowledge, _un_suggestive of those other space-sensations
which we all the time know from extrinsic evidence to constitute
the real space-determinations of the diagram. Very likely, if these
sensations were as frequent and as practically important as they
now are insignificant and rare, we should end by substituting their
significates--the real space-values of the diagrams--for them. These
latter we should then seem to see directly, and the illusions would
disappear like that of the size of a tooth-socket when the tooth has
been out a week.

       *       *       *       *       *

_(b) Another batch of cases which we may discard is that of double
images_. A thoroughgoing anti-sensationalist ought to deny all native
tendency to see double images when disparate retinal points are
stimulated, because, he should say, most people never get them, but
_see_ all things single which experience has led them to believe to
_be_ single. "Can a doubleness, so easily neutralized by our knowledge,
ever be a datum of sensation at all?" such an anti-sensationalist might
ask.

[Illustration: FIG. 70.]

To which the answer is that it _is_ a datum of sensation, but a datum
which, like many other data, must first be _discriminated_. As a
rule, no sensible qualities are discriminated without a motive.[239]
And those that later we learn to discriminate were originally felt
confused. As well pretend that a voice, or an odor, which we have
learned to pick out, is no sensation now. One may easily acquire
skill in discriminating double images, though, as Hering somewhere
says, it is an art of which one cannot become master in one year or
in two. For masters like Hering himself, or Le Conte, the ordinary
stereoscopic diagrams are of little use. Instead of combining into
one solid appearance, they simply cross each other with their doubled
lines. Volkmann has shown a great variety of ways in which the addition
of secondary lines, differing in the two fields, helps us to see
the primary lines double. The effect is analogous to that shown in
the cases which we despatched a moment ago, where given lines have
their space-value changed by the addition of new lines, without our
being able to say why, except that a certain mutual adhesion of
the lines and modification of the resultant feeling takes place by
psychophysiological laws. Thus, if in Fig. 70, _l_ and _r_ be crossed
by an horizontal line at the same level, and viewed stereoscopically,
they appear as a single pair of lines, _s_, in space. But if the
horizontal be at different levels, as in _l', r',_ three lines appear,
as in _s'_'.[240]

Let us then say no more about double images. All that the facts prove
is what Volkmann says,[241] that, although there may be sets of retinal
fibres so organized as to give an impression of two separate spots,
yet the excitement of other retinal fibres may inhibit the effect
of the first excitement, and prevent us from actually making the
discrimination. Still farther retinal processes may, however, bring the
doubleness to the eye of attention; and, once there, it is as genuine a
sensation as any that our life affords.[242]

       *       *       *       *       *

_(c) These groups of illusions being eliminated,_ either as cases of
defective discrimination, or as changes of one space-sensation into
another when the total retinal process changes, _there remain but two
other groups to puzzle us._ The first is that of the after-images
distorted by projection on to oblique planes; the second relates to the
instability of our judgments of relative distance and size by the eye,
and includes especially what are known as pseudoscopic illusions.

The phenomena of the first group were described on page 232. A.
W. Volkmann has studied them with his accustomed clearness and
care.[243] Even an imaginarily inclined wall, in a picture, will, if an
after-image be thrown upon it, distort the shape thereof, and make us
_see_ a form of which our after-image would be the natural projection
on the retina, were that form laid upon the wall. Thus a signboard
is painted in perspective on a screen, and the eye, after steadily
looking at a rectangular cross, is turned to the painted signboard. The
after-image appears as an oblique-legged cross upon the signboard. It
is the converse phenomenon of a perspective drawing like Fig. 71, in
which really oblique-legged figures are seen as rectangular crosses.

[Illustration: FIG. 71.]

[Illustration: FIG. 72.]

[Illustration: FIG. 73.]

The unstable judgments of relative distance and size were also
mentioned on pp. 231-2. Whatever the size may be of the retinal
image which an object makes, the object is seen as of its own normal
size. A man moving towards us is not sensibly perceived to _grow_, for
example; and my finger, of which a single joint may more than conceal
him from my view, is nevertheless seen as a much smaller object than
the man. As for distances, it is often possible to make the farther
part of an object seem near and the nearer part far. A human profile in
intaglio, looked at steadily with one eye, or even both, soon appears
irresistibly as a bas-relief. The inside of a common pasteboard mask,
painted like the outside, and viewed with one eye in a direct light,
also looks convex instead of hollow. So strong is the illusion, after
long fixation, that a friend who painted such a mask for me told
me it soon became difficult to see how to apply the brush. Bend a
visiting-card across the middle, so that its halves form an angle of
90º more or less; set it upright on the table, as in Fig. 72, and view
it with one eye. You can make it appear either as if it opened towards
you or away from you. In the former case, the angle _ab_ lies upon
the table, _b_ being nearer to you than _a_; in the latter case _ab_
seems vertical to the table--as indeed it really is--with _a_ nearer
to you than _b_.[244] Again, look, with either one or two eyes, at
the opening of a wine-glass or tumbler (Fig. 73), held either above or
below the eye's level. The retinal image of the opening is an oval,
but we can see the oval in either of two ways,--as if it were the
perspective view of a circle whose edge _b_ were farther from us than
its edge _a_ (in which case we should seem to be looking down on the
circle), or as if its edge _a_ were the more distant edge (in which
case we should be looking up at it through the _b_ side of the glass).
As the manner of seeing the edge changes, the glass itself alters its
form in space and looks straight or seems bent towards or from the
eye,[245] according as the latter is placed beneath or above it.

[Illustration: FIG. 74.]

[Illustration: FIG. 75.]

[Illustration: FIG. 76.]

Plane diagrams also can be conceived as solids, and that in more than
one way. Figs. 74, 75, 76, for example, are ambiguous perspective
projections, and may each of them remind us of two different natural
objects. Whichever of these objects we conceive clearly at the moment
of looking at the figure, we seem to _see_ in all its solidity before
us. A little practice will enable us to flap the figures, so to speak,
backwards and forwards from one object to the other at will. We need
only attend to one of the angles represented, and imagine it either
solid or hollow--pulled towards us out of the plane of the paper, or
pushed back behind the same--and the whole figure obeys the cue and is
instantaneously transformed beneath our gaze.[246]

The peculiarity of all these cases is the ambiguity of the perception
to which the fixed retinal impression gives rise. With our retina
excited in exactly the same way, whether by after-image, mask or
diagram, we _see_ now this object and now that, as if the retinal image
_per se_ had no essential space-import. Surely if form and length were
originally retinal sensations, retinal rectangles ought not to become
acute or obtuse, and lines ought not to alter their relative lengths
as they do. If _relief_ were an optical feeling, it ought not to flap
to and fro, with every optical condition unchanged. Here, if anywhere,
the deniers of space-sensation ought to be able to make their final
stand.[247]

It must be confessed that their plea is plausible at first sight.
But it is one thing to throw out retinal sensibility altogether as
a space-yielding function the moment we find an ambiguity in its
deliverances, and another thing to examine candidly the conditions
which may have brought the ambiguity about. The former way is cheap,
wholesale, shallow; the latter difficult and complicated, but full of
instruction in the end. Let us try it for ourselves.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the case of the diagrams 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, the real object, lines
meeting or crossing each other on a plane, is replaced by an _imagined
solid which we describe as seen. Really it is not seen but only so
vividly conceived as to approach a vision of reality._ We feel all the
while, however, that the solid suggested is not solidly there. _The
reason_ why one solid may seem more easily suggested than another, and
_why it is easier in general to perceive the diagram solid than flat,
seems due to probability._[248] Those lines have countless times in our
past experience been drawn on our retina by solids for once that we
have seen them flat on paper. And hundreds of times we have looked down
upon the upper surface of parallelopipeds, stairs and glasses, for once
that we have looked upwards at their bottom--hence we see the solids
easiest as if from above.

Habit or probability seems also to govern the illusion of the intaglio
profile, and of the hollow mask. We have _never_ seen a human face
except in relief--hence the case with which the present sensation is
overpowered. Hence, too, the obstinacy with which human faces and
forms, and other extremely familiar convex objects, refuse to appear
hollow when viewed through Wheatstone's pseudoscope. Our perception
seems wedded to certain total ways of seeing certain objects. The
moment the object is suggested at all, it takes possession of the mind
in the fulness of its stereotyped habitual form. This explains the
suddenness of the transformations when the perceptions change. The
object shoots back and forth completely from this to that familiar
thing, and doubtful, indeterminate, and composite things are excluded,
apparently because we are _unused_ to their existence.

When we turn from the diagrams to the actual folded visiting-card
and to the real glass, the imagined form seems fully as real as the
correct one. The card flaps over; the glass rim tilts this way or
that, as if some inward spring suddenly became released in our eye. In
these changes the actual retinal image receives different _complements
from the mind_. But the remarkable thing is that the complement and
the image combine so completely that the twain are one flesh, as it
were, and cannot be discriminated in the result. If the complement
be, as we have called it (on pp. 237-8), a set of imaginary absent
eye-sensations, they seem no whit less vividly there than the sensation
which the eye now receives from without.

The case of the after-images distorted by projection upon an oblique
plane is even more strange, for the imagined perspective figure, lying
in the plane, seems less to combine with the one a moment previously
seen by the eye than to suppress it and take its place.[249] The point
needing explanation, then, in all this, is how it comes to pass that,
when imagined sensations are usually so inferior in vivacity to real
ones, they should in these few experiences prove to be almost or quite
their match.

The mystery is solved when we note the class to which all these
experiences belong. They are 'perceptions' of definite 'things,'
definitely situated in tridimensional space. The mind uniformly uses
its sensations to _identify things by_. The sensation is invariably
apperceived by the idea, name, or 'normal' aspect (p. 238) of the
_thing_. The peculiarity of the _optical_ signs of things is their
extraordinary mutability. A 'thing' which we follow with the eye,
never doubting of its physical identity, will change its retinal image
incessantly. A cross, a ring, waved about in the air, will pass through
every conceivable angular and elliptical form. All the while, however,
as we look at them, we hold fast to the perception of their 'real'
shape, by mentally combining the pictures momentarily received with the
notion of peculiar positions in space. It is not the cross and ring
pure and simple which we perceive, but the cross _so held_, the ring
_so held_. From the day of our birth we have sought every hour of our
lives to _correct_ the apparent form of things, and translate it into
the real form by keeping note of the way they are placed or held. In no
other class of sensations does this incessant correction occur. What
wonder, then, that the notion 'so placed' should invincibly exert its
habitual corrective effect, even when the object with which it combines
is only an after-image, and make us perceive the latter under a changed
but more 'real' form? The 'real' form is also a sensation conjured up
by memory; but it is one so _probable_, so _habitually_ conjured up
when we have just this combination of optical experiences, that it
partakes of the invincible freshness of reality, and seems to break
through that law which elsewhere condemns reproductive processes to
being so much fainter than sensations.

Once more, _these cases form an extreme. Somewhere, in the list of our
imaginations of absent feelings, there must be found the vividest of
all. These optical reproductions of real form are the vividest of all._
It is foolish to reason from cases lower in the scale, to prove that
the scale can contain no such extreme cases as these; and particularly
foolish since we can definitely see why these imaginations ought to be
more vivid than any others, whenever they recall the forms of habitual
and probable things. These latter, by incessantly repeated presence and
reproduction, will plough deep grooves in the nervous system. There
will be developed, to correspond to them, paths of least resistance,
of unstable equilibrium, liable to become active in their totality
when any point is touched off. Even when the objective stimulus is
imperfect, we shall still _see_ the full convexity of a human face, the
correct inclination of an angle or sweep of a curve, or the distance
of two lines. Our mind will be like a polyhedron, whose facets are the
attitudes of perception in which it can most easily rest. These are
worn upon it by _habitual_ objects, and from one of these it can pass
only by tumbling over into another.[250]

Hering has well accounted for the sensationally vivid character of
these habitually reproduced forms. He says, after reminding us that
every visual sensation is correlated to a physical process in the
nervous apparatus:

 "If this psycho-physical process is aroused, as usually happens, by
 light-rays impinging on the retina, its form depends not only on the
 nature of these rays, but on the constitution of the entire nervous
 apparatus which is connected with the organ of vision, and on the
 _state_ in which it finds itself. The same stimulus may excite widely
 different sensations according to this state.

 "The constitution of the nervous apparatus depends naturally in part
 upon innate predisposition; but the _ensemble_ of effects wrought by
 stimuli upon it in the course of life, whether these come through the
 eyes or from elsewhere, is a co-factor of its development. To express
 it otherwise, involuntary and voluntary experience and exercise assist
 in determining the material structure of the nervous organ of vision,
 and hence the ways in which it may react on a retinal image as an
 outward stimulus. That experience and exercise should be possible at
 all in vision is a consequence of the reproductive power, or memory,
 of its nerve-substance. Every particular activity of the organ makes
 it more suited to a repetition of the _same_; ever slighter touches
 are required to make the repetition occur. The organ habituates itself
 to the repeated activity....

 "Suppose now that, in the first experience of a complex sensation
 produced by a particular retinal image, certain portions were made
 the special objects of attention. In a repetition of the sensible
 experience it will happen that notwithstanding the identity of the
 outward stimulus these portions will be more easily and strongly
 reproduced; and when this happens a hundred times the inequality with
 which the various constituents of the complex sensation appeal to
 consciousness grows ever greater.

 "Now in the present state of our knowledge we cannot assert that
 in both the first and the last occurrence of the retinal image
 in question the same _pure sensation_ is provoked, but that the
 mind _interprets_ it differently the last time in consequence of
 experience; for the only _given_ things we know are on the one hand
 the retinal image which is both times the same, and on the other the
 mental percept which is both times different; of a third thing, such
 as a pure sensation, interpolated between image and percept, we know
 nothing. We ought, therefore, if we wish to avoid hypotheses, simply
 to say that the nervous apparatus reacts the last time differently
 from the first, and gives us in consequence a different group of
 sensations.

 "But not only by repetition of the same retinal image, but by that of
 similar ones, will the law obtain. Portions of the image common to
 the successive experiences will awaken, as it were, a stronger echo
 in the nervous apparatus than other portions. Hence it results that
 _reproduction is usually elective_: the more strongly reverberating
 parts of the picture yield stronger feelings than the rest. This
 may result in the latter being quite overlooked and, as it were,
 eliminated from perception. It may even come to pass that instead of
 these parts eliminated by election a feeling of entirely different
 elements comes to consciousness-elements not objectively contained
 in the stimulus. A group of sensations, namely, for which a strong
 tendency to reproduction has become, by frequent repetition, ingrained
 in the nervous system will easily revive as a _whole_ when, not its
 whole retinal image, but only an essential part thereof, returns.
 In this case we get some sensations to which no adequate stimulus
 exists in the retinal image, and which owe their being solely to the
 reproductive power of the nervous apparatus. This is _complementary
 (ergänzende) reproduction_.

 "Thus a few points and disconnected strokes are sufficient to make
 us see a human face, and without specially directed attention we
 fail to note that we see much that really is not drawn on the paper.
 Attention will show that the outlines were deficient in spots where
 we thought them complete.... The portions of the percept supplied by
 complementary reproduction depend, however, just as much as its other
 portions, on the reaction of the nervous apparatus upon the retinal
 image, indirect though this reaction may, in the case of the supplied
 portions, be. And so long as they are present, we have a perfect
 right to call them sensations, for they differ in no wise from such
 sensations as correspond to an actual stimulus in the retina. Often,
 however, they are not persistent; many of them may be expelled by more
 close observation, but this is not proved to be the case with all....
 In vision with one eye ... the distribution of parts within the third
 dimension is essentially the work of this complementary reproduction,
 i.e. of former experience.... When a certain way of localizing a
 particular group of sensations has become with us a second nature,
 our better knowledge, our judgment, our logic, are of no avail....
 Things actually diverse may give similar or almost identical retinal
 images; e.g., an object extended in three dimensions, and its
 flat perspective picture. In such cases it often depends on small
 accidents, and especially on our will, whether the one or the other
 group of sensations shall be excited.... We can see a relief hollow,
 as a mould, or _vice versâ_; for a relief illuminated from the left
 can look just like its mould illuminated from the right. Reflecting
 upon this, one may infer from the direction of the shadows that one
 has a relief before one, and the idea of the relief will guide the
 nerve-processes into the right path, so that _the feeling_ of the
 relief is suddenly aroused.... Whenever the retinal image is of such a
 nature that two diverse modes of reaction on the part of the nervous
 apparatus are, so to speak, equally, or nearly equally, imminent, it
 must depend on small accidents whether the one or the other reaction
 is realized. In these cases our previous knowledge often has a
 decisive effect, and helps the correct perception to victory. The
 bare idea of the right object is itself a feeble reproduction which
 with the help of the proper retinal picture develops into clear and
 lively sensation. But if there be not already in the nervous apparatus
 a disposition to the production of that percept which our judgment
 tells us is right, our knowledge strives in vain to conjure up the
 feeling of it; we then know that we see something to which no reality
 corresponds, but we see it all the same."[251]

[Illustration: FIG. 77.]

_Note that no object not probable, no object which we are not
incessantly practised in reproducing, can acquire this vividness in
imagination._ Objective corners are ever changing their angles to the
eyes, spaces their apparent size, lines their distance. But by no
transmutation of position in space does an objective straight line
appear bent, and only in one position out of an infinity does a broken
line look straight. Accordingly, it is impossible by projecting the
after-image of a straight line upon two surfaces which make a solid
angle with each other to give the line itself a sensible 'kink.' Look
with it at the corner of your room: the after-image, which may overlap
all three surfaces of the corner, still continues straight. Volkmann
constructed a complicated surface of projection like that drawn in Fig.
77, but he found it impossible so to throw a straight after-image upon
it as to alter its visible form.

One of the situations in which we oftenest see things is spread out on
the ground before us. We are incessantly drilled in making allowance
for _this_ perspective, and reducing things to their real form in spite
of optical foreshortening. Hence if the preceding explanations are
true, we ought to find this habit inveterate. The _lower_ half of the
retina, which habitually sees the _farther_ half of things spread out
on the ground, ought to have acquired a habit of enlarging its pictures
by imagination, so as to make them more than equal to those which fall
on the upper retinal surface; and this habit ought to be hard to escape
from, even when both halves of the object are equidistant from the eye,
as in a vertical line on paper. Delbœuf has found, accordingly, that if
we try to bisect such a line we place the point of division about of
its length too high.[252]

[Illustration: FIG. 78.]

Similarly, a square cross, or a square, drawn on paper, should look
higher than it is broad. And that this is actually the case, the reader
may verify by a glance at Fig. 78. For analogous reasons the upper
and lower halves of the letter S, or of the figure 8, hardly seem to
differ. But when turned upside down, the upper half looks much the
larger.[253]

[Illustration: FIG. 79.]

Hering has tried to explain our exaggeration of small angles in the
same way. We have more to do with right angles than with any others:
right angles, in fact, have an altogether unique sort of interest for
the human mind. Nature almost never begets them, but we think space by
means of them and put them everywhere. Consequently obtuse and acute
ones, liable always to be the images of right ones foreshortened,
particularly easily revive right ones in memory. It is hard to look
at such figures as _a, b, c,_ in Fig. 79, without seeing them in
perspective, as approximations, at least, to foreshortened rectangular
forms.[254]

At the same time the genuine sensational form of the lines before us
can, in all the cases of distortion by suggested perspective, be felt
correctly by a mind able to abstract from the notion of perspective
altogether. Individuals differ in this abstracting power. Artistic
training improves it, so that after a little while errors in vertical
bisection, in estimating height relatively to breadth, etc., become
impossible. In other words, we learn to take the optical sensation
before us _pure_.[255]

_We may then sum up our study of illusions by saying that they in no
wise undermine our view that every spatial determination of things is
originally given in the shape of a sensation of the eyes._ They only
show how very potent certain _imagined_ sensations of the eyes may
become.

These sensations, so far as they bring definite forms to the mind,
appear to be retinal exclusively. The movements of the eyeballs play
a great part in educating our perception, it is true; but they have
nothing to do with _constituting_ any one feeling of form. Their
function is limited to _exciting_ the various feelings of form, by
tracing retinal streaks; and to _comparing_ them, and _measuring_ them
off against each other, by applying different parts of the retinal
surface to the same objective thing. Helmholtz's analysis of the
facts of our '_measurement of the field of view_' is, bating a lapse
or two, masterly, and seems to prove that the movements of the eye
have had some part in bringing our sense of retinal equivalencies
about--_equivalencies_, mind, of different retinal forms and sizes, not
forms and sizes themselves. _Superposition_ is the way in which the
eye-movements accomplish this result. An object traces the line AB on
a peripheral tract of the retina. Quickly we move the eye so that the
same object traces the line _ab_ on a central tract. Forthwith, to our
mind, AB and _ab_ are judged equivalent. But, as Helmholtz admits, the
equivalence-judgment is independent of the way in which we may feel the
form and length of the several retinal pictures themselves:

 "The retina is like a pair of compasses, whose points we apply in
 succession to the ends of several lines to see whether they agree
 or not in length. All we need know meanwhile about the compasses
 is that the distance of their points remains unchanged. What that
 distance is, and what is the shape of the compasses, is a matter of no
 account."[256]

_Measurement implies a stuff to measure. Retinal sensations give the
stuff; objective things form the yardstick; motion does the measuring
operation;_ which can, of course, be well performed only where it is
possible to make the same object fall on many retinal tracts. This is
practically impossible where the tracts make a wide angle with each
other. But there are certain directions in the field of view, certain
retinal lines, along which it is particularly easy to make the image
of an object slide. The object then becomes a 'ruler' for these lines,
as Helmholtz puts it,[257] making them seem straight throughout if the
object looked straight to us in that part of them at which it was most
distinctly seen.

But all this need of superposition shows how devoid of exact
space-import the feelings of movement are _per se_. As we compare the
space-value of two retinal tracts by superposing them successively upon
the same objective line, so we also have to compare the space-value
of objective angles and lines by superposing them on the same retinal
tract. Neither procedure would be required if our eye-movements were
apprehended immediately, by pure muscular feeling or innervation,
for example, as distinct lengths and directions in space. To compare
retinal tracts, it would then suffice simply to notice how it feels to
move _any_ image over them. And two objective lines could be compared
as well by moving different retinal tracts along them as by laying them
along the same. It would be as easy to compare non-parallel figures
as it now is to judge of those which are parallel.[258] Those which
it took the same amount of movement to traverse would be equal, in
whatever direction the movement occurred.


GENERAL SUMMARY.


With this we may end our long and, I fear to many readers, tediously
minute survey. The facts of vision form a jungle of intricacy; and
those who penetrate deeply into physiological optics will be more
struck by our omissions than by our abundance of detail. But for
students who may have lost sight of the forest for the trees, I
will recapitulate briefly the points of our whole argument from the
beginning, and then proceed to a short historical survey, which will
set them in relief.

All our sensations are positively and inexplicably extensive wholes.

The sensations contributing to space-_perception_ seem exclusively to
be the surface of skin, retina, and joints. 'Muscular' feelings play no
appreciable part in the generation of our feelings of form, direction,
etc.

The total bigness of a cutaneous or retinal feeling soon becomes
subdivided by discriminative attention.

_Movements_ assist this discrimination by reason of the peculiarly
exciting quality of the sensations which stimuli moving over surfaces
arouse.

Subdivisions, once discriminated, acquire definite relations of
position towards each other within the total space. These 'relations'
are themselves feelings of the subdivisions that intervene. When these
subdivisions are not the seat of stimuli, the relations are only
reproduced in imaginary form.

The various sense-spaces are, in the first instance, incoherent with
each other; and primitively both they and their subdivisions are but
vaguely comparable in point of bulk and form.

The _education_ of our space-perception consists largely of two
processes--reducing the various sense-feelings to a common _measure_,
and _adding them together_ into the single all-including space of the
real world.

Both the measuring and the adding are performed by the aid of _things_.

The imagined aggregate of positions occupied by all the actual or
possible, moving or stationary, things which we know, is our notion of
'real' space--a very incomplete and vague conception in all minds.

The _measuring_ of our space-feelings against each other mainly comes
about through the successive arousal of different ones by the same
_thing_, by our selection of certain ones as feelings of its _real_
size and shape, and by the degradation of others to the status of being
merely _signs_ of these.

For the successive application of the same thing to different
space-giving surfaces motion is indispensable, and hence plays a great
part in our space-education, especially in that of the eye. Abstractly
considered, the motion of the object over the sensitive surface would
educate us quite as well as that of the surface over the object. But
the self-mobility of the organ carrying the surface _accelerates_
immensely the result.

In completely educated space-perception, the present sensation is
usually just what Helmholtz (Physiol. Optik, p. 797) calls it, 'a sign,
the interpretation of whose meaning is left to the understanding.' But
the understanding is exclusively reproductive and never productive in
the process; and its function is limited to the recall of previous
space-sensations with which the present one has been associated and
which may be judged more real than it.

Finally, this reproduction may in the case of certain visual forms be
as vivid, or almost so, as actual sensation is.

The third dimension forms an original element of all our
space-sensations. In the eye it is subdivided by various
discriminations. The more distant subdivisions are often shut out
altogether, and, in being suppressed, have the effect of diminishing
the absolute space-value of the total field of view.[259]


HISTORICAL.


Let us now close with a brief historical survey. The first achievement
of note in the study of space-perception was Berkeley's theory of
vision. This undertook to establish two points, first that _distance_
was not a visual but a tactile form of consciousness, suggested by
visual signs; secondly, that there is no one quality or 'idea' common
to the sensations of touch and sight, such that prior to experience one
might possibly anticipate from the look of an object anything about its
felt size, shape, or position, or from the touch of it anything about
its look.

In other words, that primitively chaotic or semi-chaotic condition of
our various sense-spaces which we have demonstrated, was established
for good by Berkeley; and he bequeathed to psychology the problem of
describing the manner in which the deliverances are harmonized so as
all to refer to one and the same extended world.

His disciples in Great Britain have solved this problem after
Berkeley's own fashion, and to a great extent as we have done
ourselves, by the ideas of the various senses suggesting each other in
consequence of Association. But, either because they were intoxicated
with the principle of association, or because in the number of details
they lost their general bearings, they have forgotten, as a rule, to
state _under what sensible form the primitive spatial experiences are
found_ which later became associated with so many other sensible signs.
Heedless of their master Locke's precept, that the mind can frame unto
itself no one new simple idea, they seem for the most part to be trying
to _explain the extensive quality itself_, account for it, and evolve
it, by the mere association together of feelings which originally
possessed it not. They first evaporate the nature of extension by
making it tantamount to mere 'coexistence,' and then they explain
coexistence as being the same thing as _succession_, provided it be
an extremely rapid or a reversible succession. Space-perception thus
emerges without being anywhere postulated. The only things postulated
are unextended feelings and time. Says Thomas Brown (lecture xxiii.):
"I am inclined to reverse exactly the process commonly supposed; and
instead of deriving the measure of time from extension, to derive the
knowledge and original measure of extension from time." Brown and both
the Mills think that retinal sensations, colors, in their primitive
condition, are felt with no extension and that the latter merely
becomes inseparably associated with them. John Mill says: "Whatever may
be the retinal impression conveyed by a line which bounds two colors, I
see no ground for thinking that by the eye alone we could acquire the
conception of what we now mean when we say that one of the colors is
outside [beside] the other."[260]

Whence does the extension come which gets so inseparably associated
with these non-extended colored sensations? From the 'sweep and
movements' of the _eye_--from muscular feelings. But, as Prof. Bain
says, if movement-feelings give us any property of things, "it would
seem to be not space, but time."[261] And John Mill says that "the idea
of space is, at bottom, one of time."[262] Space, then, is not to be
found in any elementary sensation, but, in Bain's words, "as a quality,
it has no other origin and no other meaning than the _association_ of
these different [non-spatial] motor and sensitive effects."[263]

This phrase is mystical-sounding enough to one who understands
association as _producing_ nothing, but only as knitting together
things already produced in separate ways. The truth is that the English
Associationist school, in trying to show how much their principle can
accomplish, have altogether overshot the mark and espoused a kind
of theory in respect to space-perception which the general tenor of
their philosophy should lead them to abhor. Really there are but three
possible kinds of theory concerning space. Either (1) there is no
spatial _quality_ of sensation at all, and space is a mere symbol of
succession; or (2) there is an _extensive quality given_ immediately
in certain particular sensations; or, finally, (3) there is a _quality
produced_ out of the inward resources of the mind, to envelop
sensations which, as given originally, are not spatial, but which, on
being cast into the spatial form, become united and orderly. This last
is the Kantian view. Stumpf admirably designates it as the 'psychic
stimulus' theory, the crude sensations being considered as goads to the
mind to put forth its slumbering power.

Brown, the Mills, and Bain, amid these possibilities, seem to have gone
astray like lost sheep. With the 'mental chemistry' of which the Mills
speak--precisely the same thing as the 'psychical synthesis' of Wundt,
which, as we shall soon see, is a principle expressly intended to do
what Association can never perform--they hold the third view, but again
in other places imply the first. And, between the impossibility of
getting from mere association anything not contained in the sensations
associated and the dislike to allow spontaneous mental productivity,
they flounder in a dismal dilemma. Mr. Sully joins them there in what
I must call a vague and vacillating way. Mr. Spencer of course is
bound to pretend to 'evolve' all mental qualities out of antecedents
different from themselves, so that we need perhaps not wonder at his
refusal to accord the spatial quality to any of the several elementary
sensations out of which our space-perception grows. Thus (Psychology,
ii. 168, 172, 218):

 "No idea of extension can arise from a _simultaneous_ excitation" of a
 multitude of nerve-terminations like those of the skin or the retina,
 since this would imply a "knowledge of their relative positions"--that
 is, "a pre-existent idea of a special extension, which is absurd." "No
 relation between _successive_ states of consciousness gives in itself
 any idea of extension." "The muscular sensations accompanying motion
 are quite distinct from the notions of space and time associated with
 them."

Mr. Spencer none the less inveighs vociferously against the Kantian
position that space is produced by the mind's own resources. And yet
he nowhere denies space to be a specific affection of consciousness
different from time!

Such incoherency is pitiful. The fact is that, at bottom, all these
authors are really 'psychical stimulists,' or Kantists. The space they
speak of is a super-sensational mental product. This position appears
to me thoroughly mythological. But let us see how it is held by those
who know more definitely what they mean. Schopenhauer expresses the
Kantian view with more vigor and clearness than anyone else. He says:

 "A man must be forsaken by all the gods to dream that the world we
 see outside of us, filling space in its three dimensions, moving down
 the inexorable stream of time, governed at each step by Causality's
 invariable law,--but in all this only following rules which we may
 prescribe for it in advance of all experience,--to dream, I say, that
 such a world should stand there outside of us, quite objectively real
 with no complicity of ours, and thereupon by a subsequent _act_,
 through the instrumentality of mere sensation, that it should enter
 our head and reconstruct a duplicate of itself as it was outside. For
 what a poverty-stricken thing is this mere sensation! Even in the
 noblest organs of sense it is nothing more than a local and specific
 feeling, susceptible within its kind of a few variations, but always
 strictly subjective and containing in itself nothing objective,
 nothing resembling a perception. For sensation of every sort is and
 remains a process in the organism itself. As such it is limited to
 the territory inside the skin and can never, accordingly, _per se_
 contain anything that lies outside the skin or outside ourselves....
 Only when the Understanding ... is roused to activity and brings its
 sole and only form, the _law of Causality_, into play, only then does
 the mighty transformation take place which makes out of subjective
 sensation objective intuition. The Understanding, namely, grasps by
 means of its innate, _a priori_, ante-experiential form, the given
 sensation of the body as an _effect_ which as such must necessarily
 have a _cause_. At the same time the Understanding summons to its aid
 the form of the outer sense which similarly lies already preformed in
 the intellect (or brain), and which is Space, in order to locate that
 cause outside of the organism.... In this process the Understanding,
 as I shall soon show, takes note of the most minute peculiarities
 of the given sensation in order to construct in the outer space a
 cause which shall completely account for them. This operation of the
 Understanding is, however, not one that takes place discursively,
 reflectively, _in abstracto_, by means of words and concepts; but is
 intuitive and immediate.... Thus the Understanding must first create
 the objective world; never can the latter, already complete _in
 se_, simply promenade into our heads through the senses and organic
 apertures. For the senses yield us nothing further than the raw
 material which must be first elaborated into the objective conception
 of an orderly physical world-system by means of the aforesaid simple
 forms of Space, Time, and Causality.... Let me show the great chasm
 between sensation and perception by showing how raw the material is
 out of which the fair structure is upreared. Only two senses serve
 objective perception: touch and sight. They alone furnish the data
 on the basis whereof the Understanding, by the process indicated,
 erects the objective world.... These data in themselves are still
 no perception; that is the Understanding's work. If I press with my
 hand against the table, the sensation I receive has no analogy with
 the idea of the firm cohesion of the parts of this mass: only when my
 Understanding passes from the sensation to its cause does it create
 for itself a body with the properties of solidity, impenetrability,
 and hardness. When in the dark I lay my hand on a surface, or grasp a
 ball of three inches diameter, in either case the same parts of the
 hand receive the impression: but out of the different contraction of
 the hand in the two cases my Understanding constructs the form of the
 body whose contact caused the feeling, and confirms its construction
 by leading me to move my hand over the body. If one born blind
 handles a cubical body, the sensations of his hand are quite uniform
 on all sides and in all directions,--only the corners press upon a
 smaller part of his skin. In these sensations, as such, there is
 nothing whatever analogous to a cube. But from the felt resistance
 his Understanding infers immediately and intuitively a cause thereof,
 which now presents itself as a solid body; and from the movements
 of exploration which the arms made whilst the feelings of the hands
 remained constant he constructs, in the space known to him _a priori_,
 the body's cubical shape. Did he not bring with him ready-made the
 idea of a cause and of a space, with the laws thereof, there never
 could arise, out of those successive feelings in his hand, the
 image of a cube. If we let a string run through our closed hand, we
 immediately construct as the cause of the friction and its duration in
 such an attitude of the hand, a long cylindrical body moving uniformly
 in one direction. But never out of the pure sensation in the hand
 could the idea of movement, that is, of change of position in space
 by means of time, arise: such a content can never lie in sensation,
 nor come out of it. Our Intellect, antecedently to all experience,
 must bear in itself the intuitions of Space and Time, and therewithal
 of the possibility of motion, and no less the idea of Causality, to
 pass from the empirically given feeling to its cause, and to construct
 the latter as a so moving body of the designated shape. For how great
 is the abyss between the mere sensation in the hand and the ideas
 of causality, materiality, and movement through Space, occurring
 in Time! The feeling in the hand, even with different contacts and
 positions, is something far too uniform and poor in content for it
 to be possible to construct out of _it_ the idea of Space with its
 three dimensions, of the action of bodies on each other, with the
 properties of extension, impenetrability, cohesion, shape, hardness,
 softness, rest, and motion--in short, the foundations of the objective
 world. This is only possible through Space, Time, and Causality ...
 being preformed in the Intellect itself,... from whence it again
 follows that the perception of the external world is essentially an
 intellectual process, a work of the Understanding, _to which sensation
 furnishes merely the occasion,_ and the data to be interpreted in each
 particular case."[264]

I call this view mythological, because I am conscious of no such
Kantian machine-shop in my mind, and feel no call to disparage the
powers of poor sensation in this merciless way. I have no introspective
experience of mentally producing or creating space. My space-intuitions
occur not in two times but in one. There is not one moment of passive
inextensive sensation, succeeded by another of active extensive
perception, but the form I see is as immediately felt as the color
which fills it out. That the higher parts of the mind come in, who can
deny? They add and subtract, they compare and measure, they reproduce
and abstract. They inweave the space-sensations with intellectual
relations; but _these_ relations are the same when they obtain between
the elements of the space-system as when they obtain between any of the
other elements of which the world is made.

The essence of the Kantian contention is that there are not _spaces_,
but _Space_--one infinite continuous _Unit_--and that our knowledge of
_this_ cannot be a piecemeal sensational affair, produced by summation
and abstraction. To which the obvious reply is that, if any known thing
bears on its front the _appearance_ of piecemeal construction and
abstraction, it is this very notion of the infinite unitary space of
the world. It is a _notion_, if ever there was one; and no intuition.
Most of us apprehend it in the barest symbolic abridgment: and if
perchance we ever do try to make it more adequate, we just add one
image of sensible extension to another until we are tired. Most of us
are obliged to turn round and drop the thought of the space in front of
us when we think of that behind. And the space represented as near to
us seems more minutely subdivisible than that we think of as lying far
away.

       *       *       *       *       *

The other prominent German writers on space are also 'psychical
stimulists.' Herbart, whose influence has been widest, says 'the
resting eye sees no space,'[265] and ascribes visual extension to the
influence of movements combining with the non-spatial retinal feelings
so as to form gradated series of the latter. A given sensation of such
a series reproduces the idea of its associates in regular order, and
its idea is similarly reproduced by any one of them with the order
reversed. Out of the fusion of these two contrasted reproductions comes
the form of space[266]--Heaven knows how.

The obvious objection is that mere serial order is a _genus_, and
space-order a very peculiar species of that _genus_; and that, if the
terms of reversible series became by that fact coexistent terms in
space, the musical scale, the degrees of warmth and cold, and all other
ideally graded series ought to appear to us in the shape of extended
corporeal aggregates,--which they notoriously do not, though we may of
course _symbolize_ their order by a spatial scheme. W. Volkmann von
Volkmar, the Herbartian, takes the bull here by the horns, and says the
musical scale _is_ spatially extended, though he admits that its space
does not belong to the real world.[267] I am unacquainted with any
other Herbartian so bold.

       *       *       *       *       *

To Lotze we owe the much-used term 'local sign.' He insisted that
space could not emigrate directly into the mind from without, but
must be _reconstructed_ by the soul; and he seemed to think that the
first reconstructions of it by the soul must be super-sensational. But
why sensations themselves might not be the soul's _original_ spatial
reconstructive acts Lotze fails to explain.

       *       *       *       *       *

Wundt has all his life devoted himself to the elaboration of a
space-theory, of which the neatest and most final expression is to be
found in his Logik (ii. 457-60). He says:

 "In the eye, space-perception has certain constant peculiarities
 which prove that no single optical sensation by itself possesses
 the extensive form, but that everywhere in our perception of space
 heterogeneous feelings combine. If we simply suppose that luminous
 sensations _per se_ feel extensive, our supposition is shattered by
 that influence of movement in vision which is so clearly to be traced
 in many normal errors in the measurement of the field of view. If
 we assume, on the other hand, that the movements and their feelings
 are alone possessed of the extensive quality, we make an unjustified
 hypothesis, for the phenomena compel us, it is true, to accord an
 influence to movement, but give us no right to call the retinal
 sensations indifferent, for there are no visual ideas without retinal
 sensations. If then we wish rigorously to express the given facts, we
 can ascribe a spatial constitution only to _combinations_ of retinal
 sensations with those of movement."

Thus Wundt, dividing theories into 'nativistic' and 'genetic,' calls
his own a genetic theory. To distinguish it from other theories of the
same class, he names it a 'theory of complex local signs.'

 "It supposes two systems of local signs, whose relations--taking the
 eye as an example--we may think as ... the measuring of the manifold
 local-sign system of the retina by the simple local-sign system of
 the movements. In its psychological nature this is a process of
 associative synthesis: it consists in the fusion of both groups of
 sensations into a product, whose elementary components are no longer
 separable from each other in idea. In melting wholly away into the
 product which they create they become consciously undistinguishable,
 and the mind apprehends only their resultant, the intuition of space.
 Thus there obtains a certain analogy between this psychic synthesis
 and that chemical synthesis which out of simple bodies generates a
 compound that appears to our immediate perception as a homogeneous
 whole with new properties."

Now let no modest reader think that if this sounds obscure to him it is
because he does not know the full context; and that if a wise professor
like Wundt can talk so fluently and plausibly about 'combination' and
'psychic synthesis,' it must surely be because those words convey a so
much greater fulness of positive meaning to the scholarly than to the
unlearned mind. Really it is quite the reverse; _all_ the virtue of
the phrase lies in its mere sound and skin. Learning does but make one
the more sensible of its inward unintelligibility. Wundt's 'theory' is
the flimsiest thing in the world. It starts by an untrue assumption,
and then corrects it by an unmeaning phrase. Retinal sensations _are_
spatial; and were they not, no amount of 'synthesis' with equally
spaceless motor sensations could intelligibly make them so. Wundt's
theory is, in short, but an avowal of impotence, and an appeal to
the inscrutable powers of the soul.[268] It confesses that we cannot
analyze the constitution or give the genesis of the spatial quality
in consciousness. But at the same time it says the _antecedents_
thereof are psychical and not cerebral facts. In calling the quality in
question a _sensational_ quality, our own account equally disclaimed
ability to analyze it, but said its antecedents were cerebral, not
psychical--in other words, that it was a _first_ psychical thing. This
is merely a question of probable fact, which the reader may decide.

       *       *       *       *       *

And now what shall be said of Helmholtz? Can I find fault with a book
which, on the whole, I imagine to be one of the four or five greatest
monuments of human genius in the scientific line? If truth impels I
must fain try, and take the risks. It seems to me that Helmholtz's
genius moves most securely when it keeps close to particular facts. At
any rate, it shows least strong in purely speculative passages, which
in the Optics, in spite of many beauties, seem to me fundamentally
vacillating and obscure. The 'empiristic' view which Helmholtz defends
is that the space-determinations we perceive are in every case products
of a process of unconscious inference.[269] The inference is similar to
one from induction or analogy.[270] We always see that form before us
which _habitually_ would have caused the sensation we now have.[271]
But the latter sensation can never be intrinsically spatial, or its
intrinsic space-determinations would never be overcome as they are so
often by the 'illusory' space-determinations it so often suggests.[272]
Since the illusory determination can be traced to a suggestion of
Experience, the 'real' one must also be such a suggestion: so that
_all_ space intuitions are due solely to Experience.[273] The only
psychic activity required for this is the association of ideas.[274]

But how, it may be asked, can association produce a space-quality not
in the things associated? How can we by induction or analogy infer what
we do not already generically know? Can 'suggestions of experience'
reproduce elements which no particular experience originally contained?
This is the point by which Helmholtz's 'empiristic' theory, as a
_theory_, must be judged. No theory is worthy of the name which leaves
such a point obscure.

Well, Helmholtz does so leave it. At one time he seems to fall
back on inscrutable powers of the soul, and to range himself with
the 'psychical stimulists.' He speaks of Kant as having made the
essential step in the matter in distinguishing the content of
experience from that form--space, course--which is given it by the
peculiar faculties of the mind.[275] But elsewhere, again,[276]
speaking of sensationalistic theories which would connect spatially
determinate feelings _directly_ with certain neural events, he says
it is better to assume only such simple psychic activities as we
_know_ to exist, and gives the association of ideas as an instance of
what he means. Later,[277] he reinforces this remark by confessing
that he does not see how any neural process _can_ give rise without
antecedent experience to a ready-made (_fertige_) perception of
space. And, finally, in a single momentous sentence, he speaks of
sensations of _touch_ as if they might be the original material of our
space-percepts--which thus, from the optical point of view, 'may be
assumed as _given_.'[278]

Of course the eye-man has a right to fall back on the skin-man for
help at a pinch. But doesn't this mean that he is a mere eye-man and
not a complete psychologist? In other words, Helmholtz's Optics and
the 'empiristic theory' therein professed must not be understood as
attempts at answering the _general_ question of how space-consciousness
enters the mind. They simply deny that it enters with the first
optical sensations.[279] Our own account has affirmed stoutly that it
enters _then_; but no more than Helmholtz have we pretended to show
_why_. Who calls a thing a first sensation admits he has no theory of
its production. Helmholtz, though all the while without an articulate
theory, makes the world think he has one. He beautifully traces the
immense part which reproductive processes play in our vision of space,
and never--except in that one pitiful little sentence about touch--does
he tell us just what it is they reproduce. He limits himself to
denying that they reproduce originals of a visual sort. And so
difficult is the subject, and so magically do catch-words work on the
popular-scientist ear, that most likely, had he written 'physiological'
instead of 'nativistic,' and 'spiritualistic' instead of 'empiristic'
(which synonyms Hering suggests), numbers of his present empirical
evolutionary followers would fail to find in his teaching anything
worthy of praise. But since he wrote otherwise, they hurrah for him as
a sort of second Locke, dealing another death-blow at the old bugaboo
of 'innate ideas.' His 'nativistic' adversary Hering they probably
imagine--Heaven save the mark!--to be a scholastic in modern disguise.

       *       *       *       *       *

After Wundt and Helmholtz, the most important anti-sensationalist
space-philosopher in Germany is Professor Lipps, whose deduction
of space from an order of non-spatial differences, continuous yet
separate, is a wonderful piece of subtlety and logic. And yet he has
to confess that continuous differences form in the first instance only
a logical series, which _need_ not appear spatial, and that wherever
it does so appear, this must be accounted a 'fact,' due merely 'to the
nature of the soul.'[280]

Lipps, and almost all the anti-sensationalist theorists except
Helmholtz, seem guilty of that confusion which Mr. Shadworth Hodgson
has done so much to clear away, viz., the confounding the analysis
of an idea with the means of its production. Lipps, for example,
finds that every space we think of can be broken up into positions,
and concludes that in some undefined way the several positions must
have pre-existed in thought before the aggregate space could have
appeared to perception. Similarly Mr. Spencer, defining extension as an
'aggregate of relations of coexistent position,' says "every cognition
of magnitude is a cognition of relations of position,"[281] and "no
idea of extension can arise from the simultaneous excitation" of many
nerves "unless there is a knowledge of their relative positions."[282]
Just so Prof. Bain insists that the very _meaning_ of space is scope
for movement,[283] and that therefore distance and magnitude _can_ be
no original attributes of the eye's sensibility. Similarly because
movement is analyzable into positions occupied at successive moments
by the mover, philosophers (e.g. Schopenhauer, as quoted above)
have repeatedly denied the possibility of _its_ being an immediate
sensation. We have, however, seen that it is the most immediate of all
our space-sensations. Because it can only occur in a definite direction
the impossibility of perceiving it without perceiving its direction has
been decreed--a decree which the simplest experiment overthrows.[284]
It is a case of what I have called the 'psychologist's fallacy':
mere acquaintance with space is treated as tantamount to every sort
of knowledge about it, the conditions of the latter are demanded of
the former state of mind, and all sorts of mythological processes
are brought in to help.[285] As well might one say that because the
world consists of all its parts, therefore we can only apprehend it
at all by having unconsciously summed these up in our head. It is the
old idea of our actual knowledge being drawn out from a pre-existent
potentiality, an idea which, whatever worth it may metaphysically
possess, does no good in psychology.

My own sensationalistic account has derived most aid and comfort
from the writings of Hering, A. W. Volkmann, Stumpf, Le Conte, and
Schön. All these authors allow ample scope to that Experience which
Berkeley's genius saw to be a present factor in all our visual acts.
But they give Experience some grist to grind, which the _soi-distant_
'empiristic' school forgets to do. Stumpf seems to me the most
philosophical and profound of all these writers; and I owe him much. I
should doubtless have owed almost as much to Mr. James Ward, had his
article on Psychology in the Encyclopædia Britannica appeared before my
own thoughts were written down. The literature of the question is in
all languages very voluminous. I content myself with referring to the
bibliography in Helmholtz's and Aubert's works on Physiological Optics
for the visual part of the subject, and with naming in a note the
ablest works in the English tongue which have treated of the subject in
a _general_ way.[286]

       *       *       *       *       *

[140] Reprinted, with considerable revision, from 'Mind' for 1887.

[141] Prof. Jastrow has found that invariably we tend to
_underestimate_ the amount of our skin which may be stimulated by
contact with an object when we express it in terms of visual space;
that is, when asked to mark on paper the extent of skin affected, we
always draw it much too small. This shows that the eye gets as much
space feeling from the smaller line as the skin gets from the larger
one. Cf. Jastrow: Mind, xi. 546-7; American Journal of Psychology, iii.
53.

[142] Amongst sounds the graver ones seem the most extensive. Stumpf
gives three reasons for this: 1) association with bigger causes; 2)
wider reverberation of the hand and body when grave notes are sung; 3)
audibility at a greater distance. He thinks that these three reasons
dispense us from supposing an immanent extensity in the sensation of
sound as such. See his remarks in the Tonpsychologie, i. 207-211.

[143] Encyclopædia Britannica, 9th Edition, article Psychology, pp. 46,
58.

[144] Philosophical Transactions (1841).

[145] Hermann's Handb. d. Physiol., Bd. iii. 1, §. 575.

[146] _Loc. cit._ §. 572.

[147] Elemente der Psychophysik, ii. 475-6.

[148] See Foster's Text-book of Physiology, bk. iii. c. vi. § 2.

[149] Fechner, who was ignorant of the but lately discovered function
of the semi-circular canals, gives a different explanation of the
organic seat of these feelings. They are probably highly composite.
With me, actual movements in the eyes play a considerable part in
them, though I am hardly conscious of the peculiar feelings in the
scalp which Fechner goes on to describe thus: "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 set of 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 outwards in over the whole cranium, undoubtedly caused by a
contraction of the muscles of the scalp. This harmonizes very well with
the expressions, _sich den Kopf zerbrechen, den Kopf zusammennehmen_.
In a former illness, when I could not endure the slightest effort after
continuous thought, and had no theoretical bias on this question, the
muscles of the scalp, especially those of the back-head, assumed a
fairly morbid degree of sensibility whenever I tried to think." (Elem.
der Psychophysik, ii, 490-91.)

[150] That the sensation in question is one of tactile rather than
of acoustic sensibility would seem proved by the fact that a medical
friend of the writer, both of whose _membranæ tympani_ are quite
normal, but one of whose ears is almost totally deaf, feels the
presence and withdrawal of objects as well at one ear as at the other.

[151] The skin seems to obey a different law from the eye here. If a
given retinal tract be excited, first by a series of points, and next
by the two extreme points, with the interval between them unexcited,
this interval will seem considerably less in the second case than it
seemed in the first. In the skin the unexcited interval feels the
larger. The reader may easily verify the facts in this case by taking
a visiting-card, cutting one edge of it into a saw-tooth pattern, and
from the opposite edge cutting out all but the two corners, and then
comparing the feelings aroused by the two edges when held against the
skin.

[152] Classen, Physiologie des Gesichtssinnes, p. 114; see also A.
Riehl, Der Philosophische Kriticismus, ii. p. 149.

[153] It is worth while at this point to call attention with some
emphasis to the fact that, though the anatomical condition of the
feeling _resembles_ the feeling itself, such resemblance cannot be
taken by our understanding to explain _why_ the feeling should be
just what it is. We hear it untiringly reiterated by materialists and
spiritualists alike that we can see no possible inward reason why a
certain brain-process should produce the feeling of redness and another
of anger: the one process is no more red than the other is angry, and
the coupling of process and feeling is, as far as our understanding
goes, a juxtaposition pure and simple. But in the matter of _spatial_
feeling, where the retinal patch that produces a triangle in the mind
is itself a triangle, etc., it looks at first sight as if the sensation
might be a direct cognition of its own neural condition. Were this
true, however, our sensation should be one of _multitude_ rather
than of continuous extent; for the condition is _number_ of optical
nerve-termini, and even this is only a remote condition and not an
immediate condition. The immediate condition of the feeling is not the
process in the retina, but the process in the brain; and the process
in the brain may, for aught we know, be as unlike a triangle,--nay,
it probably is so,--as it is unlike redness or rage. It is simply a
_coincidence_ that in the case of space one of the organic conditions,
viz., the triangle impressed on the skin or the retina, should lead
to a representation in the mind of the subject observed similar to
that which it produces in the psychological observer. In no other
kind of case is the coincidence found. Even should we admit that we
cognize triangles in space because of our immediate cognition of the
triangular shape of our excited group of nerve-tips, the matter would
hardly be more transparent, for the mystery would still remain, why
are we so much better cognizant of triangles on our finger-tips than
on the nerve-tips of our back, on our eye than on our ear, and on any
of these parts than in our brain? Thos. Brown very rightly rejects the
notion of explaining the shape of the space perceived by the shape of
the 'nervous expansion affected.' "If this alone were necessary, we
should have square inches and half inches, and various other forms,
rectilinear and curvilinear, of fragrance and sound." (Lectures, XXII.)

[154] Musical tones, e.g., have an order of quality independent either
of their space- or time-order. Music comes from the time-order of the
notes upsetting their quality-order. In general, if _a b c d e f g h
i j k_, etc., stand for an arrangement of feelings in the order of
their quality, they may assume _any_ space-order or time-order, as _d
e f a h g_, etc., and still the order of quality will remain fixed and
unchanged.

[155] The whole science of geometry may be said to owe its being to the
exorbitant interest which the human mind takes in _lines_. We cut space
up in every direction in order to manufacture them.

[156] Kant was, I believe, the first to call attention to this last
order of facts. After pointing out that two opposite spherical
triangles, two gloves of a pair, two spirals wound in contrary
directions, have identical inward determinations, that is, have their
parts defined with relation _to each other_ by the same law, and so
must be _conceived_ as identical, he showed that the impossibility
of their mutual superposition obliges us to assign to each figure of
a symmetrical pair a peculiar difference of its own which can only
consist in an _outward_ determination or relation of its parts, no
longer to each other, but to the whole of an objectively outlying space
with its points of the compass given absolutely. This in_con_ceivable
difference is perceived only "through the relation to right and
left, which is a matter of immediate intuition." In these last words
(_welches unmittelbar auf Anschauung geht_--Prolegomena, § 12) Kant
expresses all that we have meant by speaking of up and down, right and
left, as _sensations_. He is wrong, however, in invoking relation to
extrinsic total space as essential to the existence of these contrasts
in figures. Relation to our own body is enough.

[157] In the eyes of many it will have seemed strange to call a
relation a mere line, and a line a mere sensation. We may easily learn
a great deal _about_ any relation, say that between two points: we may
divide the line which joins these, and distinguish it, and classify
it, and find out _its_ relations by drawing or representing new lines,
and so on. But all this further industry has naught to do with our
_acquaintance_ with the relation itself, in its first intention. So
cognized, the relation _is_ the line and nothing more. It would indeed
be fair to call it something less; and in fact it is easy to understand
how most of us come to feel as if the line were a much grosser thing
than the relation. The line is broad or narrow, blue or red, made by
this object or by that alternately, in the course of our experience;
it is therefore independent of any one of these accidents; and so,
from viewing it as no one of _such_ sensible qualities, we may end
by thinking of it as something which cannot be defined except as the
negation of all sensible quality whatever, and which needs to be put
_into_ the sensations by a mysterious act of 'relating thought.'

Another reason why we get to feel as if a space-relation must be
something other than the mere feeling of a line or angle is that
between two positions we can potentially make any number of lines and
angles, or find, to suit our purposes, endlessly numerous relations.
The sense of this indefinite potentiality cleaves to our words when we
speak in a general way of 'relations of place,' and misleads us into
supposing that not even any single one of them can be exhaustively
equated by a single angle or a single line.

[158] This often happens when the warm and cold points, or the round
and pointed ones, are applied to the skin within the limits of a single
'Empfindungskreis.'

[159] Vierordt, Grundriss der Physiologie, 5te Auflage (1877), pp. 326,
436.

[160] Vorlesungen üb. Menschen- u. Thierseele (Leipzig, 1863), i. 214.
See also Ladd's Physiological Psychology, pp. 396-8, and compare the
account by G. Stanley Hall (Mind, x. 571) of the sensations produced
by moving a blunt point lightly over the skin. Points of cutting pain,
quivering, thrilling, whirling, tickling, scratching, and acceleration,
alternated with each other along the surface.

[161] Of the anatomical and physiological conditions of these facts we
know as yet but little, and that little need not here be discussed.
Two principal hypotheses have been invoked in the case of the retina.
Wundt (Menschen- u. Thierseele, i. 214) called attention to the changes
of color-sensibility which the retina displays as the image of the
colored object passes from the fovea to the periphery. The color alters
and becomes darker, and the change is more rapid in certain directions
than in others. This alteration in general, however, is one of which,
_as such_, we are wholly unconscious. We see the sky as bright blue
all over, the modifications of the blue sensation being interpreted by
us, not as differences in the objective color, but as distinctions in
its locality. Lotze (Medizinische Psychologie, 333, 355), on the other
hand, has pointed out the peculiar tendency which each particular point
of the retina has to call forth that movement of the eyeball which
will carry the image of the exciting object from the point in question
to the _fovea_. With each separate tendency to movement (as with each
actual movement) we may suppose a peculiar modification of sensibility
to be conjoined. This modification would constitute the peculiar local
tingeing of the image by each point. See also Sully's Psychology, pp.
118-121. Prof. B. Erdman has quite lately (Vierteljahrsschrift f. wiss.
Phil., x. 324-9) denied the existence of all evidence for such immanent
_qualia_ of feeling characterizing each locality. Acute as his remarks
are, they quite fail to convince me. On the skin the _qualia_ are
evident, I should say. Where, as on the retina, they are less so (Kries
and Auerbach), this may well be a mere difficulty of discrimination not
yet educated to the analysis.

[162] 1852, p. 331.

[163] Maybe the localization of intracranial pain is itself due to
such association as this of local signs with each other, rather than
to their qualitative similarity in neighboring parts (_supra_, p.
19); though it is conceivable that association and similarity itself
should here have one and the same neural basis. If we suppose the
sensory nerves from those parts of the body beneath any patch of skin
to terminate in the same sensorial brain-tract as those from the skin
itself, and if the excitement of any one fibre tends to irradiate
through the whole of that tract, the feelings of all fibres going to
that tract would presumably both have a similar intrinsic quality,
and at the same time tend each to arouse the other. Since the same
nerve-trunk in most cases supplies the skin and the parts beneath, the
anatomical hypothesis presents nothing improbable.

[164] Unless, indeed, the foot happen to be spontaneously tingling or
something of the sort at the moment. The whole surface of the body is
always in a state of semi-conscious irritation which needs only the
emphasis of attention, or of some accidental inward irritation, to
become strong at any point.

[165] It is true that the inside of the forearm, though its
discriminative sensibility is often less than that of the outside,
usually rises very prominently into consciousness when the latter is
touched. Its _æsthetic_ sensibility to contact is a good deal finer. We
enjoy stroking it from the extensor to the flexor surface around the
ulnar side more than in the reverse direction. Pronating movements give
rise to contacts in this order, and are frequently indulged in when the
back of the forearm feels an object against it.

[166] These facts were first noticed by Wundt: see his Beiträge, p.
140, 202. See also Lamansky, Pflüger's Archiv, xi. 418.

[167] So far all has been plain sailing, but our course begins to be so
tortuous when we descend into minuter detail that I will treat of the
more precise determination of locality in a long note. When _P_ recalls
an ideal line leading to the fovea the line is felt in its entirety
and but vaguely; whilst _P_, which we supposed to be a single star of
actual light, stands out in strong distinction from it. The ground of
the distinction between _P_ and the ideal line which it terminates is
manifest--_P_ being vivid while the line is faint; _but why should P
hold the particular position it does, at the end of the line, rather
than anywhere else--for example, in its middle?_ That seems something
not at all manifest.

To clear up our thoughts about this latter mystery, let us take the
case of an actual line of light, none of whose parts is ideal. The
feeling of the line is produced, as we know, when a multitude of
retinal points are excited together, each of which _when excited
separately_ would give rise to _one_ of the feelings called local
signs. Each of these signs is the feeling of a small space. From their
simultaneous arousal we might well suppose a feeling of larger space
to result. But why is it necessary that _in_ this larger spaciousness
the sign _a_ should appear always at one end of the line, _z_ at the
other, and _m_ in the middle? For though the line be a unitary streak
of light, its several constituent points can nevertheless break out
from it, and become alive, each for itself, under the selective eye of
attention.

The uncritical reader, giving his first careless glance at the
subject, will say that there is no mystery in this, and that 'of
course' local signs must appear alongside of each other, each in its
own place;--there is no other way possible. But the more philosophic
student, whose business it is to discover difficulties quite as much
as to get rid of them, will reflect that it is conceivable that the
partial factors might fuse into a larger space, and yet not each be
located within it any more than a voice is _located_ in a chorus. He
will wonder how, after combining into the line, the points _can_ become
severally alive again: the separate puffs of a 'sirene' no longer
strike the ear after they have fused into a certain pitch of sound.
He will recall the fact that when, after looking at things with one
eye closed, we double, by opening the other eye, the number of retinal
points affected, the new retinal sensations do not as a rule appear
_alongside_ of the old ones and additional to them, but merely make the
old ones seem larger and nearer. Why should the affection of new points
on the _same_ retina have so different a result? In fact, he will
see no sort of logical connection between (1) the original separate
local signs, (2) the line as a unit, (3) the line with the points
discriminated in it, and (4) the various nerve-processes which subserve
all these different things. He will suspect our local sign of being a
very slippery and ambiguous sort of creature. Positionless at first,
it no sooner appears in the midst of a gang of companions than it is
found maintaining the strictest position of its own, and assigning
place to each of its associates. How is this possible? Must we accept
what we rejected a while ago as absurd, and admit the points each to
have position _in se_? Or must we suspect that our whole construction
has been fallacious, and that we have tried to conjure up, out of
association, qualities which the associates never contained?

There is no doubt a real difficulty here; and the shortest way of
dealing with it would be to confess it insoluble and ultimate. Even if
position be not an intrinsic character of any one of those sensations
we have called local signs, we must still admit that there is
_something about_ every one of them that stands for the potentiality of
position, and is the _ground_ why the local sign, when it gets placed
at all, gets placed _here_ rather than _there_. If this 'something' be
interpreted as a physiological something, as a mere nerve-process, it
is easy to say in a blank way that when it is excited alone, it is an
'ultimate fact' (1) that a positionless spot will appear; that when it
is excited together with other similar processes, but _without_ the
process of discriminative attention, it is another 'ultimate fact'
(2) that a unitary line will come; and that the final 'ultimate fact'
(3) is that, when the nerve-process is excited _in combination with_
that other process which subserves the feeling of attention, what
results will be the line with the local sign inside of it determined
to a particular place. Thus we should escape the responsibility of
explaining, by falling back on the everlasting inscrutability of the
psycho-neural nexus. The moment we call the ground of localization
physiological, we need only point out _how_, in those cases in which
localization occurs, the physiological process _differs_ from those
in which it does not, to have done all we can possibly do in the
matter. This would be unexceptionable logic, and with it we might let
the matter drop, satisfied that there was no self-contradiction in
it, but only the universal psychological puzzle of how a new mode of
consciousness emerges whenever a fundamentally new mode of nervous
action occurs.

But, blameless as such tactics would logically be on our part, let us
see whether we cannot push our theoretic insight a little farther.
It seems to me we can. We cannot, it is true, give a reason why the
line we feel when process (2) awakens should have its own peculiar
shape; nor can we explain the essence of the process of discriminative
attention. But we can see why, if the brute facts be admitted that
a line may have one of its parts singled out by attention at all,
and that that part may appear in relation to other parts at all, the
relation must be _in the line itself_,--for the line and the parts are
the only things supposed to be in consciousness. And we can furthermore
suggest a reason why parts appearing thus in relation to each other in
a line should fall into an immutable order, and each within that order
keep its characteristic place.

If a lot of such local signs all have any quality which evenly augments
as we pass from one to the other, we can arrange them in an ideal
serial order, in which any one local sign must lie below those with
more, above those with less, of the quality in question. It must divide
the series into two parts,--unless indeed it have a maximum or minimum
of the quality, when it either begins or ends it.

Such an ideal series of local signs in the mind is, however, not yet
identical with the feeling of a line in space. Touch a dozen points on
the skin _successively_, and there seems no necessary reason why the
notion of a definite line should emerge, even though we be strongly
aware of a gradation of quality among the touches. We may of course
symbolically arrange them in a line in our thought, but we can always
distinguish between a line symbolically thought and a line directly
felt.

But note now the peculiarity of the nerve-processes of all these local
signs: though they may give no line when excited successively, when
excited _together_ they do give the actual sensation of a line in
space. The sum of them is the neural process of that line; the sum of
their feelings is the feeling of that line; and if we begin to single
out particular points from the line, and notice them by their rank, it
is impossible to see how this rank can _appear_ except as an actual
fixed space-position sensibly felt as a bit of the total line. The
scale itself appearing as a line, rank in it must appear as a definite
part of the line. If the seven notes of an octave, when heard together,
appeared to the sense of hearing as an outspread _line_ of sound--which
it is needless to say they do not--why then no one note could be
discriminated without being localized, according to its pitch, _in_ the
line, either as one of its extremities or as some part between.

But not alone the gradation of their quality arranges the local-sign
feelings in a scale. Our _movements_ arrange them also in a time-scale.
Whenever a stimulus passes from point _a_ of the skin or retina to
point _f_, it awakens the local-sign feelings in the perfectly definite
time-order _abcdef_. It cannot excite _f_ until _cde_ have been
successively aroused. The feeling _c_ sometimes is preceded by _ab_,
sometimes followed by _ba_, according to the movement's direction;
the result of it all being that we never feel either _a, c,_ or _f_,
without there clinging to it faint reverberations of the various
time-orders of transition in which, throughout past experience, it
has been aroused. To the local sign _a_ there clings the tinge or
tone, the penumbra or fringe, of the transition _bcd_. To _f_, to _c_,
there cling quite different tones. Once admit the principle that a
feeling may be tinged by the reproductive consciousness of an habitual
transition, even when the transition is not made, and it seems entirely
natural to admit that, if the transition be habitually in the order
_abcdef_, and if _a, c,_ and _f_ be felt separately at all, _a_ will be
felt with an essential _earliness_, _f_ with an essential _lateness_,
and that _c_ will fall between. Thus those psychologists who set
little store by local signs and great store by movements in explaining
space-perception, would have a perfectly definite time-order, due to
motion, by which to account for the definite order of positions that
appears when sensitive spots are excited all at once. Without, however,
the preliminary admission of the 'ultimate fact' that this collective
excitement shall feel like a _line_ and nothing else, it can never be
explained why the new order should needs be an order of _positions_,
and not of merely ideal serial rank. We shall hereafter have any amount
of opportunity to observe how thoroughgoing is the participation of
motion in all our spatial measurements. Whether the local signs have
their respective qualities evenly graduated or not, the feelings of
transition must be set down as among the _veræ causæ_ in localization.
But the gradation of the local signs is hardly to be doubted; so we may
believe ourselves really to possess two sets of reasons for localizing
any point we may happen to distinguish from out the midst of any line
or any larger space.

[168] M. Binet (Revue Philosophique, Sept. 1880, page 291) says we
judge them locally different as soon as their sensations differ enough
for us to distinguish them as qualitatively different when successively
excited. This is not strictly true. Skin-sensations, different enough
to be discriminated when _successive_, may still fuse locally if
excited both at once.

[169] It may, however, be said that even in the tongue there is a
determination of bitter flavors to the back and of acids to the front
edge of the organ. Spices likewise affect its sides and front, and a
taste like that of alum localizes itself, by its styptic effect on the
portion of mucous membrane, which it immediately touches, more sharply
than roast pork, for example, which stimulates all parts alike. The
pork, therefore, tastes more spacious than the alum or the pepper.
In the nose, too, certain smells, of which vinegar may be taken as
the type, seem less spatially extended than heavy, suffocating odors,
like musk. The reason of this appears to be that the former inhibit
inspiration by their sharpness, whilst the latter are drawn into the
lungs, and thus excite an objectively larger surface. The ascription of
height and depth to certain notes seems due, not to any localization of
the sounds, but to the fact that a feeling of vibration in the chest
and tension in the gullet accompanies the singing of a bass note,
whilst, when we sing high, the palatine mucous membrane is drawn upon
by the muscles which move the larynx, and awakens a feeling in the roof
of the mouth.

The only real objection to the law of partial stimulation laid down
in the text is one that might be drawn from the organ of hearing;
for, according to modern theories, the cochlea may have its separate
nerve-termini exclusively excited by sounds of differing pitch, and
yet the sounds seem all to fill a common space, and not necessarily
to be arranged alongside of each other. At most the high note is felt
as a thinner, brighter streak against a darker background. In an
article on Space, published in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy
for January, 1879, I ventured to suggest that possibly the auditory
nerve termini might be "excited all at once by sounds of any pitch,
as the whole retina would be by every luminous point if there were
no dioptric apparatus affixed." And I added: "Notwithstanding the
brilliant conjectures of the last few years which assign different
acoustic end-organs to different rates of air-wave, we are still
greatly in the dark about the subject; and I, for my part, would
much more confidently reject a theory of hearing which violated the
principles advanced in this article than give up those principles for
the sake of any hypothesis hitherto published about either organs of
Corti or basilar membrane." Professor Rutherford's theory of hearing,
advanced at the meeting of the British Association for 1886, already
furnishes an alternative view which would make hearing present no
exception to the space-theory I defend and which, whether destined to
be proved true or false, ought, at any rate to make us feel that the
Helmholtzian theory is probably not the last word in the physiology of
hearing. Stepano, ff. (Hermann und Schwalbe's Jahresbericht, xv. 404,
Literature 1886) reports a case in which more than the upper half of
one cochlea was lost without any such deafness to deep notes on that
side as Helmholtz's theory would require.

[170] Donaldson, in Mind, x. 399, 577; Goldscheider, in Archiv f.
(Anat. u.) Physiologie; Blix, in Zeitschrift für Biologie. A good
résumé may be found in Ladd's Physiol. Psychology, part ii. chap. iv.
§§ 21-23.

[171] I tried on nine or ten people, making numerous observations on
each, what difference it made in the discrimination of two points
to have them alike or unlike. The points chosen were (1) two large
needle-heads, (2) two screw-heads, and (3) a needle-head and a
screw-head. The distance of the screw-heads was measured from their
centres. I found that when the points gave diverse qualities of
feeling (as in 3), this facilitated the discrimination, but much less
strongly than I expected. The difference, in fact, would often not be
perceptible twenty times running. When, however, one of the points
was endowed with a rotary movement, the other remaining still, the
doubleness of the points became much more evident than before. To
observe this I took an ordinary pair of compasses with one point blunt,
and the movable leg replaced by a metallic rod which could, at any
moment, be made to rotate _in situ_ by a dentist's drilling-machine, to
which it was attached. The compass had then its points applied to the
skin at such a distance apart as to be felt as one impression. Suddenly
rotating the drill-apparatus then almost always made them seem as two.

[172] This is only another example of what I call 'the psychologist's
fallacy'--thinking that the mind he is studying must necessarily be
conscious of the object after the fashion in which the psychologist
himself is conscious of it.

[173] Sitzb. der. k. Akad. Wien, Bd. lxxii., Abth. 8 (1875).

[174] Zeitschrift für Biologie, xii. 226 (1876).

[175] Vierteljahrsch. für wiss. Philos., ii. 377.

[176] Exner tries to show that the structure of the faceted eye of
articulates adapts it for perceiving motions almost exclusively.

[177] Schneider tries to explain why a sensory surface is so much more
excited when its impression moves. It has long since been noticed how
much more acute is discrimination of successive than of simultaneous
differences. But in the case of a moving impression, say on the retina,
we have a summation of both sorts of difference; whereof the natural
effect must be to produce the most perfect discrimination of all.

[Illustration: FIG. 53.]

In the left-hand figure let the dark spot B move, for example, from
right to left. At the outset there is the simultaneous contrast of
black and white in B and A. When the motion has occurred so that the
right-hand figure is produced, the same contrast remains, the black
and the white having changed places. But in addition to it there is
a double successive contrast, first in A, which, a moment ago white,
has now become black; and second in B, which, a moment ago black,
has now become white. If we make each single feeling of contrast = 1
(a supposition far too favorable to the state of rest), the sum of
contrasts in the case of motion will be 3, as against 1 in the state
of rest. That is, our attention will be called by a treble force to
the difference of color, provided the color begin to move.--(Cf. also
Fleischl, Physiologische Optische Notizen, 2te Mittheilung, Wiener
Sitzungsberichte, 1882.)

[178] Brown, Bain, J. S. Mill, and in a modified manner Wundt,
Helmholtz, Sully, etc.

[179] M. Ch. Dunan, in his forcibly written essay 'l'Espace Visuel et
l'Espace Tactile' in the Revue Philosophique for 1888, endeavors to
prove that surfaces alone give no perception of extent, by citing the
way in which the blind go to work to gain an idea of an object's shape.
If surfaces were the percipient organ, he says, "both the seeing and
the blind ought to gain an exact idea of the size (and shape) of an
object by merely laying their hand flat upon it (provided of course
that it were smaller than the hand), and this because of their direct
appreciation of the amount of tactile surface affected, and with no
recourse to the muscular sense.... But the fact is that a person
born blind never proceeds in this way to measure objective surfaces.
The only means which he has of getting at the size of a body is that
of running his finger along the lines by which it is bounded. For
instance, if you put into the hands of one born blind a book whose
dimensions are unknown to him, he will begin by resting it against
his chest so as to hold it horizontal; then, bringing his two hands
together at the middle of the edge opposite to the one against his
body, he will draw them asunder till they reach the ends of the edge
in question; and then, and not till then, will he be able to say what
the length of the object is" (vol. xxv. p. 148). I think that anyone
who will try to appreciate the size and shape of an object by simply
'laying his hand flat upon it' will find that the great obstacle is
that he _feels the contours_ so imperfectly. The moment, however, the
hands move, the contours are emphatically and distinctly felt. All
perception of shape and size is perception of contours, and first of
all these must be made _sharp_. Motion does this; and the impulse to
move our organs in perception is primarily due to the craving which we
feel to get our surface-sensations sharp. When it comes to the naming
and measuring of objects in terms of some common standard we shall
see presently how movements help also; but no more in this case than
the other do they help, because the quality of extension itself is
contributed by the 'muscular sense.'

[180] Fechner describes (Psychophysik, i. 132) a 'method of
equivalents' for measuring the sensibility of the skin. Two compasses
are used, one on the part A, another on the part B, of the surface. The
points on B must be adjusted so that their distance apart appears equal
to that between the points on A. With the place A constant, the second
pair of points must be varied a great deal for every change in the
place B, though for the same A and B the relation of the two compasses
is remarkably constant, and continues unaltered for months, provided
but few experiments are made on each day. If, however, we practise
daily their difference grows less, in accordance with the law given in
the text.

[181] Prof. Jastrow gives as the result of his experiments this general
conclusion (Am. Journal of Psychology, iii. 53): "The space-perceptions
of disparate senses are themselves disparate, and whatever harmony
there is amongst them we are warranted in regarding as the result
of experience. The spacial notions of one deprived of the sense of
sight and reduced to the use of the other space-senses must indeed
be different from our own." But he continues: "The existence of the
striking disparities between our visual and our other space-perceptions
without confusing us, and, indeed, without usually being noticed, can
only be explained by the tendency to interpret all dimensions _into
their visual equivalents_." But this author gives no reasons for
saying 'visual' rather than 'tactile;' and I must continue to think
that probabilities point the other way so far as what we call real
magnitudes are concerned.

[182] Cf. Lipps on 'Complication,' Grundtatsachen, etc., p. 579.

[183] Ventriloquism shows this very prettily. The ventriloquist talks
without moving his lips, and at the same time draws our attention to a
doll, a box, or some other object. We forthwith locate the voice within
this object. On the stage an actor ignorant of music sometimes has to
sing, or play on the guitar or violin. He goes through the _motions_
before our eyes, whilst in the orchestra or elsewhere the music is
performed. But because as we listen we see the actor, it is almost
impossible not to _hear_ the music as if coming from where he sits or
stands.

[184] Cf. Shand, in Mind, xiii. 340.

[185] See, e.g., Bain's Senses and Intellect, pp. 366-7, 371.

[186] When, for example, a baby looks at its own moving hand, it sees
one object at the same time that it feels another. Both interest its
attention, and it locates them together. But the felt object's size is
the more constant size, just as the felt object is, on the whole, the
more interesting and important object; and so the retinal sensations
become regarded as its signs and have their 'real space-values'
interpreted in tangible terms.

[187] The incoherence of the different primordial sense-spaces _inter
se_ is often made a pretext for denying to the primitive bodily
feelings any spatial quality at all. Nothing is commoner than to hear
it said: "Babies have originally no spatial perception; for when a
baby's toe aches he does not place the pain in the toe. He makes no
definite movements of defence, and may be vaccinated without being
held." The facts are true enough; but the interpretation is all wrong.
What really happens is that _the baby does not place his 'toe' in the
pain_; for he knows nothing of his 'toe' as yet. He has not attended
to it as a visual object; he has not handled it with his fingers; nor
have its normal organic sensations or contacts yet become interesting
enough to be discriminated from the whole massive feeling of the foot,
or even of the leg to which it belongs. In short, the toe is neither
a member of the babe's optical space, of his hand-movement space, nor
an independent member of his leg-and-foot space. It has actually no
mental existence yet save as this little pain-space. What wonder, then,
if the pain seem a little space-world all by itself? But let the pain
once associate itself with these other space-worlds, and its space
will become part of their space. Let the baby feel the nurse stroking
the limb and awakening the pain every time her finger passes towards
the toe; let him look on and see her finger on the toe every time
the pain shoots up; let him handle his foot himself and get the pain
whenever the toe comes into his fingers or his mouth; let moving the
leg exacerbate the pain,--and all is changed. The space of the pain
becomes identified with that part of each of the other spaces which
gets felt when it awakens; and by their identity with _it_ these parts
are identified with each other, and grow systematically connected as
members of a larger extensive whole.

[188] 'Pourquoi les Sensations visuelles sont elles étendues?' in
Revue Philosophique, iv. 167.--As the proofs of this chapter are being
corrected, I receive the third 'Heft' of Münsterberg's Beiträge zur
Experimentellen Psychologie, in which that vigorous young psychologist
reaffirms (if I understand him after so hasty a glance) more radically
than ever the doctrine that muscular sensation proper is our one means
of measuring extension. Unable to reopen the discussion here, I am in
duty bound to call the attention of the reader to Herr M.'s work.

[189] Even if the figure be drawn on a board instead of in the air, the
variations of contact on the finger's surface will be much simpler than
the peculiarities of the traced figure itself.

[190] See for example Duchenne, Electrisation localisée, pp. 727, 770,
Leyden; Virchow's Archiv, Bd. xlvii. (1869).

[191] E.g., Eulenburg, Lehrb. d. Nervenkrankheiten (Berlin), 1878, i. 3.

[192] 'Ueber den Kraftsinn,' Virchow's Archiv, Bd. lxxvii. 134.

[193] Archiv f. (Anat. u) Physiologie (1889), pp. 369, 540.

[194] Direction in its 'first intention,' of course; direction with
which so far we merely become _acquainted_, and _about_ which we know
nothing save perhaps its difference from another direction a moment ago
experienced in the same way!

[195] I have said hardly anything about associations with visual space
in the foregoing account, because I wished to represent a process which
the blind and the seeing man might equally share. It is to be noticed
that the space suggested to the imagination when the joint moves, and
projected to the distance of the finger-tip, is not represented as any
_specific_ skin-tract. What the seeing man imagines is a visible path;
what the blind man imagines is rather a generic image, an abstraction
from many skin-spaces whose local signs have neutralized each other,
and left nothing but their common vastness behind. We shall see as we
go on that this generic abstraction of space-magnitude from the various
local peculiarities of feeling which accompanied it when it was for
the first time felt, occurs on a considerable scale in the acquired
perceptions of blind as well as of seeing men.

[196] The ideal enlargement of a system of sensations by the mind is
nothing exceptional. Vision is full of it; and in the manual arts,
where a workman gets a tool larger than the one he is accustomed to
and has suddenly to adapt all his movements to its scale, or where he
has to execute a familiar set of movements in an unnatural position of
body; where a piano-player meets an instrument with unusually broad or
narrow keys; where a man has to alter the size of his handwriting--we
see how promptly the mind multiplies once for all, as it were, the
whole series of its operations by a constant factor, and has not to
trouble itself after that with further adjustment of the details.

[197] Pflüger's Archiv, xlv. 65.

[198] Untersuchungen im Gebiete der Optik, Leipzig (1863), p. 188.

[199] Problems of Life and Mind, prob. vi. chap. iv. § 45.

[200] Volkmann, _op. cit._ p. 189. Compare also what Hering says of
the inability in his own case to make after-images seem to move when
he rolls his closed eyes in their sockets; and of the insignificance
of his feelings of convergence for the sense of distance (Beiträge zur
Physiologie, 1881-2, pp. 31, 141). Helmholtz also allows to the muscles
of convergence a very feeble share in producing our sense of the third
dimension (Physiologische Optik, 649-59).

[201] Compare Lipps, Psychologische Studien (1885), p. 18, and the
other arguments given on pp. 12 to 27. The most plausible reasons
_for_ contractions of the eyeball-muscles being admitted as original
contributors to the perception of extent, are those of Wundt,
Physiologische Psychologie, ii. 96-100. They are drawn from certain
constant errors in our estimate of lines and angles; which, however,
are susceptible, all of them, of different interpretations (see
some of them further on).--Just as my MS. goes to the printer, Herr
Münsterberg's Beiträge zur experimentellen Psychologie, Heft 2, comes
into my hands with experiments on the measurement of space recorded in
it, which, in the author's view, prove the feeling of muscular strain
to be a principal factor in our vision of extent. As Münsterberg worked
three hours a day for a year and a half at comparing the length of
lines, seen with his eyes in different positions; and as he carefully
averaged and 'percented' 20,000 observations, his conclusion must be
listened to with great respect. Briefly it is this, that "our judgments
of size depend on a comparison of the intensity of the feelings of
movement which arise in our eyeball-muscles as we glance over the
distance, and which fuse with the sensations of light" (p. 142). The
facts upon which the conclusion is based are certain constant errors
which Münsterberg found according as the standard or given interval was
to the right or the left of the interval to be marked off as equal to
it, or as it was above or below it, or stood in some more complicated
relation still. He admits that he cannot explain all the errors in
detail, and that we "stand before results which seem surprising and
not to be unravelled, because we cannot analyze the elements which
enter into the complex sensation which we receive." But he has no
doubt whatever of the general fact "that the movements of the eyes
and the sense of their position when fixed exert so decisive an
influence on our estimate of the spaces seen, that the errors cannot
possibly be explained by anything else than the movement-feelings and
their reproductions in the memory" (pp. 166, 167). It is presumptuous
to doubt a man's opinion when you haven't had his experience; and
yet there are a number of points which make me feel like suspending
judgment in regard to Herr M.'s _dictum_. He found, for example, a
constant tendency to underestimate intervals lying to the right, and
to overestimate intervals lying to the left. He ingeniously explains
this as a result of the habit of _reading_, which trains us to move our
eyes easily along straight lines from left to right, whereas in looking
from right to left we move them in curved lines across the page. As we
_measure intervals as straight lines_, it costs more muscular effort
to measure from right to left than the other way, and an interval
lying to the left seems to us consequently longer than it really is.
Now I have been a reader for more years than Herr Münsterberg; and yet
with me there is a strongly pronounced error the other way. It is the
rightward-lying interval which to me seems longer than it really is.
Moreover, Herr M. wears concave spectacles, and looked through them
with his _head fixed_. May it not be that some of the errors were due
to distortion of the retinal image, as the eye looked no longer through
the centre but through the margin of the glass? In short, with all the
presumptions which we have seen against muscular contraction being
definitely felt as length, I think that there may be explanations of
Herr M.'s results which have escaped even his sagacity; and I call for
a suspension of judgment until they shall have been confirmed by other
observers. I do not myself doubt that our feeling of seen extent may
be _altered_ by concomitant muscular feelings. In Chapter XVII (pp.
28-30) we saw many examples of similar alterations, interferences
with, or exaltations of, the sensory effect of one nerve-process
by another. I do not see why currents from the muscles or eyelids,
coming in at the same time with a retinal impression, might not make
the latter seem bigger, in the same way that a greater _intensity_ in
the retinal stimulation makes it seem bigger; or in the way that a
greater extent of surface excited makes the color of the surface seem
stronger, or if it be a skin-surface, makes its heat seem greater;
or in the way that the coldness of the dollar on the forehead (in
Weber's old experiments) made the dollar seem heavier. But this is a
_physiological_ way; and the bigness gained is that of the retinal
image after all. If I understand Münsterberg's meaning, it is quite
different from this: the bigness belongs to the muscular feelings, as
such, and is merely _associated_ with those of the retina. _This_ is
what I deny.

[202] Archiv f. (Anat. u.) Physiol. (1889), p. 543.

[203] _Ibid._ p. 496.

[204] _Ibid._ p. 497. Goldscheider thinks that our muscles do not
even give us the feeling of _resistance_, that being also due to the
articular surfaces; whilst _weight_ is due to the tendons. _Ibid._ p.
541.

[205] "Whilst the memories which we seeing folks preserve of a man all
centre round a certain exterior form composed of his image, his height,
his gait, in the blind all these memories are referred to something
quite different, namely, _the sound of his voice_." (Dunan, Rev. Phil.,
xxv. 357.)

[206] Vol. xxv. pp. 357-8.

[207] P. 135.

[208] Essay conc. Hum. Und., bk. ii. chap. ix. § 8.

[209] Philosophical Transactions, 1841. In T. K. Abbot's Sight and
Touch there is a good discussion of these cases. Obviously, positive
cases are of more importance than negative. An under-witted peasant,
Noé M., whose case is described by Dr. Dufour of Lausanne (Guerison
d'un Aveugle né; 1876) is much made of by MM. Naville and Dunan; but
it seems to me only to show how little _some_ people can deal with new
experiences in which others find themselves quickly at home. This man
could not even tell whether one of his first objects of sight moved or
stood still (p. 9).

[210] What may be the physiological process connected with this
increased sensation of depth is hard to discover. It seems to have
nothing to do with the parts of the retina affected, since the mere
inversion of the picture (by mirrors, reflecting prisms, etc.),
without inverting the head, does not seem to bring it about; nothing
with sympathetic axial rotation of the eyes, which might enhance
the perspective through exaggerated disparity of the two retinal
images (see J. J. Müller, 'Raddrehung u. Tiefendimension,' Leipzig
Acad. Berichte, 1875, page 124), for one-eyed persons get it as
strongly as those with two eyes. I cannot find it to be connected
with any alteration in the pupil or with any ascertainable strain
in the muscles of the eye, sympathizing with those of the body. The
exaggeration of distance is even greater when we throw the head over
backwards and contract our superior recti in getting the view, than
when we bend forward and contract the inferior recti. Making the eyes
diverge slightly by weak prismatic glasses has no such effect. To me,
and to all whom I have asked to repeat the observation, the result
is so marked that I do not well understand how such an observer as
Helmholtz, who has carefully examined vision with inverted head, can
have overlooked it. (See his Phys. Optik, pp. 488, 723, 728, 772.) I
cannot help thinking that anyone who can explain the exaggeration of
the depth-sensation in this case will at the same time throw much light
on its normal constitution.

[211] "In Froriep's Notizen (1838, July), No. 133, is to be found a
detailed account, with a picture, of an Esthonian girl, Eva Lauk,
then fourteen years old, born with neither arms nor legs, which
concludes with the following words: 'According to the mother, her
intellect developed quite as fast as that of her brother and sisters;
in particular, she came as quickly to a right judgment of the size and
distance of visible objects, although, of course, she had no use of
hands.'" (Schopenhauer, Welt als Wille, ii. 44.)

[212] Physiol. Optik, p. 438. Helmholtz's reservation of 'qualities'
is inconsistent. Our judgments of light and color vary as much as our
judgments of size, shape, and place, and ought by parity of reasoning
to be called intellectual products and not sensations. In other places
he does treat color as if it were an intellectual product.

[213] It is needless at this point to consider what Helmholtz's views
of the nature of the intellectual space-yielding process may be. He
vacillates--we shall later see how.

[214] _Op. cit._ p. 214.

[215] Before embarking on this new topic it will be well to shelve,
once for all, the problem of what is the physiological process that
underlies the distance-feeling. Since one-eyed people have it, and
are inferior to the two-eyed only in measuring its gradations, it can
have no exclusive connection with the double and disparate images
produced by binocular parallax. Since people with closed eyes,
looking at an after-image, do not usually see it draw near or recede
with varying convergence, it cannot be simply constituted by the
convergence-feeling. For the same reason it would appear non-identical
with the feeling of accommodation. The differences of apparent
parallactic movement between far and near objects as we move our head
cannot constitute the distance-sensation, for such differences may be
easily reproduced experimentally (in the movements of visible spots
against a background) without engendering any illusion of perspective.
Finally, it is obvious that visible faintness, dimness, and smallness
_are_ not _per se_ the feeling of visible distance, however much in the
case of well-known objects they _may_ serve as signs to suggest it.

A certain maximum distance-value, however, being given to the field of
view of the moment, whatever it be, the feelings that accompany the
processes just enumerated become so many _local signs_ of the gradation
of distances within this maximum depth. They help us to subdivide and
measure it. Itself, however, is felt as a unit, a total distance-value,
determining the vastness of the whole field of view, which accordingly
appears as an abyss of a certain volume. And the question still
persists, what neural process is it that underlies the sense of this
distance-value?

Hering, who has tried to explain the gradations within it by the
interaction of certain native distance-values belonging to each point
of the two retinæ, seems willing to admit that the _absolute_ scale of
the space-volume within which the natively fixed relative distances
shall appear is _not_ fixed, but determined each time by 'experience
in the widest sense of the word' (_Beiträge_, p. 344). What he calls
the _Kernpunkt_ of this space-volume is the point we are momentarily
fixating. The absolute scale of the whole volume depends on the
absolute distance at which this _Kernpunkt_ is judged to lie from
the person of the looker. "By an alteration of the localization of
the _Kernpunkt_, the _inner_ relations of the seen space are nowise
altered; this space in its totality is as a fixed unit, so to speak,
displaced with respect to the self of the looker" (p. 345). But what
constitutes the localization of the _Kernpunkt_ itself at any given
time, except 'Experience,' i.e., higher cerebral and intellectual
processes, involving memory, Hering does not seek to define.

Stumpf, the other sensationalist writer who has best realized the
difficulties of the problem, thinks that the primitive sensation
of distance must have an immediate physical antecedent, either in
the shape of "an organic alteration accompanying the process of
accommodation, or else given directly in the specific energy of the
optic nerve." In contrast with Hering, however, he thinks that it is
the _absolute_ distance of the spot fixated which is thus primitively,
immediately, and physiologically given, and not the relative distances
of other things about this spot. These, he thinks, are originally
seen in what, broadly speaking, may be termed one plane with it.
Whether the distance of this plane, considered as a phenomenon of
our primitive sensibility, be an invariable datum, or susceptible
of fluctuation, he does not, if I understand him rightly, undertake
dogmatically to decide, but inclines to the former view. For him then,
as for Hering, higher cerebral processes of association, under the
name of 'Experience,' are the authors of fully one-half part of the
distance-perceptions which we at any given time may have.

Hering's and Stumpf's theories are reported for the English reader by
Mr. Sully (in Mind, iii. pp. 172-6). Mr. Abbott, in his Sight and Touch
(pp. 96-8), gives a theory which is to me so obscure that I only refer
the reader to its place, adding that it seems to make of distance a
fixed function of retinal sensation as modified by focal adjustment.
Besides these three authors I am ignorant of any, except Panum, who
may have attempted to define distance as in any degree an immediate
sensation. And with them the direct sensational share is reduced to a
very small proportional part, in our completed distance-judgments.

Professor Lipps, in his singularly acute Psychologische Studien (p.
69 ff.), argues, as Ferrier, in his review of Berkeley (Philosophical
Remains, ii. 330 ff.), had argued before him, that it is _logically
impossible_ we should perceive the distance of anything from the eye
by sight; for a _seen_ distance can only be between _seen_ termini;
and one of the termini, in the case of distance from the eye, is
the eye itself, which is not seen. Similarly of the distance of two
points behind each other: the near one _hides_ the far one, no space
is seen between them. For the space between two objects to be _seen_,
both must appear _beside_ each other, then the space in question will
be _visible_. On no other condition is its visibility possible. The
conclusion is that things can properly be seen only in what Lipps calls
a surface, and that our knowledge of the third dimension must needs be
conceptual, not sensational or visually intuitive.

But no arguments in the world can prove a feeling which actually exists
to be impossible. The feeling of depth or distance, of farness or
awayness, does actually exist as a fact of our visual sensibility. All
that Professor Lipps's reasonings prove concerning it is that it is
not linear in its character, or in its immediacy fully homogeneous and
consubstantial with the feeling of literal distance between two seen
termini; in short, that there are _two_ sorts of optical sensation,
each inexplicably due to a peculiar neural process. The neural
process is easily discovered, in the case of lateral extension or
spreadoutness, to be the number of retinal nerve-ends affected by the
light; in the case of protension or mere farness it is more complicated
and, as we have concluded, is still to seek. The two sensible
qualities unite in the primitive visual bigness. The measurement of
their various amounts against each other obeys the general laws of
all such measurements. We discover their equivalencies by means of
objects, apply the same units to both, and translate them into each
other so habitually that at last they get to seem to us even quite
similar in kind. This final appearance of homogeneity may perhaps be
facilitated by the fact that in binocular vision two points situated
on the prolongation of the optical axis of _one_ of the eyes, so that
the near one hides the far one, are by the _other_ eye seen laterally
apart. Each eye has in fact a foreshortened lateral view of the other's
line of sight. In The London Times for Feb. 8, 1884, is an interesting
letter by J. D. Dougal, who tries to explain by this reason why
two-eyed rifle-shooting has such advantages over shooting with one eye
closed.

[216] Just so, a pair of spectacles held an inch or so from the eyes
seem like one large median glass. The faculty of seeing stereoscopic
slides single without an instrument is of the utmost utility to the
student of physiological optics, and persons with strong eyes can
easily acquire it. The only difficulty lies in dissociating the degree
of accommodation from the degree of convergence which it usually
accompanies. If the right picture is focussed by the right eye, the
left by the left eye, the optic axes must either be parallel or
converge upon an imaginary point some distance behind the plane of the
pictures, according to the size and distance apart of the pictures.
The accommodation, however, has to be made for the plane of the
pictures itself, and a near accommodation with a far-off convergence is
something which the ordinary use of our eyes never teaches us to effect.

[217] These two observations prove the law of identical direction
only for objects which excite the foveæ or lie in the line of direct
looking. Observers skilled in indirect vision can, however, more or
less easily verify the law for outlying retinal points.

[218] This essay, published in the Philosophical Transactions, contains
the germ of almost all the methods applied since to the study of
optical perception. It seems a pity that England, leading off so
brilliantly the modern epoch of this study, should so quickly have
dropped out of the field. Almost all subsequent progress has been made
in Germany, Holland, and, _longo intervallo_, America.

[219] This is no place to report this controversy, but a few
bibliographic references may not be inappropriate. Wheatstone's
own experiment is in section 12 of his memoir. In favor of his
interpretation see Helmholtz, Phys. Opt., pp. 737-9; Wundt, Physiol.
Psychol., 2te Aufl. p. 144; Nagel, Sehen mit zwei Augen, pp. 78-82.
Against Wheatstone see Volkmann, Arch. f. Ophth., v. 2-74, and
Untersuchungen, p. 266; Hering, Beiträge zur Physiologie, 29-45,
also in Hermann's Hdbch. d. Physiol., Bd. iii. 1 Th. p. 435; Aubert,
Physiologie d. Netzhaut, p. 322; Schön, Archiv f. Ophthal., xxiv. 1.
pp. 56-65; and Donders, _ibid._ xiii. 1. p. 15 and note.

[220] When we see the finger the whole time, we usually put it in the
line joining object and left eye if it be the left finger, joining
object and right eye if it be the right finger. Microscopists,
marksmen, or persons one of whose eyes is much better than the other,
almost always refer directions to a single eye, as may be seen by the
position of the shadow on their face when they point at a candle-flame.

[221] Professor Joseph Le Conte, who believes strongly in the
identity-theory, has embodied the latter in a pair of laws of the
relation between positions seen single and double, near or far, on
the one hand, and convergences and retinal impressions, on the other,
which, though complicated, seems to me by far the best descriptive
formulation yet made of the normal facts of vision. His account
is easily accessible to the reader in his volume 'Sight' in the
International Scientific Series, bk. ii. c. 8, so I say no more about
it now, except that it does not solve any of the difficulties we are
noting in the identity-theory, nor account for the other fluctuating
perceptions of which we go on to treat.

[222] Naturally it takes a smaller object at a less distance to cover
by its image a constant amount of retinal surface.

[223] Archiv f. Ophthal., Bd. xvii. Abth. 2, pp. 44-6 (1871).

[224] A. W. Volkmann, Untersuchungen, p. 253.

[225] Philosophical Transactions, 1852, p. 4.

[226] Physiol. Optik, 649-664. Later this author is led to value
convergence more highly. Arch. f. (Anat. u.) Physiol. (1878), p. 322.

[227] Anomalies of Accommodation and Refraction (New Sydenham Soc.
Transl., London, 1864), p. 155.

[228] These strange contradictions have been called by Aubert
'secondary' deceptions of judgment. See Grundzüge d. Physiologischen
Optik (Leipzig, 1876), pp. 601, 615, 627. One of the best examples of
them is the small size of the moon as first seen through a telescope.
It is larger and brighter, so we see its details more distinctly and
judge it nearer. But because we judge it so much nearer we think it
must have grown smaller. Cf. Charpentier in Jahresbericht, x. 430.

[229] Revue Philosophique, iii. 9, p. 220.

[230] See Chapter XXIV.

[231] The only exception seems to be when we expressly wish to abstract
from particulars, and to judge of the general 'effect.' Witness ladies
trying on new dresses with their heads inclined and their eyes askance;
or painters in the same attitude judging of the 'values' in their
pictures.

[232] The importance of Superposition will appear later on.

[233] Physiol. Optik, p. 817.

[234] Bowditch and Hall, in Journal of Physiology, vol. iii. p. 299.
Helmholtz tries to explain this phenomenon by unconscious rotations
of the eyeball. But movements of the eyeball can only explain such
appearances of movements as are the same over the whole field. In the
windowed board one part of the field seems to move in one way, another
part in another. The same is true when we turn from the spiral to look
at the wall--the _centre_ of the field alone swells out or contracts,
the margin does the reverse or remains at rest. Mach and Dvorak have
beautifully proved the impossibility of eye-rotations in this case
(Sitzungsber. d. Wiener Akad., Bd. lxi.). See also Bowditch and Hall's
paper as above, p. 300.

[235] Bulletins de l'Acad. de Belgique, xxi. 2; Revue Philosophique,
vi. pp. 223-5; Physiologische Psychologie, 2te Aufl. p. 103. Compare
Münsterberg's views, Beiträge, Heft 2, p. 174.

[236] Physiol. Optik, pp. 562-71.

[237] Physiol. Psych., pp. 107-8.

[238] Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens, pp. 526-30.

[239] Cf. _supra_, vol. I. p. 515 ff.

[240] See Archiv f. Ophthalm., v. 2, 1 (1859), where many more examples
are given.

[241] Untersuchungen, p. 250; see also p. 242.

[242] I pass over certain difficulties about double images, drawn from
the perceptions of a few squinters (e.g. by Schweigger, Klin. Untersuch
über das Schielen, Berlin, 1881; by Javal, Annales d'Oculistique,
lxxxv. p. 217), because the facts are exceptional at best and very
difficult of interpretation. In favor of the sensationalistic or
nativistic view of one such case, see the important paper by Von Kries,
Archiv f. Ophthalm., xxiv. 4, p. 117.

[243] Physiologische Untersuchungen im Gebiete der Optik, v.

[244] Cf. E. Mach, Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen, p. 87.

[245] Cf. V. Egger, Revue Philos., xx. 488.

[246] Loeb (Pflüger's Archiv, xl. 274) has proved that muscular changes
of adaptation in the eye for near and far distance are what determine
the form of the relief.

[247] The strongest passage in Helmholtz's argument against sensations
of space is relative to these fluctuations of seen relief: "Ought one
not to conclude that if sensations of relief exist at all, they must be
so faint and vague as to have no influence compared with that of past
experience? Ought we not to believe that the perception of the third
dimension may have arisen _without_ them, since we now see it taking
place as well _against_ them as _with_ them?" (Physiol. Optik, p. 817.)

[248] Cf. E. Mach, Beiträge, etc., p. 90, and the preceding chapter of
the present work, p. 86 ff.

[249] I ought to say that I seem always able to see the cross
rectangular at will. But this appears to come from an imperfect
absorption of the rectangular after-image by the inclined plane at
which the eyes look. The cross, with me, is apt to detach itself from
this and then look square. I get the illusion better from the circle,
whose after-image becomes in various ways elliptical on being projected
upon the different surfaces of the room, and cannot then be easily made
to look circular again.

[250] In Chapter XVIII, p. 74, I gave a reason why imaginations
_ought_ not to be as vivid as sensations. It should be borne in mind
that that reason does not apply to these complemental imaginings of the
real shape of things actually before our eyes.

[251] Hermann's Handb. der Physiologie, iii. 1. p. 565-71.

[252] Bulletin de l'Académie de Belgique, 2me Série, xix. 2.

[253] Wundt seeks to explain all these illusions by the relatively
stronger 'feeling of innervation' needed to move the eyeballs
upwards,--a careful study of the muscles concerned is taken to prove
this,--and a consequently greater estimate of the distance traversed.
It suffices to remark, however, with Lipps, that were the innervation
all, a column of S's placed on top of each other should look each
larger than the one below it, and a weathercock on a steeple gigantic,
neither of which is the case. Only the halves of _the same object_ look
different in size, because the customary correction for foreshortening
bears only on the relations of the parts of special _things_ spread out
before us. Cf. Wundt, Physiol. Psych., 2te Aufl. ii. 96-8; Th. Lipps,
Grundtatsachen, etc., p. 535.

[254] Hering would partly solve in this way the mystery of Figs. 60,
61, and 67. No doubt the explanation partly applies; but the strange
cessation of the illusion when we fix the gaze fails to be accounted
for thereby.

[255] Helmholtz has sought (Physiol. Optik, p. 715) to explain the
divergence of the apparent vertical meridians of the two retinæ, by
the manner in which an identical line drawn on the ground before us in
the median plane will throw its images on the two eyes respectively.
The matter is too technical for description here; the unlearned reader
may be referred for it to J. Le Conte's Sight in the Internat. Scient.
Series, p. 198 ff. But, for the benefit of those to whom _verbum
sat_, I cannot help saying that it seems to me that the _exactness_
of the relation of the two meridians--whether divergent or not, for
their divergence differs in individuals and often in one individual at
diverse times--precludes its being due to the mere habitual falling-off
of the image of one objective line on both. Le Conte, e.g., measures
their position down to a sixth of a degree, others to tenths. This
indicates an organic identity in the sensations of the two retinæ,
which the experience of median perspective horizontals may roughly
have agreed with, but hardly can have engendered. Wundt explains the
divergence as usual, by the _Innervationsgefühl_ (_op. cit._. ii. 99
ff.).

[256] Physiol. Optik, p. 547.

[257] "We can with a short ruler draw a line as long as we please on
a plane surface by first drawing one as long as the ruler permits,
and then sliding the ruler somewhat along the drawn line and drawing
again, etc. If the ruler is exactly straight, we get in this way a
straight line. If it is somewhat curved we get a circle. Now, instead
of the sliding ruler we use in the field of sight the central spot of
distinctest vision impressed with a linear sensation of sight, which
at times may be intensified till it becomes an after-image. We follow,
in looking, the direction of this line, and in so doing we slide the
line along itself and get a prolongation of its length. On a plane
surface we can carry on this procedure on any sort of a straight or
curved ruler, but in the field of vision there is for each direction
and movement of the eye only one sort of line which it is possible for
us to slide along in its own direction continually." These are what
Helmholtz calls the 'circles of direction' of the visual field--lines
which he has studied with his usual care. Cf. Physiol. Optik, p. 548 ff.

[258] Cf. Hering in Hermann's Handb. der Physiol., iii. 1, pp. 558-4.

[259] This shrinkage and expansion of the absolute space-value of the
total optical sensation remains to my mind the most obscure part of the
whole subject. It is a real optical sensation, seeming introspectively
to have nothing to do with locomotor or other suggestions. It is easy
to say that 'the Intellect produces it,' but what does that mean? The
investigator who will throw light on this one point will probably clear
up other difficulties as well.

[260] Examination of Hamilton, 3d ed. p. 283.

[261] Senses and Intellect, 3d ed. p. 183.

[262] Exam. of Hamilton, 3d ed. p. 283.

[263] Senses and Intellect, p. 372.

[264] Vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde, pp. 52-7.

[265] Psychol. als Wissenschaft, § 111.

[266] Psychol. als Wissenschaft, § 113.

[267] Lehrbuch d. Psychol., 2te Auflage, Bd. ii. p. 66. Volkmann's
fifth chapter contains a really precious collection of historical
notices concerning space-perception theories.

[268] Why talk of 'genetic theories'? when we have in the next breath
to write as Wundt does: "If then we must regard the intuition of space
as a product that simply emerges from the conditions of our mental and
physical organization, nothing need stand in the way of our designating
it as one of the _a priori_ functions with which consciousness is
endowed." (Logik, ii. 460.)

[269] P. 430.

[270] Pp. 430, 449.

[271] P. 428.

[272] P. 442.

[273] Pp. 442, 818.

[274] P. 798. Cf. also Popular Scientific Lectures, pp. 301-3.

[275] P. 456; see also 428, 441.

[276] P. 797.

[277] P. 812.

[278] Bottom of page 797.

[279] In fact, to borrow a simile from Prof. G. E. Müller (Theorie
der sinnl. Aufmerksamkeit, p. 38), the various senses bear in the
Helmholtzian philosophy of perception the same relation to the 'object'
perceived by their means that a troop of jolly drinkers bear to the
landlord's bill, when no one has any money, but each hopes that one of
the rest will pay.

[280] Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens (1883), pp. 480, 591-2.
Psychologische Studien (1885), p. 14.

[281] Psychology, ii. p. 174.

[282] _Ibid._ p. 168.

[283] Senses and Intellect, 3d ed. pp. 366-75.

[284] Cf. Hall and Donaldson in Mind, x. 559.

[285] As other examples of the confusion, take Mr. Sully: "The
_fallacious assumption_ that there can be an idea of distance in
general, apart from particular distances" (Mind, iii. p. 177); and
Wundt: "An indefinite localization, which waits for experience to give
it its reference to real space, stands in contradiction with the very
idea of localization, which means the reference to a determinate point
of space" (Physiol. Psych., 1te Aufl. p. 480).

[286] G. Berkeley: Essay towards a new Theory of Vision; Samuel Bailey:
A Review of Berkeley's Theory of Vision (1842); J. S. Mill's Review of
Bailey, in his Dissertations and Disquisitions, vol. ii; Jas. Ferrier:
Review of Bailey, in 'Philosophical Remains,' vol. ii; A. Bain:
Senses and Intellect, 'Intellect,' chap. i; H. Spencer: Principles
of Psychology, pt. vi. chaps. xiv, xvi; J. S. Mill: Examination of
Hamilton, chap. xiii (the best statement of the so-called English
empiricist position); T. K. Abbott: Sight and Touch, 1861 (the first
English book to go at all minutely into _facts_; Mr. Abbott maintaining
retinal sensations to be originally of space in three dimensions); A.
C. Fraser: Review of Abbott, in North British Review for Aug. 1864;
another review in Macmillan's Magazine, Aug. 1866; J. Sully: Outlines
of Psychology, chap. vi; J. Ward: Encyclop. Britannica, 9th Ed.,
article 'Psychology,' pp. 53-5; J. E. Walter: The Perception of Space
and Matter (1879)--I may also refer to a discussion between Prof. G.
Groom Robertson, Mr. J. Ward, and the present writer, in Mind, vol.
xiii.--The present chapter is only the filling out with detail of an
article entitled 'The Spatial Quale,' which appeared in the Journal of
Speculative Philosophy for January 1879 (xiii. 64).




CHAPTER XXI.[287]

THE PERCEPTION OF REALITY.

BELIEF.


Everyone knows the difference between imagining a thing and believing
in its existence, between supposing a proposition and acquiescing in
its truth. In the case of acquiescence or belief, the object is not
only apprehended by the mind, but is held to have reality. Belief is
thus the mental state or function of cognizing reality. As used in
the following pages, 'Belief' will mean every degree of assurance,
including the highest possible certainty and conviction.

There are, as we know, two ways of studying every psychic state. First,
the way of analysis: What does it consist in? What is its inner nature?
Of what sort of mind-stuff is it composed? Second, the way of history:
What are its conditions of production, and its connection with other
facts?

Into the first way we cannot go very far. _In its inner nature,
belief, or the sense of reality, is a sort of feeling more allied to
the emotions than to anything else._ Mr. Bagehot distinctly calls it
the 'emotion' of conviction. I just now spoke of it as acquiescence.
It resembles more than anything what in the psychology of volition we
know as consent. Consent is recognized by all to be a manifestation of
our active nature. It would naturally be described by such terms as
'willingness' or the 'turning of our disposition.' What characterizes
both consent and belief is the cessation of theoretic agitation,
through the advent of an idea which is inwardly stable, and fills the
mind solidly to the exclusion of contradictory ideas. When this is the
case, motor effects are apt to follow. Hence the states of consent
and belief, characterized by repose on the purely intellectual side,
are both intimately connected with subsequent practical activity.
This inward stability of the mind's content is as characteristic of
disbelief as of belief. But we shall presently see that we never
disbelieve anything except for the reason that we believe something
else which contradicts the first thing.[288] Disbelief is thus an
incidental complication to belief, and need not be considered by itself.

       *       *       *       *       *

_The true opposites of belief,_ psychologically considered, _are
doubt and inquiry, not disbelief._ In both these states the content
of our mind is in unrest, and the emotion engendered thereby is,
like the emotion of belief itself, perfectly distinct, but perfectly
indescribable in words. Both sorts of emotion may be pathologically
exalted. One of the charms of drunkenness unquestionably lies in the
deepening of the sense of reality and truth which is gained therein.
In whatever light things may then appear to us, they seem more utterly
what they are, more 'utterly utter' than when we are sober. This goes
to a fully unutterable extreme in the nitrous oxide intoxication, in
which a man's very soul will sweat with conviction, and he be all
the while unable to tell what he is convinced of at all.[289] The
pathological state opposed to this solidity and deepening has been
called the questioning mania (_Grübelsucht_ by the Germans). It is
sometimes found as a substantive affection, paroxysmal or chronic, and
consists in the inability to rest in any conception, and the need of
having it confirmed and explained. 'Why do I stand here where I stand?'
'Why is a glass a glass, a chair a chair?' 'How is it that men are only
of the size they are? Why not as big as houses,' etc., etc.[290] There
is, it is true, another pathological state which is as far removed
from doubt as from belief, and which some may prefer to consider the
proper contrary of the latter state of mind. I refer to the feeling
that everything is hollow, unreal, dead. I shall speak of this state
again upon a later page. The point I wish to notice here is simply that
belief and disbelief are but two aspects of one psychic state.

       *       *       *       *       *

John Mill, reviewing various opinions about belief, comes to the
conclusion that no account of it can be given:

 "What," he says, "is the difference _to our minds_ between thinking
 of a reality and representing to ourselves an imaginary picture? I
 confess I can see no escape from the opinion that the distinction is
 ultimate and primordial. There is no more difficulty in holding it
 to be so than in holding the difference between a sensation and an
 idea to be primordial. It seems almost another aspect of the same
 difference.... I cannot help thinking, therefore, that there is in the
 remembrance of a real fact, as distinguished from that of a thought,
 an element which does not consist... in a difference between the mere
 ideas which are present to the mind in the two cases. This element,
 howsoever we define it, constitutes belief, and is the difference
 between Memory and Imagination. From whatever direction we approach,
 this difference seems to close our path. When we arrive at it, we seem
 to have reached, as it were, the central point of our intellectual
 nature, presupposed and built upon in every attempt we make to explain
 the more recondite phenomena of our mental being."[291]

If the words of Mill be taken to apply to the mere subjective analysis
of belief--to the question, What does it feel like when we have
it?--they must be held, on the whole, to be correct. Belief, the sense
of reality, feels like itself--that is about as much as we can say.

Prof. Brentano, in an admirable chapter of his _Psychologie_,
expresses this by saying that conception and belief (which he names
_judgment_) are two different fundamental psychic phenomena. What
I myself have called (Vol. I, p. 275) the 'object' of thought may
be comparatively simple, like "Ha! what a pain," or "It-thunders";
or it may be complex, like "Columbus-discovered-America-in-1492,"
or "There-exists-an-all-wise-Creator-of-the-world." In either case,
however, the mere thought of the object may exist as something quite
distinct from the belief in its reality. The belief, as Brentano says,
presupposes the mere thought:

 "Every object comes into consciousness in a twofold way, as simply
 thought of [_vorgestellt_] and as admitted [_anerkannt_] or
 denied. The relation is analogous to that which is assumed by most
 philosophers (by Kant no less than by Aristotle) to obtain between
 mere thought and desire. Nothing is ever desired without being thought
 of; but the desiring is nevertheless a second quite new and peculiar
 form of relation to the object, a second quite new way of receiving
 it into consciousness. No more is anything judged [i.e., believed or
 disbelieved] which is not thought of too. But we must insist that, so
 soon as the object of a thought becomes the object of an assenting
 or rejecting judgment, our consciousness steps into an entirely new
 relation towards it. It is then twice present in consciousness, as
 thought of, and as held for real or denied; just as when desire
 awakens for it, it is both thought and simultaneously desired." (P.
 266.)

The commonplace doctrine of 'judgment' is that it consists in the
combination of 'ideas' by a 'copula' into a 'proposition,' which may
be of various sorts, as affirmative, negative, hypothetical, etc. But
who does not see that in a disbelieved or doubted or interrogative
or conditional proposition, the ideas are combined in the same
identical way in which they are in a proposition which is solidly
believed? _The way in which the ideas are combined is a part of the
inner constitution of the thought's object or content._ That object
is sometimes an articulated whole with relations between its parts,
amongst which relations, that of predicate to subject may be one. But
when we have got our object with its inner constitution thus defined
in a proposition, then the question comes up regarding the object as
a whole: 'Is it a real object? is this proposition a true proposition
or not?' And in the answer _Yes_ to _this_ question lies that new
psychic act which Brentano calls 'judgment,' but which I prefer to call
'belief.'

In every proposition, then, so far as it is believed, questioned, or
disbelieved, four elements are to be distinguished, the subject, the
predicate, and their relation (of whatever sort it be)--these form the
_object_ of belief--and finally the psychic attitude in which our mind
stands towards the proposition taken as a whole--and this is the belief
itself.[292]

Admitting, then, that this attitude is a state of consciousness _sui
generis_, about which nothing more can be said in the way of internal
analysis, let us proceed to the second way of studying the subject of
belief: _Under what circumstances do we think things real?_ We shall
soon see how much matter this gives us to discuss.


THE VARIOUS ORDERS OF REALITY.


Suppose a new-born mind, entirely blank and waiting for experience
to begin. Suppose that it begins in the form of a visual impression
(whether faint or vivid is immaterial) of a lighted candle against a
dark background, and nothing else, so that whilst this image lasts
it constitutes the entire universe known to the mind in question.
Suppose, moreover (to simplify the hypothesis), that the candle is
only imaginary, and that no 'original' of it is recognized by us
psychologists outside. Will this hallucinatory candle be believed in,
will it have a real existence for the mind?

What possible sense (for that mind) would a suspicion have that the
candle was not real? What would doubt or disbelief of it imply? When
_we_, the onlooking psychologists, say the candle is unreal, we mean
something quite definite, viz., that there is a world known to _us_
which _is_ real, and to which we perceive that the candle does not
belong; it belongs exclusively to that individual mind, has no _status_
anywhere else, etc. It exists, to be sure, in a fashion, for it forms
the content of that mind's hallucination; but the hallucination itself,
though unquestionably it is a sort of existing fact, has no knowledge
of _other_ facts; and since those _other_ facts are the realities par
_excellence_ for us, and the only things we believe in, the candle is
simply outside of our reality and belief altogether.

By the hypothesis, however, the _mind which sees the candle_ can spin
no such considerations as these about it, for of other facts, actual
or possible, it has no inkling whatever. That candle is its all, its
absolute. Its entire faculty of attention is absorbed by it. It _is_,
it is _that_; it is _there_; no other possible candle, or quality
of this candle, no other possible place, or possible object in the
place, no alternative, in short, suggests itself as even conceivable;
so how can the mind help believing the candle real? The supposition
that it might possibly not do so is, under the supposed conditions,
unintelligible.[293]

This is what Spinoza long ago announced:

 "Let us conceive a boy," he said, "imagining to himself a horse,
 and taking note of nothing else. As this imagination involves the
 existence of the horse, _and the boy has no perception which annuls
 its existence,_ he will necessarily contemplate the horse as present,
 nor will he be able to doubt of its existence, however little
 certain of it he may be. I deny that a man in so far as he imagines
 [_percipit_] affirms nothing. For what is it to imagine a winged
 horse but to affirm that, the horse [that horse, namely] has wings?
 For if the mind had nothing before it but the winged horse it would
 contemplate the same as present, would have no cause to doubt of its
 existence, nor any power of dissenting from its existence, unless
 the imagination of the winged horse were joined to an idea which
 contradicted [_tollit_] its existence." (Ethics, ii. 49, Scholium.)

The sense that anything we think of is unreal can only come, then, when
that thing is contradicted by some other thing of which we think. _Any
object which remains uncontradicted is ipso facto believed and posited
as absolute reality._

Now, how comes it that one thing thought of can be contradicted by
another? It cannot unless it begins the quarrel by saying something
inadmissible about that other. Take the mind with the candle, or the
boy with the horse. If either of them say, 'That candle or that horse,
even when I don't see it, exists in _the outer world_,' he pushes into
'the outer world' an object which may be incompatible with everything
which he otherwise knows of that world. If so, he must take his choice
of which to hold by, the present perceptions or the other knowledge of
the world. If he holds to the other knowledge, the present perceptions
are contradicted, _so far as their relation to that world goes._ Candle
and horse, whatever they may be, are not existents in outward space.
They are existents, of course; they are mental objects; mental objects
have existence as mental objects. But they are situated in their own
spaces, the space in which they severally appear, and neither of those
spaces is the space in which the realities called 'the outer world'
exist.

Take again the horse with wings. If I merely dream of a horse with
wings, my horse interferes with nothing else and has not to be
contradicted. That horse, its wings, and its place, are all equally
real. That horse exists no otherwise than as winged, and is moreover
really there, for that place exists no otherwise than as the place of
that horse, and claims as yet no connection with the other places of
the world. But if with this horse I make an inroad into the _world
otherwise known_, and say, for example, 'That is my old mare Maggie,
having grown a pair of wings where she stands in her stall,' the whole
case is altered; for now the horse and place are identified with a
horse and place otherwise known, and _what_ is known of the latter
objects is incompatible with what is perceived with the former. 'Maggie
in her stall with wings! Never!' The wings are unreal, then, visionary.
I have dreamed a lie about Maggie in her stall.

The reader will recognize in these two cases the two sorts of judgment
called in the logic-books existential and attributive respectively.
The candle exists as an outer reality' is an existential, 'My Maggie
has got a pair of wings' is an attributive, proposition;[294] and
it follows from what was first said that _all propositions, whether
attributive or existential, are believed through the very fact of
being conceived, unless they clash with other propositions believed,
at the same time, by affirming that their terms are the same with the
terms of these other propositions._ A dream-candle has existence, true
enough; but not the same existence (existence for itself, namely, or
_extra mentem meam_) which the candles of waking perception have. A
dream-horse has wings; but then neither horse nor wings are the same
with any horses or wings known to memory. That we can at any moment
think of the same thing which at any former moment we thought of is the
ultimate law of our intellectual constitution. But when we now think
of it incompatibly with our other ways of thinking it, then we must
choose which way to stand by, for we cannot continue to think in two
contradictory ways at once. _The whole distinction of real and unreal,
the whole psychology of belief, disbelief, and doubt, is thus grounded
on two mental facts--first, that we are liable to think differently of
the same; and second, that when we have done so, we can choose which
way of thinking to adhere to and which to disregard._

The subjects adhered to become real subjects, the attributes adhered
to real attributes, the existence adhered to real existence; whilst
the subjects disregarded become imaginary subjects, the attributes
disregarded erroneous attributes, and the existence disregarded an
existence in no man's land, in the limbo 'where footless fancies
dwell.' The real things are, in M. Taine's terminology, the
_reductives_ of the things judged unreal.


THE MANY WORLDS.


Habitually and practically we do not _count_ these disregarded things
as existents at all. For them _Væ victis_ is the law in the popular
philosophy; they are not even treated as appearances; they are treated
as if they were mere waste, equivalent to nothing at all. To the
genuinely philosophic mind, however, they still have existence, though
not the same existence, as the real things. _As_ objects of fancy,
_as_ errors, _as_ occupants of dreamland, etc., they are in their way
as indefeasible parts of life, as undeniable features of the Universe,
as the realities are in their way. The total world of which the
philosophers must take account is thus composed of the realities _plus_
the fancies and illusions.

Two sub-universes, at least, connected by relations which philosophy
tries to ascertain! Really there are more than two sub-universes of
which we take account, some of us of this one, and others of that.
For there are various categories both of illusion and of reality, and
alongside of the world of absolute error (i.e., error confined to
single individuals) but still within the world of absolute reality
(i.e., reality believed by the complete philosopher) there is the
world of collective error, there are the worlds of abstract reality,
of relative or practical reality, of ideal relations, and there is the
supernatural world. The popular mind conceives of all these sub-worlds
more or less disconnectedly; and when dealing with one of them, forgets
for the time being its relations to the rest. The complete philosopher
is he who seeks not only to assign to every given object of his thought
its right place in one or other of these sub-worlds, but he also seeks
to determine the relation of each sub-world to the others in the total
world which _is_.

The most important sub-universes commonly discriminated from each other
and recognized by most of us as existing, each with its own special and
separate style of existence, are the following:

(1) The world of sense, or of physical 'things' as we instinctively
apprehend them, with such qualities as heat, color, and sound, and such
'forces' as life, chemical affinity, gravity, electricity, all existing
as such within or on the surface of the things.

(2) The world of science, or of physical things as the learned conceive
them, with secondary qualities and 'forces' (in the popular sense)
excluded, and nothing real but solids and fluids and their 'laws'
(i.e., customs) of motion.[295]

(3) The world of ideal relations, or abstract truths believed
or believable by all, and expressed in logical, mathematical,
metaphysical, ethical, or æsthetic propositions.

(4) The world of 'idols of the tribe,' illusions or prejudices common
to the race. All educated people recognize these as forming one
sub-universe. The motion of the sky round the earth, for example,
belongs to this world. That motion is not a recognized item of any of
the other worlds; but as an 'idol of the tribe' it really exists. For
certain philosophers 'matter' exists only as an idol of the tribe. For
science, the 'secondary qualities' of matter are but 'idols of the
tribe.'

(5) The various supernatural worlds, the Christian heaven and hell,
the world of the Hindoo mythology, the world of Swedenborg's _visa
et audita_, etc. Each of these is a consistent system, with definite
relations among its own parts. Neptune's trident, e.g., has no status
of reality whatever in the Christian heaven; but within the classic
Olympus certain definite things are true of it, whether one believe
in the reality of the classic mythology as a whole or not. The
various worlds of deliberate fable may be ranked with these worlds of
faith--the world of the _Iliad_, that of _King Lear_, of the _Pickwick
Papers_, etc.[296]

(6) The various worlds of individual opinion, as numerous as men are.

(7) The worlds of sheer madness and vagary, also indefinitely numerous.

_Every object we think of gets at last referred to one world or
another of this or of some similar list._ It settles into our belief
as a common-sense object, a scientific object, an abstract object, a
mythological object, an object of some one's mistaken conception, or
a madman's object; and it reaches this state sometimes immediately,
but often only after being hustled and bandied about amongst other
objects until it finds some which will tolerate its presence and
stand in relations to it which nothing contradicts. The molecules and
ether-waves of the scientific world, for example, simply kick the
object's warmth and color out, they refuse to have any relations with
them. But the world of 'idols of the tribe' stands ready to take them
in. Just so the world of classic myth takes up the winged horse; the
world of individual hallucination, the vision of the candle; the world
of abstract truth, the proposition that justice is kingly, though no
actual king be just. The various worlds themselves, however, appear
(as aforesaid) to most men's minds in no very definitely conceived
relation to each other, and our attention, when it turns to one, is apt
to drop the others for the time being out of its account. Propositions
concerning the different worlds are made from 'different points of
view'; and in this more or less chaotic state the consciousness of most
thinkers remains to the end. Each world _whilst it is attended to_ is
real after its own fashion; only the reality lapses with the attention.


THE WORLD OF 'PRACTICAL REALITIES.'


Each thinker, however, has dominant habits of attention; and these
_practically elect from among the various worlds some one to be for him
the world of ultimate realities_. From this world's objects he does not
appeal. Whatever positively contradicts them must get into another
world or die. The horse, e.g., may have wings to its heart's content,
so long as it does not pretend to be the real world's horse--_that_
horse is absolutely wingless. For most men, as we shall immediately
see, the 'things of sense' hold this prerogative position, and are the
absolutely real world's nucleus. Other things, to be sure, may be real
for this man or for that--things of science, abstract moral relations,
things of the Christian theology, or what not. But even for the special
man, these things are usually real with a less real reality than that
of the things of sense. They are taken less seriously; and the very
utmost that can be said for anyone's belief in them is that it is as
strong as his 'belief in his own senses.'[297]

In all this the everlasting partiality of our nature shows itself, our
inveterate propensity to choice. For, in the strict and ultimate sense
of the word existence, everything which can be thought of at all exists
as _some_ sort of object, whether mythical object, individual thinker's
object, or object in outer space and for intelligence at large. Errors,
fictions, tribal beliefs, are parts of the whole great Universe which
God has made, and He must have meant all these things to be in it,
each in its respective place. But for us finite creatures, "'tis to
consider too curiously to consider so." The mere fact of appearing
as an object at all is not enough to constitute reality. That may be
metaphysical reality, reality for God; but what we need is practical
reality, reality for ourselves; and, to have that, an object must not
only appear, but it must appear both _interesting_ and _important_. The
worlds whose objects are neither interesting nor important we treat
simply negatively, we brand them as _un_real.

_In the relative sense,_ then, the sense in which we contrast reality
with simple _un_reality, and in which one thing is said to have _more_
reality than another, and to be more believed, _reality means simply
relation to our emotional and active life._ This is the only sense
which the word ever has in the mouths of practical men. _In this sense,
whatever excites and stimulates our interest is real;_ whenever an
object so appeals to us that we turn to it, accept it, fill our mind
with it, or practically take account of it, so far it is real for us,
and we believe it. Whenever, on the contrary, we ignore it, fail to
consider it or act upon it, despise it, reject it, forget it, so far it
is unreal for us and disbelieved. Hume's account of the matter was then
essentially correct, when he said that belief in anything was simply
the having the idea of it in a lively and active manner:

 "I say, then, that belief is nothing but a more vivid, lively,
 forcible, firm, steady conception of an object than the imagination
 alone is ever able to attain.... It consists not in the peculiar
 nature or order of the ideas, but in the _manner_ of their conception
 and in their _feeling_ to the mind. I confess that it is impossible
 perfectly to explain this feeling or manner of conception.... Its
 true and proper name... is _belief_, which is a term that everyone
 sufficiently understands in common life. And in philosophy we can go
 no farther than assert that belief is something felt by the mind,
 which distinguishes the idea of the judgment from the fictions of the
 imagination.[298] It gives them more weight and influence; makes them
 appear of greater importance; enforces them in the mind; gives them
 a superior influence on the passions, and renders them the governing
 principle in our actions."[299]

Or as Prof. Bain puts it: "In its essential character, belief is a
phase of our active nature--otherwise called the Will."[300]

       *       *       *       *       *

The object of belief, then, reality or real existence, is something
quite different from all the other predicates which a subject may
possess. Those are properties intellectually or sensibly intuited.
When we add any one of them to the subject, we increase the intrinsic
content of the latter, we enrich its picture in our mind. But adding
reality does not enrich the picture in any such inward way; it leaves
it inwardly as it finds it, and only fixes it and stamps it in to _us_.

 "The real," as Kant says, "contains no more than the possible. A
 hundred real dollars do not contain a penny more than a hundred
 possible dollars.... By whatever, and by however many, predicates I
 may think a thing, nothing is added to it if I add that the thing
 exists.... Whatever, therefore, our concept of an object may contain,
 we must always step outside of it in order to attribute to it
 existence."[301]

The 'stepping outside' of it is the establishment either of immediate
practical relations between it and ourselves, or of relations between
it and other objects with which we have immediate practical relations.
Relations of this sort, which are as yet not transcended or superseded
by others, are _ipso facto_ real relations, and confer reality upon
their objective term. _The fons et origo of all reality, whether from_
_the absolute or the practical point of view, is thus subjective, is
ourselves._ As bare logical thinkers, without emotional reaction, we
give reality to whatever objects we think of, for they are really
phenomena, or objects of our passing thought, if nothing more. But,
_as thinkers with emotional reaction, we give what seems to us a still
higher degree of reality to whatever things we select and emphasize
and turn to_ WITH A WILL. These are our _living_ realities; and not
only these, but all the other things which are intimately connected
with these. Reality, starting from our Ego, thus sheds itself from
point to point--first, upon all objects which have an immediate sting
of interest for our Ego in them, and next, upon the objects most
continuously related with these. It only fails when the connecting
thread is lost. A whole system may be real, if it only hang to our
Ego by one immediately _stinging_ term. But what contradicts any such
stinging term, even though it be another stinging term itself, is
either not believed, or only believed after settlement of the dispute.

       *       *       *       *       *

We reach thus the important conclusion that _our own reality, that
sense of our own life which we at every moment possess, is the ultimate
of ultimates for our belief._ 'As sure as I exist!'--this is our
uttermost warrant for the being of all other things. As Descartes made
the indubitable reality of the _cogito_ go bail for the reality of all
that the _cogito_ involved, so we all of us, feeling our own present
reality with absolutely coercive force, ascribe an all but equal degree
of reality, first to whatever things we lay hold on with a sense of
personal need, and second, to whatever farther things continuously
belong with these. "Mein Jetzt und Hier," as Prof. Lipps says, "ist der
letzte Angelpunkt für alle Wirklichkeit, also alle Erkenntniss."

The world of living realities as contrasted with unrealities is thus
anchored in the Ego, considered as an active and emotional term.[302]
That is the hook from which the rest dangles, the absolute support.
And as from a painted hook it has been said that one can only hang
a painted chain, so conversely, from a real hook only a real chain
can properly be hung. _Whatever things have intimate and continuous
connection with my life are things of whose reality I cannot doubt._
Whatever things fail to establish this connection are things which are
practically no better for me than if they existed not at all.

In certain forms of melancholic perversion of the sensibilities and
reactive powers, nothing touches us intimately, rouses us, or wakens
natural feeling. The consequence is the complaint so often heard from
melancholic patients, that nothing is believed in by them as it used to
be, and that all sense of reality is fled from life. They are sheathed
in india-rubber; nothing penetrates to the quick or draws blood, as it
were. According to Griesinger, "I see, I hear!" such patients say, "but
the objects do not reach me, it is as if there were a wall between me
and the outer world!"

 "In such patients there often is an alteration of the cutaneous
 sensibility, such that things feel indistinct or sometimes rough
 and woolly. But even were this change always present, it would not
 completely explain the psychic phenomenon... which reminds us more
 of the alteration in our psychic relations to the outer world which
 advancing age on the one hand, and on the other emotions and passions,
 may bring about. In childhood we feel ourselves to be closer to the
 world of sensible phenomena, we live immediately with them and in
 them; an intimately vital tie binds us and them together. But with
 the ripening of reflection this tie is loosened, the warmth of our
 interest cools, things look differently to us, and we act more as
 foreigners to the outer world, even though we know it a great deal
 better. Joy and expansive emotions in general draw it nearer to us
 again. Everything makes a more lively impression, and with the quick
 immediate return of this warm receptivity for sense impressions, joy
 makes us feel young again. In depressing emotions it is the other
 way. Outer things, whether living or inorganic, suddenly grow cold
 and foreign to us, and even our favorite objects of interest feel as
 if they belonged to us no more. Under these circumstances, receiving
 no longer from anything a lively impression, we cease to turn
 towards outer things, and the sense of inward loneliness grows upon
 us.... Where there is no strong intelligence to control this _blasé_
 condition, this psychic coldness and lack of interest, the issue of
 these states in which all seems so cold and hollow, the heart dried
 up, the world grown dead and empty, is often suicide or the deeper
 forms of insanity."[303]


THE PARAMOUNT REALITY OF SENSATIONS.


But now we are met by questions of detail. What does this stirring,
this exciting power, this interest, consist in, which some objects
have? which _are_ those 'intimate relations' with our life which give
reality? And what things stand in these relations immediately, and
what others are so closely connected with the former that (in Hume's
language) we 'carry our disposition' also on to them?

In a simple and direct way these questions cannot be answered at all.
The whole history of human thought is but an unfinished attempt to
answer them. For what have men been trying to find out, since men were
men, but just those things: "Where do our true interests lie--which
relations shall we call the intimate and real ones--which things shall
we call living realities and which not?" A few psychological points
can, however, be made clear.

_Any relation to our mind at all, in the absence of a stronger
relation, suffices to make an object real._ The barest appeal to our
attention is enough for that. Revert to the beginning of the chapter,
and take the candle entering the vacant mind. The mind was waiting for
just some such object to make its spring upon. It makes its spring
and the candle is believed. But when the candle appears at the same
time with other objects, it must run the gauntlet of their rivalry,
and then it becomes a question which of the various candidates for
attention shall compel belief. As a rule we believe as much as we
can. We would believe everything if we only could. When objects are
represented by us quite unsystematically they conflict but little with
each other, and the number of them which in this chaotic manner we
can believe is limitless. The primitive savage's mind is a jungle in
which hallucinations, dreams, superstitions, conceptions, and sensible
objects all flourish alongside of each other, unregulated except by the
attention turning in this way or in that. The child's mind is the same.
It is only as objects become permanent and their relations fixed that
discrepancies and contradictions are felt and must be settled in some
stable way. As a rule, the success with which a contradicted object
maintains itself in our belief is proportional to several qualities
which it must possess. Of these the one which would be put first by
most people, because it characterizes objects of sensation, is its--

(1) Coerciveness over attention, or the mere power to possess
consciousness: then follow--

(2) Liveliness, or sensible pungency, especially in the way of exciting
pleasure or pain;

(3) Stimulating effect upon the will, i.e., capacity to arouse active
impulses, the more instinctive the better;

(4) Emotional interest, as object of love, dread, admiration, desire,
etc.;

(5) Congruity with certain favorite forms of contemplation--unity,
simplicity, permanence, and the like;

(6) Independence of other causes, and its own causal importance.

These characters run into each other. Coerciveness is the result of
liveliness or emotional interest. What is lively and interesting
stimulates _eo ipso_ the will; congruity holds of active impulses as
well as of contemplative forms; causal independence and importance
suit a certain contemplative demand, etc. I will therefore abandon all
attempt at a formal treatment, and simply proceed to make remarks in
the most convenient order of exposition.

       *       *       *       *       *

As a whole, sensations are more lively and are judged more real than
conceptions; things met with every hour more real than things seen
once; attributes perceived when awake, more real than attributes
perceived in a dream. But, owing to the _diverse relations contracted
by the various objects with each other,_ the simple rule that the
lively and permanent is the real is often enough disguised. A conceived
thing may be deemed more real than a certain sensible thing, if it only
be intimately related to other sensible things more vivid, permanent,
or interesting than the first one. Conceived molecular vibrations,
e.g., are by the physicist judged more real than felt warmth, because
so intimately related to all those other facts of motion in the world
which he has made his special study. Similarly, a rare thing may be
deemed more real than a permanent thing if it be more widely related
to other permanent things. All the occasional crucial observations of
science are examples of this. A rare experience, too, is likely to be
judged more real than a permanent one, if it be more interesting and
exciting. Such is the sight of Saturn through a telescope; such are the
occasional insights and illuminations which upset our habitual ways of
thought.

But no mere floating conception, no mere disconnected rarity, ever
displaces vivid things or permanent things from our belief. A
conception, to prevail, must _terminate_ in the world of orderly
sensible experience. A rare phenomenon, to displace frequent ones,
must belong with others more frequent still. The history of science
is strewn with wrecks and ruins of theory--essences and principles,
fluids and forces--once fondly clung to, but found to hang together
with no facts of sense. And exceptional phenomena solicit our belief in
vain until such time as we chance to conceive them as of kinds already
admitted to exist. What science means by 'verification' is no more
than this, that no object of conception shall be believed which sooner
or later has not some permanent and vivid object of sensation for its
_term_. Compare what was said on pages 3-7, above.

_Sensible objects are thus either our realities or the tests of our
realities. Conceived objects must show sensible effects or else
be disbelieved._ And the effects, even though reduced to relative
unreality when their causes come to view (as heat, which molecular
vibrations make unreal), are yet the things on which our knowledge
of the causes rests. Strange mutual dependence this, in which the
appearance needs the reality in order to exist, but the reality needs
the appearance in order to be known!

_Sensible vividness or pungency is then the vital factor in reality
when once the conflict between objects, and the connecting of them
together in the mind, has begun._ No object which neither possesses
this vividness in its own right nor is able to borrow it from anything
else has a chance of making headway against vivid rivals, or of rousing
in us that reaction in which belief consists. On the vivid objects we
_pin_, as the saying is, our faith in all the rest; and out belief
returns instinctively even to those of them from which reflection has
led it away. Witness the obduracy with which the popular world of
colors, sounds, and smells holds its own against that of molecules and
vibrations. Let the physicist himself but nod, like Homer, and the
world of sense becomes his absolute reality again.[304]

That things originally devoid of this stimulating power should be
enabled, by association with other things which have it, to compel our
belief as if they had it themselves, is a remarkable psychological
fact, which since Hume's time it has been impossible to overlook.

 "The vividness of the first conception," he writes, "diffuses itself
 along the relations and is conveyed, as by so many pipes or channels,
 to every idea that has any communication with the primary one....
 Superstitious people are fond of the relics of saints and holy men,
 for the same reason that they seek after types and images, in order
 to enliven their devotion and give them a more intimate and strong
 conception of those exemplary lives.... Now, 'tis evident one of
 the best relics a devotee could procure would be the handiwork of a
 saint, and if his clothes and furniture are ever to be considered in
 this light, 'tis because they were once at his disposal, and were
 moved and affected by him; in which respect they are... connected
 with him by a shorter train of consequences than any of those from
 which we learn the reality of his existence. This phenomenon clearly
 proves that a present impression, with a relation of causation,
 may enliven any idea, and consequently produce belief or assent,
 according to the precedent definition of it.... It has been remarked
 among the Mahometans as well as Christians that those pilgrims who
 have seen Mecca or the Holy Land are ever after more faithful and
 zealous believers than those who have not had that advantage. A man
 whose memory presents him with a lively image of the Red Sea and the
 Desert and Jerusalem and Galilee can never doubt of any miraculous
 events which are related either by Moses or the Evangelists. The
 lively idea of the places passes by an easy transition to the facts
 which are supposed to have been related to them by contiguity, and
 increases the belief by increasing the vivacity of the conception. The
 remembrance of those fields and rivers has the same influence as a new
 argument.... The ceremonies of the Catholic religion may be considered
 as instances of the same nature. The devotees of that strange
 superstition usually plead in excuse for the mummeries with which they
 are upbraided that they feel the good effect of external motions and
 postures and actions in enlivening their devotion and quickening their
 fervor, which otherwise would decay, if directed entirely to distant
 and immaterial objects. We shadow out the objects of our faith, say
 they, in sensible types and images, and render them more present to us
 by the immediate presence of these types than it is possible for us to
 do merely by an intellectual view and contemplation."[305]

Hume's cases are rather trivial; and the things which associated
sensible objects make us believe in are supposed by him to be unreal.
But all the more manifest for that is the fact of their psychological
influence. Who does not 'realize' more the fact of a dead or distant
friend's existence, at the moment when a portrait, letter, garment or
other material reminder of him is found? The whole notion of him then
grows pungent and speaks to us and shakes us, in a manner unknown at
other times. In children's minds, fancies and realities live side by
side. But however lively their fancies may be, they still gain help
from association with reality. The imaginative child identifies its
_dramatis personæ_ with some doll or other material object, and this
evidently solidifies belief, little as it may resemble what it is held
to stand for. A thing not too interesting by its own real qualities
generally does the best service here. The most useful doll I ever saw
was a large cucumber in the hands of a little Amazonian-Indian girl;
she nursed it and washed it and rocked it to sleep in a hammock, and
talked to it all day long--there was no part in life which the cucumber
did not play. Says Mr. Tylor:

 "An imaginative child will make a dog do duty for a horse, or a
 soldier for a shepherd, till at last the objective resemblance almost
 disappears, and a bit of wood may be dragged about, resembling a ship
 on the sea or a coach on the road. Here the likeness of the bit of
 wood to a ship or coach is very slight indeed; but it is a thing, and
 can be moved about,... and is an evident assistance to the child in
 enabling it to arrange and develop its ideas.... Of how much use...
 may be seen by taking it away, and leaving the child nothing to play
 with.... In later years and among highly educated people the mental
 process which goes on in a child's playing with wooden soldiers and
 horses, though it never disappears, must be sought for in more complex
 phenomena. Perhaps nothing in after-life more closely resembles the
 effect of a doll upon a child than the effect of the illustrations
 of a tale upon a grown reader. Here the objective resemblance is
 very indefinite... yet what reality is given to the scene by a good
 picture.... Mr. Backhouse one day noticed in Van Diemen's Land a woman
 arranging several stones that were flat, oval, and about two inches
 wide, and marked in various directions with black and red lines.
 These, he learned, represented absent friends, and one larger than the
 rest stood for a fat native woman on Flinder's Island, known by the
 name of Mother Brown. Similar practices are found among far higher
 races than the ill-fated Tasmanians. Among some North American tribes
 a mother who has lost a child keeps its memory ever present to her by
 filling its cradle with black feathers and quills, and carrying it
 about with her for a year or more. When she stops anywhere, she sets
 up the cradle and talks to it as she goes about her work, just as she
 would have done if the dead body had been still alive within it. Here
 we have an image; but in Africa we find a rude doll representing the
 child, kept as a memorial.... Bastian saw Indian women in Peru who
 had lost an infant carrying about on their backs a wooden doll to
 represent it."[306]

To many persons among us, photographs of lost ones seem to be fetishes.
They, it is true, resemble; but the fact that the mere materiality of
the reminder is almost as important as its resemblance is shown by
the popularity a hundred years ago of the black taffeta 'silhouettes'
which are still found among family relics, and of one of which Fichte
could write to his affianced: '_Die Farbe fehlt, das Auge fehlt, es
fehlt der himmlische Ausdruck deiner lieblichen Züge_'--and yet go on
worshipping it all the same. The opinion so stoutly professed by many,
that language is essential to thought, seems to have this much of truth
in it, that all our inward images tend invincibly to attach themselves
to something sensible, so as to gain in corporeity and life. Words
serve this purpose, gestures serve it, stones, straws, chalk-marks,
anything will do. As soon as anyone of these things stands for the
idea, the latter seems to be more real. Some persons, the present
writer among the number, can hardly lecture without a blackboard:
the abstract conceptions must be symbolized by letters, squares or
circles, and the relations between them by lines. All this symbolism,
linguistic, graphic, and dramatic, has other uses too, for it abridges
thought and fixes terms. But one of its uses is surely to rouse the
believing reaction and give to the ideas a more living reality. As,
when we are told a story, and shown the very knife that did the murder,
the very ring whose hiding-place the clairvoyant revealed, the whole
thing passes from fairy-land to mother-earth, so here we believe all
the more, if only we see that 'the bricks are alive to tell the tale.'

       *       *       *       *       *

So much for the prerogative position of sensations in regard to our
belief. But among the sensations themselves all are not deemed equally
real. The more practically important ones, the more permanent ones,
and the more æsthetically apprehensible ones are selected from the
mass, to be believed in most of all; the others are degraded to the
position of mere signs and suggestions of these. This fact has already
been adverted to in former chapters.[307] The real color of a thing
is that one color-sensation which it gives us when most favorably
lighted for vision. So of its real size, its real shape, etc.--these
are but optical sensations selected out of thousands of others, because
they have æsthetic characteristics which appeal to our convenience
or delight. But I will not repeat what I have already written about
this matter, but pass on to our treatment of tactile and muscular
sensations, as 'primary qualities,' more real than those 'secondary'
qualities which eye and ear and nose reveal. Why do we thus so markedly
select the _tangible_ to be the real? Our motives are not far to seek.
The tangible qualities are the least fluctuating. When we get them at
all we get them the same. The other qualities fluctuate enormously
as our relative position to the object changes. Then, more decisive
still, the tactile properties are those most intimately connected with
our weal or woe. A dagger hurts us only when in contact with our skin,
a poison only when we take it into our mouths, and we can only use
an object for our advantage when we have it in our muscular control.
It is as tangibles, then, that things concern us most; and the other
senses, so far as their practical use goes, do but warn us of what
tangible things to expect. They are but organs of anticipatory touch,
as Berkeley has with perfect clearness explained.[308]

Among all sensations, the _most_ belief-compelling are those productive
of pleasure or of pain. Locke expressly makes the _pleasure_- or
_pain_-giving quality to be the ultimate human criterion of anything's
reality. Discussing (with a supposed Berkeleyan before Berkeley) the
notion that all our perceptions may be but a dream, he says:

 "He may please to dream that I make him this answer... that I believe
 he will allow a very manifest difference between dreaming of being in
 the fire and being actually in it. But yet if he be resolved to appear
 so sceptical as to maintain that what I call being actually in the
 fire is nothing but a dream, and that we cannot thereby certainly know
 that any such thing as fire actually exists without us, I answer that
 we, certainly finding that pleasure or pain [or emotion of any sort]
 follows upon the application of certain objects to us, whose existence
 we perceive, or dream that we perceive by our senses, _this certainly
 is as great as our happiness or misery,_ beyond which we have no
 concernment to know or to be."[309]


THE INFLUENCE OF EMOTION AND ACTIVE IMPULSE ON BELIEF.


The quality of arousing emotion, of shaking, moving us or inciting us
to action, has as much to do with our belief in an object's reality
as the quality of giving pleasure or pain. In Chapter XXIV I shall
seek to show that our emotions probably owe their pungent quality to
the bodily sensations which they involve. Our tendency to believe
in emotionally exciting objects (objects of fear, desire, etc.) is
thus explained without resorting to any fundamentally new principle
of choice. Speaking generally, the more a conceived object _excites_
us, the more reality it has. The same object excites us differently
at different times. Moral and religious truths come 'home' to us far
more on some occasions than on others. As Emerson says, "There is a
difference between one and another hour of life in their authority
and subsequent effect. Our faith comes in moments,... yet there is
a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more
reality to them than to all other experiences." The 'depth' is partly,
no doubt, the insight into wider systems of unified relation, but far
more often than that it is the emotional thrill. Thus, to descend to
more trivial examples, a man who has no belief in ghosts by daylight
will temporarily believe in them when, alone at midnight, he feels his
blood curdle at a mysterious sound or vision, his heart thumping, and
his legs impelled to flee. The thought of falling when we walk along a
curbstone awakens no emotion of dread; so no sense of reality attaches
to it, and we are sure we shall not fall. On a precipice's edge,
however, the sickening emotion which the notion of a possible fall
engenders makes us believe in the latter's imminent reality, and quite
unfits us to proceed.

The greatest proof that a man is _sui compos_ is his ability to suspend
belief in presence of an emotionally exciting idea. To give this power
is the highest result of education. In untutored minds the power does
not exist. _Every exciting thought in the natural man carries credence
with it. To conceive with passion is eo ipso to affirm._ As Bagehot
says:

 "The Caliph Omar burnt the Alexandrian Library, saying: 'All books
 which contain what is not in the Koran are dangerous. All which
 contain what is in it are useless!' Probably no one ever had an
 intenser belief in anything than Omar had in this. Yet it is
 impossible to imagine it preceded by an argument. His belief in
 Mahomet, in the Koran, and in the sufficiency of the Koran, probably
 came to him in spontaneous rushes of emotion; there may have been
 little vestiges of argument floating here and there, but they did
 not justify the strength of the emotion, still less did they create
 it, and they hardly even excused it.... Probably, when the subject
 is thoroughly examined, conviction will be found to be one of the
 intensest of human emotions, and one most closely connected with the
 bodily state,... accompanied or preceded by the sensation that Scott
 makes his seer describe as the prelude of a prophecy:

    'At length the fatal answer came,
    In characters of living flame--
    Not spoke in words, nor blazed in scroll,
    But borne and branded on my soul.'

 A hot flash seems to burn across the brain. Men in these intense
 states of mind have altered all history, changed for better or worse
 the creed of myriads, and desolated or redeemed provinces or ages. Nor
 is this intensity a sign of truth, for it is precisely strongest in
 those points in which men differ most from each other. John Knox felt
 it in his anti-Catholicism; Ignatius Loyola in his anti-Protestantism;
 and both, I suppose, felt it as much as it is possible to feel
 it."[310]

The reason of the belief is undoubtedly the bodily commotion which the
exciting idea sets up. 'Nothing which I can feel like _that_ can be
false.' All our religious and supernatural beliefs are of this order.
The surest warrant for immortality is the yearning of our bowels for
our dear ones; for God, the sinking sense it gives us to imagine no
such Providence or help. So of our political or pecuniary hopes and
fears, and things and persons dreaded and desired. "A grocer has a
full creed as to foreign policy, a young lady a complete theory of the
sacraments, as to which neither has any doubt.... A girl in a country
parsonage will be sure that Paris never can be taken, or that Bismarck
is a wretch"--all because they have either conceived these things at
some moment with passion, or associated them with other things which
they have conceived with passion.

M. Renouvier calls this belief of a thing for no other reason than that
we conceive it with passion, by the name of _mental vertigo_.[311]
Other objects whisper doubt or disbelief; but the object of passion
makes us deaf to all but itself, and we affirm it unhesitatingly.
Such objects are the delusions of insanity, which the insane person
can at odd moments steady himself against, but which again return to
sweep him off his feet. Such are the revelations of mysticism. Such,
particularly, are the sudden beliefs which animate mobs of men when
frenzied impulse to action is involved. Whatever be the action in
point--whether the stoning of a prophet, the hailing of a conqueror,
the burning of a witch, the baiting of a heretic or Jew, the starting
of a forlorn hope, or the flying from a foe--the fact that to believe
a certain object will _cause that action to explode_ is a sufficient
reason for that belief to come. The motor impulse sweeps it unresisting
in its train.

The whole history of witchcraft and early medicine is a commentary
on the facility with which anything which chances to be conceived
is believed the moment the belief chimes in with an emotional mood.
'The cause of sickness?' When a savage asks the cause of anything he
means to ask exclusively 'What is to blame?' The theoretic curiosity
starts from the practical life's demands. Let some one then accuse a
necromancer, suggest a charm or spell which has been cast, and no more
'evidence' is asked for. What evidence is required beyond this intimate
sense of the culprit's responsibility, to which our very viscera and
limbs reply?[312]

Human credulity in the way of therapeutics has similar psychological
roots. If there is anything intolerable (especially to the heart of a
woman), it is to do nothing when a loved one is sick or in pain. To do
anything is a relief. Accordingly, whatever remedy may be suggested is
a spark on inflammable soil. The mind makes its spring towards action
on that cue, sends for that remedy, and for a day at least believes the
danger past. Blame, dread, and hope are thus the great belief-inspiring
passions, and cover among them the future, the present, and the past.

These remarks illustrate the earlier heads of the list on page
292. Whichever represented objects give us sensations, especially
interesting ones, or incite our motor impulses, or arouse our hate,
desire, or fear, are real enough for us. Our requirements in the way
of reality terminate in our own acts and emotions, our own pleasures
and pains. These are the ultimate fixities from which, as we formerly
observed, the whole chain of our beliefs depends, object hanging to
object, as the bees, in swarming, hang to each other until, _de proche
en proche,_ the supporting branch, the Self, is reached and held.


BELIEF IN OBJECTS OF THEORY.


Now the merely conceived or imagined objects which our mind represents
as hanging to the sensations (causing them, etc.), filling the gaps
between them, and weaving their interrupted chaos into order are
innumerable. Whole systems of them conflict with other systems, and
our choice of which system shall carry our belief is governed by
principles which are simple enough, however subtle and difficult may
be their application to details. _The conceived system, to pass for
true, must at least include the reality of the sensible objects in
it, by explaining them as effects on us, if nothing more. The system
which includes the most of them, and definitely explains or pretends
to explain the most of them, will, ceteris paribus, prevail._ It is
needless to say how far mankind still is from having excogitated such
a system. But the various materialisms, idealisms, and hylozoisms show
with what industry the attempt is forever made. It is conceivable
that several rival theories should equally well include the actual
order of our sensations in their scheme, much as the one-fluid and
two-fluid theories of electricity formulated all the common electrical
phenomena equally well. The sciences are full of these alternatives.
Which theory is then to be believed? _That theory will be most
generally believed which, besides offering us objects able to account
satisfactorily for our sensible experience_, _also offers those which
are most interesting, those which appeal most urgently to our æsthetic,
emotional, and active needs._ So here, in the higher intellectual life,
the same selection among general conceptions goes on which went on
among the sensations themselves. First, a word of their relation to our
emotional and active needs--and here I can do no better than quote from
an article published some years ago:[313]

 "A philosophy may be unimpeachable in other respects, but either
 of two defects will be fatal to its universal acceptance. First,
 its ultimate principle must not be one that essentially baffles
 and disappoints our dearest desires and most cherished powers.
 A pessimistic principle like Schopenhauer's incurably vicious
 Will-substance, or Hartmann's wicked jack-at-all-trades, the
 Unconscious, will perpetually call forth essays at other philosophies.
 Incompatibility of the future with their desires and active tendencies
 is, in fact, to most men a source of more fixed disquietude than
 uncertainty itself. Witness the attempts to overcome the 'problem of
 evil,' the 'mystery of pain.' There is no problem of 'good.'

 "But a second and worse defect in a philosophy than that of
 contradicting our active propensities is to give them no Object
 whatever to press against. A philosophy whose principle is so
 incommensurate with our most intimate powers as to deny them all
 relevancy in universal affairs, as to annihilate their motives at
 one blow, will be even more unpopular than pessimism. Better face
 the enemy than the eternal Void! This is why materialism will always
 fail of universal adoption, however well it may fuse things into an
 atomistic unity, however clearly it may prophesy the future eternity.
 For materialism denies reality to the objects of almost all the
 impulses which we most cherish. The real _meaning_ of the impulses, it
 says, is something which has no emotional interest for us whatever.
 But what is called extradition is quite as characteristic of our
 emotions as of our sense. Both point to an Object as the cause of the
 present feeling. What an intensely objective reference lies in fear!
 In like manner an enraptured man, a dreary-feeling man, are not simply
 aware of their subjective states; if they were, the force of their
 feelings would evaporate. Both believe there is outward cause _why_
 they should feel as they do: either 'It is a glad world! how good
 is life!' or 'What a loathsome tedium is existence!' Any philosophy
 which annihilates the validity of the reference by explaining away
 its objects or translating them into terms of no emotional pertinency
 leaves the mind with little to care or act for. This is the opposite
 condition from that of nightmare, but when acutely brought home to
 consciousness it produces a kindred horror. In nightmare we have
 motives to act, but no power; here we have powers, but no motives.
 A nameless _Unheimlichkeit_ comes over us at the thought of there
 being nothing eternal in our final purposes, in the objects of those
 loves and aspirations which are our deepest energies. The monstrously
 lopsided equation of the universe and its knower, which we postulate
 as the ideal of cognition, is perfectly paralleled by the no less
 lopsided equation of the universe and the _doer_. We demand in it
 a _character_ for which our emotions and active propensities shall
 be a match. Small as we are, minute as is the point by which the
 Cosmos impinges upon each one of us, each one desires to feel that
 his reaction at that point is congruous with the demands of the vast
 whole, that he balances the latter, so to speak, and is able to do
 what it expects of him. But as his abilities to 'do' lie wholly in
 the line of his natural propensities; as he enjoys reaction with such
 emotions as fortitude, hope, rapture, admiration, earnestness, and the
 like; and as he very unwillingly reacts with fear, disgust, despair,
 or doubt,--a philosophy which should legitimate only emotions of the
 latter sort would be sure to leave the mind a prey to discontent and
 craving.

 "It is far too little recognized how entirely the intellect is built
 up of practical interests. The theory of Evolution is beginning to do
 very good service by its reduction of all mentality to the type of
 reflex action. Cognition, in this view, is but a fleeting moment, a
 cross-section at a certain point of what in its totality is a motor
 phenomenon. In the lower forms of life no one will pretend that
 cognition is anything more than a guide to appropriate action. The
 germinal question concerning things brought for the first time before
 consciousness is not the theoretic 'What is that?' but the practical
 'Who goes there?' or rather, as Horwicz has admirably put it, 'What
 is to be done?'--'_Was fang' ich an_?' In all our discussions about
 the intelligence of lower animals the only test we use is that of
 their _acting_ as if for a purpose. Cognition, in short, is incomplete
 until discharged in act. And although it is true that the later mental
 development, which attains its maximum through the hypertrophied
 cerebrum of man, gives birth to a vast amount of theoretic activity
 over and above that which is immediately ministerial to practice,
 yet the earlier claim is only postponed, not effaced, and the active
 nature asserts its rights to the end.

 "If there be any truth at all in this view, it follows that however
 vaguely a philosopher may define the ultimate universal datum,
 he cannot be said to leave it unknown to us so long as he in the
 slightest degree pretends that our emotional or active attitude
 towards it should be of one sort rather than another. He who says,
 'Life is real, life is earnest,' however much he may speak of the
 fundamental mysteriousness of things, gives a distinct definition to
 that mysteriousness by ascribing to it the right to claim from us the
 particular mood called seriousness, which means the willingness to
 live with energy, though energy bring pain. The same is true of him
 who says that all is vanity. Indefinable as the predicate vanity may
 be _in se_, it is clearly enough something which permits anæsthesia,
 mere escape from suffering, to be our rule of life. There is no more
 ludicrous incongruity than for agnostics to proclaim with one breath
 that the substance of things is unknowable, and with the next that
 the thought of it should inspire us with admiration of its glory,
 reverence, and a willingness to add our co-operative push in the
 direction towards which its manifestations seem to be drifting. The
 unknowable may be unfathomed, but if it make such distinct demands
 upon our activity, we surely are not ignorant of its essential quality.

 "If we survey the field of history and ask what feature all great
 periods of revival, of expansion of the human mind, display in common,
 we shall find, I think, simply this: that each and all of them
 have said to the human being, 'The inmost nature of the reality is
 congenial to _powers_ which you possess.' In what did the emancipating
 message of primitive Christianity consist, but in the announcement
 that God recognizes those weak and tender impulses which paganism had
 so rudely overlooked? Take repentance: the man who can do nothing
 rightly can at least repent of his failures. But for paganism this
 faculty of repentance was a pure supernumerary, a straggler too late
 for the fair. Christianity took it and made it the one power within
 us which appealed straight to the heart of God. And after the night
 of the Middle Ages had so long branded with obloquy even the generous
 impulses of the flesh, and defined the Reality to be such that only
 slavish natures could commune with it, in what did the _Sursum corda!_
 of the Renaissance lie but in the proclamation that the archetype
 of verity in things laid claim on the widest activity of our whole
 æsthetic being? What were Luther's mission and Wesley's but appeals
 to powers which even the meanest of men might carry with them, faith
 and self-despair, but which were personal, requiring no priestly
 intermediation, and which brought their owner face to face with God?
 What caused the wild-fire influence of Rousseau but the assurance he
 gave that man's nature was in harmony with the nature of things, if
 only the paralyzing corruptions of custom would stand from between?
 How did Kant and Fichte, Goethe and Schiller, inspire their time
 with cheer, except by saying, 'Use all your powers; that is the only
 obedience which the universe exacts'? And Carlyle with his gospel of
 Work, of Fact, of Veracity, how does he move us except by saying that
 the universe imposes no tasks upon us but such as the most humble can
 perform? Emerson's creed that everything that ever was or will be is
 here in the enveloping Now; that man has but to obey himself--'He who
 will rest in what he _is_, is a part of Destiny'--is in like manner
 nothing but an exorcism of all scepticism as to the pertinency of
 one's natural faculties.

 "In a word, 'Son of Man, _stand upon thy feet_ and I will speak unto
 thee!' is the only revelation of truth to which the solving epochs
 have helped the disciple. But that has been enough to satisfy the
 greater part of his rational need. _In se_ and _per se_ the universal
 essence has hardly been more defined by any of these formulæ than by
 the agnostic _x_; but the mere assurance that my powers, such as they
 are, are not irrelevant to it, but pertinent, that it speaks to them
 and will in some way recognize their reply, that I can be a match for
 it if I will, and not a footless waif, suffices to make it rational
 to my feeling in the sense given above. Nothing could be more absurd
 than to hope for the definitive triumph of any philosophy which should
 refuse to legitimate, and to legitimate in an emphatic manner, the
 more powerful of our emotional and practical tendencies. Fatalism,
 whose solving word in all crises of behavior is 'All striving is
 vain,' will never reign supreme, for the impulse to take life
 strivingly is indestructible in the race. Moral creeds which speak
 to that impulse will be widely successful in spite of inconsistency,
 vagueness, and shadowy determination of expectancy. Man needs a rule
 for his will, and will invent one if one be not given him."

After the emotional and active needs come the intellectual and æsthetic
ones. The two great æsthetic principles, of richness and of ease,
dominate our intellectual as well as our sensuous life. And, _ceteris
paribus_, no system which should not be rich, simple, and harmonious
would have a chance of being chosen for belief, if rich, simple,
and harmonious systems were also there. Into the latter we should
unhesitatingly settle, with that welcoming attitude of the will in
which belief consists. To quote from a remarkable book:

 "This law that our consciousness constantly tends to the minimum of
 complexity and to the maximum of definiteness, is of great importance
 for all our knowledge.... Our own activity of attention will thus
 determine what we are to know and what we are to believe. If things
 have more than a certain complexity, not only will our limited powers
 of attention forbid us to unravel this complexity, but we shall
 strongly desire to believe the things much simpler than they are.
 For our thoughts about them will have a constant tendency to become
 as simple and definite as possible. Put a man into a perfect chaos
 of phenomena--sounds, sights, feelings--and if the man continued to
 exist, and to be rational at all, his attention would doubtless soon
 find for him away to make up some kind of rhythmic regularity, which
 he would impute to the things about him, so as to imagine that he had
 discovered some laws of sequence in this mad new world. And thus, in
 every case where we fancy ourselves sure of a simple law of Nature, we
 must remember that a great deal of the fancied simplicity may be due,
 in the given case, not to Nature, but to the ineradicable prejudice of
 our own minds in favor of regularity and simplicity. All our thoughts
 are determined, in great measure, by this law of least effort, as it
 is found exemplified in our activity of attention.... The aim of the
 whole process seems to be to reach as complete and united a conception
 of reality as possible, a conception wherein the greatest fulness of
 data shall be combined with the greatest simplicity of conception. The
 effort of consciousness seems to be to combine the greatest richness
 of content with the greatest definiteness of organization."[314]

The richness is got by including all the facts of sense in the
scheme; the simplicity, by deducing them out of the smallest possible
number of permanent and independent primordial entities: the definite
organization, by assimilating these latter to ideal objects between
which relations of an inwardly rational sort obtain. What these ideal
objects and rational relations are will require a separate chapter
to show.[315] Meanwhile, enough has surely been said to justify the
assertion made above that no general off-hand answer can be given as
to which objects mankind shall choose as its realities. The fight is
still under way. Our minds are yet chaotic; and at best we make a
mixture and a compromise, as we yield to the claim of this interest
or that, and follow first one and then another principle in turn. It
is undeniably true that materialistic, or so-called 'scientific,'
conceptions of the universe have so far gratified the purely
intellectual interests more than the mere sentimental conceptions
have. But, on the other hand, as already remarked, they leave the
emotional and active interests cold. _The perfect object of belief
would be a God or 'Soul of the World,' represented both optimistically
and moralistically (if such a combination could be), and withal so
definitely conceived as to show us why our phenomenal experiences
should be sent to us by Him in just the very way in which they come._
All Science and all History would thus be accounted for in the deepest
and simplest fashion. The very room in which I sit, its sensible
walls and floor, and the feeling the air and fire within it give me,
no less than the 'scientific' conceptions which I am urged to frame
concerning the mode of existence of all these phenomena when my back
is turned, would then all be corroborated, not de-realized, by the
ultimate principle of my belief. The World-soul sends me just those
phenomena in order that I may react upon them; and among the reactions
is the intellectual one of spinning these conceptions. What is beyond
the crude experiences is not an _alternative_ to them, but something
that _means_ them for me here and now. It is safe to say that, if ever
such a system is satisfactorily excogitated, mankind will drop all
other systems and cling to that one alone as real. Meanwhile the other
systems coexist with the attempts at that one, and, all being alike
fragmentary, each has its little audience and day.

       *       *       *       *       *

I have now, I trust, shown sufficiently what the psychologic sources of
the sense of reality are. Certain postulates are given in our nature;
and whatever satisfies those postulates is treated as if real.[316]
I might therefore finish the chapter here, were it not that a few
additional words will set the truth in a still clearer light.


DOUBT.


There is hardly a common man who (if consulted) would not say that
things come to us in the first instance _as ideas_; and that if we take
them for realities, it is because we _add something to them_, namely,
the predicate of having also '_real existence outside of our thought_.'
This notion that a higher faculty than the mere _having_ of a conscious
content is needed to make us know anything real by its means has
pervaded psychology from the earliest times, and is the tradition of
Scholasticism, Kantism, and Common-sense. Just as sensations must come
as inward affections and then be 'extradited;' as objects of memory
must appear at first as presently unrealities, and subsequently be
'projected' backwards as past realities; so conceptions must be _entia
rationis_ till a higher faculty uses them as windows to look beyond
the ego, into the real _extra_-mental world;--so runs the orthodox and
popular account.

And there is no question that this is a true account of the way in
which many of our later beliefs come to pass. The logical distinction
between the bare thought of an object and belief in the object's
reality is often a chronological distinction as well. The having
and the crediting of an idea do not always coalesce; for often we
first suppose and then believe; first play with the notion, frame the
hypothesis, and then affirm the existence, of an object of thought.
And we are quite conscious of the succession of the two mental acts.
But these cases are none of them _primitive_ cases. They only occur
in minds long schooled to doubt by the contradictions of experience.
_The primitive impulse is to affirm immediately the reality of all
that is conceived._[317] When we do doubt, however, in what does the
subsequent resolution of the doubt consist? It either consists in a
purely verbal performance, the coupling of the adjectives 'real' or
'outwardly existing' (as predicates) to the thing originally conceived
(as subject); or it consists in the perception in the given case of
_that for which these adjectives_, abstracted from other similar
concrete cases, _stand_. But what these adjectives stand for, we now
know well. They stand for certain relations (immediate, or through
intermediaries) to ourselves. Whatever concrete objects have hitherto
stood in those relations have been for us 'real,' 'outwardly existing.'
So that when we now abstractly admit a thing to be 'real' (without
perhaps going through any definite perception of its relations), it is
as if we said "it belongs in the same world with those other objects."
Naturally enough, we have hourly opportunities for this summary process
of belief. All remote objects in space or time are believed in this
way. When I believe that some prehistoric savage chipped this flint,
for example, the reality of the savage and of his act makes no direct
appeal either to my sensation, emotion, or volition. What I mean by
my belief in it is simply my dim sense of a _continuity_ between the
long dead savage and his doings and the present world of which the
flint forms part. It is pre-eminently a case for applying our doctrine
of the 'fringe' (see Vol I. p. 258). When I think the savage with one
fringe of relationship, I believe in him; when I think him without
that fringe, or with another one (as, e.g., if I should class him with
'scientific vagaries' in general), I disbelieve him. The word 'real'
itself is, in short, a fringe.


RELATIONS OF BELIEF AND WILL.


We shall see in Chapter XXV that will consists in nothing but a
manner of attending to certain objects, or consenting to their stable
presence before the mind. The objects, in the case of will, are those
whose existence depends on our thought, movements of our own body
for example, or facts which such movements executed in future may
make real. Objects of belief, on the contrary, are those which do not
change according as we think regarding them. I _will_ to get up early
to-morrow morning; I _believe_ that I got up late yesterday morning; I
_will_ that my foreign bookseller in Boston shall procure me a German
book and write to him to that effect. I _believe_ that he will make me
pay three dollars for it when it comes, etc. Now the important thing to
notice is that this difference between the objects of will and belief
is entirely immaterial, as far as the relation of the mind to them
goes. All that the mind does is in both cases the same; it looks at the
object and consents to its existence, espouses it, says 'it shall be my
reality.' It turns to it, in short, in the interested active emotional
way. The rest is done by nature, which in some cases _makes_ the
objects real which we think of in this manner, and in other cases does
not. Nature cannot change the past to suit our thinking. She cannot
change the stars or the winds; but she _does_ change our bodies to suit
our thinking, and through their instrumentality changes much besides;
so the great practical distinction between objects which we may will or
unwill, and objects which we can merely believe or disbelieve, grows
up, and is of course one of the most important distinctions in the
world. Its roots, however, do not lie in psychology, but in physiology;
as the chapter on Volition will abundantly make plain. _Will and
Belief, in short, meaning a certain relation between objects and the
Self, are two names for one and the same_ PSYCHOLOGICAL _phenomenon_.
All the questions which arise concerning one are questions which
arise concerning the other. The causes and conditions of the peculiar
relation must be the same in both. The free-will question arises as
regards belief. If our wills are indeterminate, so must our beliefs
be, etc. The first act of free-will, in short, would naturally be to
believe in free-will, etc. In Chapter XXVI, I shall mention this
again.

       *       *       *       *       *

A practical observation may end this chapter. If belief consists in
an emotional reaction of the entire man on an object, how _can_ we
believe at will? We cannot control our emotions. Truly enough, a man
cannot believe at will abruptly. Nature sometimes, and indeed not very
infrequently, produces instantaneous conversions for us. She suddenly
puts us in an active connection with objects of which she had till
then left us cold. "I realize for the first time," we then say, "what
that means!" This happens often with moral propositions. We have often
heard them; but now they shoot into our lives; they move us; we feel
their living force. Such instantaneous beliefs are truly enough not
to be achieved by will. But _gradually_ our will can lead us to the
same results by a very simple method: _we need only in cold blood_ ACT
_as if the thing in question were real, and keep acting as if it were
real, and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with
our life that it will become real._ It will become so knit with habit
and emotion that our interests in it will be those which characterize
belief. Those to whom 'God' and 'Duty' are now mere names can make
them much more than that, if they make a little sacrifice to them every
day. But all this is so well known in moral and religious education
that I need say no more.[318]

       *       *       *       *       *

[287] Reprinted, with additions, from 'Mind' for July 1889.

[288] Compare this psychological fact with the corresponding logical
truth that all negation rests on covert assertion of something else
than the thing denied. (See Bradley's Principles of Logic, bk. i. ch.
3.)

[289] See that very remarkable little work, 'The Anæsthetic Revelation
and the Gist of Philosophy,' by Benj. P. Blood (Amsterdam, N. Y.,
1874). Compare also Mind, vii. 206.

[290] "To one whose mind is healthy thoughts come and go unnoticed;
with me they have to be faced, thought about in a peculiar fashion, and
then disposed of as finished, and this often when I am utterly wearied
and would be at peace; but the call is imperative. This goes on to the
hindrance of all natural action. If I were told that the staircase was
on fire and I had only a minute to escape, and the thought arose--'Have
they sent for fire-engines? Is it probable that the man who has the
key is on hand? Is the man a careful sort of person? Will the key be
hanging on a peg? Am I thinking rightly? Perhaps they don't lock the
depot'--my foot would be lifted to go down; I should be conscious to
excitement that I was losing my chance; but I should be unable to
stir until all these absurdities were entertained and disposed of. In
the most critical moments of my life, when I ought to have been so
_engrossed as to leave no room for any secondary thoughts_, I have been
oppressed by the inability to be at peace. And in the most ordinary
circumstances it is all the same. Let me instance the other morning
I went to walk. The day was biting cold, but I was unable to proceed
except by jerks. Once I got arrested, my feet in a muddy pool. One foot
was lifted to go, knowing that it was not good to be standing in water,
but there I was fast, the cause of detention being the discussing
with myself the reasons why I should not stand in that pool." (T. S.
Clouston, Clinical Lectures on Mental Diseases, 1883, p. 43. See also
Berger, in Archiv f. Psychiatrie, vi. 217.)

[291] Note to Jas. Mill's Analysis, i. 412-428.

[292] For an excellent account of the history of opinion on this
subject see A. Marty, in Vierteljahrsch. f. wiss. Phil., viii. 181 ff.
(1884).

[293] We saw near the end of Chapter XIX that a candle-image taking
exclusive possession of the mind in this way would probably acquire the
sensational vividness. But this physiological accident is logically
immaterial to the argument in the text, which ought to apply as well to
the dimmest sort of mental image as to the brightest sensation.

[294] In both existential and attributive judgments a synthesis is
represented. The syllable _ex_ in the word Existence, _da_ in the word
_Dasein_, express it. 'The candle exists' is equivalent to 'The candle
is _over there_.' And the 'over there' means real space, space related
to other reals. The proposition amounts to saying: 'The candle is in
the same space with other reals.' It affirms of the candle a very
concrete predicate--namely, this relation to other particular concrete
things. _Their_ real existence, as we shall later see, resolves
itself into their peculiar relation to _ourselves_. Existence is thus
no substantive quality when we predicate it of any object; it is a
relation, ultimately terminating in ourselves, and at the moment when
it terminates, becoming a _practical_ relation. But of this more anon.
I only wish now to indicate the superficial nature of the distinction
between the existential and the attributive proposition.

[295] I define the scientific universe here in the radical mechanical
way. Practically, it is oftener thought of in a mongrel way and
resembles in more points the popular physical world.

[296] It thus comes about that we can say such things as that Ivanhoe
did not _really_ marry Rebecca, as Thackeray _falsely_ makes him do.
The real Ivanhoe-world is the one which Scott wrote down for us. _In
that world_ Ivanhoe does _not_ marry Rebecca. The objects within that
world are knit together by perfectly definite relations, which can be
affirmed or denied. Whilst absorbed in the novel, we turn our backs
on all other worlds, and, for the time, the Ivanhoe-world remains our
absolute reality. When we wake from the spell, however, we find a
still more real world, which reduces Ivanhoe, and all things connected
with him, to the Active status, and relegates them to one of the
sub-universes grouped under No. 5.

[297] The world of dreams is our real world whilst we are sleeping,
because our attention then lapses from the sensible world. Conversely,
when we wake the attention usually lapses from the dream-world and that
becomes unreal. But if a dream haunts us and compels our attention
during the day it is very apt to remain figuring in our consciousness
as a sort of sub-universe alongside of the waking world. Most people
have probably had dreams which it is hard to imagine not to have been
glimpses into an actually existing region of being, perhaps a corner
of the 'spiritual world.' And dreams have accordingly in all ages been
regarded as revelations, and have played a large part in furnishing
forth mythologies and creating themes for faith to lay hold upon. The
'larger universe,' here, which helps us to believe both in the dream
and in the waking reality which is its immediate reductive, is the
_total_ universe, of Nature _plus_ the Supernatural. The dream holds
true, namely, in one half of that universe; the waking perceptions in
the other half. Even to-day dream-objects figure among the realities
in which some 'psychic-researchers' are seeking to rouse our belief.
All our theories, not only those about the supernatural, but our
philosophic and scientific theories as well, are like our dreams in
rousing such different degrees of belief in different minds.

[298] Distinguishes realities from unrealities, the essential from the
rubbishy and neglectable.

[299] Inquiry concerning Hum. Understanding, sec. v. pt. 2 (slightly
transposed in my quotation).

[300] Note to Jas. Mill's Analysis, i. 394.

[301] Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Müller, ii. 515-17. Hume also:
"When, after the simple conception of anything, we would conceive it
as existent, we in reality make no addition to, or alteration of,
our first idea. Thus, when we affirm that God is existent, we simply
form the idea of such a being as He is represented to us; nor is the
existence which we attribute to Him conceived by a particular idea,
which we join to His other qualities, and can again separate and
distinguish from them.... The belief of the existence joins no new
idea to those which compose the ideas of the object. When I think of
God, when I think of Him as existent, and when I believe Him to be
existent, my idea of Him neither increases nor diminishes. But as 'tis
certain there is a great difference betwixt the simple conception of
the existence of an object and the belief of it, and as this difference
lies not in the facts or compositions of the idea which we conceive,
it follows that it must lie in the manner in which we conceive it."
(Treatise of Human Nature, pt. iii. sec. 7.)

[302] I use the notion of the Ego here, as common-sense uses it.
Nothing is prejudged as to the results (or absence of results) of
ulterior attempts to analyze the notion.

[303] Griesinger, Mental Diseases, §§ 50, 98. The neologism we so often
hear, that an experience 'gives us a _realising sense_' of the truth of
some proposition or other, illustrates the dependence of the sense of
reality upon _excitement_. Only what stirs us is 'realized.'

[304] The way in which sensations are pitted against systematized
conceptions, and in which the one or the other then prevails
according as the sensations are felt by ourselves or merely known
by report, is interestingly illustrated at the present day by the
state of public belief about 'spiritualistic' phenomena. There exist
numerous narratives of movement without contact on the part of
articles of furniture and other material objects, in the presence
of certain privileged individuals called mediums. Such movement
violates our memories, and the whole system of accepted physical
'science.' Consequently those who have not seen it either brand the
narratives immediately as lies or call the phenomena 'illusions' of
sense, produced by fraud or due to hallucination. But one who has
actually seen such a phenomenon, under what seems to him sufficiently
'test-conditions,' will hold to his sensible experience through thick
and thin, even though the whole fabric of 'science' should be rent in
twain. That man would be a weak-spirited creature indeed who should
allow any fly-blown generalities about 'the liability of the senses to
be deceived' to bully him out of his adhesion to what for him was an
indubitable experience of sight. A man may err in this obstinacy, sure
enough, in any particular case. But the spirit that animates him is
that on which ultimately the very life and health of Science rest.

[305] Treatise of Human Nature, bk. i. pt. iii. sec. 7.

[306] Early Hist. of Mankind, p. 108.

[307] See Vol. I. pp. 285-6; Vol. II. pp. 237 ff.

[308] See Theory of Vision, § 59.

[309] Essay, bk. iv. chap. 2, § 14. In another place: "He that sees a
candle burning and hath experimented the force of its flame by putting
his finger into it, will little doubt that this is something existing
without him, which does him harm and puts him to great pain.... And if
our dreamer pleases to try whether the glowing heat of a glass furnace
be barely a wandering imagination in a drowsy man's fancy by putting
his hand into it, he may, perhaps, be awakened into a certainty greater
than he could wish, that it is something more than bare imagination.
So that the evidence is as great as we can desire, being as certain to
us as our pleasure or pain, i.e. happiness or misery; beyond which we
have no concernment, either of knowledge or being. Such an assurance of
the existence of things without us is sufficient to direct us in the
attaining the good and avoiding the evil which is caused by them, which
is the important concernment we have of being made acquainted with
them," (_Ibid._ bk. iv. chap. 11, § 8.)

[310] W. Bagehot, 'The Emotion of Conviction,' Literary Studies, i.
412-17.

[311] Psychologie Rationnelle, ch. 12.

[312] Two examples out of a thousand:

Reid, Inquiry, ch. ii. § 9: "I remember, many years ago, a white ox
was brought into the country, of so enormous size that people came
many miles to see him. There happened, some months after, an uncommon
fatality among women in child-hearing. Two such uncommon events,
following one another, gave a suspicion of their connection, and
occasioned a common opinion among the country people that the white ox
was the cause of this fatality."

H. M. Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, ii. 388: "On the third day
of our stay at Mowa, feeling quite comfortable amongst the people, on
account of their friendly bearing, I began to write in my note-book the
terms for articles, in order to improve my already copious vocabulary
of native words. I had proceeded only a few minutes when I observed a
strange commotion amongst the people who had been flocking about me,
and presently they ran away. In a short time we heard war-cries ringing
loudly and shrilly over the table-land. Two hours afterwards a long
line of warriors were seen descending the table-land and advancing
towards our camp. There may have been between five and six hundred
of them. We, on the other hand, had made but few preparations except
such as would justify us replying to them in the event of the actual
commencement of hostilities. But I had made many firm friends among
them, and I firmly believed that I should be able to avert an open
rupture. When they had assembled at about a hundred yards in front of
our camp, Safeni and I walked up towards them and sat down midway. Some
half-dozen of the Mowa people came near, and the shauri began.

"'What is the matter, my friends?' I asked. 'Why do you come with guns
in your hands, in such numbers, as though you were coming to fight?
Fight? fight us, your friends! Tut! this is some great mistake, surely.'

"'Mundele,' replied one of them,... 'our people saw you yesterday make
marks on some tara-tara [paper]. This is very bad. Our country will
waste, our goats will die, our bananas will rot, and our women will
dry up. What have we done to you that you should wish to kill us? We
have sold you food and we have brought you wine each day. Your people
are allowed to wander where they please without trouble. Why is the
Mundele so wicked? We have gathered together to fight you if you do not
burn that tara-tara now before our eyes. If you burn it we go away, and
shall be your friends as heretofore.'

"'I told them to rest there, and left Safeni in their hands as a pledge
that I should return. My tent was not fifty yards from the spot, but
while going towards it my brain was busy in devising some plan to foil
this superstitious madness. My note-book contained a vast number of
valuable notes.... I could not sacrifice it to the childish caprice
of savages. As I was rummaging my book-box, I came across a volume of
Shakespeare [Chandos edition] much worn, and well thumbed, and which
was of the same size as my field-book; its cover was similar also, and
it might be passed for the field-book, provided that no one remembered
its appearance too well. I took it to them. 'Is this the tara-tara,
friends, that you wish burned?'

"'Yes, yes, that is it.'

"'Well, take it, and burn it, or keep it.'

"'M--m. No, no, no. We will not touch it. It is fetish. You must burn
it.'

"'I! Well, let it be so. I will do anything to please my good friends
of Mowa.'

"'We walked to the nearest fire. I breathed a regretful farewell to
my genial companion, which, during my many weary hours of night, had
assisted to relieve my mind when oppressed by almost intolerable woes,
and then gravely consigned the innocent Shakespeare to the flames,
heaping the brush fuel over it with ceremonious care.

"'A-h-h,' breathed the poor deluded natives sighing their relief....
'There is no trouble now.'... And something approaching to a cheer was
shouted among them, which terminated the episode of the burning of
Shakespeare."

[313] 'Rationality, Activity, and Faith' (Princeton Review, July 1882,
pp. 64-9).

[314] J. Royce, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (Boston, 1885). pp.
317-57.

[315] Chapter XXVII.

[316] Prof. Royce puts this well in discussing idealism and the reality
of an 'external' world. "If the history of popular speculation on these
topics could be written, how much of cowardice and shuffling would be
found in the behavior of the natural mind before the question, 'How
dost thou know of an external reality?' Instead of simply and plainly
answering: 'I mean by the external world in the first place something
that I accept or demand, that I posit, postulate, actively construct
on the basis of sense-data,' the natural man gives us all kinds of
vague compromise answers.... Where shall these endless turnings and
twistings have an end?... All these lesser motives are appealed to, and
the one ultimate motive is neglected. The ultimate motive with the man
of every-day life is the _will to have an external world._ Whatever
consciousness contains, reason will persist in spontaneously adding the
thought: 'But there _shall be_ something beyond this.'... The popular
assurance of an external world is the _fixed determination to make
one,_ now and henceforth." (Religious Aspect of Philosophy, p. 304--the
italics are my own.) This immixture of the will appears most flagrantly
in the fact that although external matter is doubted commonly enough,
minds external to our own are never doubted. We need them too much, are
too essentially social to dispense with them. Semblances of matter may
suffice to react upon, but not semblances of communing souls. A psychic
solipsism is too hideous a mockery of our wants, and, so far as I know,
has never been seriously entertained.--Chapters ix and x of Prof.
Royce's work are on the whole the clearest account of the psychology of
belief with which I am acquainted.

[317] "The leading fact in Belief, according to my view of it, is our
Primitive Credulity. We begin by believing everything; whatever is, is
true.... The animal born in the morning of a summer day proceeds upon
the fact of daylight; assumes the perpetuity of that fact. Whatever
it is disposed to do, it does without misgivings. If in the morning
it began a round of operations continuing for hours, under the full
benefit of daylight, it would unhesitatingly begin the same round
in the evening. Its state of mind is practically one of unbounded
confidence; but, as yet, it does not understand what confidence means.

"The pristine assurance is soon met by checks; a disagreeable
experience leading to new insight. To be thwarted and opposed is one
of our earliest and most frequent pains. It develops the sense of a
distinction between free and obstructed impulses; the unconsciousness
of an open way is exchanged for consciousness; we are now said properly
to believe in what has never been contradicted, as we disbelieve in
what has been contradicted. We believe that, after the dawn of day,
there is before us a continuance of light; we do not believe that this
light is to continue forever.

"Thus, the vital circumstance in belief is never to be
contradicted--never to lose _prestige_. The number of repetitions
counts for little in the process: we are as much convinced after ten as
after fifty; we are more convinced by ten unbroken than by fifty for
and one against." (Bain: The Emotions and the Will, pp. 511, 512.)

[318] _Literature._ D. Hume: Treatise on Human Nature, part iii. §§
vii-x. A. Bain: Emotions and Will, chapter on Belief (also pp. 20
ff.). J. Sully: Sensation and Intuition, essay iv. J. Mill: Analysis
of Human Mind, chapter xi. Ch. Renouvier: Psychologie Rationnelle,
vol. ii. pt. ii. and Esquisse d'une Classification systématique des
Doctrines Philosophiques, part vi. J. H. Newman: The Grammar of Assent.
J. Venn: Some Characteristics of Belief. V. Brochard: De l'Erreur,
part ii. chap. vi, ix; and Revue Philosophique, xxviii. 1. E. Rabier:
Psychologie, chap xxi. Appendix. Ollé Laprune: La Certitude Morale
(1881). G. F. Stout: On Genesis of Cognition of Physical Reality,
in 'Mind,' Jan. 1890. J. Pikler: The Psychology of the Belief in
Objective Existence (London, 1890).--Mill says that we believe present
sensations; and makes our belief in all other things a matter of
_association_ with these. So far so good; but as he makes no mention
of emotional or volitional reaction, Bain rightly charges him with
treating belief as a purely intellectual state. For Bain belief is
rather an incident of our active life. When a thing is such as to
make us _act_ on it, then we believe it, according to Bain. "But how
about past things, or remote things, upon which no reaction of ours is
possible? And how about belief in things which _check_ action?" says
Sully; who considers that we believe a thing only when "the idea of it
has an inherent tendency to approximate in character and intensity to a
sensation." It is obvious that each of these authors emphasizes a true
aspect of the question. My own account has sought to be more complete,
sensation, association, and active reaction all being acknowledged to
be concerned. The most compendious possible formula perhaps would be
that _our belief and attention_ are the same fact. For the moment, what
we attend to is reality; Attention is a motor reaction; and we are so
made that sensations force attention from us. On Belief and Conduct see
an article by Leslie Stephen, Fortnightly Review, July 1888.

A set of facts have been recently brought to my attention which I
hardly know how to treat, so I say a word about them in this foot-note.
I refer to a type of experience which has frequently found a place
amongst the 'Yes' answers to the 'Census of Hallucinations,' and
which is generally described by those who report it as an 'impression
of the presence' of someone near them, although no sensation either
of sight, hearing, or touch is involved. From the way in which this
experience is spoken of by those who have had it, it would appear to
be an extremely definite and positive state of mind, coupled with a
belief in the reality of its object quite as strong as any direct
sensation ever gives. And yet _no_ sensation seems to be connected with
it at all. Sometimes the person whose nearness is thus impressed is a
known person, dead or living, sometimes an unknown one. His attitude
and situation are often very definitely impressed, and so, sometimes
(though not by way of hearing), are words which he wishes to say.

The phenomenon would seem to be due to a pure _conception_ becoming
saturated with the sort of stinging urgency which ordinarily only
sensations bring. But I cannot yet persuade myself that the urgency
in question consists in concomitant emotional and motor impulses.
The 'impression' may come quite suddenly and depart quickly; it may
carry no emotional suggestions, and wake no motor consequences beyond
those involved in attending to it. Altogether, the matter is somewhat
paradoxical, and no conclusion can be come to until more definite data
are obtained.

Perhaps the most curious case of the sort which I have received is the
following. The subject of the observation, Mr. P., is an exceptionally
intelligent witness, though the words of the narrative are his wife's.

"Mr. P. has all his life been the occasional subject of rather singular
delusions or impressions of various kinds. If I had belief in the
existence of latent or embryo faculties, other than the five senses,
I should explain them on that ground. Being totally blind, his other
perceptions are abnormally keen and developed, and given the existence
of a rudimentary sixth sense, it would be only natural that this also
should be more acute in him than in others. One of the most interesting
of his experiences in this line was the frequent apparition of a corpse
some years ago, which may be worth the attention of your Committee
on that subject. At the time Mr. P. had a music-room in Boston on
Beacon Street, where he used to do severe and protracted practice
with little interruption. Now, all one season it was a very familiar
occurrence with him while in the midst of work to feel a cold draft of
air suddenly upon his face, with a prickling sensation at the roots
of his hair, when he would turn from the piano, and a figure which he
knew to be dead would come sliding under the crack of the door from
without, flattening itself to squeeze through and rounding out again to
the human form. It was of a middle-aged man, and drew itself along the
carpet on hands and knees, but with head thrown back till it reached
the sofa, upon which it stretched itself. It remained some moments,
but vanished always if Mr. P. spoke or made a decided movement. The
most singular point in the occurrence was its frequent repetition. He
might expect it on any day between two and four o'clock, and it came
always heralded by the same sudden cold shiver, and was invariably the
same figure which went through the same movements. He afterwards traced
the whole experience to strong tea. He was in the habit of taking cold
tea, which always stimulates him, for lunch, and on giving up this
practice he never saw this or any other apparition again. However, even
allowing, as is doubtless true, that the event was a delusion of nerves
first fatigued by overwork and then excited by this stimulant, there
is one point which is still wholly inexplicable and highly interesting
to me. Mr. P. has no memory whatever of sight, nor conception of it.
It is impossible for him to form any idea of what we mean by light
or color, consequently he has no cognizance of any object which does
not reach his sense of hearing or of touch, though these are so acute
as to give a contrary impression sometimes to other people. When he
becomes aware of the presence of a person or an object, by means which
seem mysterious to outsiders, he can always trace it naturally and
legitimately to slight echoes, perceptible only to his keen ears, or
to differences in atmospheric pressure, perceptible only to his acute
nerves of touch; but with the apparition described, for the only time
in his experience, he was aware of presence, size, and appearance,
without the use of either of these mediums. The figure never produced
the least sound nor came within a number of feet of his person, yet he
knew that it was a man, that it moved, and in what direction, even that
it wore a full beard, which, like the thick curly hair, was partially
gray; also that it was dressed in the style of suit known as 'pepper
and salt.' These points were all perfectly distinct and invariable each
time. If asked how he perceived them, he will answer he cannot tell, he
simply knew it, and so strongly and so distinctly that it is impossible
to shake his opinion as to the exact details of the man's appearance.
It would seem that in this delusion of the senses he really _saw_, as
he has never done in the actual experiences of life, except in the
first two years of childhood."

On cross-examining Mr. P., I could not make out that there was anything
like visual imagination involved, although he was quite unable to
describe in just what terms the false perception was carried on. It
seemed to be more like an intensely definite _conception_ than anything
else, a conception to which the feeling of _present reality_ was
attached, but in no such shape as easily to fall under the heads laid
down in my text.




CHAPTER XXII.[319]

REASONING.


We talk of man being the rational animal; and the traditional
intellectualist philosophy has always made a great point of treating
the brutes as wholly irrational creatures. Nevertheless, it is by no
means easy to decide just what is meant by reason, or how the peculiar
thinking process called reasoning differs from other thought-sequences
which may lead to similar results.

Much of our thinking consists of trains of images suggested one by
another, of a sort of spontaneous revery of which it seems likely
enough that the higher brutes should be capable. This sort of thinking
leads nevertheless to rational conclusions, both practical and
theoretical. The links between the terms are either 'contiguity' or
'similarity,' and with a mixture of both these things we can hardly be
very incoherent. As a rule, in this sort of irresponsible thinking,
the terms which fall to be coupled together are empirical concretes,
not abstractions. A sunset may call up the vessel's deck from which
I saw one last summer, the companions of my voyage, my arrival into
port, etc.; or it may make me think of solar myths, of Hercules' and
Hector's funeral pyres, of Homer and whether he could write, of the
Greek alphabet, etc. If habitual contiguities predominate, we have a
prosaic mind; if rare contiguities, or similarities, have free play, we
call the person fanciful, poetic, or witty. But the thought as a rule
is of matters taken in their entirety. Having been thinking of one,
we find later that we are thinking of another, to which we have been
lifted along, we hardly know how. If an abstract quality figures in
the procession, it arrests our attention but for a moment, and fades
into something else; and is never very abstract. Thus, in thinking of
the sun-myths, we may have a gleam of admiration at the gracefulness of
the primitive human mind, or a moment of disgust at the narrowness of
modern interpreters. But, in the main, we think less of qualities than
of whole things, real or possible, just as we may experience them.

The upshot of it may be that we are reminded of some practical duty:
we write a letter to a friend abroad, or we take down the lexicon
and study our Greek lesson. Our thought is rational, and leads to a
rational act, but it can hardly be called reasoning in a strict sense
of the term.

There are other shorter flights of thought, single couplings of terms
which suggest one another by association, which approach more to what
would commonly be classed as acts of reasoning proper. Those are
where a present sign suggests an unseen, distant, or future reality.
Where the sign and what it suggests are both concretes which have
been coupled together on previous occasions, the inference is common
to both brutes and men, being really nothing more than association by
contiguity. A and B, dinner-bell and dinner, have been experienced in
immediate succession. Hence A no sooner falls upon the sense than B
is anticipated, and steps are taken to meet it. The whole education
of our domestic beasts, all the cunning added by age and experience
to wild ones, and the greater part of our human knowingness consists
in the ability to make a mass of inferences of this simplest sort.
Our 'perceptions,' or recognitions of what objects are before us,
are inferences of this kind. We feel a patch of color, and we say 'a
distant house,' a whiff of odor crosses us, and we say 'a skunk,' a
faint sound is heard, and we call it 'a railroad train.' Examples are
needless; for such inferences of sensations not presented form the
staple and tissue of our perceptive life, and our Chapter XIX was full
of them, illusory or veracious. They have been called _unconscious
inferences_. Certainly we are commonly unconscious that we are
inferring at all. The sign and the signified melt into what seems to us
the object of a single pulse of thought. _Immediate inferences_ would
be a good name for these simple acts of reasoning requiring but two
terms,[320] were it not that formal logic has already appropriated the
expression for a more technical use.


'RECEPTS.'


In these first and simplest inferences the conclusion may follow so
continuously upon the 'sign' that the latter is not discriminated
or attended to as a separate object by the mind. Even now we can
seldom define the optical signs which lead us to infer the shapes
and distances of the objects which by their aid we so unhesitatingly
perceive. The objects, too, when thus inferred, are _general_ objects.
The dog crossing a scent thinks of a deer in general, or of another dog
in general, not of a particular deer or dog. To these most primitive
abstract objects Dr. G. J. Romanes gives the name of _recepts_ or
_generic_ ideas, to distinguish them from concepts and general ideas
properly so called.[321] They are not analyzed or defined, but only
imagined.

 "It requires but a slight analysis of our ordinary mental processes
 to prove that all our simpler ideas are group-arrangements which
 have been formed spontaneously or without any of that intentionally
 comparing, sifting, and combining process which is required in the
 higher departments of ideational activity. The comparing, sifting,
 and combining is here done, as it were, _for_ the conscious agent,
 not _by_ him. Recepts are received; it is only concepts that require
 to be conceived.... If I am crossing a street and hear behind me a
 sudden shout, I do not require to wait in order to predicate to myself
 that there is probably a hansom-cab just about to run me down: a cry
 of this kind, and in those circumstances, is so intimately associated
 in my mind with its purpose, that the idea which it arouses need
 not rise above the level of a recept; and the adaptive movements on
 my part which that idea immediately prompts are performed without
 any intelligent reflection. Yet, on the other hand, they are neither
 reflex actions nor instinctive actions; they are what may be termed
 receptual actions, or actions depending on recepts."[322]

"How far can this kind of unnamed or non-conceptional ideation extend?"
Dr. Romanes asks; and answers by a variety of examples taken from the
life of brutes, for which I must refer to his book. One or two of them,
however, I will quote:

 "Houzeau writes that while crossing a wide and arid plain in Texas,
 his two dogs suffered greatly from thirst, and that between thirty
 and forty times they rushed down the hollows to search for water. The
 hollows were not valleys, and there were no trees in them, or any
 other difference in the vegetation; and as they were absolutely dry,
 there could have been no smell of damp earth. The dogs behaved as if
 they knew that a dip in the ground offered them the best chance of
 finding water, and Houzeau has often witnessed the same behavior in
 other animals....

 "Mr. Darwin writes: 'When I say to my terrier in an eager voice (and
 I have made the trial many times), "Hi! hi! where is it?" she at once
 takes it as a sign that something is to be hunted, and generally first
 looks quickly all round, and then rushes into the nearest thicket,
 to scout for any game, but finding nothing she looks up into any
 neighboring tree for a squirrel. Now do not these actions clearly show
 that she had in her mind a general idea, or concept, that some animal
 is to be discovered and hunted?'"[323]

They certainly show this. But the idea in question is of an object
_about_ which nothing farther may be articulately known. The thought of
it prompts to activity, but to no theoretic consequence. Similarly in
the following example:

 "Water-fowl adopt a somewhat different mode of alighting upon land, or
 even upon ice, from that which they adopt when alighting upon water;
 and those kinds which dive from a height (such as terns and gannets)
 never do so upon land or upon ice. These facts prove that the animals
 have one recept answering to a solid surface, and another answering
 to a fluid. Similarly a man will not dive from a height over hard
 ground or over ice, nor will he jump into water in the same way as
 he jumps upon dry land. In other words, like the water-fowl he has
 two distinct recepts, one of which answers to solid ground, and the
 other to an unresisting fluid. But unlike the water-fowl he is able
 to bestow upon each of these recepts a name, and thus to raise them
 both to the level of concepts. So far as the practical purposes of
 locomotion are concerned, it is of course immaterial whether or not he
 thus raises his recepts into concepts; but ... for many other purposes
 it is of the highest importance that he is able to do this."[324]


IN REASONING, WE PICK OUT ESSENTIAL QUALITIES.


The chief of these purposes is _predication_, a theoretic function
which, though it always leads eventually to some kind of action,
yet tends as often as not to inhibit the immediate motor response
to which the simple inferences of which we have been speaking give
rise. In reasoning, A may suggest B; but B, instead of being an
idea which is simply _obeyed_ by us, is an idea which suggests the
distinct additional idea C. And where the train of suggestion is one
of reasoning distinctively so called as contrasted with mere revery or
'associative' sequence, the ideas bear certain inward relations to each
other which we must proceed to examine with some care.

The result C yielded by a true act of reasoning is apt to be a
thing voluntarily _sought_, such as the means to a proposed end,
the ground for an observed effect, or the effect of an assumed
cause. All these results may be thought of as concrete things, but
they are _not suggested immediately by other concrete things_, as
in the trains of simply associative thought. They are linked to
the concretes which precede them by intermediate steps, and these
steps are formed by _general characters_ articulately denoted and
expressly analyzed out. A thing inferred by reasoning need neither
have been an habitual associate of the datum from which we infer it,
nor need it be similar to it. It may be a thing entirely unknown to
our previous experience, something which no simple association of
concretes could ever have evoked. The great difference, in fact,
between that simpler kind of rational thinking which consists in the
concrete objects of past experience merely suggesting each other,
and reasoning distinctively so called, is this, that whilst the
empirical thinking is only reproductive, reasoning is productive. An
empirical, or 'rule-of-thumb,' thinker can deduce nothing from data
with whose behavior and associates in the concrete he is unfamiliar.
But put a reasoner amongst a set of concrete objects which he has
neither seen nor heard of before, and with a little time, if he is a
good reasoner, he will make such inferences from them as will quite
atone for his ignorance. Reasoning helps us out of unprecedented
situations--situations for which all our common associative wisdom, all
the 'education' which we share in common with the beasts, leaves us
without resource.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Let us make this ability to deal with_ NOVEL _data the technical
differentia of reasoning._ This will sufficiently mark it out from
common associative thinking, and will immediately enable us to say just
what peculiarity it contains.

_It contains analysis and abstraction._ Whereas the merely empirical
thinker stares at a fact in its entirety, and remains helpless, or gets
'stuck,' if it suggests no concomitant or similar, the reasoner breaks
it up and notices some one of its separate attributes. This attribute
he takes to be the essential part of the whole fact before him. This
attribute has properties or consequences which the fact until then was
not known to have, but which, now that it is noticed to contain the
attribute, it must have.

    Call the fact or concrete datum S;
        the essential attribute M;
        the attribute's property P.

Then the reasoned inference of P from S cannot be made without M's
intermediation. The 'essence' M is thus that third or middle term in
the reasoning which a moment ago was pronounced essential. _For his
original concrete S the reasoner substitutes its abstract property, M._
What is true of M, what is coupled with M, then holds true of S, is
coupled with S. As M is properly one of the _parts_ of the entire S,
_reasoning may then be very well defined as the substitution of parts
and their implications or consequences for wholes_. And the art of the
reasoner will consist of two stages:

First, _sagacity_,[325] or the ability to discover what part, M, lies
embedded in the whole S which is before him;

Second, _learning_, or the ability to recall promptly M's consequences,
concomitants, or implications.[326]

If we glance at the ordinary syllogism--

    M is P;
    S is M;
    Therefore S is P

--we see that the second or minor premise, the 'subsumption' as it is
sometimes called, is the one requiring the sagacity; the first or major
the one requiring the fertility, or fulness of learning. Usually the
learning is more apt to be ready than the sagacity, the ability to
seize fresh aspects in concrete things, being rarer than the ability to
learn old rules; so that, in most actual cases of reasoning, the minor
premise, or the way of conceiving the subject, is the one that makes
the novel step in thought. This is, to be sure, not always the case;
for the fact that M carries P with it may also be unfamiliar and now
formulated for the first time.

The perception that S is M is a _mode of conceiving S_. The statement
that M is P is an _abstract or general proposition_. A word about both
is necessary.


WHAT IS MEANT BY A MODE OF CONCEIVING.


When we conceive of S merely as M (of vermilion merely as a
mercury-compound, for example), we neglect all the other attributes
which it may have, and attend exclusively to this one. We mutilate the
fulness of S's reality. Every reality has an infinity of aspects or
properties. Even so simple a fact as a line which you trace in the air
may be considered in respect to its form, its length, its direction,
and its location. When we reach more complex facts, the number of ways
in which we may regard them is literally endless. Vermilion is not only
a mercury-compound, it is vividly red, heavy, and expensive, it comes
from China, and so on, _in infinitum_. All objects are well-springs of
properties, which are only little by little developed to our knowledge,
and it is truly said that to know one thing thoroughly would be to know
the whole universe. Mediately or immediately, that one thing is related
to everything else; and to know _all_ about it, all its relations need
be known. But each relation forms one of its attributes, one angle by
which some one may conceive it, and while so conceiving it may ignore
the rest of it. A man is such a complex fact. But out of the complexity
all that an army commissary picks out as important for his purposes is
his property of eating so many pounds a day; the general, of marching
so many miles; the chair-maker, of having such a shape; the orator,
of responding to such and such feelings; the theatre-manager, of
being willing to pay just such a price, and no more, for an evening's
amusement. Each of these persons singles out the particular side of the
entire man which has a bearing on _his_ concerns, and not till this
side is distinctly and separately conceived can the proper practical
conclusions _for that reasoner_ be drawn; and when they are drawn the
man's other attributes may be ignored.

All ways of conceiving a concrete fact, if they are true ways at all,
are equally true ways. _There is no property_ ABSOLUTELY _essential to
any one thing_. The same property which figures as the essence of a
thing on one occasion becomes a very inessential feature upon another.
Now that I am writing, it is essential that I conceive my paper as a
surface for inscription. If I failed to do that, I should have to stop
my work. But if I wished to light a fire, and no other materials were
by, the essential way of conceiving the paper would be as combustible
material; and I need then have no thought of any of its other
destinations. It is really _all_ that it is: a combustible, a writing
surface, a thin thing, a hydrocarbonaceous thing, a thing eight inches
one way and ten another, a thing just one furlong east of a certain
stone in my neighbor's field, an American thing, etc., etc., _ad
infinitum_. Whichever one of these aspects of its being I temporarily
class it under, makes me unjust to the other aspects. But as I always
am classing it under one aspect or another, I am always unjust, always
partial, always exclusive. My excuse is necessity--the necessity which
my finite and practical nature lays upon me. My thinking is first and
last and always for the sake of my doing, and I can only do one thing
at a time. A God, who is supposed to drive the whole universe abreast,
may also be supposed, without detriment to his activity, to see all
parts of it at once and without emphasis. But were our human attention
so to disperse itself we should simply stare vacantly at things at
large and forfeit our opportunity of doing any particular act. Mr.
Warner, in his Adirondack story, shot a bear by aiming, not at his eye
or heart, but 'at him generally.' But we cannot aim 'generally' at
the universe; or if we do, we miss our game. Our scope is narrow, and
we must attack things piecemeal, ignoring the solid fulness in which
the elements of Nature exist, and stringing one after another of them
together in a serial way, to suit our little interests as they change
from hour to hour. In this, the partiality of one moment is partly
atoned for by the different sort of partiality of the next. To me now,
writing these words, emphasis and selection seem to be the essence of
the human mind. In other chapters other qualities have seemed, and will
again seem, more important parts of psychology.

Men are so ingrainedly partial that, for common-sense and scholasticism
(which is only common-sense grown articulate), the notion that there
is no one quality genuinely, absolutely, and exclusively essential to
anything is almost unthinkable. "A thing's essence makes it _what_ it
is. Without an exclusive essence it would be nothing in particular,
would be quite nameless, we could not say it was this rather than that.
What you write on, for example,--why talk of its being combustible,
rectangular, and the like, when you know that these are mere accidents,
and that what it really is, and was made to be, is just _paper_ and
nothing else?" The reader is pretty sure to make some such comment as
this. But he is himself merely insisting on an aspect of the thing
which suits his own petty purpose, that of _naming_ the thing; or else
on an aspect which suits the manufacturer's purpose, that of _producing
an article for which there is a vulgar demand_. Meanwhile the reality
overflows these purposes at every pore. Our usual purpose with it, our
commonest title for it, and the properties which this title suggests,
have in reality nothing sacramental. They characterize _us_ more than
they characterize the thing. But we are so stuck in our prejudices,
so petrified intellectually, that to our vulgarest names, with their
suggestions, we ascribe an eternal and exclusive worth. The thing must
be, essentially, what the vulgarest name connotes; what less usual
names connote, it can be only in an 'accidental' and relatively unreal
sense.[327]

Locke undermined the fallacy. But none of his successors, so far as
I know, have radically escaped it, or seen that _the only meaning of
essence is teleological, and that classification and conception are
purely teleological weapons of the mind_. The essence of a thing is
that one of its properties which is so _important for my interests_
that in comparison with it I may neglect the rest. Amongst those other
things which have this important property I class it, after this
property I name it, as a thing endowed with this property I conceive
it; and whilst so classing, naming, and conceiving it, all other
truths about it become to me as naught.[328] The properties which are
important vary from man to man and from hour to hour.[329] Hence divers
appellations and conceptions for the same thing. But many objects of
daily use--as paper, ink, butter, horse-car--have properties of such
constant unwavering importance, and have such stereotyped names, that
we end by believing that to conceive them in those ways is to conceive
them in the only true way. Those are no truer ways of conceiving them
than any others; they are only more important ways, more frequently
serviceable ways.[330]

So much for what is implied, when the reasoner conceives of the fact
S before him as a case of which the essence is to be M. One word now
as to what is involved in M's having properties, consequences, or
implications, and we can go back to the study of the reasoning process
again.


WHAT IS INVOLVED IN GENERAL PROPOSITIONS.


M is not a concrete, or 'self-sufficient,' as Mr. Clay would say. It is
an abstract character which may exist, embedded with other characters,
in many concretes. Whether it be the character of being a writing
surface, of being made in America or China, of being eight inches
square, or of being in a certain part of space, this is always true
of it. Now we might conceive of this being a world in which all such
general characters were independent of each other, so that if any one
of them were found in a subject S, we never could be sure what others
would be found alongside of it. On one occasion there might be P with
M, on another Q, and so on. In such a world there would be no _general_
sequences or coexistences, and no universal laws. Each grouping would
be _sui generis_; from the experience of the past no future could
be predicted; and reasoning, as we shall presently see, would be an
impossibility.

But the world we live in is not one of this sort. Though many general
characters seem indifferent to each other, there remain a number of
them which affect constant habits of mutual concomitance or repugnance.
They involve or imply each other. One of them is a sign to us that
the other will be found. They hunt in couples, as it were; and such a
proposition as that M is P, or includes P, or precedes or accompanies
P, if it prove to be true in one instance, may very likely be true in
every other instance which we meet. This is, in fact, a world in which
general laws obtain, in which universal propositions _are_ true, and in
which reasoning is therefore possible. Fortunately for us: for since
we cannot handle things as wholes, but only by conceiving them through
some general character which for the time we call their essence, it
would be a great pity if the matter ended there, and if the general
character, once picked out and in our possession, helped us to no
farther advance. In Chapter XXVIII we shall have again to consider
this harmony between our reasoning faculty and the world in which its
lot is cast.[331]

To revert now to our symbolic representation of the reasoning process:

    M is P
    S is M
    ------
    S is P

M is discerned and picked out for the time being to be the essence of
the concrete fact, phenomenon, or reality, S. But M in this world of
ours is inevitably conjoined with P; so that P is the next thing that
we may expect to find conjoined with the fact S. We may conclude or
infer P, through the intermediation of the M which our sagacity began
by discerning, when S came before it, to be the essence of the case.

Now note that if P have any value or importance for us, M was a very
good character for our sagacity to pounce upon and abstract. If, on the
contrary, P were of no importance, some other character than M would
have been a better essence for us to conceive of S by. Psychologically,
as a rule, P overshadows the process from the start. We are _seeking_
P, or something like P. But the bare totality of S does not yield it
to our gaze; and casting about for some point in S to take hold of,
which will lead us to P, we hit, if we are sagacious, upon M, because
M happens to be just the character which is knit up with P. Had we
wished Q instead of P, and were N a property of S conjoined with Q, we
ought to have ignored M, noticed N, and conceived of S as a sort of N
exclusively.

Reasoning is always for a subjective interest, to attain some
particular conclusion, or to gratify some special curiosity. It not
only breaks up the datum placed before it and conceives it abstractly;
it must conceive it _rightly_ too; and conceiving it rightly means
conceiving it by that one particular abstract character which leads
to the one sort of conclusion which it is the reasoner's temporary
interest to attain.[332]

The _results_ of reasoning may be hit upon by accident, The stereoscope
was actually a result of reasoning; it is conceivable, however, that
a man playing with pictures and mirrors might accidentally have hit
upon it. Cats have been known to open doors by pulling latches, etc.
But no cat, if the latch got out of order, could open the door again,
unless some new accident of random fumbling taught her to associate
some new total movement with the total phenomenon of the closed door.
A reasoning man, however, would open the door by first analyzing the
hindrance. He would ascertain what particular feature of the door was
wrong. The lever, e.g., does not raise the latch sufficiently from its
slot--case of insufficient elevation--raise door bodily on hinges! Or
door sticks at top by friction against lintel--press it bodily down!
Now it is obvious that a child or an idiot might without this reasoning
learn the _rule_ for opening that particular door. I remember a clock
which the maid-servant had discovered would not go unless it were
supported so as to tilt slightly forwards. She had stumbled on this
method after many weeks of groping. The reason of the stoppage was the
friction of the pendulum-bob against the back of the clock-case, a
reason which an educated man would have analyzed out in five minutes.
I have a student's lamp of which the flame vibrates most unpleasantly
unless the collar which bears the chimney be raised about a sixteenth
of an inch. I learned the remedy after much torment by accident, and
now always keep the collar up with a small wedge. But my procedure is a
mere association of two totals, diseased object and remedy. One learned
in pneumatics could have named the _cause_ of the disease, and thence
inferred the remedy immediately. By many measurements of triangles
one might find their area always equal to their height multiplied by
half their base, and one might formulate an empirical law to that
effect. But a reasoner saves himself all this trouble by seeing that
it is the essence (_pro hac vice_) of a triangle to be the half of a
parallelogram whose area is the height into the entire base. To see
this he must invent additional lines; and the geometer must often draw
such to get at the essential property he may require in a figure. The
essence consists in some _relation of the figure to the new lines_,
a relation not obvious at all until they are put in. The geometer's
sagacity lies in the invention of the new lines.


THUS, THERE ARE TWO GREAT POINTS IN REASONING:


_First, an extracted character is taken as equivalent to the entire
datum from which it comes; and,_

_Second, the character thus taken suggests a certain consequence more
obviously than it was suggested by the total datum as it originally
came._ Take them again, successively.

       *       *       *       *       *

1. Suppose I say, when offered a piece of cloth, "I won't buy that;
it looks as if it would fade," meaning merely that something about
it suggests the idea of fading to my mind,--my judgment, though
possibly correct, is not reasoned, but purely empirical; but, if I
can say that into the color there enters a certain dye which I know
to be chemically unstable, and that _therefore_ the color will fade,
my judgment is reasoned. The notion of the dye which is one of the
parts of the cloth, is the connecting link between the latter and the
notion of fading. So, again, an uneducated man will expect from past
experience to see a piece of ice melt if placed near the fire, and the
tip of his finger look coarse if he views it through a convex glass.
In neither of these cases could the result be anticipated without full
previous acquaintance with the entire phenomenon. It is not a result of
reasoning.

But a man who should conceive heat as a mode of motion, and
liquefaction as identical with increased motion of molecules; who
should know that curved surfaces bend light-rays in special ways, and
that the apparent size of anything is connected with the amount of
the 'bend' of its light-rays as they enter the eye,--such a man would
make the right inferences for all these objects, even though he had
never in his life had any concrete experience of them; and he would
do this because the ideas which we have above supposed him to possess
would mediate in his mind between the phenomena he starts with and the
conclusions he draws. But these ideas or reasons for his conclusions
are all mere extracted portions or circumstances singled out from the
mass of characters which make up the entire phenomena. The motions
which form heat, the bending of the light-waves, are, it is true,
excessively recondite ingredients; the hidden pendulum I spoke of above
is less so; and the sticking of a door on its sill in the earlier
example would hardly be so at all. But each and all agree in this, that
they bear a _more evident relation_ to the conclusion than did the
immediate data in their full totality.

The difficulty is, in each case, to extract from the immediate data
that particular ingredient which shall have this very evident relation
to the conclusion. Every phenomenon or so-called 'fact' has an infinity
of aspects or properties, as we have seen, amongst which the fool, or
man with little sagacity, will inevitably go astray. But no matter for
this point now. The first thing is to have seen that every possible
case of reasoning involves the extraction of a particular partial
aspect of the phenomena thought about, and that whilst Empirical
Thought simply associates phenomena in their entirety, Reasoned Thought
couples them by the conscious use of this extract.

       *       *       *       *       *

2. And, now, to prove the second point: Why are the couplings,
consequences, and implications of extracts more evident and obvious
than those of entire phenomena? For two reasons.

First, the extracted characters are more general than the concretes,
and the connections they may have are, therefore, more familiar to us,
having been more often met in our experience. Think of heat as motion,
and whatever is true of motion will be true of heat; but we have had a
hundred experiences of motion for every one of heat. Think of the rays
passing through this lens as bending towards the perpendicular, and
you substitute for the comparatively unfamiliar lens the very familiar
notion of a particular change in direction of a line, of which notion
every day brings us countless examples.

The other reason why the relations of the extracted characters are
so evident is that their properties are so _few_, compared with the
properties of the whole, from which we derived them. In every concrete
total the characters and their consequences are so inexhaustibly
numerous that we may lose our way among them before noticing the
particular consequence it behooves us to draw. But, if we are lucky
enough to single out the proper character, we take in, as it were,
by a single glance all its possible consequences. Thus the character
of scraping the sill has very few suggestions, prominent among which
is the suggestion that the scraping will cease if we raise the door;
whilst the entire refractory door suggests an enormous number of
notions to the mind.

Take another example. I am sitting in a railroad-car, waiting for
the train to start. It is winter, and the stove fills the car with
pungent smoke. The brakeman enters, and my neighbor asks him to "stop
that stove smoking." He replies that it will stop entirely as soon as
the car begins to move. "Why so?" asks the passenger. "It _always_
does," replies the brakeman. It is evident from this 'always' that the
connection between car moving and smoke stopping was a purely empirical
one in the brakeman's mind, bred of habit. But, if the passenger had
been an acute reasoner, he, with no experience of what that stove
always did, might have anticipated the brakeman's reply, and spared his
own question. Had he singled out of all the numerous points involved
in a stove's not smoking the one special point of smoke pouring freely
out of the stove-pipe's mouth, he would, probably, owing to the few
associations of that idea, have been immediately reminded of the law
that a fluid passes more rapidly out of a pipe's mouth if another fluid
be at the same time streaming over that mouth; and then the rapid
draught of air over the stove-pipe's mouth, which is one of the points
involved in the car's motion, would immediately have occurred to him.

Thus a couple of extracted characters, with a couple of their few
and obvious connections, would have formed the reasoned link in the
passenger's mind between the phenomena, smoke stopping and car moving,
which were only linked as wholes in the brakeman's mind. Such examples
may seem trivial, but they contain the essence of the most refined and
transcendental theorizing. The reason why physics grows more deductive
the more the fundamental properties it assumes are of a mathematical
sort, such as molecular mass or wave-length, is that the immediate
consequences of these notions are so few that we can survey them all at
once, and promptly pick out those which concern us.


_Sagacity; or the Perception of the Essence._


To reason, then, we must be able to extract characters,--not _any_
characters, but the right characters for our conclusion. If we extract
the wrong character, it will not lead to that conclusion. Here,
then, is the difficulty: _How are characters extracted, and why does
it require the advent of a genius in many cases before the fitting
character is brought to light?_ Why cannot anybody reason as well
as anybody else? Why does it need a Newton to notice the law of the
squares, a Darwin to notice the survival of the fittest? To answer
these questions we must begin a new research, and see how our insight
into facts naturally grows.

All our knowledge at first is vague. When we say that a thing is vague,
we mean that it has no subdivisions _ab intra_, nor precise limitations
_ab extra_; but still all the forms of thought may apply to it. It may
have unity, reality, externality, extent, and what not--_thinghood_,
in a word, but thinghood only as a whole.[333] In this vague way,
probably, does the room appear to the babe who first begins to be
conscious of it as something other than his moving nurse. It has no
subdivisions in his mind, unless, perhaps, the window is able to
attract his separate notice. In this vague way, certainly, does every
entirely new experience appear to the adult. A library, a museum, a
machine-shop, are mere confused wholes to the uninstructed, but the
machinist, the antiquary, and the bookworm perhaps hardly notice the
whole at all, so eager are they to pounce upon the details. Familiarity
has in them bred discrimination. Such vague terms as 'grass,' 'mould,'
and 'meat' do not exist for the botanist or the anatomist. They know
too much about grasses, moulds, and muscles. A certain person said to
Charles Kingsley, who was showing him the dissection of a caterpillar,
with its exquisite viscera, "Why, I thought it was nothing but skin
and squash!" A layman present at a shipwreck, a battle, or a fire
is helpless. Discrimination has been so little awakened in him by
experience that his consciousness leaves no single point of the complex
situation accented and standing out for him to begin to act upon.
But the sailor, the fireman, and the general know directly at what
corner to take up the business. They 'see into the situation'--that
is, they analyze it--with their first glance. It is full of delicately
differenced ingredients which their education has little by little
brought to their consciousness, but of which the novice gains no clear
idea.

How this power of analysis was brought about we saw in our chapters on
Discrimination and Attention. We dissociate the elements of originally
vague totals by attending to them or noticing them alternately, of
course. But what determines which element we shall attend to first?
There are two immediate and obvious answers: first, our practical
or instinctive interests; and, second, our æsthetic interests. The
dog singles out of any situation its smells, and the horse its
sounds, because they may reveal facts of practical moment, and are
instinctively exciting to these several creatures. The infant notices
the candle-flame or the window, and ignores the rest of the room,
because those objects give him a vivid pleasure. So, the country boy
dissociates the blackberry, the chestnut, and the wintergreen, from
the vague mass of other shrubs and trees, for their practical uses,
and the savage is delighted with the beads, the bits of looking-glass,
brought by an exploring vessel, and gives no heed to the features of
the vessel itself, which is too much beyond his sphere. These æsthetic
and practical interests, then, are the weightiest factors in making
particular ingredients stand out in high relief. What they lay their
accent on, that we notice; but what they are in themselves, we cannot
say. We must content ourselves here with simply accepting them as
irreducible ultimate factors in determining the way our knowledge grows.

Now, a creature which has few instinctive impulses, or interests,
practical or æsthetic, will dissociate few characters, and will, at
best, have limited reasoning powers; whilst one whose interests are
very varied will reason much better. Man, by his immensely varied
instincts, practical wants, and æsthetic feelings, to which every sense
contributes, would, by dint of these alone, be sure to dissociate
vastly more characters than any other animal; and accordingly we find
that the lowest savages reason incomparably better than the highest
brutes. The diverse interests lead, too, to a diversification of
experiences, whose accumulation becomes a condition for the play of
that _law of dissociation by varying concomitants_ of which I treated
in a former chapter (see Vol I. p. 506).


_The Help given by Association by Similarity._


It is probable, also, that man's _superior association by similarity_
has much to do with those discriminations of character on which his
higher flights of reasoning are based. As this latter is an important
matter, and as little or nothing was said of it in the chapter on
Discrimination, it behooves me to dwell a little upon it here.

What does the reader do when he wishes to see in what the precise
likeness or difference of two objects lies? He transfers his attention
as rapidly as possible, backwards and forwards, from one to the
other. The rapid alteration in consciousness shakes out, as it were,
the points of difference or agreement, which would have slumbered
forever unnoticed if the consciousness of the objects compared had
occurred at widely distant periods of time. What does the scientific
man do who searches for the reason or law embedded in a phenomenon? He
deliberately accumulates all the instances he can find which have any
analogy to that phenomenon; and, by simultaneously filling his mind
with them all, he frequently succeeds in detaching from the collection
the peculiarity which he was unable to formulate in one alone; even
though that one had been preceded in his former experience by all of
those with which he now at once confronts it. These examples show
that the mere general fact of having occurred at some time in one's
experience, with varying concomitants, is not by itself a sufficient
reason for a character to be dissociated now. We need something more;
we need that the varying concomitants should in all their variety be
brought into consciousness _at once_. Not till then will the character
in question escape from its adhesion to each and all of them and stand
alone. This will immediately be recognized by those who have read
Mill's Logic as the ground of Utility in his famous 'four methods of
experimental inquiry,' the methods of agreement, of difference, of
residues, and of concomitant variations. Each of these gives a list of
analogous instances out of the midst of which a sought-for character
may roll and strike the mind.

Now it is obvious that any mind in which association by similarity
is highly developed is a mind which will spontaneously form lists of
instances like this. Take a present case A, with a character _m_ in it.
The mind may fail at first to notice this character _m_ at all. But
if A calls up C, D, E, and F,--these being phenomena which resemble
A in possessing _m_, but which may not have entered for months into
the experience of the animal who now experiences A, why, plainly,
such association performs the part of the reader's deliberately rapid
comparison referred to above, and of the systematic consideration
of like cases by the scientific investigator, and may lead to the
noticing of _m_ in an abstract way. Certainly this is obvious; and
no conclusion is left to us but to assert that, after the few most
powerful practical and æsthetic interests, our chief help towards
noticing those special characters of phenomena, which, when once
possessed and named, are used as reasons, class names, essences, or
middle terms, _is this association by similarity._ Without it, indeed,
the deliberate procedure of the scientific man would be impossible:
he could never collect his analogous instances. But it operates of
itself in highly-gifted minds without any deliberation, spontaneously
collecting analogous instances, uniting in a moment what in nature the
whole breadth of space and time keeps separate, and so permitting a
perception of identical points in the midst of different circumstances,
which minds governed wholly by the law of contiguity could never begin
to attain.

[Illustration: FIG. 80.]

Figure 80 shows this. If _m_, in the present representation A, calls
up B, C, D, and E, which are similar to A in possessing it, and
calls them up in rapid succession, then _m_, being associated almost
simultaneously with such varying concomitants, will 'roll out' and
attract our separate notice.

If so much is clear to the reader, he will be willing to admit that the
mind _in which this mode of association most prevails_ will, from its
better opportunity of extricating characters, be the one most prone to
reasoned thinking; whilst, on the other hand, a mind in which we do not
detect reasoned thinking will probably be one in which association by
contiguity holds almost exclusive sway.

Geniuses are, by common consent, considered to differ from ordinary
minds by an unusual development of association by similarity. One
of Professor Bain's best strokes of work is the exhibition of this
truth.[334] It applies to geniuses in the line of reasoning as well as
in other lines. And as the genius is to the vulgarian, so the vulgar
human mind is to the intelligence of a brute. Compared with men, it
is probable that brutes neither attend to abstract characters, nor
have associations by similarity. Their thoughts probably pass from one
concrete object to its habitual concrete successor far more uniformly
than is the case with us. In other words, their associations of ideas
are almost exclusively by contiguity. It will clear up still farther
our understanding of the reasoning process, if we devote a few pages to


THE INTELLECTUAL CONTRAST BETWEEN BRUTE AND MAN.


I will first try to show, by taking the best stories I can find of
animal sagacity, that the mental process involved may as a rule be
perfectly accounted for by mere contiguous association, based on
experience. Mr. Darwin, in his 'Descent of Man,' instances the Arctic
dogs, described by Dr. Hayes, who scatter, when drawing a sledge,
as soon as the ice begins to crack. This might be called by some an
exercise of reason. The test would be, Would the most intelligent
Eskimo dogs that ever lived act so when placed upon ice for the
first time together? A band of men from the tropics might do so
easily. Recognizing cracking to be a sign of breaking, and seizing
immediately the partial character that the point of rupture is the
point of greatest strain, and that the massing of weight at a given
point concentrates there the strain, a Hindoo might quickly infer that
scattering would stop the cracking, and, by crying out to his comrades
to disperse, save the party from immersion. But in the dog's case we
need only suppose that they have individually experienced wet skins
after cracking, that they have often noticed cracking to begin when
they were huddled together, and that they have observed it to cease
when they scattered. Naturally, therefore, the sound would redintegrate
all these former experiences, including that of scattering, which
latter they would promptly renew. It would be a case of immediate
suggestion or of that 'Logic of Recepts' as Mr. Romanes calls it, of
which we spoke above on p. 327.

A friend of the writer gave as a proof of the almost human intelligence
of his dog that he took him one day down to his boat on the shore,
but found the boat full of dirt and water. He remembered that the
sponge was up at the house, a third of a mile distant; but, disliking
to go back himself, he made various gestures of wiping out the boat
and so forth, saying to his terrier, "Sponge, sponge; go fetch the
sponge." But he had little expectation of a result, since the dog had
never received the slightest training with the boat or the sponge.
Nevertheless, off he trotted to the house, and, to his owner's great
surprise and admiration, brought the sponge in his jaws. Sagacious
as this was, it required nothing but ordinary contiguous association
of ideas. The terrier was only exceptional in the minuteness of his
spontaneous observation. Most terriers would have taken no interest
in the boat-cleaning operation, nor noticed what the sponge was for.
This terrier, in having picked those details out of the crude mass
of his boat-experience distinctly enough to be reminded of them, was
truly enough ahead of his peers on the line which leads to human
reason. But his act was not yet an act of reasoning proper. It might
fairly have been called so if, unable to find the sponge at the house,
he had brought back a dipper or a mop instead. Such a substitution
would have shown that, embedded in the very different appearances of
these articles, he had been able to discriminate the identical partial
attribute of capacity to take up water, and had reflected, "For the
present purpose they are identical." This, which the dog did not do,
any man but the very stupidest could not fail to do.

If the reader will take the trouble to analyze the best dog and
elephant stories he knows, he will find that, in most cases, this
simple contiguous calling up of one whole by another is quite
sufficient to explain the phenomena. Sometimes, it is true, we have
to suppose the recognition of a property or character as such, but
it is then always a character which the peculiar practical interests
of the animal may have singled out. A dog, noticing his master's hat
on its peg, may possibly infer that he has not gone out. Intelligent
dogs recognize by the tone of the master's voice whether the latter
is angry or not. A dog will perceive whether you have kicked him by
accident or by design, and behave accordingly. The character inferred
by him, the particular mental state in you, however it be represented
in his mind--it is represented probably by a 'recept' (p. 327) or
set of practical tendencies, rather than by a definite concept or
idea--is still a partial character extracted from the totality of
your phenomenal being, and is his reason for crouching and skulking,
or playing with you. Dogs, moreover, seem to have the feeling of the
value of their master's personal property, or at least a particular
_interest_ in objects which their master uses. A dog left with his
master's coat will defend it, though never taught to do so. I know
of a dog accustomed to swim after sticks in the water, but who
always refused to dive for stones. Nevertheless, when a fish-basket,
which he had never been trained to carry, but merely knew as his
master's, fell over, he immediately dived after it and brought it
up. Dogs thus discern, at any rate so far as to be able to act, this
partial character of _being valuable_, which lies hidden in certain
things.[335] Stories are told of dogs carrying coppers to pastry-cooks
to get buns, and it is said that a certain dog, if he gave two coppers,
would never leave without two buns. This was probably mere contiguous
association, but it is _possible_ that the animal noticed the character
of duality, and identified it as the same in the coin and the cake.
If so, it is the maximum of canine abstract thinking. Another story
told to the writer is this: a dog was sent to a lumber-camp to fetch a
wedge, with which he was known to be acquainted. After half an hour,
not returning, he was sought and found biting and tugging at the handle
of an axe which was driven deeply into a stump. The wedge could not
be found. The teller of the story thought that the dog must have had
a clear perception of the common character of serving to split which
was involved in both the instruments, and, from their identity in this
respect, inferred their identity for the purposes required.

It cannot be denied that this interpretation is a possible one, but it
seems to me far to transcend the limits of ordinary canine abstraction.
The property in question was not one which had direct personal interest
for the dog, such as that of belonging to his master is in the case of
the coat or the basket. If the dog in the sponge story had returned to
the boat with a dipper it would have been no more remarkable. It seems
more probable, therefore, that this wood-cutter's dog had also been
accustomed to carry the axe, and now, excited by the vain hunt for the
wedge, had discharged his carrying powers upon the former instrument in
a sort of confusion--just as a man may pick up a sieve to carry water
in, in the excitement of putting out a fire.[336]

Thus, then, the characters extracted by animals are very few, and
always related to their immediate interests or emotions. That
dissociation by varying concomitants, which in man is based so largely
on association by similarity, hardly seems to take place at all in
the mind of brutes. One total thought suggests to them another total
thought, and they find themselves acting with propriety, they know not
why. The great, the fundamental, defect of their minds seems to be the
inability of their groups of ideas to break across in unaccustomed
places. They are enslaved to routine, to cut-and-dried thinking; and if
the most prosaic of human beings could be transported into his dog's
mind, he would be appalled at the utter absence of fancy which reigns
there.[337] Thoughts will not be found to call up their similars,
but only their habitual successors. Sunsets will not suggest heroes'
deaths, but supper-time. This is why man is the only metaphysical
animal. To wonder why the universe should be as it is presupposes
the notion of its being different, and a brute, which never reduces
the actual to fluidity by breaking up its literal sequences in his
imagination, can never form such a notion. He takes the world simply
for granted, and never wonders at it at all.

Professor Strümpell quotes a dog-story which is probably a type of
many others. The feat performed looks like abstract reasoning; but an
acquaintance with all the circumstances shows it to have been a random
trick learned by habit. The story is as follows:

 "I have two dogs, a small, long-legged pet dog and a rather large
 watch-dog. Immediately beyond the house-court is the garden, into
 which one enters through a low lattice-gate which is closed by a
 latch on the yard-side. This latch is opened by lifting it. Besides
 this, moreover, the gate is fastened on the garden-side by a string
 nailed to the gate-post. Here, as often as one wished, could the
 following sight be observed. If the little dog was shut in the
 garden and he wished to get out, he placed himself before the gate
 and barked. Immediately the large dog in the court would hasten to
 him and raise the latch with his nose while the little dog on the
 garden-side leaped up and, catching the string in his teeth, bit it
 through; whereupon the big one wedged his snout between the gate and
 the post, pushed the gate open, and the little dog slipped through.
 Certainly reasoning seems here to prevail. In face of it, however,
 and although the dogs arrived of themselves, and without human aid,
 at their solution of the gate question, I am able to point out that
 the complete action was pieced together out of accidental experiences
 which the dogs followed, I might say, unconsciously. While the large
 dog was young, he was allowed, like the little one, to go into the
 garden, and therefore the gate was usually not latched, but simply
 closed. Now if he saw anyone go in, he would follow by thrusting his
 snout between gate and post, and so pushing the gate open. When he was
 grown I forbade his being taken in, and had the gate kept latched. But
 he naturally still tried to follow when anyone entered and tried in
 the old fashion to open it, which he could no longer do. Now it fell
 out that once, while making the attempt, he raised his nose higher
 than usual and hit the latch from below so as to lift it off its hook,
 and the gate unclosed. From thenceforth he made the same movement of
 the head when trying to open it, and, of course, with the same result.
 He now knew how to open the gate when it was latched.

 "The little dog had been the large one's teacher in many things,
 especially in the chasing of cats and the catching of mice and moles;
 so when the little one was heard barking eagerly, the other always
 hastened to him. If the barking came from the garden, he opened the
 gate to get inside. But meanwhile the little dog, who wanted to get
 out the moment the gate opened, slipped out between the big one's
 legs, and so the appearance of his having come with the intention of
 letting him out arose. And that it was simply an appearance transpired
 from the fact that when the little dog did not succeed at once in
 getting out, the large one ran in and nosed about the garden, plainly
 showing that he had expected to find something there. In order to
 stop this opening of the gate I fastened a string on the garden-side
 which, tightly drawn, held the gate firm against the post, so that if
 the yard dog raised the latch and let go, it would every time fall
 back on to the hook. And this device was successful for quite a time,
 until it happened one day that on my return from a walk upon which the
 little dog had accompanied me I crossed the garden, and in passing
 through the gate the dog remained behind, and refused to come to my
 whistle. As it was beginning to rain, and I knew how he disliked to
 get wet, I closed the gate in order to punish him in this manner. But
 I had hardly readied the house ere he was before the gate, whining and
 crying most piteously, for the rain was falling faster and faster.
 The big dog, to whom the rain was a matter of perfect indifference,
 was instantly on hand and tried his utmost to open the gate, but
 naturally without success. Almost in despair the little dog bit at the
 gate, at the same time springing into the air in the attempt to jump
 over it, when he chanced to catch the string in his teeth; it broke,
 and the gate flew open. Now he knew the secret and thenceforth bit the
 string whenever he wished to get out, so that I was obliged to change
 it.

 "That the big dog in raising the latch did not in the least _know_
 that the latch closed the gate, that the raising of the same opened
 it, but that he merely repeated the automatic blow with his snout
 which had once had such happy consequences, transpires from the
 following: the gate leading to the barn is fastened with a latch
 precisely like the one on the garden-gate, only placed a little
 higher, still easily within the dog's reach. Here, too, occasionally
 the little dog is confined, and when he barks the big one makes every
 possible effort to open the gate, but it has never occurred to him
 to push the latch up. The brute cannot draw conclusions, that is, he
 cannot think."[338]

Other classical _differentiæ_ of man besides that of being the only
reasoning animal, also seem consequences of his unrivalled powers of
similar association. He has, e.g., been called 'the laughing animal.'
But humor has often been defined as the recognition of identities in
things different. When the man in Coriolanus says of that hero that
"there is no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male tiger,"
both the invention of the phrase and its enjoyment by the hearer depend
on a peculiarly perplexing power to associate ideas by similarity.

Man is known again as 'the talking animal'; and language is assuredly
a capital distinction between man and brute. But it may readily be
shown how this distinction merely flows from those we have pointed
out, easy dissociation of a representation into its ingredients, and
association by similarity.

Language is a system of _signs_, different from the things signified,
but able to suggest them.

No doubt brutes have a number of such signs. When a dog yelps in front
of a door, and his master, understanding his desire, opens it, the dog
may, after a certain number of repetitions, get to repeat in cold blood
a yelp which was at first the involuntary interjectional expression
of strong emotion. The same dog may be taught to 'beg' for food, and
afterwards come to do so deliberately when hungry. The dog also learns
to understand the signs of men, and the word 'rat' uttered to a terrier
suggests exciting thoughts of the rat-hunt. If the dog had the varied
impulse to vocal utterance which some other animals have, he would
probably repeat the word 'rat' whenever he spontaneously happened to
think of a rat-hunt--he no doubt does have it as an auditory image,
just as a parrot calls out different words spontaneously from its
repertory, and having learned the name of a given dog will utter it
on the sight of a different dog. In each of these separate cases the
particular sign _may_ be consciously noticed by the animal, as distinct
from the particular thing signified, and will thus, so far as it goes,
be a true manifestation of language. But when we come to man we find
a great difference. _He has a deliberate intention to apply a sign
to everything._ The linguistic impulse is with him generalized and
systematic. For things hitherto unnoticed or unfelt, he _desires_ a
sign before he has one. Even though the dog should possess his 'yelp'
for this thing, his 'beg' for that, and his auditory image 'rat' for
a third thing, the matter with him rests there. If a fourth thing
interests him for which no sign happens already to have been learned,
he remains tranquilly without it and goes no further. But the man
_postulates_ it, its absence irritates him, and he ends by inventing
it. _This_ GENERAL PURPOSE _constitutes, I take it, the peculiarity of
human speech, and explains its prodigious development._

How, then, does the general purpose arise? It arises as soon as the
notion of a _sign as such_, apart from any particular import, is born;
and this notion is born by dissociation from the outstanding portions
of a number of concrete cases of signification. The 'yelp,' the 'beg,'
the 'rat,' differ as to their several imports and natures. They agree
only in so far as they have the same _use_--to _be signs_, to stand for
something more important than themselves. The dog whom this similarity
could strike would have grasped the sign _per se_ as such, and would
probably thereupon become a general sign-maker, or speaker in the
human sense. But how can the similarity strike him? Not without the
juxtaposition of the similars (in virtue of the law we have laid down
(Vol. I. p. 506), that in order to be segregated an experience must be
repeated with varying concomitants)--not unless the 'yelp' of the dog
at the moment it occurs _recalls_ to him his 'beg,' by the delicate
bond of their subtle similarity of use--not till then can this thought
flash through his mind: "Why, yelp and beg, in spite of all their
unlikeness, are yet alike in this: that they are actions, signs, which
lead to important boons. Other boons, _any_ boons, may then be got
by other signs!" This reflection made, the gulf is passed. Animals
probably never make it, because the bond of similarity is not delicate
enough. Each sign is drowned in _its_ import, and never awakens other
signs and other imports in juxtaposition. The rat-hunt idea is too
absorbingly interesting in itself to be interrupted by anything so
uncontiguous to it as the idea of the 'beg for food,' or of 'the
door-open yelp,' nor in their turn do these awaken the rat-hunt idea.

In the human child, however, these ruptures of contiguous association
are very soon made; far off cases of sign-using arise when we make a
sign now; and soon language is launched. The child in each case makes
the discovery for himself. No one can help him except by furnishing
him with the conditions. But as he is constituted, the conditions will
sooner or later shoot together into the result.[339]

The exceedingly interesting account which Dr. Howe gives of the
education of his various blind-deaf mutes illustrates this point
admirably. He began to teach Laura Bridgman by gumming raised letters
on various familiar articles. The child was taught by mere contiguity
to pick out a certain number of particular articles when made to feel
the letters. But this was merely a collection of particular signs,
out of the mass of which the general purpose of _signification_ had
not yet been extracted by the child's mind. Dr. Howe compares his
situation at this moment to that of one lowering a line to the bottom
of the deep sea in which Laura's soul lay, and waiting until she should
spontaneously take hold of it and be raised into the light. The moment
came, 'accompanied by a radiant flash of intelligence and glow of joy';
she seemed suddenly to become aware of the general purpose imbedded
in the different details of all these signs, and from that moment her
education went on with extreme rapidity.

Another of the great capacities in which man has been said to differ
fundamentally from the animal is that of possessing self-consciousness
or reflective knowledge of himself as a thinker. But this capacity
also flows from our criterion, for (without going into the matter
very deeply) we may say that the brute never reflects on himself as a
thinker, because he has never clearly dissociated, in the full concrete
act of thought, the element of the thing thought of and the operation
by which he thinks it. They remain always fused, conglomerated--just as
the interjectional vocal sign of the brute almost invariably merges in
his mind with the thing signified, and is not independently attended to
_in se_.[340]

Now, the dissociation of these two elements probably occurs first in
the child's mind on the occasion of some error or false expectation
which would make him experience the shock of difference between merely
imagining a thing and getting it. The thought experienced once with the
concomitant reality, and then without it or with opposite concomitants,
reminds the child of other cases in which the same provoking phenomenon
occurred. Thus the general ingredient of error may be dissociated and
noticed _per se_, and from the notion of his error or wrong thought
to that of his thought in general the transition is easy. The brute,
no doubt, has plenty of instances of error and disappointment in his
life, but the similar shock is in him most likely always swallowed up
in the accidents of the actual case. An expectation disappointed may
breed dubiety as to the realization of that particular thing when the
dog next expects it. But that disappointment, that dubiety, while they
are present in the mind, will _not_ call up other cases, in which the
material details were different, but this feature of possible error
was the same. The brute will, therefore, stop short of dissociating the
general notion of error _per se_, and _a fortiori_ will never attain
the conception of Thought itself as such.

       *       *       *       *       *

We may then, we think, consider it proven that _the most elementary
single difference between the human mind and that of brutes lies
in this deficiency on the brute's part to associate ideas by
similarity_--characters, the abstraction of which depends on this
sort of association, must in the brute always remain drowned, swamped
in the total phenomenon which they help constitute, and never used
to reason from. If a character stands out alone, it is always some
obvious sensible quality like a sound or a smell which is instinctively
exciting and lies in the line of the animal's propensities; or it
is some obvious sign which experience has habitually coupled with a
consequence, such as, for the dog, the sight of his master's hat on and
the master's going out.


DIFFERENT ORDERS OF HUMAN GENIUS.


But, now, since nature never makes a jump, it is evident that we
should find the lowest men occupying in this respect an intermediate
position between the brutes and the highest men. And so we do. Beyond
the analogies which their own minds suggest by breaking up the literal
sequence of their experience, there is a whole world of analogies
which they can appreciate when imparted to them by their betters, but
which they could never excogitate alone. This answers the question why
Darwin and Newton had to be waited for so long. The flash of similarity
between an apple and the moon, between the rivalry for food in nature
and the rivalry for man's selection, was too recondite to have occurred
to any but exceptional minds. _Genius, then,_ as has been already
said, _is identical with the possession of similar association to an
extreme degree._ Professor Bain says: "This I count the leading fact
of genius. I consider it quite impossible to afford any explanation of
intellectual originality except on the supposition of unusual energy on
this point." Alike in the arts, in literature, in practical affairs,
and in science, association by similarity is the prime condition of
success.

But as, according to our view, there are two stages in reasoned
thought, one where similarity merely _operates_ to call up cognate
thoughts, and another farther stage, where the bond of identity between
the cognate thoughts is _noticed_; so _minds of genius may be divided
into two main sorts, those who notice the bond and those who merely
obey it._ The first are the abstract reasoners, properly so called,
the men of science, and philosophers--the analysts, in a word; the
latter are the poets, the critics--the artists, in a word, the men of
intuitions. These judge rightly, classify cases, characterize them
by the most striking analogic epithets, but go no further. At first
sight it might seem that the analytic mind represented simply a higher
intellectual stage, and that the intuitive mind represented an arrested
stage of intellectual development; but the difference is not so simple
as this. Professor Bain has said that a man's advance to the scientific
stage (the stage of noticing and abstracting the bond of similarity)
may often be due to an _absence_ of certain emotional sensibilities.
The sense of color, he says, may no less determine a mind away from
science than it determines it toward painting. There must be a penury
in one's interest in the details of particular forms in order to permit
the forces of the intellect to be concentrated on what is common to
many forms.[341] In other words, supposing a mind fertile in the
suggestion of analogies, but, at the same time, keenly interested in
the particulars of each suggested image, that mind would be far less
apt to single out the particular character which called up the analogy
than one whose interests were less generally lively. A certain richness
of the æsthetic nature may, therefore, easily keep one in the intuitive
stage. All the poets are examples of this. Take Homer:

 "Ulysses, too, spied round the house to see if any man were still
 alive and hiding, trying to get away from gloomy death. He found them
 all fallen in the blood and dirt, and in such number as the fish which
 the fishermen to the low shore, out of the foaming sea, drag with
 their meshy nets. These all, sick for the ocean water, are strewn
 around the sands, while the blazing sun takes their life from them. So
 there the suitors lay strewn round on one another." Or again:

 "And as when a Mæonian or a Carian woman stains ivory with purple to
 be a cheek-piece for horses, and it is kept in the chamber, and many
 horsemen have prayed to bear it off; but it is kept a treasure for a
 king, both a trapping for his horse and a glory to the driver--in such
 wise were thy stout thighs, Menelaos, and legs and fair ankles stained
 with blood."[342]

A man in whom all the accidents of an analogy rise up as vividly as
this, may be excused for not attending to the ground of the analogy.
But he need not on that account be deemed intellectually the inferior
of a man of drier mind, in whom the ground is not as liable to be
eclipsed by the general splendor. Barely are both sorts of intellect,
the splendid and the analytic, found in conjunction. Plato among
philosophers, and M. Taine, who cannot quote a child's saying without
describing the '_voix chantante, étonnée, heureuse_' in which it is
uttered, are only exceptions whose strangeness proves the rule.

An often-quoted writer has said that Shakespeare possessed more
_intellectual power_ than any one else that ever lived. If by
this he meant the power to pass from given premises to right or
congruous conclusions, it is no doubt true. The abrupt transitions in
Shakespeare's thought astonish the reader by their unexpectedness no
less than they delight him by their fitness. Why, for instance, does
the death of Othello so stir the spectator's blood and leave him with a
sense of reconcilement? Shakespeare himself could very likely not say
why; for his invention, though rational, was not ratiocinative. Wishing
the curtain to fall upon a reinstated Othello, that speech about the
turbaned Turk suddenly simply flashed across him as the right end of
all that went before. The dry critic who comes after can, however,
point out the subtle bonds of identity that guided Shakespeare's pen
through that speech to the death of the Moor. Othello is sunk in
ignominy, lapsed from his height at the beginning of the play. What
better way to rescue him at last from this abasement than to make him
for an instant identify himself in memory with the old Othello of
better days, and then execute justice on his present disowned body, as
he used then to smite all enemies of the State? But Shakespeare, whose
mind supplied these means, could probably not have told why they were
so effective.

But though this is true, and though it would be absurd in an absolute
way to say that a given analytic mind was superior to any intuitional
one, yet it is none the less true that the former _represents_ the
higher stage. Men, taken historically, reason by analogy long before
they have learned to reason by abstract characters. Association
by similarity and true reasoning may have identical results. If a
philosopher wishes to prove to you why you should do a certain thing,
he may do so by using abstract considerations exclusively; a savage
will prove the same by reminding you of a similar case in which
you notoriously do as he now proposes, and this with no ability to
state the _point_ in which the cases are similar. In all primitive
literature, in all savage oratory, we find persuasion carried on
exclusively by parables and similes, and travellers in savage countries
readily adopt the native custom. Take, for example, Dr. Livingstone's
argument with the negro conjuror. The missionary was trying to dissuade
the savage from his fetichistic ways of invoking rain. "You see," said
he, "that, after all your operations, sometimes it rains and sometimes
it does not, exactly as when you have not operated at all." "But,"
replied the sorcerer, "it is just the same with you doctors; you give
your remedies, and sometimes the patient gets well and sometimes he
dies, just as when you do nothing at all." To that the pious missionary
replied: "The doctor does his duty, after which God performs the cure
if it pleases Him." "Well," rejoined the savage, "it is just so with
me. I do what is necessary to procure rain, after which God sends it or
withholds it according to His pleasure."[343]

This is the stage in which proverbial philosophy reigns supreme. "An
empty sack can't stand straight" will stand for the reason why a man
with debts may lose his honesty; and "a bird in the hand is worth two
in the bush" will serve to back up one's exhortations to prudence.
Or we answer the question: "Why is snow white?" by saying, "For the
same reason that soap-suds or whipped eggs are white"--in other words,
instead of giving the _reason_ for a fact, we give another _example_ of
the same fact. This offering a similar instance, instead of a reason,
has often been criticised as one of the forms of logical depravity in
men. But manifestly it is not a perverse act of thought, but only an
incomplete one. Furnishing parallel cases is the necessary first step
towards abstracting the reason imbedded in them all.

As it is with reasons, so it is with words. The first words are
probably always names of entire things and entire actions, of extensive
coherent groups. A new experience in the primitive man can only be
talked about by him in terms of the old experiences which have received
names. It reminds him of certain ones from among them, but the _points_
in which it agrees with them are neither named nor dissociated.
Pure similarity must work before the abstraction can work which is
based upon it. The first adjectives will therefore probably be total
nouns embodying the striking character. The primeval man will say,
not 'the bread is hard,' but 'the bread is stone'; not 'the face is
round,' but 'the face is moon'; not 'the fruit is sweet,' but 'the
fruit is sugar-cane.' The first words are thus neither particular nor
general, but _vaguely_ concrete; just as we speak of an 'oval' face,
a 'velvet' skin, or an 'iron' will, without meaning to connote any
other attributes of the adjective-noun than those in which it _does_
resemble the noun it is used to qualify. After a while certain of these
adjectively-used nouns come only to signify the particular quality
for whose sake they are oftenest used; the _entire thing_ which they
originally meant receives another name, and they become true abstract
and general terms. Oval, for example, with us suggests _only_ shape.
The first abstract qualities thus formed are, no doubt, qualities of
one and the same sense found in different objects--as big, sweet; next
analogies between different senses, as 'sharp' of taste, 'high' of
sound, etc.; then analogies of motor combinations, or form of relation,
as simple, confused, difficult, reciprocal, relative, spontaneous, etc.
The extreme degree of subtlety in analogy is reached in such cases as
when we say certain English art critics' writing reminds us of a close
room in which pastilles have been burning, or that the mind of certain
Frenchmen is like old Roquefort cheese. Here language utterly fails to
hit upon the basis of resemblance.

Over immense departments of our thought we are still, all of us, in
the savage state. Similarity operates in us, but abstraction has not
taken place. We know what the present case is like, we know what it
reminds us of, we have an intuition of the right course to take, if
it be a practical matter. But analytic thought has made no tracks,
and we cannot justify ourselves to others. In ethical, psychological,
and æsthetic matters, to give a clear reason for one's judgment is
universally recognized as a mark of rare genius. The helplessness of
uneducated people to account for their likes and dislikes is often
ludicrous. Ask the first Irish girl why she likes this country better
or worse than her home, and see how much she can tell you. But if you
ask your most educated friend why he prefers Titian to Paul Veronese,
you will hardly get more of a reply; and you will probably get
absolutely none if you inquire why Beethoven reminds him of Michael
Angelo, or how it comes that a bare figure with unduly flexed joints,
by the latter, can so suggest the moral tragedy of life. His thought
obeys a _nexus_, but cannot name it. And so it is with all those
judgments of _experts_, which even though unmotived are so valuable.
Saturated with experience of a particular class of materials, an
expert intuitively feels whether a newly-reported fact is probable or
not, whether a proposed hypothesis is worthless or the reverse. He
instinctively knows that, in a novel case, this and not that will be
the promising course of action. The well-known story of the old judge
advising the new one never to give reasons for his decisions, "the
decisions will probably be right, the reasons will surely be wrong,"
illustrates this. The doctor will feel that the patient is doomed,
the dentist will have a premonition that the tooth will break, though
neither can articulate a reason for his foreboding. The reason lies
imbedded, but not yet laid bare, in all the countless previous cases
dimly suggested by the actual one, all calling up the same conclusion,
which the adept thus finds himself swept on to, he knows not how or why.

       *       *       *       *       *

_A physiological conclusion remains to be drawn._ If the principles
laid down in Chapter XIV are true, then it follows that the great
cerebral difference between habitual and reasoned thinking must be
this: that in the former an entire system of cells vibrating at any one
moment discharges in its totality into another entire system, and that
the order of the discharges tends to be a constant one in time; whilst
in the latter a part of the prior system still keeps vibrating in the
midst of the subsequent system, and the order--which part this shall
be, and what shall be its concomitants in the subsequent system--has
little tendency to fixedness in time. This physical selection, so to
call it, of one part to vibrate persistently whilst the others rise
and subside, we found, in the chapter in question, to be the basis of
similar association. (See especially Vol. I. pp. 578-81.) It would seem
to be but a minor degree of that still more urgent and importunate
localized vibration which we can easiest conceive to underlie the
mental fact of interest, attention, or dissociation. In terms of the
brain-process, then, all these mental facts resolve themselves into a
single peculiarity: that of indeterminateness of connection between
the different tracts, and tendency of action to focalize itself, so
to speak, in small localities which vary infinitely at different
times, and from which irradiation may proceed in countless shifting
ways. (Compare figure 80, p. 347.) To discover, or (what more befits
the present stage of nerve-physiology) to adumbrate by some possible
guess, on what chemical or molecular-mechanical fact this instable
equilibrium of the human brain may depend, should be the next task
of the physiologist who ponders over the passage from brute to man.
Whatever the physical peculiarity in question may be, _it_ is the cause
why a man, whose brain has it, reasons so much, whilst his horse, whose
brain lacks it, reasons so little. We can but bequeath the problem to
abler hands than our own.

But, meanwhile, this mode of stating the matter suggests a couple
of other inferences. The first is brief. If _focalization_ of
brain-activity be the fundamental fact of reasonable thought, we see
why intense interest or concentrated passion makes us think so much
more truly and profoundly. The persistent _focalization_ of motion in
certain tracts is the cerebral fact corresponding to the persistent
domination in consciousness of the important feature of the subject.
When not 'focalized,' we are scatter-brained; but when thoroughly
impassioned, we never wander from the point. None but congruous and
relevant images arise. When roused by indignation or moral enthusiasm,
how trenchant are our reflections, how smiting are our words! The whole
network of petty scruples and by-considerations which, at ordinary
languid times, surrounded the matter like a cobweb, holding back our
thought, as Gulliver was pinned to the earth by the myriad Lilliputian
threads, are dashed through at a blow, and the subject stands with its
essential and vital lines revealed.

       *       *       *       *       *

The last point is relative to the theory that what was acquired habit
in the ancestor may become congenital tendency in the offspring. So
vast a superstructure is raised upon this principle that the paucity
of empirical evidence for it has alike been matter of regret to its
adherents, and of triumph to its opponents. In Chapter XXVIII we
shall see what we may call the whole beggarly array of proof. In the
human race, where our opportunities for observation are the most
complete, we seem to have no evidence whatever which would support
the hypothesis, unless it possibly be the law that city-bred children
are more apt to be near-sighted than country children. In the mental
world we certainly do not observe that the children of great travellers
get their geography lessons with unusual ease, or that a baby whose
ancestors have spoken German for thirty generations will, on that
account, learn Italian any the less easily from its Italian nurse.
But if the considerations we have been led to are true, they explain
perfectly well why this law _should not_ be verified in the human
race, and why, therefore, in looking for evidence on the subject, we
should confine ourselves exclusively to lower animals. In them fixed
habit is the essential and characteristic law of nervous action. The
brain grows to the exact modes in which it has been exercised, and the
inheritance of these modes--then called instincts--would have in it
nothing surprising. But in man the negation of all fixed modes is the
essential characteristic. He owes his whole pre-eminence as a reasoner,
his whole human quality of intellect, we may say, to the facility with
which a given mode of thought in him may suddenly be broken up into
elements, which recombine anew. Only at the price of inheriting no
settled instinctive tendencies is he able to settle every novel case
by the fresh discovery by his reason of novel principles. He is, _par
excellence_, the _educable_ animal. If, then, the law that habits are
inherited were found exemplified in him, he would, in so far forth,
fall short of his human perfections; and, when we survey the human
races, we actually do find that those which are most instinctive at the
outset are those which, on the whole, are least educated in the end.
An untutored Italian is, to a great extent, a man of the world; he has
instinctive perceptions, tendencies to behavior, reactions, in a word,
upon his environment, which the untutored German wholly lacks. If the
latter be not drilled, he is apt to be a thoroughly loutish personage;
but, on the other hand, the mere absence in his brain of definite
innate tendencies enables him to advance by the development, through
education, of his purely reasoned thinking, into complex regions of
consciousness that the Italian may probably never approach.

We observe an identical difference between men as a whole and women
as a whole. A young woman of twenty reacts with intuitive promptitude
and security in all the usual circumstances in which she may be
placed.[344] Her likes and dislikes are formed; her opinions, to a
great extent, the same that they will be through life. Her character
is, in fact, finished in its essentials. How inferior to her is a boy
of twenty in all these respects! His character is still gelatinous,
uncertain what shape to assume, 'trying it on' in every direction.
Feeling his power, yet ignorant of the manner in which he shall express
it, he is, when compared with his sister, a being of no definite
contour. But this absence of prompt tendency in his brain to set into
particular modes is the very condition which insures that it shall
ultimately become so much more efficient than the woman's. The very
lack of preappointed trains of thought is the ground on which general
principles and heads of classification grow up; and the masculine brain
deals with new and complex matter indirectly by means of these, in a
manner which the feminine method of direct intuition, admirably and
rapidly as it performs within its limits, can vainly hope to cope with.

       *       *       *       *       *

In looking back over the subject of reasoning, one feels how intimately
connected it is with conception; and one realizes more than ever the
deep reach of that principle of selection on which so much stress was
laid towards the close of Chapter IX. As the art of reading (after a
certain stage in one's education) is the art of skipping, so the art of
being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook. The first effect on
the mind of growing cultivated is that processes once multiple get to
be performed by a single act. Lazarus has called this the progressive
'condensation' of thought. But in the psychological sense it is less a
condensation than a loss, a genuine dropping out and throwing overboard
of conscious content. Steps really sink from sight. An advanced thinker
sees the relations of his topics in such masses and so instantaneously
that when he comes to explain to younger minds it is often hard to say
which grows the more perplexed, he or the pupil. In every university
there are admirable investigators who are notoriously bad lecturers.
The reason is that they never spontaneously see the subject in the
minute articulate way in which the student needs to have it offered
to his slow reception. They grope for the links, but the links do
not come. Bowditch, who translated and annotated Laplace's Mécanique
Céleste, said that whenever his author prefaced a proposition by the
words 'it is evident,' he knew that many hours of hard study lay before
him.

When two minds of a high order, interested in kindred subjects, come
together, their conversation is chiefly remarkable for the summariness
of its allusions and the rapidity of its transitions. Before one
of them is half through a sentence the other knows his meaning and
replies. Such genial play with such massive materials, such an easy
flashing of light over far perspectives, such careless indifference to
the dust and apparatus that ordinarily surround the subject and seem
to pertain to its essence, make these conversations seem true feasts
for gods to a listener who is educated enough to follow them at all.
His mental lungs breathe more deeply, in an atmosphere more broad and
vast than is their wont. On the other hand, the excessive explicitness
and short-windedness of an ordinary man are as wonderful as they are
tedious to the man of genius. But we need not go as far as the ways
of genius. Ordinary social intercourse will do. There the charm of
conversation is in direct proportion to the possibility of abridgment
and elision, and in inverse ratio to the need of explicit statement.
With old friends a word stands for a whole story or set of opinions.
With new-comers everything must be gone over in detail. Some persons
have a real mania for completeness, they must express every step. They
are the most intolerable of companions, and although their mental
energy may in its way be great, they always strike us as weak and
second-rate. In short, the essence of plebeianism, that which separates
vulgarity from aristocracy, is perhaps less a defect than an excess,
the constant need to animadvert upon matters which for the aristocratic
temperament do not exist. To ignore, to disdain to consider, to
overlook, are the essence of the 'gentleman.' Often most provokingly
so; for the things ignored may be of the deepest moral consequence.
But in the very midst of our indignation with the gentleman, we have
a consciousness that his preposterous inertia and negativeness
in the actual emergency is, somehow or other, _allied_ with his
general superiority to ourselves. It is not only that the gentleman
ignores considerations relative to conduct, sordid suspicions, fears,
calculations, etc., which the vulgarian is fated to entertain; it is
that he is silent where the vulgarian talks; that he gives nothing but
results where the vulgarian is profuse of reasons; that he does not
explain or apologize; that he uses one sentence instead of twenty; and
that, in a word, there is an amount of _interstitial_ thinking, so
to call it, which it is quite impossible to get him to perform, but
which is nearly all that the vulgarian mind performs at all. All this
suppression of the secondary leaves the field _clear_,--for higher
flights, should they choose to come. But even if they never came, what
thoughts there were would still manifest the aristocratic type and
wear the well-bred form. So great is our sense of harmony and ease in
passing from the company of a philistine to that of an aristocratic
temperament, that we are almost tempted to deem the falsest views and
tastes as held by a man of the world, truer than the truest as held by
a common person. In the latter the best ideas are choked, obstructed,
and contaminated by the redundancy of their paltry associates. The
negative conditions, at least, of an atmosphere and a free outlook are
present in the former.

I may appear to have strayed from psychological analysis into æsthetic
criticism. But the principle of selection is so important that no
illustrations seem redundant which may help to show how great is its
scope. The upshot of what I say simply is that selection implies
rejection as well as choice; and that the function of ignoring, of
_in_attention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function
of attention itself.

       *       *       *       *       *

[319] The substance of this chapter, and a good many pages of the text,
originally appeared in an article entitled 'Brute and Human Intellect,'
in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy for July 1878 (vol. xii. p.
236).

[320] I see no need of assuming more than two terms in this sort of
reasoning--first, the sign, and second, the thing inferred from it.
Either may be complex, but essentially it is but A calling up B, and no
middle term is involved. M. Binet, in his most intelligent little book,
La Psychologie du Raisonnement, maintains that there are three terms.
The present sensation or sign must, according to him, first evoke from
the past an image which resembles it and fuses with it, and the things
suggested or inferred are always the contiguous associates of this
intermediate image, and not of the immediate sensation. The reader of
Chapter XIX will see why I do not believe in the 'image' in question
as a distinct psychic fact.

[321] Mental Evolution in Man (1889), chapters iii and iv. See
especially pp. 68-80, and later 353, 396.

[322] _Loc. cit._ p. 50.

[323] P. 52.

[324] _Loc. cit._ p. 74.

[325] J. Locke, Essay conc. Hum. Understanding, bk. iv. chap. ii. § 3.

[326] To be sagacious is to be a good observer. J. S. Mill has a
passage which is so much in the spirit of the text that I cannot
forbear to quote it. "The observer is not he who merely sees the
thing which is before his eyes, but he who sees what parts that thing
is composed of. To do this well is a rare talent. One person, from
inattention, or attending only in the wrong place, overlooks half of
what he sees; another sets down much more than he sees, confounding it
with what he imagines, or with what he infers; another takes note of
the _kind_ of all the circumstances, but being inexpert in estimating
their degree, leaves the quantity of each vague and uncertain; another
sees indeed the whole, but makes such an awkward division of it into
parts, throwing things into one mass which require to be separated,
and separating others which might more conveniently be considered as
one, that the result is much the same, sometimes even worse, than
if no analysis had been attempted at all. It would be possible to
point out what qualities of mind, and modes of mental culture, fit a
person for being a good observer: that, however, is a question not
of Logic, but of the Theory of Education, in the most enlarged sense
of the term. There is not properly an Art of Observing. There may be
rules for observing. But these, like rules for inventing, are properly
instructions for the preparation of one's own mind; for putting it into
the state in which it will be most fitted to observe, or most likely
to invent. They are, therefore, essentially rules of self-education,
which is a different thing from Logic. They do not teach how to do
the thing, but how to make ourselves capable of doing it. They are an
art of strengthening the limbs, not an art of using them. The extent
and minuteness of observation which may be requisite, and the degree
of decomposition to which it may be necessary to carry the mental
analysis, depend on the particular purpose in view. To ascertain the
state of the whole universe at any particular moment is impossible, but
would also be useless. In making chemical experiments, we do not think
it necessary to note the position of the planets; because experience
has shown, as a very superficial experience is sufficient to show, that
in such cases that circumstance is not material to the result: and
accordingly, in the ages when man believed in the occult influences
of the heavenly bodies, it might have been unphilosophical to omit
ascertaining the precise condition of those bodies at the moment of the
experiment." (Logic, bk. iii. chap. vii. § 1. Cf. also bk. iv. chap.
ii.)

[327] Readers brought up on Popular Science may think that the
molecular structure of things is their real essence in an absolute
sense, and that water is H-O-H more deeply and truly than it is a
solvent of sugar or a slaker of thirst. Not a whit! It is _all_ of
these things with equal reality, and the only reason why _for the
chemist_ it is H-O-H primarily, and only secondarily the other things,
is that _for his purpose of deduction and compendious definition_, the
H-O-H aspect of it is the more useful one to bear in mind.

[328] "We find that we take for granted irresistibly that each kind [of
thing] has some character which distinguishes it from other classes....
What is the foundation of this postulate? What is the ground of this
assumption that there must exist a definition which we have never seen,
and which perhaps no one has seen in a satisfactory form?... I reply
that our conviction that there must needs be characteristic marks by
which things can be defined in words is founded upon the assumption
of _the necessary possibility of reasoning_." (W. Whewell: Hist. of
Scientific Ideas, bk. viii. chap. i, § 9.)

[329] I may quote a passage from an article entitled 'The Sentiment
of Rationality,' published in vol. iv of Mind, 1879: "What is a
_conception_? It is a _teleological instrument_. It is a partial aspect
of a thing which _for our purpose_ we regard as its essential aspect,
as the representative of the entire thing. In comparison with this
aspect, whatever other properties and qualities the thing may have
are unimportant accidents which we may without blame ignore. But the
essence, the ground of conception, varies with the end we have in view.
A substance like oil has as many different essences as it has uses to
different individuals. One man conceives it as a combustible, another
as a lubricator, another as a food; the chemist thinks of it as a
hydrocarbon; the furniture-maker as a darkener of wood; the speculator
as a commodity whose market-price to-day is this and to-morrow that.
The soap-boiler, the physicist, the clothes-scourer severally ascribe
to it other essences in relation to their needs. Ueberweg's doctrine
that the essential quality of a thing is the quality of most _worth_ is
strictly true; but Ueberweg has failed to note that the worth is wholly
relative to the temporary interests of the conceiver. And, even, when
his interest is distinctly defined in his own mind, the discrimination
of the quality in the object which has the closest connection with it
is a thing which no rules can teach. The only _a priori_ advice that
can be given to a man embarking on life with a certain purpose is the
somewhat barren counsel: Be sure that in the circumstances that meet
you, you attend to the _right_ ones for your purpose. To pick out the
right ones is the measure of the man. 'Millions,' says Hartmann, 'stare
at the phenomenon before a _genialer Kopf_ pounces on the concept.' The
genius is simply he to whom, when he opens his eyes upon the world, the
'right' characters are the prominent ones. The fool is he who, with the
same purposes as the genius, infallibly gets his attention tangled amid
the accidents."

[330] Only if one of our purposes were itself truer than another,
could one of our conceptions become the truer conception. To be
a truer purpose, however, our purpose must conform more to some
absolute standard of purpose in things to which our purposes ought to
conform. This shows that the whole doctrine of essential characters
is intimately bound up with a teleological view of the world.
Materialism becomes self-contradictory when it denies teleology, and
yet in the same breath calls atoms, etc., the _essential_ facts.
The world contains consciousness as well as atoms--and the one must
be written down as just as essential as the other, in the absence
of any declared purpose regarding them on the creator's part, or in
the absence of any creator. As far as we ourselves go, the atoms are
worth more for purposes of deduction, the consciousness for purposes
of inspiration. We may fairly write the Universe in either way, thus:
ATOMS-producing-consciousness; or CONSCIOUSNESS-produced-by-atoms.
Atoms alone, or consciousness alone, are precisely equal mutilations of
the truth. If, without believing in a God, I still continue to talk of
what the world 'essentially is,' I am just as much entitled to define
it as a place in which my nose itches, or as a place where at a certain
corner I can get a mess of oysters for twenty cents, as to call it an
evolving nebula differentiating and integrating itself. It is hard to
say which of the three abstractions is the more rotten or miserable
substitute for the world's concrete fulness. To conceive it merely as
'God's work' would be a similar mutilation of it, so long as we said
not what God, or what kind of work. The only real truth about the
world, apart from particular purposes, is the _total_ truth.

[331] Compare Lotze, Metaphysik, §§ 58, 67, for some instructive
remarks on ways in which the world's constitution might differ from
what it actually is. Compare also Chapter XXVIII.

[332] Sometimes, it must be confessed, the conceiver's purpose falls
short of reasoning and the only conclusion he cares to reach is the
bare naming of the datum. "What is that?" is our first question
relative to any unknown thing. And the ease with which our curiosity
is quenched as soon as we are supplied with any sort of a name to call
the object by, is ridiculous enough. To quote from an unpublished
essay by a former student of mine, Mr. R. W. Black: "The simplest end
which a thing's predicate can serve is the satisfaction of the desire
for unity itself, the mere desire that the thing shall be the same
with _something_ else. Why, the other day, when I mistook a portrait
of Shakespeare for one of Hawthorne, was I not, on psychological
principles, as right as if I had correctly named it?--the two pictures
had a common essence, bald forehead, mustache, flowing hair. Simply
because the only end that could possibly be served by naming it
Hawthorne was my desire to have it so. With reference to any other
end that classification of it would not serve. And every unity, every
identity, every classification is rightly called fanciful unless
it serves some other end than the mere satisfaction, emotion, or
inspiration caught by momentarily believing in it."

[333] See above, p. 8.

[334] See his Study of Character, chap. xv; also Senses and Intellect,
'Intellect,' chap. ii, the latter half.

[335] Whether the dog has the notion of your being angry or of your
property being valuable in any such abstract way as _we_ have these
notions is more than doubtful. The conduct is more likely an impulsive
result of a conspiracy of outward stimuli; the beast _feels like_
acting so when these stimuli are present, though conscious of no
definite reason why. The distinction of recept and concept is useful
here. Some breeds of dogs, e.g. collies, seem instinctively to defend
their master's property. The case is similar to that of a dog's barking
at people after dark, at whom he would not bark in daylight. I have
heard this quoted as evidence of the dog's reasoning power. It is only,
as Chapter III has shown us, the impulsive result of a summation of
stimuli, and has no connection with reasoning.

In certain stages of the hypnotic trance the subject seems to lapse
into the non-analytic state. If a sheet of ruled foolscap paper, or a
paper with a fine monotonous ornamental pattern printed on it, be shown
to the subject, and _one_ of the ruled lines or elements of the pattern
be pointed to for an instant, and the paper immediately removed, he
will then almost always, when after a short interval the paper is
presented to him again, pick out the indicated line or element with
infallible correctness. The operator, meanwhile, has either to keep
his eye fixed upon it, or to make sure of its position by counting,
in order not to lose its place. Just so we may remember a friend's
house in a street by the single character of its number rather than by
its general look. The trance-subject would seem, in these instances,
to surrender himself to the general look. He disperses his attention
impartially over the sheet. The place of the particular line touched is
part of a 'total effect' which he gets in its entirety, and which would
be distorted if another line were touched instead. This total effect
is lost upon the normal looker-on, bent as he is on concentration,
analysis, and emphasis. What wonder, then, that, under these
experimental conditions, the trance-subject excels him in touching
the right line again? If he has time given him to count the line, he
will excel the trance-subject; but if the time be too short to count,
he will best succeed by following the trance-method, abstaining from
analysis, and being guided by the 'general look' of the line's place
on the sheet. One is surprised at one's success in this the moment one
gives up one's habitually analytic state of mind.

Is it too much to say that we have in this dispersion of the attention
and subjection to the 'general effect' something like a relapse into
the state of mind of brutes? The trance-subject never gives any other
reason for his optical discriminations, save that 'it looks so.' So a
man, on a road once traversed inattentively before, takes a certain
turn for no reason except that _he feels_ as if it must be right. He
is guided by a sum of impressions, not one of which is emphatic or
distinguished from the rest, not one of which is essential, not one
of which is _conceived_, but all of which together drive him to a
conclusion to which nothing but _that_ sum-total leads. Are not some
of the wonderful discriminations of animals explicable in the same
way? The cow finds her own stanchions in the long stable, the horse
stops at the house he has once stopped at in the monotonous street,
because no other stanchions, no other house, yield impartially _all_
the impressions of the previous experience. The man, however, by
seeking to make some one impression characteristic and essential,
prevents the rest from having their effect. So that, if the (for him)
essential feature be forgotten or changed, he is too apt to be thrown
off altogether, and then the brute or the trance-subject may seem to
outstrip him in sagacity.

Dr. Romanes's already quoted distinction between 'receptual' and
'conceptual' thought (published since the body of my text and my note
were written) connotes conveniently the difference which I seek to
point out. See also his Mental Evolution in Man, p. 197 ff., for proofs
of the fact that in a receptual way brutes cognize the mental states of
other brutes and men.

[336] This matter of confusion is important and interesting. Since
confusion is mistaking the wrong part of the phenomenon for the
whole, whilst reasoning is, according to our definition, based on the
substitution of the right part for the whole, it might be said that
confusion and reasoning are generically the same process. I believe
that they are so, and that the only difference between a muddle-head
and a genius is that between extracting wrong characters and right
ones. In other words, a muddle-headed person is a genius spoiled in the
making. I think it will be admitted that all _eminently_ muddle-headed
persons have the temperament of genius. They are constantly breaking
away from the usual consecutions of concretes. A common associator by
contiguity is too closely tied to routine to get muddle-headed.

[337] The horse is a densely stupid animal, as far as everything goes
except contiguous association. We reckon him intelligent, partly
because he looks so handsome, partly because he has such a wonderful
faculty of contiguous association and can be so quickly moulded into a
mass of set habits. Had he anything of reasoning intelligence, he would
be a less faithful slave than he is.

[338] Th. Schumann: Journal Daheim, No. 19, 1878. Quoted by Strümpell:
Die Geisteskräfte der Menschen verglicken mit denen der Thiere
(Leipzig, 1878), p. 39. Cats are notorious for the skill with which
they will open latches, locks, etc. Their feats are usually ascribed to
their reasoning powers. But Dr. Romanes well remarks (Mental Evolution,
etc., p. 351, note) that we ought first to be sure that the actions
are not due to mere association. A cat is constantly playing with
things with her paws; a trick accidentally hit upon may be retained.
Romanes notes the fact that the animals most skilled in this way need
not be the most generally intelligent, but those which have the best
corporeal members for handling things, cat's paws, horse's lips,
elephant's trunk, cow's horns. The monkey has both the corporeal and
the intellectual superiority. And my deprecatory remarks on animal
reasoning in the text apply far less to the quadrumana than to
quadrupeds.--On the possible fallacies in interpreting animals' minds,
compare C. L. Morgan in Mind, xi. 174 (1886).

[339] There are two other conditions of language in the human being,
additional to association by similarity, that assist its action,
or rather pave the way for it. These are: first, the great natural
loquacity; and, second, the great imitativeness of man. The first
produces the original reflex interjectional sign; the second (as
Bleek has well shown) fixes it, stamps it, and ends by multiplying
the number of determinate specific signs which are a requisite
preliminary to the general conscious purpose of sign-making, which
I have called the characteristic human element in language. The way
in which imitativeness fixes the meaning of signs is this: When a
primeval man has a given emotion, he utters his natural interjection;
or when (to avoid supposing that the reflex sounds are exceedingly
determinate by nature) a group of such men experience a common emotion,
and one takes the lead in the cry, the others cry like him from
sympathy or imitativeness. Now, let one of the group hear another,
who is in presence of the experience, utter the cry; he, even without
the experience, will repeat the cry from pure imitativeness. But,
as he repeats the sign, he will be reminded by it of his own former
experience. Thus, first, he has the sign with the emotion; then,
without it; then, with it again. It is "dissociated by change of
concomitants"; he feels it as a separate entity and yet as having a
connection with the emotion. Immediately it becomes possible for him
to couple it deliberately with the emotion, in cases where the latter
would either have provoked no interjectional cry or not the same one.
In a word, his mental procedure tends to _fix_ this cry on _that_
emotion; and when this occurs, in many instances, he is provided with
a stock of signs, like the yelp, beg, rat of the dog, each of which
suggests a determinate image. On this stock, then, similarity works in
the way above explained.

[340] See the 'Evolution of Self-consciousness' in 'Philosophical
Discussions,' by Chauncey Wright (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1877).
Dr. Romanes, in the book from which I have already quoted, seeks to
show that the 'consciousness of truth as truth' and the deliberate
intention to predicate (which are the characteristics of higher human
reasoning) presuppose a consciousness of ideas as such, as things
distinct from their objects; and that this consciousness depends on our
having made signs for them by language. My text seems to me to include
Dr. Romanes's facts, and formulates them in what to me is a more
elementary way, though the reader who wishes to understand the matter
better should go to his clear and patient exposition also.

[341] Study of Character, p. 317.

[342] Translated by my colleague, Professor G. H. Palmer.

[343] Quoted by Renouvier, Critique Philosophique, October 19, 1879.

[344] Social and domestic circumstances, that is, not material ones.
Perceptions of social relations seem very keen in persons whose
dealings with the material world are confined to knowing a few useful
objects, principally animals, plants, and weapons. Savages and boors
are often as tactful and astute socially as trained diplomatists. In
general, it is probable that the consciousness of how one stands with
other people occupies a relatively larger and larger part of the mind,
the lower one goes in the scale of culture. Woman's intuitions, so fine
in the sphere of personal relations, are seldom first-rate in the way
of mechanics. All boys teach themselves how a clock goes: few girls.
Hence Dr. Whately's jest, "Woman is the unreasoning animal, and pokes
the fire from on top."




CHAPTER XXIII.

THE PRODUCTION OF MOVEMENT.


The reader will not have forgotten, in the jungle of purely inward
processes and products through which the last chapters have borne him,
that the final result of them all must be some form of bodily activity
due to the escape of the central excitement through outgoing nerves.
The whole neural organism, it will be remembered, is, physiologically
considered, but a machine for converting stimuli into reactions; and
the intellectual part of our life is knit up with but the middle or
'central' portion of the machine's operations. Let us now turn to
consider the final or emergent operations, the bodily activities, and
the forms of consciousness connected therewithal.

Every impression which impinges on the incoming nerves produces some
discharge down the outgoing ones, whether we be aware of it or not.
Using sweeping terms and ignoring exceptions, _we might say that every
possible feeling produces a movement, and that the movement is a
movement of the entire organism, and of each and all its parts._ What
happens patently when an explosion or a flash of lightning startles
us, or when we are tickled, happens latently with every sensation
which we receive. The only reason why we do not feel the startle or
tickle in the case of insignificant sensations is partly its very small
amount, partly our obtuseness. Professor Bain many years ago gave the
name of the Law of Diffusion to this phenomenon of general discharge,
and expressed it thus: "According as an impression is accompanied
with Feeling, the aroused currents diffuse themselves over the brain,
leading to a general agitation of the moving organs, as well as
affecting the viscera."

In cases where the feeling is strong the law is too familiar to require
proof. As Prof. Bain says:

 "Each of us knows in our own experience that a sudden shock of feeling
 is accompanied with movements of the body generally, and with other
 effects. When no emotion is present, we are quiescent; a slight
 feeling is accompanied with slight manifestations; a more intense
 shock has a more intense outburst. Every pleasure and every pain,
 and every mode of emotion, has a definite wave of effects, which our
 observation makes known to us; and we apply the knowledge to infer
 other men's feelings from their outward display.... The organs first
 and prominently affected, in the diffused wave of nervous influence,
 are the moving members, and of these, by preference, the features
 of the face (with the ears in animals), whose movements constitute
 the _expression_ of the countenance. But the influence extends to
 all the parts of the moving system, voluntary and involuntary;
 while an important series of effects are produced on the glands and
 viscera--the stomach, lungs, heart, kidneys, skin, together with the
 sexual and mammary organs.... The circumstance is seemingly universal,
 the proof of it does not require a citation of instances in detail; on
 the objectors is thrown the burden of adducing unequivocal exceptions
 to the law."[345]

There are probably no exceptions to the diffusion of every impression
through the _nerve-centres_. The _effect_ of the wave through the
centres may, however, often be to interfere with processes, and to
diminish tensions already existing there; and the outward consequences
of such inhibitions may be the arrest of discharges from the inhibited
regions and the checking of bodily activities already in process of
occurrence. When this happens it probably is like the draining or
siphoning of certain channels by currents flowing through others. When,
in walking, we suddenly stand still because a sound, sight, smell, or
thought catches our attention, something like this occurs. But there
are cases of arrest of peripheral activity which depend, not on central
inhibition, but on stimulation of centres which discharge outgoing
currents of an inhibitory sort. Whenever we are startled, for example,
our heart momentarily stops or slows its beating, and then palpitates
with accelerated speed. The brief arrest is due to an outgoing current
down the pneumogastric nerve. This nerve, when stimulated, stops or
slows the heart-beats, and this particular effect of startling fails
to occur if the nerve be cut.

In general, however, the stimulating effects of a sense-impression
preponderate over the inhibiting effects, so that we may roughly say,
as we began by saying, that the wave of discharge produces an activity
in all parts of the body. The task of tracing out _all_ the effects of
any one incoming sensation has not yet been performed by physiologists.
Recent years have, however, begun to enlarge our information; and
although I must refer to special treatises for the full details, I can
briefly string together here a number of separate observations which
prove the truth of the law of diffusion.

[Illustration: FIG. 81.]

First take _effects upon the circulation_. Those upon the heart we
have just seen. Haller long ago recorded that the blood from an open
vein flowed out faster at the beat of a drum.[346] In Chapter III.
(Vol. I. p. 98) we learned how instantaneously, according to Mosso, the
circulation in the brain is altered by changes of sensation and of the
course of thought. The effect of objects of fear, shame, and anger upon
the blood-supply of the skin, especially the skin of the face, are too
well known to need remark. Sensations of the higher senses produce,
according to Couty and Charpentier, the most varied effects upon
the pulse-rate and blood-pressure in dogs. Fig. 81, a pulse-tracing
from these authors, shows the tumultuous effect on a dog's heart of
hearing the screams of another dog. The changes of blood-pressure still
occurred when the pneumogastric nerves were cut, showing the vaso-motor
effect to be direct and not dependent on the heart. When Mosso invented
that simple instrument, the _plethysmograph_, for recording the
fluctuations in volume of the members of the body, what most astonished
him, he says, "in the first experiments which he made in Italy, was
the extreme unrest of the blood-vessels of the hand, which at every
smallest emotion, whether during waking or during sleep, changed their
volume in surprising fashion."[347] Figure 82 (from Féré[348])
shows the way in which the pulse of one subject was modified by the
exhibition of a red light lasting from the moment marked _a_ to that
marked _b_.

[Illustration: FIG. 82.]

[Illustration: FIG. 83.--Respiratory curve of B: _a_, with eyes open;
_b_, with eyes closed.]

_The effects upon respiration_ of sudden sensory stimuli are also
too well known to need elaborate comment. We 'catch our breath' at
every sudden sound. We 'hold our breath' whenever our attention and
expectation are strongly engaged, and we sigh when the tension of the
situation is relieved. When a fearful object is before us we pant and
cannot deeply inspire; when the object makes us angry it is, on the
contrary, the act of expiration which is hard. I subjoin a couple of
figures from Féré which explain themselves. They show the effects of
light upon the breathing of two of his hysteric patients.[349]

[Illustration: FIG. 84. Respiratory curve of L: _a_, with yellow light;
_b_ with green light; _c_, with red light. The red has the strongest
effect.]

_On the sweat-glands,_ similar consequences of sensorial stimuli are
observed. Tarchanoff, testing the condition of the sweat-glands by
the power of the skin to start a galvanic current through electrodes
applied to its surface, found that "nearly every kind of nervous
activity, from the simplest sensations and impressions, to voluntary
motions and the highest forms of mental exertion, is accompanied by
an increased activity in the glands of the skin."[350] _On the pupil_
observations are recorded by Sanders which show that a transitory
dilatation follows every sensorial stimulus applied _during sleep_,
even if the stimulus be not strong enough to wake the subject up. At
the moment of awaking there is a dilatation, even if strong light falls
on the eye.[351] The pupil of children can easily be observed to dilate
enormously under the influence of _fear_. It is said to dilate in pain
and fatigue; and to contract, on the contrary, in rage.

As regards _effects on the abdominal viscera_, they unquestionably
exist, but very few accurate observations have been made.[352]

The bladder, bowels, and uterus respond to sensations, even indifferent
ones. Mosso and Pellicani, in their plethysmographic investigations
on the bladder of dogs, found all sorts of sensorial stimuli to
produce reflex contractions of this organ, independent of those of the
abdominal walls. They call the bladder 'as good an æsthesiometer as the
iris,' and refer to the not uncommon reflex effects of psychic stimuli
in the human female upon this organ.[353] M. Féré has registered the
contractions of the sphincter ani which even indifferent sensations
will produce. In some pregnant women the fœtus is felt to move after
almost every sensorial excitement received by the mother. The only
natural explanation is that it is stimulated at such moments by
reflex contractions of the womb.[354] That the glands are affected
in emotion is patent enough in the case of the tears of grief, the
dry mouth, moist skin, or diarrhœa of fear, the biliary disturbances
which sometimes follow upon rage, etc. The watering of the mouth at
the sight of succulent food is well known. It is difficult to follow
the smaller degrees of all these reflex changes, but it can hardly be
doubted that they exist in some degree, even where they cease to be
traceable, and that all our sensations have some visceral effects. The
sneezing produced by sunshine, the roughening of the skin (goose-flesh)
which certain strokings, contacts, and sounds, musical or non-musical,
provoke, are facts of the same order as the shuddering and standing up
of the hair in fear, only of less degree.

_Effects on Voluntary Muscles._ Every sensorial stimulus not only
sends a special discharge into certain particular muscles dependent on
the special nature of the stimulus in question--some of these special
discharges we have studied in Chapter XI, others we shall examine
under the heads of Instinct and Emotion--but it innervates the muscles
generally. M. Féré has given very curious experimental proofs of
this. The strength of contraction of the subject's hand was measured
by a self-registering dynamometer. Ordinarily the maximum strength,
under simple experimental conditions, remains the same from day to
day. But if simultaneously with the contraction the subject received
a sensorial impression, the contraction was sometimes weakened, but
more often increased. This reinforcing effect has received the name of
_dynamogeny_. The dynamogenic value of simple _musical notes_ seems
to be proportional to their loudness and height. Where the notes are
compounded into sad strains, the muscular strength diminishes. If the
strains are gay, it is increased.--The dynamogenic value of _colored
lights_ varies with the color. In a subject[355] whose normal strength
was expressed by 23, it became 24 when a blue light was thrown on the
eyes, 28 for green, 30 for yellow, 35 for orange, and 42 for red. Red
is thus the most exciting color. Among _tastes_, sweet has the lowest
value, next comes salt, then bitter, and finally sour, though, as M.
Féré remarks, such a sour as acetic acid excites the nerves of pain and
smell as well as of taste. The stimulating effects of tobacco-smoke,
alcohol, beef-extract (which is innutritious), etc., etc., may be
partly due to a dynamogenic action of this sort.--Of _odors_, that of
musk seems to have a peculiar dynamogenic power. Fig. 85 is a copy of
one of M. Féré's dynamographic tracings, which explains itself. The
smaller contractions are those without stimulus; the stronger ones are
due to the influence of red rays of light.

[Illustration: FIG. 85.]

Everyone is familiar with the _patellar reflex_, or jerk upwards of
the foot, which is produced by smartly tapping the tendon below the
knee-pan when the leg hangs over the other knee. Drs. Weir Mitchell and
Lombard have found that when other sensations come in simultaneously
with the tap, the jerk is increased.[356] Heat, cold, pricking,
itching, or faradic stimulation of the skin, sometimes strong optical
impressions, music, all have this dynamogenic effect, which also
results whenever voluntary movements are set up in other parts of the
body, simultaneously with the tap.[357]

These 'dynamogenic' effects, in which one stimulation simply
reinforces another already under way, must not be confounded with
reflex acts properly so called, in which new activities are originated
by the stimulus. All instinctive performances and manifestations
of emotion are reflex acts. But underneath those of which we are
conscious there seem to go on continually others smaller in amount,
which probably in most persons might be called fluctuations of muscular
_tone_, but which in certain neurotic subjects can be demonstrated
ocularly. M. Féré figures some of them in the article to which I have
already referred.[358]

       *       *       *       *       *

Looking back over all these facts, it is hard to doubt the truth of the
law of diffusion, even where verification is beyond reach. _A process
set up anywhere in the centres reverberates everywhere, and in some
way or other affects the organism throughout, making its activities
either greater or less._ We are brought again to the assimilation which
was expressed on a previous page of the nerve-central mass to a good
conductor charged with electricity, of which the tension cannot be
changed anywhere without changing it everywhere.

       *       *       *       *       *

Herr Schneider has tried to show, by an ingenious and suggestive
zoological review,[359] that all the _special_ movements which highly
evolved animals make are differentiated from the two originally simple
movements, of contraction and expansion, in which the entire body of
simple organisms takes part. The tendency to contract is the source
of all the self-protective impulses and reactions which are later
developed, including that of flight. The tendency to expand splits up,
on the contrary, into the impulses and instincts of an aggressive kind,
feeding, fighting, sexual intercourse, etc. Schneider's articles are
well worth reading, if only for the careful observations on animals
which they embody. I cite them here as a sort of evolutionary reason
to add to the mechanical _a priori_ reason why there _ought_ to be the
diffusive wave which our _a posteriori_ instances have shown to exist.

I will now proceed to a detailed study of the more important classes
of movement consequent upon cerebro-mental change. They may be
enumerated as--

1) Instinctive or Impulsive Performances;

2) Expressions of Emotion; and

3) Voluntary Deeds;

and each shall have a chapter to itself.

       *       *       *       *       *

[345] Emotions and Will, pp. 4, 5.

[346] Cf. Féré. Sensation et Mouvement (1887), p. 56.

[347] La Paura (1884), p. 117. Compare Féré: Sensation et Mouvement,
chap. xvii.

[348] Revue Philosophique, xxiv. 570.

[349] Revue Phil., xxiv. pp. 566-7.--For further information about the
relations between the brain and respiration, see Danilewsky's Essay in
the Biologisches Centralblatt, ii. 690.

[350] Quoted from the report of Tarchanoff's paper (in Pflüger's
Archiv, xlvi. 46) in the American Journal of Psych., ii. 652.

[351] Archiv f. Psychiatrie, vii. 652; ix. 129.

[352] Sensation et Mouvement, 57-8.

[353] R. Accad. dei Lincei (1881-2). I follow the report in Hofmann
Schwalbe's Jahresbericht, x. ii. 93.

[354] Cf. Féré, Sensation et Mouvement, chap. xiv.

[355] The figures given are from an hysterical subject, and the
differences are greater than normal. M. Féré considers that the
unstable nervous system of the hysteric ('ces grenouilles de la
psychologie') shows the law on a quantitatively exaggerated scale,
without altering the qualitative relations. The effects remind us a
little of the influence of sensations upon minimal sensations of other
orders discovered by Urbantschitsch, and reported on page 29 of this
volume.

[356] Mitchell in (Philadelphia) Medical News (Feb. 13 and 20, 1886);
Lombard in American Journal of Psychology (Oct. 1887).

[357] Prof. H. P. Bowditch has made the interesting discovery that
if the reinforcing movement be as much as 0.4 of a second late, the
reinforcement fails to occur, and is transformed into a positive
inhibition of the knee-jerk for retardations of between 0.4' and 1.7'.
The knee-jerk fails to be modified at all by voluntary movements made
later than 1.7' after the patellar ligament is tapped (see Boston Med.
and Surg. Journ., May 31, 1888).

[358] Revue Phil., xxiv. 572 ff.

[359] In the Vierteljahrschrift für wiss. Philos., iii. 294.




CHAPTER XXIV.[360]

INSTINCT.


_Instinct is usually defined as the faculty of acting in such a
way as to produce certain ends, without foresight of the ends, and
without previous education in the performance._ That instincts, as
thus defined, exist on an enormous scale in the animal kingdom needs
no proof. They are the functional correlatives of structure. With the
presence of a certain organ goes, one may say, almost always a native
aptitude for its use.

 "Has the bird a gland for the secretion of oil? She knows
 instinctively how to press the oil from the gland, and apply it to the
 feather. Has the rattlesnake the grooved tooth and gland of poison?
 He knows without instruction how to make both structure and function
 most effective against his enemies. Has the silk-worm the function
 of secreting the fluid silk? At the proper time she winds the cocoon
 such as she has never seen, as thousands before have done; and thus
 without instruction, pattern, or experience, forms a safe abode for
 herself in the period of transformation. Has the hawk talons? She
 knows by instinct how to wield them effectively against the helpless
 quarry."[361]

A very common way of talking about these admirably definite tendencies
to act is by naming abstractly the purpose they subserve, such as
self-preservation, or defence, or care for eggs and young--and saying
the animal has an instinctive fear of death or love of life, or that
she has an instinct of self-preservation, or an instinct of maternity
and the like. But this represents the animal as obeying abstractions
which not once in a million cases is it possible it can have framed.
The strict physiological way of interpreting the facts leads to far
clearer results. _The actions we call instinctive all conform to the
general reflex type;_ they are called forth by determinate sensory
stimuli in contact with the animal's body, or at a distance in his
environment. The cat runs after the mouse, runs or shows fight before
the dog, avoids falling from walls and trees, shuns fire and water,
etc., not because he has any notion either of life or of death, or
of self, or of preservation. He has probably attained to no one of
these conceptions in such a way as to react definitely upon it. He
acts in each case separately, and simply because he cannot help it;
being so framed that when that particular running thing called a
mouse appears in his field of vision he _must_ pursue; that when that
particular barking and obstreperous thing called a dog appears there
he _must_ retire, if at a distance, and scratch if close by; that he
_must_ withdraw his feet from water and his face from flame, etc. His
nervous system is to a great extent a preorganized bundle of such
reactions--they are as fatal as sneezing, and as exactly correlated to
their special excitants as it is to its own. Although the naturalist
may, for his own convenience, class these reactions under general
heads, he must not forget that in the animal it is a particular
sensation or perception, or image which calls them forth.

At first this view astounds us by the enormous number of special
adjustments it supposes animals to possess ready-made in anticipation
of the outer things among which they are to dwell. _Can_ mutual
dependence be so intricate and go so far? Is each thing born fitted to
particular other things, and to them exclusively, as locks are fitted
to their keys? Undoubtedly this must be believed to be so. Each nook
and cranny of creation, down to our very skin and entrails, has its
living inhabitants, with organs suited to the place, to devour and
digest the food it harbors and to meet the dangers it conceals; and the
minuteness of adaptation thus shown in the way of _structure_ knows no
bounds. Even so are there no bounds to the minuteness of adaptation in
the way of _conduct_ which the several inhabitants display.

The older writings on instinct are ineffectual wastes of words, because
their authors never came down to this definite and simple point of
view, but smothered everything in vague wonder at the clairvoyant and
prophetic power of the animals--so superior to anything in man--and
at the beneficence of God in endowing them with such a gift. But
God's beneficence endows them, first of all, with a nervous system;
and, turning our attention to this, makes instinct immediately appear
neither more nor less wonderful than all the other facts of life.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Every instinct is an impulse._ Whether we shall call such impulses
as blushing, sneezing, coughing, smiling, or dodging, or keeping
time to music, instincts or not, is a mere matter of terminology.
The process is the same throughout. In his delightfully fresh and
interesting work, Der Thierische Wille, Herr G. H. Schneider subdivides
impulses (_Triebe_) into sensation-impulses, perception-impulses, and
idea-impulses. To crouch from cold is a sensation-impulse; to turn and
follow, if we see people running one way, is a perception-impulse;
to cast about for cover, if it begins to blow and rain, is an
imagination-impulse. A single complex instinctive action may involve
successively the awakening of impulses of all three classes. Thus
a hungry lion starts to _seek_ prey by the awakening in him of
imagination coupled with desire; he begins to _stalk_ it when, on eye,
ear, or nostril, he gets an impression of its presence at a certain
distance; he _springs_ upon it, either when the booty takes alarm and
flees, or when the distance is sufficiently reduced; he proceeds to
_tear_ and _devour_ it the moment he gets a sensation of its contact
with his claws and fangs. Seeking, stalking, springing, and devouring
are just so many different kinds of muscular contraction, and neither
kind is called forth by the stimulus appropriate to the other.

Schneider says of the hamster, which stores corn in its hole:

 "If we analyze the propensity of storing, we find that it consists of
 three impulses: First, an impulse to _pick up_ the nutritious object,
 due to perception; second, an impulse to _carry it off_ into the
 dwelling-place, due to the idea of this latter; and third, an impulse
 to _lay it down_ there, due to the sight of the place. It lies in the
 nature of the hamster that it should never see a full ear of corn
 without feeling a desire to strip it; it lies in its nature to feel,
 as soon as its cheek-pouches are filled, an irresistible desire to
 hurry to its home; and finally, it lies in its nature that the sight
 of the storehouse should awaken the impulse to empty the cheeks" (p.
 208).

In certain animals of a low order the feeling of having executed one
impulsive step is such an indispensable part of the stimulus of the
next one, that the animal cannot make any variation in the order of its
performance.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Now, why do the various animals do what seem to us such strange
things,_ in the presence of such outlandish stimuli? Why does the
hen, for example, submit herself to the tedium of incubating such a
fearfully uninteresting set of objects as a nestful of eggs, unless
she have some sort of a prophetic inkling of the result? The only
answer is _ad hominem_. We can only interpret the instincts of brutes
by what we know of instincts in ourselves. Why do men always lie
down, when they can, on soft beds rather than on hard floors? Why do
they sit round the stove on a cold day? Why, in a room, do they place
themselves, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, with their faces
towards its middle rather than to the wall? Why do they prefer saddle
of mutton and champagne to hard-tack and ditch-water? Why does the
maiden interest the youth so that everything about her seems more
important and significant than anything else in the world? Nothing more
can be said than that these are human ways, and that every creature
_likes_ its own ways, and takes to the following them as a matter of
course. Science may come and consider these ways, and find that most
of them are useful. But it is not for the sake of their utility that
they are followed, but because at the moment of following them we feel
that that is the only appropriate and natural thing to do. Not one man
in a billion, when taking his dinner, ever thinks of utility. He eats
because the food tastes good and makes him want more. If you ask him
_why_ he should want to eat more of what tastes like that, instead of
revering you as a philosopher he will probably laugh at you for a fool.
The connection between the savory sensation and the act it awakens is
for him absolute and _selbstverständlich_, an '_a priori_ synthesis'
of the most perfect sort, needing no proof but its own evidence. It
takes, in short, what Berkeley calls a mind debauched by learning to
carry the process of making the natural seem strange, so far as to
ask for the _why_ of any instinctive human act. To the metaphysician
alone can such questions occur as: Why do we smile, when pleased, and
not scowl? Why are we unable to talk to a crowd as we talk to a single
friend? Why does a particular maiden turn our wits so upside-down?
The common man can only say, "_Of course_ we smile, _of course_ our
heart palpitates at the sight of the crowd, _of course_ we love the
maiden, that beautiful soul clad in that perfect form, so palpably and
flagrantly made from all eternity to be loved!"

And so, probably, does each animal feel about the particular things
it tends to do in presence of particular objects. They, too, are _a
priori_ syntheses. To the lion it is the lioness which is made to be
loved; to the bear, the she-bear. To the broody hen the notion would
probably seem monstrous that there should be a creature in the world to
whom a nestful of eggs was not the utterly fascinating and precious and
never-to-be-too-much-sat-upon object which it is to her.[362]

Thus we may be sure that, however mysterious some animals' instincts
may appear to us, our instincts will appear no less mysterious to them.
And we may conclude that, to the animal which obeys it, every impulse
and every step of every instinct shines with its own sufficient light,
and seems at the moment the only eternally right and proper thing to
do. It is done for its own sake exclusively. What voluptuous thrill
may not shake a fly, when she at last discovers the one particular
leaf, or carrion, or bit of dung, that out of all the world can
stimulate her ovipositor to its discharge? Does not the discharge then
seem to her the only fitting thing? And need she care or know anything
about the future maggot and its food?

       *       *       *       *       *

Since the _egg-laying instincts_ are simple examples to consider, a few
quotations about them from Schneider may be serviceable:

 "The phenomenon so often talked about, so variously interpreted,
 so surrounded with mystification, that an insect should always lay
 her eggs in a spot appropriate to the nourishment of her young,
 is no more marvellous than the phenomenon that every animal pairs
 with a mate capable of bearing posterity, or feeds on materials
 capable of affording him nourishment.... Not only the choice of a
 place for laying the eggs, but all the various acts for depositing
 and protecting them, are occasioned by the perception of the proper
 object, and the relation of this perception to the various stages of
 maternal impulse. When the burying beetle perceives a carrion, she is
 not only impelled to approach it and lodge her eggs in it, but also
 to go through the movements requisite for burying it; just us a bird
 who sees his hen-bird is impelled to caress her, to strut around her,
 dance before her, or in some other way to woo her; just as a tiger,
 when he sees an antelope, is impelled to stalk it, to pounce upon it,
 and to strangle it. When the tailor-bee cuts out pieces of rose-leaf,
 bends them, carries them into a caterpillar- or mouse-hole in trees or
 in the earth, covers their seams again with other pieces, and so makes
 a thimble-shaped case--when she fills this with honey and lays an egg
 in it, all these various appropriate expressions of her will are to be
 explained by supposing that at the time when the eggs are ripe within
 her, the appearance of a suitable caterpillar- or mouse-hole and the
 perception of rose-leaves are so correlated in the insect with the
 several impulses in question, that the performances follow as a matter
 of course when the perceptions take place....

 "The perception of the empty nest, or of a single egg, seems in birds
 to stand in such a close relation to the physiological functions of
 oviparation, that it serves as a direct stimulus to these functions,
 while the perception of a sufficient number of eggs has just the
 opposite effect. It is well known that hens and ducks lay more eggs if
 we keep removing them than if we leave them in the nest. The impulse
 to sit arises, as a rule, when a bird sees a certain number of eggs
 in her nest. If this number is not yet to be seen there, the ducks
 continue to lay, although they perhaps have laid twice as many eggs as
 they are accustomed to sit upon.... That sitting, also, is independent
 of any idea of purpose and is a pure perception-impulse is evident,
 among other things, from the fact that many birds, e.g. wild ducks,
 steal eggs from each other.... The bodily disposition to sit is, it
 is true, one condition [since broody hens will sit where there are no
 eggs], but the perception of the eggs is the other condition of the
 activity of the incubating impulse. The propensity of the cuckoo and
 of the cow-bird to lay their eggs in the nests of other species must
 also be interpreted as a pure perception-impulse. These birds have no
 bodily disposition to become broody, and there is therefore in them
 no connection between the perception of an egg and the impulse to sit
 upon it. Eggs ripen, however, in their oviducts, and the body tends to
 get rid of them. And since the two birds just named do not drop their
 eggs anywhere on the ground, but in nests, which are the only places
 where they may preserve the species, it might easily appear that such
 preservation of the species was what they had in view, and that they
 acted with full consciousness of the purpose. But this is not so....
 The cuckoo is simply excited by the perception of quite determinate
 sorts of nest, which already contain eggs, to drop her own into them,
 and throw the others out, because this perception is a direct stimulus
 to these acts. It is impossible that she should have any notion of the
 other bird coming and sitting on her egg."[363]


INSTINCTS NOT ALWAYS BLIND OR INVARIABLE.


Remember that nothing is said yet of the origin of instincts, but only
of the constitution of those that exist fully formed. How stands it
with the instincts of mankind?

Nothing is commoner than the remark that Man differs from lower
creatures by the almost total absence of instincts, and the assumption
of their work in him by 'reason.' A fruitless discussion might be waged
on this point by two theorizers who were careful not to define their
terms. 'Reason' might be used, as it often has been, since Kant, not
as the mere power of 'inferring,' but also as a name for the _tendency
to obey impulses_ of a certain lofty sort, such as duty, or universal
ends. And 'instinct' might have its significance so broadened as to
cover all impulses whatever, even the impulse to act from the idea of a
distant fact, as well as the impulse to act from a present sensation.
Were the word instinct used in this broad way, it would of course be
impossible to restrict it, as we began by doing, to actions done with
no prevision of an end. We must of course avoid a quarrel about words,
and the facts of the case are really tolerably plain. Man has a far
greater variety of _impulses_ than any lower animal; and any one of
these impulses, taken in itself, is as 'blind' as the lowest instinct
can be; but, owing to man's memory, power of reflection, and power of
inference, they come each one to be felt by him, after he has once
yielded to them and experienced their results, in connection with
a _foresight_ of those results. In this condition an impulse acted
out may be said to be acted out, in part at least, _for the sake_ of
its results. It is obvious that _every instinctive act, in an animal
with memory, must cease to be 'blind' after being once repeated,_
and must be accompanied with foresight of its 'end' just so far as
that end may have fallen under the animal's cognizance. An insect
that lays her eggs in a place where she never sees them hatched must
always do so 'blindly;' but a hen who has already hatched a brood
can hardly be assumed to sit with perfect 'blindness' on her second
nest. Some expectation of consequences must in every case like this be
aroused; and this expectation, according as it is that of something
desired or of something disliked, must necessarily either re-enforce
or inhibit the mere impulse. The hen's idea of the chickens would
probably encourage her to sit; a rat's memory, on the other hand, of
a former escape from a trap would neutralize his impulse to take bait
from anything that reminded him of that trap. If a boy sees a fat
hopping-toad, he probably has incontinently an impulse (especially if
with other boys) to smash the creature with a stone, which impulse we
may suppose him blindly to obey. But something in the expression of
the dying toad's clasped hands suggests the meanness of the act, or
reminds him of sayings he has heard about the sufferings of animals
being like his own; so that, when next he is tempted by a toad, an
idea arises which, far from spurring him again to the torment, prompts
kindly actions, and may even make him the toad's champion against less
reflecting boys.

It is plain, then, that, _no matter how well endowed an animal may
originally be in the way of instincts, his resultant actions will
be much modified if the instincts combine with experience,_ if in
addition to impulses he have memories, associations, inferences, and
expectations, on any considerable scale. An object O, on which he
has an instinctive impulse to react in the manner A, would _directly_
provoke him to that reaction. But O has meantime become for him a
_sign_ of the nearness of P, on which he has an equally strong impulse
to react in the manner B, quite unlike A. So that when he meets O the
immediate impulse A and the remote impulse B struggle in his breast
for the mastery. The fatality and uniformity said to be characteristic
of instinctive actions will be so little manifest that one might be
tempted to deny to him altogether the possession of any instinct about
the object O. Yet how false this judgment would be! The instinct about
O is there; only by the complication of the associative machinery it
has come into conflict with another instinct about P.

Here we immediately reap the good fruits of our simple physiological
conception of what an instinct is. If it be a mere excito-motor
impulse, due to the pre-existence of a certain 'reflex arc' in the
nerve-centres of the creature, of course it must follow the law of
all such reflex arcs. One liability of such arcs is to have their
activity 'inhibited,' by other processes going on at the same time. It
makes no difference whether the arc be organized at birth, or ripen
spontaneously later, or be due to acquired habit, it must take its
chances with all the other arcs, and sometimes succeed, and sometimes
fail, in drafting off the currents through itself. The mystical view
of an instinct would make it invariable. The physiological view would
require it to show occasional irregularities in any animal in whom the
number of separate instincts, and the possible entrance of the same
stimulus into several of them, were great. And such irregularities are
what every superior animal's instincts do show in abundance.[364]

Wherever the mind is elevated enough to discriminate; wherever several
distinct sensory elements must combine to discharge the reflex-arc;
wherever, instead of plumping into action instantly at the first rough
intimation of what _sort_ of a thing is there, the agent waits to see
which _one_ of its kind it is and what the _circumstances_ are of its
appearance; wherever different individuals and different circumstances
can impel him in different ways; wherever these are the conditions--we
have a masking of the elementary constitution of the instinctive life.
The whole story of our dealings with the lower wild animals is the
history of our taking advantage of the way in which they judge of
everything by its mere label, as it were, so as to ensnare or kill
them. Nature, in them, has left matters in this rough way, and made
them act _always_ in the manner which would be _oftenest_ right. There
are more worms unattached to hooks than impaled upon them; therefore,
on the whole, says Nature to her fishy children, bite at _every_ worm
and take your chances. But as her children get higher, and their lives
more precious, she reduces the risks. Since what seems to be the same
object may be now a genuine food and now a bait; since in gregarious
species each individual may prove to be either the friend or the rival,
according to the circumstances, of another; since any entirely unknown
object may be fraught with weal or woe, _Nature implants contrary
impulses to act on many classes of things,_ and leaves it to slight
alterations in the conditions of the individual case to decide which
impulse shall carry the day. Thus, greediness and suspicion, curiosity
and timidity, coyness and desire, bashfulness and vanity, sociability
and pugnacity, seem to shoot over into each other as quickly, and to
remain in as unstable equilibrium, in the higher birds and mammals
as in man. They are all impulses, congenital, blind at first, and
productive of motor reactions of a rigorously determinate sort. _Each
one of them, then, is an instinct_, as instincts are commonly defined.
_But they contradict each other_--'experience' in each particular
opportunity of application usually deciding the issue. _The animal
that exhibits them, loses the 'instinctive' demeanor_ and appears to
lead a life of hesitation and choice, an intellectual life; _not,
however, because he has no instincts--rather because he has so many
that they block each other's path._

Thus, then, without troubling ourselves about the words instinct
and reason, we may confidently say that however uncertain man's
reactions upon his environment may sometimes seem in comparison with
those of lower creatures, the uncertainty is probably not due to
their possession of any principles of action which he lacks. _On the
contrary, man possesses all the impulses that they have, and a great
many more besides._ In other words, there is no material antagonism
between instinct and reason. Reason, _per se_, can inhibit no impulses;
the only thing that can neutralize an impulse is an impulse the other
way. Reason may, however, make an _inference which will excite the
imagination so as to set loose_ the impulse the other way; and thus,
though the animal richest in reason might be also the animal richest in
instinctive impulses too, he would never seem the fatal automaton which
a _merely_ instinctive animal would be.

       *       *       *       *       *

Let us now turn to human impulses with a little more detail. All we
have ascertained so far is that impulses of an originally instinctive
character may exist, and yet not betray themselves by automatic
fatality of conduct. But in man what impulses do exist? In the light
of what has been said, it is obvious that an existing impulse may not
always be superficially apparent even when its object is there. And we
shall see that some impulses may be masked by causes of which we have
not yet spoken.


TWO PRINCIPLES OF NON-UNIFORMITY IN INSTINCTS.


Were one devising an abstract scheme, nothing would be easier than to
discover from an animal's actions just how many instincts he possessed.
He would react in one way only upon each class of objects with which
his life had to deal; he would react in identically the same way upon
every specimen of a class; and he would react invariably during his
whole life. There would be no gaps among his instincts; all would
come to light without perversion or disguise. But there are no such
abstract animals, and nowhere does the instinctive life display itself
in such a way. Not only, as we have seen, may objects of the same class
arouse reactions of opposite sorts in consequence of slight changes in
the circumstances, in the individual object, or in the agent's inward
condition; but two other principles of which we have not yet spoken,
may come into play and produce results so striking that observers as
eminent as Messrs. D. A. Spalding and Romanes do not hesitate to call
them 'derangements of the mental constitution,' and to conclude that
the instinctive machinery has got out of gear.

These principles are those

1. Of the _inhibition of instincts by habits_; and

2. Of the _transitoriness of instincts_.

Taken in conjunction with the two former principles--that the same
object may excite ambiguous impulses, or _suggest_ an impulse different
from that which it _excites_, by suggesting a remote object--they
explain any amount of departure from uniformity of conduct, without
implying any getting out of gear of the elementary impulses from which
the conduct flows.

       *       *       *       *       *

1. The law of inhibition of instincts by habits is this: _When objects
of a certain class elicit from an animal a certain sort of reaction, it
often happens that the animal becomes partial to the first specimen of
the class on which it has reacted, and will not afterward react on any
other specimen._

The selection of a particular hole to live in, of a particular mate, of
a particular feeding-ground, a particular variety of diet, a particular
anything, in short, out of a possible multitude, is a very wide-spread
tendency among animals, even those low down in the scale. The limpet
will return to the same sticking-place in its rock, and the lobster
to its favorite nook on the sea-bottom. The rabbit will deposit its
dung in the same corner; the bird makes its nest on the same bough.
But each of these preferences carries with it an insensibility to
_other_ opportunities and occasions--an insensibility which can only
be described physiologically as an inhibition of new impulses by the
habit of old ones already formed. The possession of homes and wives of
our own makes us strangely insensible to the charms of those of other
people. Few of us are adventurous in the matter of food; in fact, most
of us think there is something disgusting in a bill of fare to which we
are unused. Strangers, we are apt to think, cannot be worth knowing,
especially if they come from distant cities, etc. The original impulse
which got us homes, wives, dietaries, and friends at all, seems to
exhaust itself in its first achievements and to leave no surplus energy
for reacting on new cases. And so it comes about that, witnessing
this torpor, an observer of mankind might say that no _instinctive_
propensity toward certain objects existed at all. It existed, but it
existed _miscellaneously_, or as an instinct pure and simple, only
before habit was formed. A habit, once grafted on an instinctive
tendency, restricts the range of the tendency itself, and keeps us from
reacting on any but the habitual object, although other objects might
just as well have been chosen had they been the first-comers.

Another sort of arrest of instinct by habit is where the same class of
objects awakens contrary instinctive impulses. Here the impulse first
followed toward a given individual of the class is apt to keep him from
ever awakening the opposite impulse in us. In fact, the whole class
may be protected by this individual specimen from the application to
it of the other impulse. Animals, for example, awaken in a child the
opposite impulses of fearing and fondling. But if a child, in his first
attempts to pat a dog, gets snapped at or bitten, so that the impulse
of fear is strongly aroused, it may be that for years to come no dog
will excite in him the impulse to fondle again. On the other hand, the
greatest natural enemies, if carefully introduced to each other when
young and guided at the outset by superior authority, settle down into
those 'happy families' of friends which we see in our menageries. Young
animals, immediately after birth, have no instinct of fear, but show
their dependence by allowing themselves to be freely handled. Later,
however, they grow 'wild,' and, if left to themselves, will not let
man approach them. I am told by farmers in the Adirondack wilderness
that it is a very serious matter if a cow wanders off and calves in
the woods and is not found for a week or more. The calf, by that time,
is as wild and almost as fleet as a deer, and hard to capture without
violence. But calves rarely show any particular wildness to the men who
have been in contact with them during the first days of their life,
when the instinct to attach themselves is uppermost, nor do they dread
strangers as they would if brought up wild.

Chickens give a curious illustration of the same law. Mr. Spalding's
wonderful article on instinct shall supply us with the facts. These
little creatures show opposite instincts of attachment and fear, either
of which may be aroused by the same object, man. If a chick is born in
the absence of the hen, it

 "will follow any moving object. And, when guided by sight alone, they
 seem to have no more disposition to follow a hen than to follow a duck
 or a human being. Unreflecting lookers-on, when they saw chickens
 a day old running after me," says Mr. Spalding, "and older ones
 following me for miles, and answering to my whistle, imagined that I
 must have some occult power over the creatures: whereas I had simply
 allowed them to follow me from the first. There is the instinct to
 follow; and the ear, prior to experience, attaches them to the right
 object."[365]

But if a man presents himself for the first time when the instinct of
_fear_ is strong, the phenomena are altogether reversed. Mr. Spalding
kept three chickens hooded until they were nearly four days old, and
thus describes their behavior:

 "Each of them, on being unhooded, evinced the greatest terror to me,
 dashing off in the opposite direction whenever I sought to approach
 it. The table on which they were unhooded stood before a window, and
 each in its turn beat against the window like a wild bird. One of
 them darted behind some books, and, squeezing itself into a corner,
 remained cowering for a length of time. We might guess at the meaning
 of this strange and exceptional wildness; but the odd fact is enough
 for my present purpose. Whatever might have been the meaning of this
 marked change in their mental constitution--had they been unhooded
 on the previous day they would have run to me instead of from me--it
 could not have been the effect of experience; it must have resulted
 wholly from changes in their own organizations."[366]

Their case was precisely analogous to that of the Adirondack calves.
The two opposite instincts relative to the same object ripen in
succession. If the first one engenders a habit, that habit will inhibit
the application of the second instinct to that object. All animals
are tame during the earliest phase of their infancy. Habits formed
then limit the effects of whatever instincts of wildness may later be
evolved.

Mr. Romanes gives some very curious examples of the way in which
instinctive tendencies may be altered by the habits to which their
first 'objects' have given rise. The cases are a little more
complicated than those mentioned in the text, inasmuch as the object
reacted on not only starts a habit which inhibits other kinds of
impulse toward it (although such other kinds might be natural), but
even modifies by its own peculiar conduct the constitution of the
impulse which it actually awakens.

Two of the instances in question are those of hens who hatched out
broods of chicks after having (in three previous years) hatched ducks.
They strove to coax or to compel their new progeny to enter the water,
and seemed much perplexed at their unwillingness. Another hen adopted
a brood of young ferrets which, having lost their mother, were put
under her. During all the time they were left with her she had to sit
on the nest, for they could not wander like young chicks. She obeyed
their hoarse growling as she would have obeyed her chickens' peep. She
combed out their hair with her bill, and "used frequently to stop and
look with one eye at the wriggling nestful, with an inquiring gaze,
expressive of astonishment." At other times she would fly up with a
loud scream, doubtless because the orphans had nipped her in their
search for teats. Finally, a Brahma hen nursed a young peacock during
the enormous period of _eighteen months_, and never laid any eggs
during all this time. The abnormal degree of pride which she showed in
her wonderful chicken is described by Dr. Romanes as ludicrous.[367]

2. This leads us to the _law of transitoriness_, which is this: _Many
instincts ripen at a certain age and then fade away._ A consequence of
this law is that if, during the time of such an instinct's vivacity,
objects adequate to arouse it are met with, a _habit_ of acting on
them is formed, which remains when the original instinct has passed
away; but that if no such objects are met with, then no habit will
be formed; and, later on in life, when the animal meets the objects,
he will altogether fail to react, as at the earlier epoch he would
instinctively have done.

No doubt such a law is restricted. Some instincts are far
less transient than others--those connected with feeding and
'self-preservation' may hardly be transient at all, and some, after
fading out for a time, recur as strong as ever, e.g., the instincts of
pairing and rearing young. The law, however, though not absolute, is
certainly very widespread, and a few examples will illustrate just what
it means.

In the chickens and calves above mentioned, it is obvious that the
instinct to follow and become attached fades out after a few days, and
that the instinct of flight then takes its place, the conduct of the
creature toward man being decided by the formation or non-formation
of a certain habit during those days. The transiency of the chicken's
instinct to follow is also proved by its conduct toward the hen. Mr.
Spalding kept some chickens shut up till they were comparatively old,
and, speaking of these, he says:

 "A chicken that has not heard the call of the mother till until eight
 or ten days old then hears it as if it heard it not. I regret to
 find that on this point my notes are not so full as I could wish,
 or as they might have been. There is, however, an account of one
 chicken that could not be returned to the mother when ten days old.
 The hen followed it, and tried to entice it in every way; still, it
 continually left her and ran to the house or to any person of whom it
 caught sight. This it persisted in doing, though beaten back with a
 small branch dozens of times, and, indeed, cruelly maltreated. It was
 also placed under the mother at night, but it again left her in the
 morning."

The instinct of sucking is ripe in all mammals at birth, and leads to
that habit of taking the breast which, in the human infant, may be
prolonged by daily exercise long beyond its usual term of a year or
a year and a half. But the instinct itself is transient, in the sense
that if, for any reason, the child be fed by spoon during the first few
days of its life and not put to the breast, it may be no easy matter
after that to make it suck at all. So of calves. If their mother die,
or be dry, or refuse to let them suck for a day or two, so that they
are fed by hand, it becomes hard to get them to suck at all when a new
nurse is provided. The ease with which sucking creatures are weaned, by
simply breaking the habit and giving them food in a new way, shows that
the instinct, purely as such, must be entirely extinct.

Assuredly the simple fact that instincts are transient, and that the
effect of later ones may be altered by the habits which earlier ones
have left behind, is a far more philosophical explanation than the
notion of an instinctive constitution vaguely 'deranged' or 'thrown out
of gear.'

I have observed a Scotch terrier, born on the floor of a stable in
December, and transferred six weeks later to a carpeted house, make,
when he was less than four months old, a very elaborate pretence of
burying things, such as gloves, etc., with which he had played till
he was tired. He scratched the carpet with his forefeet, dropped the
object from his mouth upon the spot, and then scratched all about it
(with both fore-and hind-feet, if I remember rightly), and finally went
away and let it lie. Of course, the act was entirely useless. I saw him
perform it at that age, some four or five times, and never again in
his life. The conditions were not present to fix a habit which should
last when the prompting instinct died away. But suppose meat instead
of a glove, earth instead of a carpet, hunger-pangs instead of a fresh
supper a few hours later, and it is easy to see how this dog might have
got into a habit of burying superfluous food, which might have lasted
all his life. Who can swear that the strictly instructive part of the
food-burying propensity in the wild _Canidæ_ may not be as short-lived
as it was in this terrier?

A similar instance is given by Dr. H. D. Schmidt[368] of New Orleans:

 "I may cite the example of a young squirrel which I had tamed,
 a number of years ago, when serving in the army, and when I had
 sufficient leisure and opportunity to study the habits of animals.
 In the autumn, before the winter sets in, adult squirrels bury as
 many nuts as they can collect, separately, in the ground. Holding
 the nut firmly between their teeth, they first scratch a hole in the
 ground, and, after pointing their ears in all directions to convince
 themselves that no enemy is near, they ram--the head, with the nut
 still between the front teeth, serving as a sledge-hammer--the nut
 into the ground, and then fill up the hole by means of their paws. The
 whole process is executed with great rapidity, and, as it appeared
 to me, always with exactly the same movements; in fact, it is done
 so well that I could never discover the traces of the burial-ground.
 Now, as regards the young squirrel, which, of course, never had been
 present at the burial of a nut, I observed that, after having eaten
 a number of hickory-nuts to appease its appetite, it would take one
 between its teeth, then sit upright and listen in all directions.
 Finding all right, it would scratch upon the smooth blanket on which
 I was playing with it as if to make a hole, then hammer with the
 nut between its teeth upon the blanket, and finally perform all the
 motions required to fill up a hole_--in the air_; after which it would
 jump away, leaving the nut, of course, uncovered."

The anecdote, of course, illustrates beautifully the close relation
of instinct to reflex action--a particular perception calls forth
particular movements, and that is all. Dr. Schmidt writes me that
the squirrel in question soon passed away from his observation. It
may fairly be presumed that, if he had been long retained prisoner
in a cage, he would soon have forgotten his gesticulations over the
hickory-nuts.

One might, indeed, go still further with safety, and expect that, if
such a captive squirrel were then set free, he would never afterwards
acquire this peculiar instinct of his tribe.[369]

       *       *       *       *       *

Leaving lower animals aside, and turning to human instincts, we see the
law of transiency corroborated on the widest scale by the alternation
of different interests and passions as human life goes on. With the
child, life is all play and fairy-tales and learning the external
properties of 'things;' with the youth, it is bodily exercises of a
more systematic sort, novels of the real world, boon-fellowship and
song, friendship and love, nature, travel and adventure, science
and philosophy; with the man, ambition and policy, acquisitiveness,
responsibility to others, and the selfish zest of the battle of life.
If a boy grows up alone at the age of games and sports, and learns
neither to play ball, nor row, nor sail, nor ride, nor skate, nor
fish, nor shoot, probably he will be sedentary to the end of his days;
and, though the best of opportunities be afforded him for learning
these things later, it is a hundred to one but he will pass them by
and shrink back from the effort of taking those necessary first steps
the prospect of which, at an earlier age, would have filled him with
eager delight. The sexual passion expires after a protracted reign;
but it is well known that its peculiar manifestations in a given
individual depend almost entirely on the habits he may form during the
early period of its activity. Exposure to bad company then makes him a
loose liver all his days; chastity kept at first makes the same easy
later on. In all pedagogy the great thing is to strike the iron while
hot, and to seize the wave of the pupil's interest in each successive
subject before its ebb has come, so that knowledge may be got and a
habit of skill acquired--a headway of interest, in short, secured,
on which afterward the individual may float. There is a happy moment
for fixing skill in drawing, for making boys collectors in natural
history, and presently dissectors and botanists; then for initiating
them into the harmonies of mechanics and the wonders of physical and
chemical law. Later, introspective psychology and the metaphysical
and religious mysteries take their turn; and, last of all, the drama
of human affairs and worldly wisdom in the widest sense of the term.
In each of us a saturation-point is soon reached in all these things;
the impetus of our purely intellectual zeal expires, and unless the
topic be one associated with some urgent personal need that keens our
wits constantly whetted about it, we settle into an equilibrium, and
live on what we learned when our interest was fresh and instinctive,
without adding to the store. Outside of their own business, the ideas
gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only
ideas they shall have in their lives. They _cannot_ get anything new.
Disinterested curiosity is past, the mental grooves and channels set,
the power of assimilation gone. If by chance we ever do learn anything
about some entirely new topic we are afflicted with a strange sense
of insecurity, and we fear to advance a resolute opinion. But, with
things learned in the plastic days of instinctive curiosity we never
lose entirely our sense of being at home. There remains a kinship, a
sentiment of intimate acquaintance, which, even when we know we have
failed to keep abreast of the subject, flatters us with a sense of
power over it, and makes us feel not altogether out of the pale.

Whatever individual exceptions might be cited to this are of the sort
that 'prove the rule.'

To detect the moment of the instinctive readiness for the subject
is, then, the first duty of every educator. As for the pupils, it
would probably lead to a more earnest temper on the part of college
students if they had less belief in their unlimited future intellectual
potentialities, and could be brought to realize that whatever physics
and political economy and philosophy they are now acquiring are, for
better or worse, the physics and political economy and philosophy that
will have to serve them to the end.

The natural conclusion to draw from this transiency of instincts
is that _most instincts are implanted for the sake of giving rise
to habits, and that, this purpose once accomplished, the instincts
themselves, as such, have no raison d'être in the psychical economy,
and consequently fade away._ That occasionally an instinct should fade
before circumstances permit of a habit being formed, or that, if the
habit be formed, other factors than the pure instinct should modify its
course, need not surprise us. Life is full of the imperfect adjustment
to individual cases, of arrangements which, taking the species as a
whole, are quite orderly and regular. Instinct cannot be expected to
escape this general risk.


SPECIAL HUMAN INSTINCTS.


Let us now test our principles by turning to human instincts in more
detail. We cannot pretend in these pages to be minute or exhaustive.
But we can say enough to set all the above generalities in a more
favorable light. But first, what kind of motor reactions upon objects
shall we count as instincts? This, as aforesaid, is a somewhat
arbitrary matter. Some of the actions aroused in us by objects go no
further than our own bodies. Such is the bristling up of the attention
when a novel object is perceived, or the 'expression' on the face or
the breathing apparatus of an emotion it may excite. These movements
merge into ordinary reflex actions like laughing when tickled, or
making a wry face at a bad taste. Other actions take effect upon the
outer world. Such are flight from a wild beast, imitation of what we
see a comrade do, etc. On the whole it is best to be catholic, since
it is very hard to draw an exact line; and call both of these kinds of
activity instinctive, so far as either may be _naturally_ provoked by
the presence of specific sorts of outward fact.

Professor Preyer, in his careful little work, 'Die Seele des Kindes,'
says "instinctive acts are in man few in number, and, apart from those
connected with the sexual passion, difficult to recognize after early
youth is past." And he adds, "so much the more attention should we
pay to the instinctive movements of new-born babies, sucklings, and
small children." That instinctive acts should be easiest _recognized_
in childhood would be a very natural effect of our principles of
transitoriness, and of the restrictive influence of habits once
acquired; but we shall see how far they are from being 'few in number'
in man. Professor Preyer divides the movements of infants into
_impulsive, reflex,_ and instinctive. By impulsive movements he means
_random_ movements of limbs, body, and voice, with no aim, and before
perception is aroused. Among the first reflex movements are crying on
contact with the air, _sneezing, snuffling, snoring, coughing, sighing,
sobbing, gagging, vomiting, hiccuping, starting, moving the limbs when
tickled, touched, or blown upon,_ etc., etc.

Of the movements called by him instinctive in the child, Professor
Preyer gives a full account. Herr Schneider does the same; and as their
descriptions agree with each other and with what other writers about
infancy say, I will base my own very brief statement on theirs.

_Sucking_: almost perfect at birth; not coupled with any congenital
tendency to _seek_ the breast, this being a later acquisition. As we
have seen, sucking is a transitory instinct.

_Biting_ an object placed in the mouth, _chewing_ and _grinding the
teeth; licking_ sugar; making characteristic _grimaces_ over bitter and
sweet tastes; _spitting_ out.

_Clasping_ an object which touches the fingers or toes. Later, attempts
to _grasp_ at an object seen at a distance. _Pointing at_ such objects,
and making a peculiar _sound expressive of desire_, which, in my own
three children, was the first manifestation of speech, occurring many
weeks before other significant sounds.

_Carrying to the mouth_ of the object, when grasped. This instinct,
guided and inhibited by the sense of taste, and combined with the
instincts of biting, chewing, sucking, spitting-out, etc., and with the
reflex act of swallowing, leads in the individual to a set of habits
which constitute his _function of alimentation_, and which may or may
not be gradually modified as life goes on.

_Crying_ at bodily discomfort, hunger, or pain, and at solitude.
_Smiling_ at being noticed, fondled, or smiled at by others. It seems
very doubtful whether young infants have any instinctive fear of a
terrible or scowling face. I have been unable to make my own children,
under a year old, change their expression when I changed mine; at most
they manifested attention or curiosity. Preyer instances a _protrusion
of the lips_, which, he says, may be so great as to remind one of
that in the chimpanzee, as an instinctive expression of concentrated
attention in the human infant.

_Turning the head aside_ as a gesture of rejection, a gesture usually
accompanied with a frown and a bending back of the body, and with
holding the breath.

_Holding head erect._

_Sitting up._

_Standing_.

_Locomotion_. The early movements of children's limbs are more or
less symmetrical. Later a baby will move his legs in alternation if
suspended in the air. But until the impulse to walk awakens by the
natural ripening of the nerve-centres, it seems to make no difference
how often the child's feet may be placed in contact with the ground;
the legs remain limp, and do not respond to the sensation of contact
in the soles by muscular contractions _pressing downwards_. No sooner,
however, is the standing impulse born, than the child stiffens his legs
and presses downward as soon as he feels the floor. In some babies
this is the first locomotory reaction. In others it is preceded by
the instinct to _creep_, which arises, as I can testify, often in a
very sudden way. Yesterday the baby sat quite contentedly wherever he
was put; to-day it has become impossible to keep him sitting at all,
so irresistible is the impulse, aroused by the sight of the floor, to
throw himself forward upon his hands. Usually the arms are too weak,
and the ambitious little experimenter falls on his nose. But his
perseverance is dauntless, and he ends in a few days by learning to
travel rapidly around the room in the quadrupedal way. The position
of the legs in 'creeping' varies much from one child to another. My
own child, when creeping, was often observed to pick up objects from
the floor with his mouth, a phenomenon which, as Dr. O. W. Holmes has
remarked, like the early tendency to grasp with the toes, easily lends
itself to interpretation as a reminiscence of prehuman ancestral habits.

The walking instinct may awaken with no less suddenness, and its entire
education be completed within a week's compass, barring, of course, a
little 'grogginess' in the gait. Individual infants vary enormously;
but on the whole it is safe to say that the mode of development of
these locomotor instincts is inconsistent with the account given by
the older English associationist school, of their being results of
the individual's education, due altogether to the gradual association
of certain perceptions with certain haphazard movements and certain
resultant pleasures. Mr. Bain has tried,[370] by describing the
demeanor of new-born lambs, to show that locomotion is _learned_ by a
very rapid experience. But the observation recorded proves the faculty
to be almost perfect from the first; and all others who have observed
new-born calves, lambs, and pigs agree that in these animals the
powers of standing and walking, and of interpreting the topographical
significance of sights and sounds, are all but fully developed at
birth. Often in animals who seem to be 'learning' to walk or fly the
semblance is illusive. The awkwardness shown is not due to the fact
that 'experience' has not yet been there to associate the successful
movements and exclude the failures, but to the fact that the animal
is beginning his attempts before the co-ordinating centres have quite
ripened for their work. Mr. Spalding's observations on this point are
conclusive as to birds.

 "Birds," he says, "do not _learn_ to fly. Two years ago I shut up five
 unfledged swallows in a small box, not much larger than the nest from
 which they were taken. The little box, which had a wire front, was
 hung on the wall near the nest, and the young swallows were fed by
 their parents through the wires. In this confinement, where they could
 not even extend their wings, they were kept until after they were
 fully fledged.... On going to set the prisoners free, one was found
 dead.... The remaining four were allowed to escape one at a time. Two
 of these were perceptibly wavering and unsteady in their flight. One
 of them, after a flight of some ninety yards, disappeared among some
 trees." No. 3 and No. 4 "never flew against anything, nor was there,
 in their avoiding objects, any appreciable difference between them and
 the old birds. No. 3 swept round the Wellingtonia, and No. 4 rose over
 the hedge, just as we see the old swallows doing every hour of the
 day. I have this summer verified these observations. Of two swallows
 I had similarly confined, one, on being set free, flew a yard or two
 close to the ground, rose in the direction of a beech-tree, which
 it gracefully avoided; it was seen for a considerable time sweeping
 round the beeches and performing magnificent evolutions in the air
 high above them. The other, which was observed to beat the air with
 its wings more than usual, was soon lost to sight, behind some trees.
 Titmice, tomtits, and wrens I have made the subjects of similar
 observations, and with similar results."[371]

In the light of this report, one may well be tempted to make a
prediction about the human child, and say that if a baby were kept
from getting on his feet for two or three weeks after the first impulse
to walk had shown itself in him,--a small blister on each sole would do
the business,--he might then be expected to walk about as well, through
the mere ripening of his nerve-centres, as if the ordinary process of
'learning' had been allowed to occur during all the blistered time.
It is to be hoped that some scientific widower, left alone with his
offspring at the critical moment, may ere long test this suggestion on
the living subject. _Climbing_ on trees, fences, furniture, banisters,
etc., is a well-marked instinctive propensity which ripens after the
fourth year.

_Vocalization._ This may be either musical or significant. Very few
weeks after birth the baby begins to express its spirits by emitting
vowel sounds, as much during inspiration as during expiration, and
will lie on its back cooing and gurgling to itself for nearly an
hour. But this singing has nothing to do with speech. Speech is sound
_significant_. During the second year a certain number of significant
sounds are gradually acquired; but talking proper does not set in till
the instinct to _imitate sounds_ ripens in the nervous system; and
this ripening seems in some children to be quite abrupt. Then speech
grows rapidly in extent and perfection. The child imitates every word
he hears uttered, and repeats it again and again with the most evident
pleasure at his new power. At this time it is quite impossible to
talk _with_ him, for his condition is that of 'Echolalia,'--instead
of answering the question, he simply reiterates it. The result is,
however, that his vocabulary increases very fast; and little by little,
with teaching from above, the young prattler understands, puts words
together to express his own wants and perceptions, and even makes
intelligent replies. From a speechless, he has become a speaking,
animal. The interesting point with regard to this instinct is the
oftentimes very sudden birth of the impulse to imitate sounds. Up to
the date of its awakening the child may have been as devoid of it as
a dog. Four days later his whole energy may be poured into this new
channel. The habits of articulation formed during the plastic age of
childhood are in most persons sufficient to inhibit the formation of
new ones of a fundamentally different sort--witness the inevitable
'foreign accent' which distinguishes the speech of those who learn a
language after early youth.

_Imitation._ The child's first words are in part vocables of his own
invention, which his parents adopt, and which, as far as they go,
form a new human tongue upon the earth; and in part they are his more
or less successful imitations of words he hears the parents use. But
the instinct of _imitating gestures_ develops earlier than that of
imitating sounds,--unless the sympathetic crying of a baby when it
hears another cry may be reckoned as imitation of a sound. Professor
Preyer speaks of his child imitating the protrusion of the father's
lips in its fifteenth week. The various accomplishments of infancy,
making 'pat-a-cake,' saying 'bye-bye,' 'blowing out the candle,' etc.,
usually fall well inside the limits of the first year. Later come
all the various imitative games in which childhood revels, playing
'horse,' 'soldiers,' etc., etc. And from this time onward man is
essentially _the_ imitative animal. His whole educability and in fact
the whole history of civilization depend on this trait, which his
strong tendencies to rivalry, jealousy, and acquisitiveness reinforce.
'_Humani nihil a me alienum puto_,' is the motto of each individual of
the species; and makes him, whenever another individual shows a power
or superiority of any kind, restless until he can exhibit it himself.
But apart from this kind of imitation, of which the psychological
roots are complex, there is the more direct propensity to speak and
walk and behave like others, usually without any conscious intention
of so doing. And there is the imitative tendency which shows itself in
large masses of men, and produces panics, and orgies, and frenzies of
violence, and which only the rarest individuals can actively withstand.
This sort of imitativeness is possessed by man in common with other
gregarious animals, and is an instinct in the fullest sense of the
term, being a blind impulse to act as soon as a certain perception
occurs. It is particularly hard not to imitate gaping, laughing, or
looking and running in a certain direction, if we see others doing so.
Certain mesmerized subjects must automatically imitate whatever motion
their operator makes before their eyes.[372] A successful piece of
mimicry gives to both bystanders and mimic a peculiar kind of æsthetic
pleasure. The dramatic impulse, the tendency to pretend one is someone
else, contains this pleasure of mimicry as one of its elements. Another
element seems to be a peculiar sense of power in stretching one's
own personality so as to include that of a strange person. In young
children this instinct often knows no bounds. For a few months in one
of my children's third year, he literally hardly ever appeared in his
own person. It was always, "Play I am So-and-so, and you are So-and-so,
and the chair is such a thing, and then we'll do this or that." If you
called him by his name, H., you invariably got the reply, "I'm not H.,
I'm a hyena, or a horse-car," or whatever the feigned object might be.
He outwore this impulse after a time; but while it lasted, it had every
appearance of being the automatic result of ideas, often suggested by
perceptions, working out irresistible motor effects. Imitation shades
into

_Emulation or Rivalry,_ a very intense instinct, especially rife with
young children, or at least especially undisguised. Everyone knows it.
Nine-tenths of the work of the world is done by it. We know that if we
do not do the task someone else will do it and get the credit, so we do
it. It has very little connection with sympathy, but rather more with
pugnacity, which we proceed in turn to consider.

_Pugnacity; anger; resentment._ In many respects man is the most
ruthlessly ferocious of beasts. As with all gregarious animals,
'two souls,' as Faust says, 'dwell within his breast,' the one of
sociability and helpfulness, the other of jealousy and antagonism to
his mates. Though in a general way he cannot live without them, yet,
as regards certain individuals, it often falls out that he cannot
live with them either. Constrained to be a member of a tribe, he
still has a right to decide, as far as in him lies, of which other
members the tribe shall consist. Killing off a few obnoxious ones
may often better the chances of those that remain. And killing off a
neighboring tribe from whom no good thing comes, but only competition,
may materially better the lot of the whole tribe. Hence the gory
cradle, the _bellum omnium contra omnes_, in which our race was reared;
hence the fickleness of human ties, the ease with which the foe of
yesterday becomes the ally of to-day, the friend of to-day the enemy
of to-morrow; hence the fact that we, the lineal representatives of
the successful enactors of one scene of slaughter after another, must,
whatever more pacific virtues we may also possess, still carry about
with us, ready at any moment to burst into flame, the smouldering and
sinister traits of character by means of which they lived through so
many massacres, harming others, but themselves unharmed.

_Sympathy_ is an emotion as to whose instinctiveness psychologists
have held hot debate, some of them contending that it is no primitive
endowment, but, originally at least, the result of a rapid calculation
of the good consequences to ourselves of the sympathetic act. Such a
calculation, at first conscious, would grow more unconscious as it
became more habitual, and at last, tradition and association aiding,
might prompt to actions which could not be distinguished from immediate
impulses. It is hardly needful to argue against the falsity of this
view. Some forms of sympathy, that of mother with child, for example,
are surely primitive, and not intelligent forecasts of board and
lodging and other support to be reaped in old age. Danger to the child
blindly and instantaneously stimulates the mother to actions of alarm
or defence. Menace or harm to the adult beloved or friend excites us in
a corresponding way, often against all the dictates of prudence. It is
true that sympathy does not necessarily follow from the mere fact of
gregariousness. Cattle do not help a wounded comrade; on the contrary,
they are more likely to dispatch him. But a dog will lick another sick
dog, and even bring him food; and the sympathy of monkeys is proved
by many observations to be strong. In man, then, we may lay it down
that the sight of suffering or danger to others is a direct exciter of
interest, and an immediate stimulus, if no complication hinders, to
acts of relief. There is nothing unaccountable or pathological about
this--nothing to justify Professor Bain's assimilation of it to the
'fixed ideas' of insanity, as 'clashing with the regular outgoings of
the will.' It may be as primitive as any other 'outgoing,' and may be
due to a random variation selected, quite as probably as gregariousness
and maternal love are, even in Spencer's opinion, due to such
variations.

It is true that sympathy is peculiarly liable to inhibition from other
instincts which its stimulus may call forth. The traveller whom the
good Samaritan rescued may well have prompted such instinctive fear
or disgust in the priest and Levite who passed him by, that their
sympathy could not come to the front. Then, of course, habits, reasoned
reflections, and calculations may either check or reinforce one's
sympathy; as may also the instincts of love or hate, if these exist,
for the suffering individual. The hunting and pugnacious instincts,
when aroused, also inhibit our sympathy absolutely. This accounts for
the cruelty of collections of men hounding each other on to bait or
torture a victim. The blood mounts to the eyes, and sympathy's chance
is gone.[373]

_The hunting instinct_ has an equally remote origin in the evolution
of the race.[374] The hunting and the fighting instinct combine in
many manifestations. They both support the emotion of anger; they
combine in the fascination which stories of atrocity have for most
minds; and the utterly blind excitement of giving the rein to our fury
when our blood is up (an excitement whose intensity is greater than
that of any other human passion save one) is only explicable as an
impulse aboriginal in character, and having more to do with immediate
and overwhelming tendencies to muscular discharge than to any possible
reminiscences of effects of experience, or association of ideas. I
say this here, because the pleasure of disinterested cruelty has
been thought a paradox, and writers have sought to show that it is
no primitive attribute of our nature, but rather a resultant of the
subtile combination of other less malignant elements of mind. This is
a hopeless task. If evolution and the survival of the fittest be true
at all, the destruction of prey and of human rivals _must_ have been
among the most important of man's primitive functions, the fighting and
the chasing instincts _must_ have become ingrained. Certain perceptions
_must_ immediately, and without the intervention of inferences and
ideas, have prompted emotions and motor discharges; and both the
latter must, from the nature of the case, have been very violent, and
therefore, when unchecked, of an intensely pleasurable kind. It is just
because human bloodthirstiness is such a primitive part of us that it
is so hard to eradicate, especially where a fight or a hunt is promised
as part of the fun.[375]

As Rochefoucauld says, there is something in the misfortunes of our
very friends that does not altogether displease us; and an apostle of
peace will feel a certain vicious thrill run through him, and enjoy
a vicarious brutality, as he turns to the column in his newspaper at
the top of which 'Shocking Atrocity' stands printed in large capitals.
See how the crowd flocks round a street-brawl! Consider the enormous
annual sale of revolvers to persons, not one in a thousand of whom
has any serious intention of using them, but of whom each one has his
carnivorous self-consciousness agreeably tickled by the notion, as he
clutches the handle of his weapon, that he will be rather a dangerous
customer to meet. See the ignoble crew that escorts every great
pugilist--parasites who feel as if the glory of his brutality rubbed
off upon them, and whose darling hope, from day to day, is to arrange
some set-to of which they may share the rapture without enduring the
pains! The first blows at a prize-fight are apt to make a refined
spectator sick; but his blood is soon up in favor of one party, and it
will then seem as if the other fellow could not be banged and pounded
and mangled enough--the refined spectator would like to reinforce the
blows himself. Over the sinister orgies of blood of certain depraved
and insane persons let a curtain be drawn, as well as over the ferocity
with which otherwise fairly decent men may be animated, when (at the
sacking of a town, for instance), the excitement of victory long
delayed, the sudden freedom of rapine and of lust, the contagion of
a crowd, and the impulse to imitate and outdo, all combine to swell
the blind drunkenness of the killing-instinct, and carry it to its
extreme. No! those who try to account for this from above downwards,
as if it resulted from the consequences of the victory being rapidly
inferred, and from the agreeable sentiments associated with them in the
imagination, have missed the root of the matter. Our ferocity is blind,
and can only be explained from _below_. Could we trace it back through
our line of descent, we should see it taking more and more the form of
a fatal reflex response, and at the same time becoming more and more
the pure and direct emotion that it is.[376]

In childhood it takes this form. The boys who pull out grasshoppers'
legs and butterflies' wings, and disembowel every frog they catch,
have no _thought_ at all about the matter. The creatures tempt their
hands to a fascinating occupation, to which they have to yield. It
is with them as with the 'boy-fiend' Jesse Pomeroy, who cut a little
girl's throat, 'just to see how she'd act.' The normal provocatives
of the impulse are all living beasts, great and small, toward which
a contrary habit has not been formed--all human beings in whom we
perceive a certain _intent_ towards _us_, and a large number of human
beings who offend us peremptorily, either by their look, or gait, or
by some circumstance in their lives which we dislike. Inhibited by
sympathy, and by reflection calling up impulses of an opposite kind,
civilized men lose the habit of acting out their pugnacious instincts
in a perfectly natural way, and a passing feeling of anger, with its
comparatively faint bodily expressions, may be the limit of their
physical combativeness. Such a feeling as this may, however, be aroused
by a wide range of objects. Inanimate things, combinations of color
and sound, bad bills of fare, may in persons who combine fastidious
taste with an irascible temperament produce real ebullitions of rage.
Though the female sex is often said to have less pugnacity than the
male, the difference seems connected more with the extent of the motor
consequences of the impulse than with its frequency. Women take offence
and get angry, if anything, more easily than men, but their anger is
inhibited by fear and other principles of their nature from expressing
itself in blows. The hunting-instinct proper seems to be decidedly
weaker in them than in men. The latter instinct is easily restricted by
habit to certain objects, which become legitimate 'game,' while other
things are spared. If the hunting-instinct be not exercised at all, it
may even entirely die out, and a man may enjoy letting a wild creature
live, even though he might easily kill it. Such a type is now becoming
frequent; but there is no doubt that in the eyes of a child of nature
such a personage would seem a sort of moral monster.

_Fear_ is a reaction aroused by the same objects that arouse ferocity.
The antagonism of the two is an interesting study in instinctive
dynamics. We both fear, and wish to kill, anything that may kill
us; and the question which of the two impulses we shall follow is
usually decided by some one of those _collateral circumstances_ of the
particular case, to be moved by which is the mark of superior mental
natures. Of course this introduces uncertainty into the reaction; but
it is an uncertainty found in the higher brutes as well as in men, and
ought not to be taken as proof that we are less instinctive than they.
Fear has bodily expressions of an extremely energetic kind, and stands,
beside lust and anger, as one of the three most exciting emotions of
which our nature is susceptible. The progress from brute to man is
characterized by nothing so much as by the decrease in frequency of
proper occasions for fear. In civilized life, in particular, it has
at last become possible for large numbers of people to pass from the
cradle to the grave without ever having had a pang of genuine fear.
Many of us need an attack of mental disease to teach us the meaning
of the word. Hence the possibility of so much blindly optimistic
philosophy and religion. The atrocities of life become 'like a tale of
little meaning though the words are strong;' we doubt if anything like
_us_ ever really was within the tiger's jaws, and conclude that the
horrors we hear of are but a sort of painted tapestry for the chambers
in which we lie so comfortably at peace with ourselves and with the
world.

Be this as it may, fear is a genuine instinct, and one of the earliest
shown by the human child. _Noises_ seem especially to call it forth.
Most noises from the outer world, to a child bred in the house, have
no exact significance. They are simply startling. To quote a good
observer, M. Perez:

 "Children between three and ten months are less often alarmed by
 visual than by auditory impressions. In cats, from the fifteenth
 day, the contrary is the case. A child, three and a half months old,
 in the midst of the turmoil of a conflagration, in presence of the
 devouring flames and ruined walls, showed neither astonishment nor
 fear, but smiled at the woman who was taking care of him, while his
 parents were busy. The noise, however, of the trumpet of the firemen,
 who were approaching, and that of the wheels of the engine, made him
 start and cry. At this age I have never yet seen an infant startled
 at a flash of lightning, even when intense; but I have seen many of
 them alarmed at the voice of the thunder.... Thus fear comes rather
 by the ears than by the eyes, to the child without experience. It is
 natural that this should be reversed, or reduced, in animals
 organized to perceive danger afar. Accordingly, although I have never
 seen a child frightened at his first sight of fire, I have many a
 time seen young dogs, young cats, young chickens, and young birds
 frightened thereby.... I picked up some years ago a lost cat about a
 year old. Some months afterward at the onset of cold weather I lit the
 fire in the grate of my study, which was her reception-room. She first
 looked at the flame in a very frightened way. I brought her near to
 it. She leaped away and ran to hide under the bed. Although the fire
 was lighted every day, it was not until the end of the winter that I
 could prevail upon her to stay upon a chair near it. The next winter,
 however, all apprehension had disappeared.... Let us, then, conclude
 that there are hereditary dispositions to fear, which are independent
 of experience, but which experiences may end by attenuating very
 considerably. In the human infant I believe them to be particularly
 connected with the ear."[377]

The effect of noise in heightening any terror we may feel in adult
years is very marked. The _howling_ of the storm, whether on sea or
land, is a principal cause of our anxiety when exposed to it. The
writer has been interested in noticing in his own person, while lying
in bed, and kept awake by the wind outside, how invariably each loud
gust of it arrested momentarily his heart. A dog, attacking us, is much
more dreadful by reason of the noises he makes.

_Strange men_, and _strange animals_, either large or small,
excite fear, but especially men or animals advancing toward us in
a threatening way. This is entirely instinctive and antecedent to
experience. Some children will cry with terror at their very first
sight of a cat or dog, and it will often be impossible for weeks to
make them touch it. Others will wish to fondle it almost immediately.
Certain kinds of 'vermin,' especially spiders and snakes, seem to
excite a fear unusually difficult to overcome. It is impossible to say
how much of this difference is instinctive and how much the result
of stories heard about these creatures. That the fear of 'vermin'
ripens gradually, seemed to me to be proved in a child of my own to
whom I gave a live frog once, at the age of six to eight months, and
again when he was a year and a half old. The first time he seized it
promptly, and holding it, in spite of its struggling, at last got its
head into his mouth. He then let it crawl up his breast, and get upon
his face, without showing alarm. But the second time, although he had
seen no frog and heard no story about a frog between whiles, it was
almost impossible to induce him to touch it. Another child, a year old,
eagerly took some very large spiders into his hand. At present he is
afraid, but has been exposed meanwhile to the teachings of the nursery.
One of my children from her birth upwards saw daily the pet pug-dog of
the house, and never betrayed the slightest fear until she was (if I
recollect rightly) about eight months old. Then the instinct suddenly
seemed to develop, and with such intensity that familiarity had no
mitigating effect. She screamed whenever the dog entered the room, and
for many months remained afraid to touch him. It is needless to say
that no change in the pug's unfailingly friendly conduct had anything
to do with this change of feeling in the child.

Preyer tells of a young child screaming with fear on being carried
near to the _sea_. The great source of terror to infancy is solitude.
The teleology of this is obvious, as is also that of the infant's
expression of dismay--the never-failing cry--on waking up and finding
himself alone.

_Black things_, and especially _dark places_, holes, caverns, etc.,
arouse a peculiarly gruesome fear. This fear, as well as that of
solitude, of being 'lost,' are explained after a fashion by ancestral
experience. Says Schneider:

 "It is a fact that men, especially in childhood, fear to go into a
 dark cavern or a gloomy wood. This feeling of fear arises, to be sure,
 partly from the fact that we easily suspect that dangerous beasts may
 lurk in these localities--a suspicion due to stories we have heard and
 read. But, on the other hand, it is quite sure that this fear at a
 certain perception is also directly inherited. Children who have been
 carefully guarded from all ghost-stories are nevertheless terrified
 and cry if led into a dark place, especially if sounds are made there.
 Even an adult can easily observe that an uncomfortable timidity steals
 over him in a lonely wood at night, although he may have the fixed
 conviction that not the slightest danger is near.

 "This feeling of fear occurs in many men even in their own house after
 dark, although it is much stronger in a dark cavern or forest. The
 fact of such instinctive fear is easily explicable when we consider
 that our savage ancestors through innumerable generations were
 accustomed to meet with dangerous beasts in caverns, especially bears,
 and were for the most part attacked by such beasts during the night
 and in the woods, and that thus an inseparable association between the
 perceptions of darkness of caverns and woods, and fear took place, and
 was inherited."[378]

_High places_ cause fear of a peculiarly sickening sort, though here,
again, individuals differ enormously. The utterly blind instinctive
character of the motor impulses here is shown by the fact that they
are almost always entirely unreasonable, but that reason is powerless
to suppress them. That they are a mere incidental peculiarity of the
nervous system, like liability to sea-sickness, or love of music, with
no teleological significance, seems more than probable. The fear in
question varies so much from one person to another, and its detrimental
effects are so much more obvious than its uses, that it is hard to
see how it could be a selected instinct. Man is anatomically one of
the best fitted of animals for climbing about high places. The best
psychical complement to this equipment would seem to be a 'level head'
when there, not a dread of going there at all. In fact, the teleology
of fear, beyond a certain point, is very dubious. Professor Mosso, in
his interesting monograph, 'La Paura' (which has been translated into
French), concludes that many of its manifestations must be considered
pathological rather than useful; Bain, in several places, expresses the
same opinion; and this, I think, is surely the view which any observer
without _a priori_ prejudices must take. A certain amount of timidity
obviously adapts us to the world we live in, but the _fear-paroxysm_ is
surely altogether harmful to him who is its prey.

Fear of the supernatural is one variety of fear. It is difficult to
assign any normal object for this fear, unless it were a genuine
ghost. But, in spite of psychical research-societies, science has
not yet adopted ghosts; so we can only say that certain _ideas_ of
supernatural agency, associated with real circumstances, produce a
peculiar kind of horror. This horror is probably explicable as the
result of a combination of simpler horrors. To bring the ghostly terror
to its maximum, many usual elements of the dreadful must combine,
such as loneliness, darkness, inexplicable sounds, especially of a
dismal character, moving figures half discerned (or, if discerned, of
dreadful aspect), and a vertiginous baffling of the expectation. This
last element, which is _intellectual_, is very important. It produces
a strange emotional 'curdle' in our blood to see a process with which
we are familiar deliberately taking an unwonted course. Any one's heart
would stop beating if he perceived his chair sliding unassisted across
the floor. The lower animals appear to be sensitive to the mysteriously
exceptional as well as ourselves. My friend Professor W. K. Brooks, of
the Johns Hopkins University, told me of his large and noble dog being
frightened into a sort of epileptic fit by a bone being drawn across
the floor by a thread which the dog did not see. Darwin and Romanes
have given similar experiences.[379] The idea of the supernatural
involves that the usual should be set at naught. In the witch and
hobgoblin supernatural, other elements still of fear are brought
in--caverns, slime and ooze, vermin, corpses, and the like.[380] A
human corpse seems normally to produce an instinctive dread, which is
no doubt somewhat due to its mysteriousness, and which familiarity
rapidly dispels. But, in view of the fact that cadaveric, reptilian,
and underground horrors play so specific and constant a part in many
nightmares and forms of delirium, it seems not altogether unwise to ask
whether these forms of dreadful circumstance may not at a former period
have been more normal objects of the environment than now. The ordinary
cock-sure evolutionist ought to have no difficulty in explaining these
terrors, and the scenery that provokes them, as relapses into the
consciousness of the cave-men, a consciousness usually overlaid in us
by experiences of more recent date.

There are certain other pathological fears, and certain peculiarities
in the expression of ordinary fear, which might receive an explanatory
light from ancestral conditions, even infra-human ones. In ordinary
fear, one may either run, or remain semi-paralyzed. The latter
condition reminds us of the so-called death-shamming instinct shown by
many animals. Dr. Lindsay, in his work 'Mind in Animals,' says this
must require great self-command in those that practise it. But it is
really no feigning of death at all, and requires no self-command. It
is simply a terror-paralysis which has been so useful as to become
hereditary. The beast of prey does not think the motionless bird,
insect, or crustacean dead. He simply fails to notice them at all;
because his senses, like ours, are much more strongly excited by a
moving object than by a still one. It is the same instinct which leads
a boy playing 'I spy' to hold his very breath when the seeker is near,
and which makes the beast of prey himself in many cases motionlessly
lie in wait for his victim or silently 'stalk' it, by rapid approaches
alternated with periods of immobility. It is the opposite of the
instinct which makes us jump up and down and move our arms when we
wish to attract the notice of some one passing far away, and makes the
shipwrecked sailor frantically wave a cloth upon the raft where he is
floating when a distant sail appears. Now, may not the statue-like,
crouching immobility of some melancholiacs, insane with general
anxiety and fear of everything, be in some way connected with this
old instinct? They can give no _reason_ for their fear to move; but
immobility makes them feel safer and more comfortable. Is not this the
mental state of the 'feigning' animal?

Again, take the strange symptom which has been described of late years
by the rather absurd name of _agoraphobia_. The patient is seized with
palpitation and terror at the sight of any open place or broad street
which he has to cross alone. He trembles, his knees bend, he may even
faint at the idea. Where he has sufficient self-command he sometimes
accomplishes the object by keeping safe under the lee of a vehicle
going across, or joining himself to a knot of other people. But usually
he slinks round the sides of the square, hugging the houses as closely
as he can. This emotion has no utility in a civilized man, but when
we notice the chronic agoraphobia of our domestic cats, and see the
tenacious way in which many wild animals, especially rodents, cling
to cover, and only venture on a dash across the open as a desperate
measure--even then making for every stone or bunch of weeds which may
give a momentary shelter--when we see this we are strongly tempted to
ask whether such an odd kind of fear in us be not due to the accidental
resurrection, through disease, of a sort of instinct which may in some
of our ancestors have had a permanent and on the whole a useful part to
play?

_Appropriation_ or _Acquisitiveness_. The beginnings of acquisitiveness
are seen in the impulse which very young children display, to snatch
at, or beg for, any object which pleases their attention. Later,
when they begin to speak, among the first words they emphasize
are 'me' and 'mine.'[381] Their earliest quarrels with each other
are about questions of ownership; and parents of twins soon learn
that it conduces to a quiet house to buy all presents in impartial
duplicate. Of the later evolution of the proprietary instinct I need
not speak. Everyone knows how difficult a thing it is not to covet
whatever pleasing thing we see, and how the sweetness of the thing
often is as gall to us so long as it is another's. When another is in
possession, the impulse to appropriate the thing often turns into the
impulse to harm him--what is called _envy_, or _jealousy_, ensues. In
civilized life the impulse to own is usually checked by a variety of
considerations, and only passes over into action under circumstances
legitimated by habit and common consent, an additional example of the
way in which one instinctive tendency may be inhibited by others. A
variety of the proprietary instinct is the impulse to form collections
of the same sort of thing. It differs much in individuals, and shows
in a striking way how instinct and habit interact. For, although a
collection of any given thing--like postage-stamps--need not be begun
by any given person, yet the chances are that if accidentally it _be_
begun by a person with the collecting instinct, it will probably be
continued. The chief interest of the objects, in the collector's eyes,
is that they are a collection, and that they are his. Rivalry, to be
sure, inflames this, as it does every other passion, yet the objects of
a collector's mania need not be necessarily such as are generally in
demand. Boys will collect anything that they see another boy collect,
from pieces of chalk and peach-pits up to books and photographs. Out
of a hundred students whom I questioned, only four or five had never
collected anything.[382]

The associationist psychology denies that there is any blind primitive
instinct to appropriate, and would explain all acquisitiveness, in
the first instance, as a desire to secure the 'pleasures' which the
objects possessed may yield; and, secondly, as the association of the
idea of pleasantness with the _holding_ of the thing, even though the
pleasure originally got by it was only gained through its expense or
destruction. Thus the miser is shown to us as one who has transferred
to the gold by which he may buy the goods of this life all the emotions
which the goods themselves would yield; and who thereafter loves the
gold for its own sake, preferring the means of pleasure to the pleasure
itself. There can be little doubt that much of this analysis a broader
view of the facts would have dispelled. 'The miser' is an abstraction.
There are all kinds of misers. The common sort, the excessively
niggardly man, simply exhibits the psychological law that the potential
has often a far greater influence over our mind than the actual. A man
will not marry now, because to do so puts an end to his indefinite
potentialities of choice of a partner. He prefers the latter. He will
not use open fires or wear his good clothes, because the day may come
when he will have to use the furnace or dress in a worn-out coat, 'and
then where will he be?' For him, better the actual evil than the fear
of it; and so it is with the common lot of misers. Better to live poor
now, with the _power_ of living rich, than to live rich at the risk of
losing the power. These men value their gold, not for its own sake, but
for its powers. Demonetize it, and see how quickly they will get rid of
it! The associationist theory is, as regards them, entirely at fault:
they care nothing for the gold _in se_.

With other misers there combines itself with this preference of the
power over the act the far more instinctive element of the simple
collecting propensity. Every one collects money, and when a man of
petty ways is smitten with the collecting mania for this object he
necessarily becomes a miser. Here again the associationist psychology
is wholly at fault. The hoarding instinct prevails widely among animals
as well as among men. Professor Silliman has thus described one of
the hoards of the California wood-rat, made in an empty stove of an
unoccupied house:

 "I found the outside to be composed entirely of spikes, all laid with
 symmetry, so as to present the points of the nails outward. In the
 centre of this mass was the nest, composed of finely-divided fibres of
 hemp-packing. Interlaced with the spikes were the following: about two
 dozen knives, forks, and spoons; all the butcher's knives, three in
 number; a large carving-knife, fork, and steel; several large plugs of
 tobacco,... an old purse containing some silver, matches, and tobacco;
 nearly all the small tools from the tool-closets, with several large
 augers,... all of which must have been transported some distance, as
 they were originally stored in different parts of the house.... The
 outside casing of a silver watch was disposed of in one part of the
 pile, the glass of the same watch in another, and the works in still
 another."[383]

In every lunatic asylum we find the collecting instinct developing
itself in an equally absurd way. Certain patients will spend all their
time picking pins from the floor and hoarding them. Others collect bits
of thread, buttons, or rags, and prize them exceedingly. Now, 'the
Miser' _par excellence_ of the popular imagination and of melodrama,
the monster of squalor and misanthropy, is simply one of these mentally
deranged persons. His intellect may in many matters be clear, but
his instincts, especially that of ownership, are insane, and their
insanity has no more to do with the association of ideas than with the
precession of the equinoxes. As a matter of fact his hoarding usually
is directed to money; but it also includes almost anything besides.
Lately in a Massachusetts town there died a miser who principally
hoarded newspapers. These had ended by so filling all the rooms of
his good-sized house from floor to ceiling that his living-space was
restricted to a few narrow channels between them. Even as I write,
the morning paper gives an account of the emptying of a miser's den
in Boston by the City Board of Health. What the owner hoarded is thus
described:

 "He gathered old newspapers, wrapping-paper, incapacitated umbrellas,
 canes, pieces of common wire, cast-off clothing, empty barrels, pieces
 of iron, old bones, battered tin-ware, fractured pots, and bushels of
 such miscellany as is to be found only at the city 'dump.' The empty
 barrels were filled, shelves were filled, every hole and corner was
 filled, and in order to make more storage-room, 'the hermit' covered
 his store-room with a network of ropes, and hung the ropes as full
 as they could hold of his curious collections. There was nothing one
 could think of that wasn't in that room. As a wood-sawyer, the old
 man had never thrown away a saw-blade or a wood-buck. The bucks were
 rheumatic and couldn't stand up, and the saw-blades were worn down to
 almost nothing in the middle. Some had been actually worn in two, but
 the ends were carefully saved and stored away. As a coal-heaver, the
 old man had never cast off a worn-out basket, and there were dozens of
 the remains of the old things, patched up with canvas and rope-yarns,
 in the store-room. There were at least two dozen old hats, fur, cloth,
 silk, and straw," etc.

Of course there may be a great many 'associations of ideas' in the
miser's mind about the things he hoards. He is a thinking being, and
must associate things; but, without an entirely blind impulse in this
direction behind all his ideas, such practical results could never be
reached.[384]

_Kleptomania_, as it is called, is an uncontrollable impulse to
appropriate, occurring in persons whose 'associations of ideas' would
naturally all be of a counteracting sort. Kleptomaniacs often promptly
restore, or permit to be restored, what they have taken; so the
impulse need not be to keep, but only to take. But elsewhere hoarding
complicates the result. A gentleman, with whose case I am acquainted,
was discovered, after his death, to have a hoard in his barn of all
sorts of articles, mainly of a trumpery sort, but including pieces of
silver which he had stolen from his own dining-room, and utensils which
he had stolen from his own kitchen, and for which he had afterward
bought substitutes with his own money.

_Constructiveness_ is as genuine and irresistible an instinct in
man as in the bee or the beaver. Whatever things are plastic to his
hands, those things he must remodel into shapes of his own, and the
result of the remodelling, however useless it may be, gives him more
pleasure than the original thing. The mania of young children for
breaking and pulling apart whatever is given them is more often the
expression of a rudimentary constructive impulse than of a destructive
one. 'Blocks' are the playthings of which they are least apt to tire.
Clothes, weapons, tools, habitations, and works of art are the result
of the discoveries to which the plastic instinct leads, each individual
starting where his forerunners left off, and tradition preserving all
that once is gained. Clothing, where not necessitated by cold, is
nothing but a sort of attempt to remodel the human body itself--an
attempt still better shown in the various tattooings, tooth-filings,
scarrings, and other mutilations that are practised by savage tribes.
As for habitation, there can be no doubt that the instinct to seek a
sheltered nook, open only on one side, into which he may retire and be
safe, is in man quite as specific as the instinct of birds to build a
nest. It is not necessarily in the shape of a shelter from wet and cold
that the need comes before him, but he feels less _exposed_ and more
at home when not altogether uninclosed than when lying all abroad. Of
course the utilitarian origin of this instinct is obvious. But to stick
to bare facts at present and not to trace origins, we must admit that
this instinct now exists, and probably always has existed, since man
was man. Habits of the most complicated kind are reared upon it. But
even in the midst of these habits we see the blind instinct cropping
out; as, for example, in the fact that we feign a shelter within a
shelter, by backing up beds in rooms with their heads against the
wall, and never lying in them the other way--just as dogs prefer to
get under or upon some piece of furniture to sleep, instead of lying
in the middle of the room. The first habitations were caves and leafy
grottoes, bettered by the hands; and we see children to-day, when
playing in wild places, take the greatest delight in discovering and
appropriating such retreats and 'playing house' there.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Play._ The impulse to play in special ways is certainly instinctive.
A boy can no more help running after another boy who runs provokingly
near him, than a kitten can help running after a rolling ball. A child
trying to get into its own hand some object which it sees another child
pick up, and the latter trying to get away with the prize, are just as
much slaves of an automatic prompting as are two chickens or fishes, of
which one has taken a big morsel into its mouth and decamps with it,
while the other darts after in pursuit. All simple active games are
attempts to gain the excitement yielded by certain primitive instincts,
through feigning that the occasions for their exercise are there. They
involve imitation, hunting, fighting, rivalry, acquisitiveness, and
construction, combined in various ways; their special rules are habits,
discovered by accident, selected by intelligence, and propagated by
tradition; but unless they were founded in automatic impulses, games
would lose most of their zest. The sexes differ somewhat in their
play-impulses. As Schneider says:

 "The little boy imitates soldiers, models clay into an oven, builds
 houses, makes a wagon out of chairs, rides on horseback upon a stick,
 drives nails with the hammer, harnesses his brethren and comrades
 together and plays the stage-driver, or lets himself be captured as a
 wild horse by some one else. The girl, on the contrary, plays with her
 doll, washes and dresses it, strokes it, clasps and kisses it, puts
 it to bed and tucks it in, sings it a cradle-song, or speaks with it
 as if it were a living being.... This fact that a sexual difference
 exists in the play-impulse, that a boy gets more pleasure from a horse
 and rider and a soldier than from a doll, while with the girl the
 opposite is the case, is proof that an hereditary connection exists
 between the perception of certain things (horse, doll, etc.), and the
 feeling of pleasure, as well as between this latter and the impulse to
 play."[385]

There is another sort of human play, into which higher æsthetic
feelings enter. I refer to that love of festivities, ceremonies,
ordeals, etc., which seems to be universal in our species. The lowest
savages have their dances, more or less formally conducted. The
various religions have their solemn rites and exercises, and civic and
military power symbolize their grandeur by processions and celebrations
of divers sorts. We have our operas and parties and masquerades. An
element common to all these ceremonial games, as they may be called,
is the excitement of concerted action as one of an organized crowd.
The same acts, performed with a crowd, seem to mean vastly more than
when performed alone. A walk with the people on a holiday afternoon,
an excursion to drink beer or coffee at a popular 'resort,' or an
ordinary ball-room, are examples of this. Not only are we amused at
seeing so many strangers, but there is a distinct stimulation at
feeling our share in their collective life. The perception of them is
the stimulus; and our reaction upon it is our tendency to join them
and do what they are doing, and our unwillingness to be the first to
leave off and go home alone. This seems a primitive element in our
nature, as it is difficult to trace any association of ideas that could
lead up to it; although, once granting it to exist, it is very easy
to see what its uses to a tribe might be in facilitating prompt and
vigorous collective action. The formation of armies and the undertaking
of military expeditions would be among its fruits. In the ceremonial
games it is but the impulsive starting-point. What particular things
the crowd then shall do, depends for the most part on the initiative of
individuals, fixed by imitation and habit, and continued by tradition.
The co-operation of other æsthetic pleasures with games, ceremonial
or other, has a great deal to do with the selection of such as shall
become stereotyped and habitual. The peculiar form of excitement
called by Professor Bain the emotion of _pursuit_, the pleasure of
a _crescendo_, is the soul of many common games. The immense extent
of the play-activities in human life is too obvious to be more than
mentioned.[386]

       *       *       *       *       *

_Curiosity._ Already pretty low down among vertebrates we find that
any object may excite attention, provided it be only _novel_, and that
attention may be followed by approach and exploration by nostril, lips,
or touch. Curiosity and fear form a couple of antagonistic emotions
liable to be awakened by the same outward thing, and manifestly both
useful to their possessor. The spectacle of their alternation is often
amusing enough, as in the timid approaches and scared wheelings which
sheep or cattle will make in the presence of some new object they are
investigating. I have seen alligators in the water act in precisely the
same way towards a man seated on the beach in front of them--gradually
drawing near as long as he kept still, frantically careering back as
soon as he made a movement. Inasmuch as new objects _may_ always be
advantageous, it is better that an animal should not _absolutely_
fear them. But, inasmuch as they may also possibly be harmful, it is
better that he should not be quite indifferent to them either, but on
the whole remaining on the _qui vive_, ascertain as much about them,
and what they may be likely to bring forth, as he can, before settling
down to rest in their presence. Some such susceptibility for being
excited and irritated by the mere novelty, as such, of any movable
feature of the environment must form the instinctive basis of all human
curiosity; though, of course, the superstructure absorbs contributions
from so many other factors of the emotional life that the original
root may be hard to find. With what is called scientific curiosity,
and with metaphysical wonder, the practical instinctive root has
probably nothing to do. The stimuli here are not objects, but ways of
conceiving objects; and the emotions and actions they give rise to are
to be classed, with many other æsthetic manifestations, sensitive and
motor, as _incidental_ features of our mental life. The philosophic
brain responds to an inconsistency or a gap in its knowledge, just as
the musical brain responds to a discord in what it hears. At certain
ages the sensitiveness to particular gaps and the pleasure of resolving
particular puzzles reach their maximum, and then it is that stores of
scientific knowledge are easiest and most naturally laid in. But these
effects may have had nothing to do with the uses for which the brain
was originally given; and it is probably only within a few centuries,
since religious beliefs and economic applications of science have
played a prominent part in the conflicts of one race with another,
that they may have helped to 'select' for survival a particular type
of brain. I shall have to consider this matter of incidental and
supernumerary faculties in Chapter XXVIII.

_Sociability and Shyness._ As a gregarious animal, man is excited
both by the absence and by the presence of his kind. To be alone is
one of the greatest of evils for him. Solitary confinement is by many
regarded as a mode of torture too cruel and unnatural for civilized
countries to adopt. To one long pent up on a desert island, the sight
of a human footprint or a human form in the distance would be the most
tumultuously exciting of experiences. In morbid states of mind, one
of the commonest symptoms is the fear of being alone. This fear may
be assuaged by the presence of a little child, or even of a baby. In
a case of hydrophobia known to the writer, the patient insisted on
keeping his room _crowded_ with neighbors all the while, so intense was
his fear of solitude. In a gregarious animal, the perception that he
is alone excites him to vigorous activity. Mr. Galton thus describes
the behavior of the South African cattle whom he had such good
opportunities for observing:

 "Although the ox has little affection for, or interest in, his
 fellows, he cannot endure even a momentary separation from his herd.
 If he be separated from it by stratagem or force, he exhibits every
 sign of mental agony; he strives with all his might to get back again,
 and when he succeeds he plunges into its middle to bathe his whole
 body with the comfort of closest companionship."[387]

Man is also excited by the presence of his kind. The _bizarre_
actions of dogs meeting strange dogs are not altogether without a
parallel in our own constitution. We cannot meet strangers without a
certain tension, or talk to them exactly as to our familiars. This is
particularly the case if the stranger be an important personage. It may
then happen that we not only shrink from meeting his eye, but actually
cannot collect our wits or do ourselves any sort of justice in his
presence.

 "This odd state of mind," says Darwin,[388] "is chiefly recognized by
 the face reddening, by the eyes being averted or cast down, and by
 awkward, nervous movements of the body.... Shyness seems to depend on
 sensitiveness to the opinion, whether good or bad, of others, more
 especially with respect to external appearance. Strangers neither know
 nor care anything about our conduct or character, but they may, and
 often do, criticise our appearance.... The consciousness of anything
 peculiar, or even new, in the dress, or any slight blemish on the
 person, and more especially on the face--points which are likely
 to attract the attention of strangers--makes the shy intolerably
 shy.[389] On the other hand, in those cases in which conduct, and not
 personal appearance, is concerned, we are much more apt to be shy in
 the presence of acquaintances whose judgment we in some degree value
 than in that of strangers.... Some persons, however, are so sensitive
 that the mere act of speaking to almost any one is sufficient to
 rouse their self-consciousness, and a slight blush is the result.
 Disapprobation ... causes shyness and blushing much more readily than
 does approbation.... Persons who are exceedingly shy are rarely shy in
 the presence of those with whom they are quite familiar, and of whose
 good opinion and sympathy they are quite assured; for instance, a girl
 in presence of her mother.... Shyness ... is closely related to fear;
 yet it is distinct from fear in the ordinary sense. A shy man dreads
 the notice of strangers, but can hardly be said to be afraid of them;
 he may be as bold as a hero in battle, and yet have no self-confidence
 about trifles in the presence of strangers. Almost every one is
 extremely nervous when first addressing a public assembly, and most
 men remain so through their lives."

As Mr. Darwin observes, a real dread of definite consequences may
enter into this 'stage-fright' and complicate the shyness. Even so
our shyness before an important personage may be complicated by what
Professor Bain calls 'servile terror,' based on representation of
definite dangers if we fail to please. But both stage-fright and
servile terror may exist with the most indefinite apprehensions of
danger, and, in fact, when our reason tells us there is no occasion for
alarm. We must, therefore, admit a certain amount of purely instinctive
perturbation and constraint, due to the consciousness that we have
become objects for other people's eyes. Mr. Darwin goes on to say:
"Shyness comes on at a very early age. In one of my own children, two
years and three months old, I saw a trace of what certainly appeared to
be shyness directed toward myself, after an absence from home of only a
week." Every parent has noticed the same sort of thing. Considering the
despotic powers of rulers in savage tribes, respect and awe must, from
time immemorial, have been emotions excited by certain individuals; and
stage-fright, servile terror, and shyness, must have had as copious
opportunities for exercise as at the present time. Whether these
impulses could ever have been useful, and selected for usefulness, is
a question which, it would seem, can only be answered in the negative.
Apparently they are pure hindrances, like fainting at sight of blood
or disease, sea-sickness, a dizzy head on high places, and certain
squeamishnesses of æsthetic taste. They are _incidental_ emotions, in
spite of which we get along. But they seem to play an important part
in the production of two other propensities, about the instinctive
character of which a good deal of controversy has prevailed. I refer
to cleanliness and modesty, to which we must proceed, but not before
we have said a word about another impulse closely allied to shyness. I
mean--

       *       *       *       *       *

_Secretiveness_, which, although often due to intelligent calculation
and the dread of betraying our interests in some more or less
definitely foreseen way, is quite as often a blind propensity, serving
no useful purpose, and is so stubborn and ineradicable a part of the
character as fully to deserve a place among the instincts. Its natural
stimuli are unfamiliar human beings, especially those whom we respect.
Its reactions are the arrest of whatever we are saying or doing when
such strangers draw nigh, coupled often with the pretense that we were
not saying or doing that thing, but possibly something different.
Often there is added to this a disposition to mendacity when asked to
give an account of ourselves. With many persons the first impulse,
when the door-bell rings, or a visitor is suddenly announced, is to
scuttle out of the room, so as not to be 'caught.' When a person at
whom we have been looking becomes aware of us, our immediate impulse
may be to look the other way, and pretend we have not seen him. Many
friends have confessed to me that this is a frequent phenomenon with
them in meeting acquaintances in the street, especially unfamiliar
ones. The bow is a secondary correction of the primary feint that we
do not see the other person. Probably most readers will recognize in
themselves, at least, the _start_, the nascent disposition, on many
occasions, to act in each and all of these several ways. That the
'start' is neutralized by second thought proves it to come from a
deeper region than thought. There is unquestionably a native impulse in
every one to conceal love-affairs, and the acquired impulse to conceal
pecuniary affairs seems in many to be almost equally strong. It is to
be noted that even where a given habit of concealment is reflective and
deliberate, its motive is far less often definite prudence than a vague
aversion to have one's sanctity invaded and one's personal concerns
fingered and turned over by other people. Thus, some persons will never
leave anything with their name written on it, where others may pick
it up--even in the woods, an old envelope must not be thrown on the
ground. Many cut all the leaves of a book of which they may be reading
a single chapter, so that no one shall know which one they have singled
out, and all this with no _definite_ notion of harm. The impulse to
conceal is more apt to be provoked by superiors than by equals or
inferiors. How differently do boys talk together when their parents are
not by! Servants see more of their masters' characters than masters of
servants'.[390] Where we conceal from our equals and familiars, there
is probably always a definite element of prudential prevision involved.
_Collective_ secrecy, mystery, enters into the emotional interest of
many games, and is one of the elements of the importance men attach to
freemasonries of various sorts, being delightful apart from any end.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Cleanliness._ Seeing how very filthy savages and exceptional
individuals among civilized people may be, philosophers have doubted
whether any genuine instinct of cleanliness exists, and whether
education and habit be not responsible for whatever amount of it
is found. Were it an instinct, its stimulus would be dirt, and its
characteristic reaction the shrinking from contact therewith, and the
cleaning of it away after contact had occurred. Now, if some animals
are cleanly, men _may_ be so, and there can be no doubt that some
kinds of matter _are_ natively repugnant, both to sight, touch, and
smell--excrementitious and putrid things, blood, pus, entrails, and
diseased tissues, for example. It is true that the shrinking from
contact with these things may be inhibited very easily, as by a medical
education; and it is equally true that the impulse to clean them
away may be inhibited by so slight an obstacle as the thought of the
coldness of the ablution, or the necessity of getting up to perform it.
It is also true than an impulse to cleanliness, habitually checked,
will become obsolete fast enough. But none of these facts prove the
impulse never to have been there.[391] It seems to be there in all
cases; and then to be particularly amenable to outside influences, the
child having his own degree of squeamishness about what he shall touch
or eat, and later being either hardened or made more fastidious still
by the habits he is forced to acquire and the examples among which he
lives.

Examples get their hold on him in this way, that a particularly
evil-smelling or catarrhal or lousy comrade is rather offensive to
him, and that he sees the odiousness in another of an amount of dirt
to which he would have no spontaneous objection if it were on his
own skin. That _we dislike in others things which we tolerate in
ourselves_ is a law of our æsthetic nature about which there can be
no doubt. But as soon as generalization and reflection step in, this
judging of others leads to a new way of regarding ourselves. "Who
taught you politeness? The impolite," is, I believe, a Chinese proverb.
The concept, 'dirty fellow,' which we have formed, becomes one under
which we personally shrink from being classed; and so we 'wash up,'
and set ourselves right, at moments when our social self-consciousness
is awakened, in a manner toward which no strictly instinctive native
prompting exists. But the standard of cleanliness attained in this way
is not likely to go beyond the mutual tolerance for one another of the
members of the tribe, and hence may comport a good deal of actual filth.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Modesty, Shame._ Whether there be an instinctive impulse to hide
certain parts of the body and certain acts is perhaps even more open to
doubt than whether there be an instinct of cleanliness. Anthropologists
have denied it, and in the utter shamelessness of infancy and of many
savage tribes have seemed to find a good basis for their views. It
must, however, be remembered that infancy proves nothing, and that, as
far as sexual modesty goes, the sexual impulse itself works directly
against it at times of excitement, and with reference to certain
people; and that habits of immodesty contracted with those people
may forever afterwards inhibit it any impulse to be modest towards
_them_. This would account for a great deal of actual immodesty, even
if an original modest impulse were there. On the other hand, the
modest impulse, if it do exist, must be admitted to have a singularly
ill-defined sphere of influence, both as regards the presences that
call it forth, and as regards the acts to which it leads. Ethnology
shows it to have very little backbone of its own, and to follow
easily fashion and example. Still, it is hard to see the ubiquity of
_some_ sort of tribute to shame, however perverted--as where female
modesty consists in covering the face alone, or immodesty in appearing
before strangers unpainted--and to believe it to have no impulsive
root whatever. Now, what may the impulsive root be? I believe that,
for one thing, it is shyness, the feeling of dread that unfamiliar
persons, as explained above, may inspire us withal. Such persons are
the original stimuli to our modesty.[392] But the actions of modesty
are quite different from the actions of shyness. They consist of the
restraint of certain bodily functions, and of the covering of certain
parts; and why do such particular actions necessarily ensue? That
there _may_ be in the human animal, as such, a 'blind' and immediate
automatic impulse to such restraints and coverings in respect-inspiring
presences is a possibility difficult of actual disproof. But it
seems more likely, from the facts, that the actions of modesty are
suggested to us in a roundabout way; and that, even more than those of
cleanliness, they arise from the application in the second instance
to ourselves of judgments primarily passed upon our mates. It is not
easy to believe that, even among the nakedest savages, an unusual
degree of cynicism and indecency in an individual should not beget a
certain degree of contempt, and cheapen him in his neighbor's eyes.
Human nature is sufficiently homogeneous for us to be sure that
everywhere reserve must inspire some respect, and that persons who
suffer every liberty are persons whom others disregard. Not to be like
such people, then, would be one of the first resolutions suggested by
social self-consciousness to a child of nature just emerging from the
unreflective state. And the resolution would probably acquire effective
pungency for the first time when the social self-consciousness was
sharpened into a real fit of shyness by some person being present whom
it was important not to disgust or displease. Public opinion would
of course go on to build its positive precepts upon this germ; and,
through a variety of examples and experiences, the ritual of modesty
would grow, until it reached the New England pitch of sensitiveness and
range, making us say stomach instead of belly, limb instead of leg,
retire instead of go to bed, and forbidding us to call a female dog by
name.

At bottom this amounts to the admission that, though in some shape or
other a natural and inevitable feature of human life, modesty need not
necessarily be an instinct in the pure and simple excito-motor sense of
the term.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Love._ Of all propensities, the sexual impulses bear on their face
the most obvious signs of being instinctive, in the sense of blind,
automatic, and untaught. The teleology they contain is often at
variance with the wishes of the individuals concerned; and the actions
are performed for no assignable reason but because Nature urges just
that way. Here, if ever, then, we ought to find those characters of
fatality, infallibility, and uniformity, which, we are told, make of
actions done from instinct a class so utterly apart. But is this so?
The facts are just the reverse: the sexual instinct is particularly
liable to be checked and modified by slight differences in the
individual stimulus, by the inward condition of the agent himself,
by habits once acquired, and by the antagonism of contrary impulses
operating on the mind. One of these is the ordinary shyness recently
described; another is what might be called the _anti-sexual instinct_,
the instinct of personal isolation, the actual repulsiveness to us
of the idea of intimate contact with most of the persons we meet,
especially those of our own sex.[393] Thus it comes about that this
strongest passion of all, so far from being the most 'irresistible,'
may, on the contrary, be the hardest one to give rein to, and that
individuals in whom the inhibiting influences are potent may pass
through life and never find an occasion to have it gratified. There
could be no better proof of the truth of that proposition with which we
began our study of the instinctive life in man, that irregularity of
behavior may come as well from the possession of too many instincts as
from the lack of any at all.

The instinct of personal isolation, of which we have spoken, exists
more strongly in men with respect to one another, and more strongly in
women with respect to men. In women it is called coyness, and has to be
positively overcome by a process of wooing before the sexual instinct
inhibits it and takes its place. As Darwin has shown in his book on
the 'Descent of Man and Sexual Selection,' it has played a vital part
in the amelioration of all higher animal types, and is to a great
degree responsible for whatever degree of chastity the human race may
show. It illustrates strikingly, however, the law of the inhibition of
instincts by habits--for, once broken through with a given person, it
is not apt to assert itself again; and habitually broken through, as by
prostitutes, with various persons, it may altogether decay. Habit also
fixes it in us toward certain individuals: nothing is so particularly
displeasing as the notion of close personal contact with those whom
we have long known in a respectful and distant way. The fondness of
the ancients and of modern Orientals for forms of unnatural vice, of
which the notion affects us with horror, is probably a mere case of the
way in which this instinct may be inhibited by habit. We can hardly
suppose that the ancients had by gift of Nature a propensity of which
we are devoid, and were all victims of what is now a pathological
aberration limited to individuals. It is more probable that with them
the instinct of physical aversion toward a certain class of objects
was inhibited early in life by _habits_, formed under the influence
of _example_; and that then a kind of sexual appetite, of which very
likely most men possess the germinal possibility, developed itself in
an unrestricted way. That the development of it in an abnormal way may
check its development in the normal way, seems to be a well-ascertained
medical fact. And that the direction of the sexual instinct towards one
individual tends to inhibit its application to other individuals, is a
law, upon which, though it suffers many exceptions, the whole _régime_
of monogamy is based. These details are a little unpleasant to discuss,
but they show so beautifully the correctness of the general principles
in the light of which our review has been made, that it was impossible
to pass them over unremarked.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Jealousy_ is unquestionably instinctive.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Parental Love_ is an instinct stronger in woman than in man, at least
in the early childhood of its object. I need do little more than quote
Schneider's lively description of it as it exists in her:

 "As soon as a wife becomes a mother her whole thought and feeling,
 her whole being, is altered. Until then she had only thought of her
 own well-being, of the satisfaction of her vanity; the whole world
 appeared made only for her; everything that went on about her was only
 noticed so far as it had personal reference to herself; she asked
 of every one that he should appear interested in her, pay her the
 requisite attention, and as far as possible fulfil her wishes. Now,
 however, the centre of the world is no longer herself, but her child.
 She does not think of her own hunger, she must first be sure that the
 child is fed. It is nothing to her that she herself is tired and needs
 rest, so long as she sees that the child's sleep is disturbed; the
 moment it stirs she awakes, though far stronger noises fail to arouse
 her now. She, who formerly could not bear the slightest carelessness
 of dress, and touched everything with gloves, allows herself to be
 soiled by the infant, and does not shrink from seizing its clouts with
 her naked hands. Now, she has the greatest patience with the ugly,
 piping cry-baby (_Schreihals_), whereas until now every discordant
 sound, every slightly unpleasant noise, made her nervous. Every limb
 of the still hideous little being appears to her beautiful, every
 movement fills her with delight. She has, in one word, transferred her
 entire egoism to the child, and lives only in it. Thus, at least, it
 is in all unspoiled, naturally-bred mothers, who, alas! seem to be
 growing rarer; and thus it is with all the higher animal-mothers. The
 maternal joys of a cat, for example, are not to be disguised. With
 an expression of infinite comfort she stretches out her fore-legs to
 offer her teats to her children, and moves her tail with delight when
 the little hungry mouths tug and suck.... But not only the contact,
 the bare look of the offspring affords endless delight, not only
 because the mother thinks that the child will some day grow great and
 handsome and bring her many joys, but because she has received from
 Nature an instinctive love for her children. She does not herself know
 why she is so happy, and why the look of the child and the care of it
 are so agreeable, any more than the young man can give an account of
 why he loves a maiden, and is so happy when she is near. Few mothers,
 in caring for their child, think of the proper purpose of maternal
 love for the preservation of the species. Such a thought may arise
 in the father's mind; seldom in that of the mother. The latter feels
 only... that it is an everlasting delight to hold the being which she
 has brought forth protectingly in her arms, to dress it, to wash it,
 to rock it to sleep, or to still its hunger."

So far the worthy Schneider, to whose words may be added this remark,
that the passionate devotion of a mother--ill herself, perhaps--to
a sick or dying child is perhaps the most simply beautiful moral
spectacle that human life affords. Contemning every danger, triumphing
over every difficulty, outlasting all fatigue, woman's love is here
invincibly superior to anything that man can show.

       *       *       *       *       *

These are the most prominent of the tendencies which are worthy of
being called instinctive in the human species.[394] It will be
observed that _no other mammal, not even the monkey, shows so large
an array._ In a perfectly-rounded development, every one of these
instincts would start a habit toward certain objects and inhibit a
habit toward certain others. Usually this is the case; but, in the
one-sided development of civilized life, it happens that the timely age
goes by in a sort of starvation of objects, and the individual then
grows up with gaps in his psychic constitution which future experiences
can never fill. Compare the accomplished gentleman with the poor
artisan or tradesman of a city: during the adolescence of the former,
objects appropriate to his growing interests, bodily and mental, were
offered as fast as the interests awoke, and, as a consequence, he is
armed and equipped at every angle to meet the world. Sport came to the
rescue and completed his education where real things were lacking. He
has tasted of the essence of every side of human life, being sailor,
hunter, athlete, scholar, fighter, talker, dandy, man of affairs, etc.,
all in one. Over the city poor boy's youth no such golden opportunities
were hung, and in his manhood no desires for most of them exist.
Fortunate it is for him if gaps are the only anomalies his instinctive
life presents; perversions are too often the fruit of his unnatural
bringing up.

       *       *       *       *       *

[360] This chapter has already appeared (almost exactly as now printed)
in the form of magazine articles in Scribner's Magazine and in the
Popular Science Monthly for 1887.

[361] P. A. Chadbourne: Instinct, p. 28 (New York, 1872).

[362] "It would be very simple-minded to suppose that bees follow their
queen, and protect her and care for her, because they are aware that
without her the hive would become extinct. The odor or the aspect of
their queen is manifestly agreeable to the bees--that is why they love
her so. Does not all true love base itself on agreeable perceptions
much more than on representations of utility?" (G. H. Schneider, Der
Thierische Wille, p. 187.) _A priori_, there is no reason to suppose
that _any_ sensation might not in _some_ animal cause _any_ emotion and
_any_ impulse. To us it seems unnatural that an odor should directly
excite anger or fear; or a color, lust. Yet there are creatures to
which some smells are quite as frightful as any sounds, and very likely
others to which color is as much a sexual irritant as form.

[363] Der Thierische Wille, pp. 282-3.

[364] In the instincts of mammals, and even of lower creatures, the
uniformity and infallibility which, a generation ago, were considered
as essential characters do not exist. The minuter study of recent years
has found continuity, transition, variation, and mistake, wherever
it has looked for them, and decided that what is called an instinct
is usually only a tendency to act in a way of which the _average_ is
pretty constant, but which need not be mathematically 'true.' Cf. on
this point Darwin's Origin of Species: Romanes's Mental Evol., chaps.
xi to xvi incl., and Appendix; W. L. Lindsay's Mind in Lower Animals,
vol. i. 133-141: ii. chaps. v, xx; and K. Semper's Conditions of
Existence in Animals, where a great many instances will be found.

[365] Spalding, Macmillan's Magazine, Feb. 1878, p. 287.

[366] _Ibid._ p. 289.

[367] For the cases in full see Mental Evolution in Animals, pp.
213-317.

[368] Transactions of American Neurological Association, vol. i. p. 129
(1875).

[369] "Mr. Spalding," says Mr. Lewes (Problems of Life and Mind, prob.
i. chap. ii. § 22, note), "tells me of a friend of his who reared a
gosling in the kitchen, away from all water; when this bird was some
months old, and was taken to a pond, it not only refused to go into
the water, but when thrown in scrambled out again, as a hen would
have done. Here was an instinct entirely suppressed." See a similar
observation on ducklings in T. R. R. Stebbing: Essays on Darwinism
(London, 1871), p. 73.

[370] Senses and Intellect. 3d ed. pp. 413-675.

[371] Nature, xii. 507 (1875).

[372] See, for some excellent pedagogic remarks about _doing yourself_
what you want to get your pupils to do, and not simply telling them to
do it: Baumann, Handbuch der Moral (1879), p. 32 ff.

[373] Sympathy has been enormously written about in books on Ethics.
A very good recent chapter is that by Thos. Fowler: The Principles of
Morals, part ii. chap. ii.

[374] "I must now refer to a very general passion which occurs in boys
who are brought up naturally, especially in the country. Everyone knows
what pleasure a boy takes in the sight of a butterfly, fish, crab or
other animal, or of a bird's nest, and what a strong propensity he
has for pulling apart, breaking, opening, and destroying all complex
objects, how he delights in pulling out the wings and legs of flies,
and tormenting one animal or another, how greedy he is to steal secret
dainties, with what irresistible strength the plundering of birds'
nests attracts him without his having the least intention of eating
the eggs or the young birds. This fact has long been familiar, and is
daily remarked by teachers; but an explanation of these impulses which
follow upon a mere perception of the objects, without in most cases
any representation being aroused of a future pleasure to be gained,
has as yet been given by no one, and yet the impulses are very easy
to explain. In many cases it will be said that the boy pulls things
apart from curiosity. Quite correct: but whence comes this curiosity,
this irresistible desire to open everything and see what is inside?
What makes the boy take the eggs from the nest and destroy them when
he never thinks of eating them? These are effects of an hereditary
instinct, so strong that warnings and punishments are unable to
counteract it." (Schneider: Der Menschliche Wille, p. 224. See also Der
Thierische Wille, pp. 180-2.)

[375] It is not surprising, in view of the facts of animal history and
evolution, that the very special object blood should have become the
stimulus for a very special interest and excitement. That the sight of
it should make people faint is strange. Less so that a child who sees
his blood flow should forthwith become much more frightened than by
the mere feeling of the cut. Horned cattle often, though not always,
become furiously excited at the smell of blood. In some abnormal human
beings the sight or thought of it exerts a baleful fascination. "B and
his father were at a neighbor's one evening, and, while paring apples,
the old man accidentally cut his hand so severely as to cause the
blood to flow profusely. B was observed to become restless, nervous,
pale, and to have undergone a peculiar change in demeanor. Taking
advantage of the distraction produced by the accident, B escaped from
the house and proceeded to a neighboring farm-yard, where he cut the
throat of a horse, killing it." Dr. D. H. Tuke, commenting on this
man's case (Journal of Mental Science, October, 1885), speaks of the
influence of blood upon him--his whole life had been one chain of
cowardly atrocities--and continues: "There can be no doubt that with
some individuals it constitutes a fascination.... We might speak of a
_mania sanguinis_. Dr. Savage admitted a man from France into Bethlehem
Hospital some time ago, one of whose earliest symptoms of insanity
was the thirst for blood, which he endeavored to satisfy by going to
an abattoir in Paris. The man whose case I have brought forward had
the same passion for gloating over blood, but had no attack of acute
mania. The sight of blood was distinctly a delight to him, and at any
time blood aroused in him the worst elements of his nature. Instances
will easily be recalled in which murderers, undoubtedly insane, have
described the intense pleasure they experienced in the warm blood of
children."

[376] "Bombonnel, having rolled with a panther to the border of a
ravine, gets his head away from the open mouth of the animal, and by
a prodigious effort rolls her into the abyss. He gets up, blinded,
spitting a mass of blood, not knowing exactly what the situation is.
He thinks only of one thing, that he shall probably die of his wounds,
but that before dying he must take vengeance on the panther. 'I didn't
think of my pain,' he tells us. 'Possessed entirely by the fury with
which I was transported, I drew my hunting-knife, and not understanding
what had become of the beast, I sought for her on every side in order
to continue the struggle. It was in this plight that the Arabs found me
when they arrived.'" (Quoted by Guyan, La Morale sans Obligation, etc.,
p. 210.)

[377] Psychologie de l'Enfant, pp. 72-74. In an account of a young
gorilla quoted from Falkenstein, by R. Hartmann ('Anthropoid Apes,'
International Scientific Series, vol. lii (New York, 1886), p. 265),
it is said: "He very much disliked strange noises. Thunder, the rain
falling on the skylight, and especially the long-drawn note of a
pipe or trumpet, threw him into such agitation us to cause a sudden
affection of the digestive organs, and it became expedient to keep him
at a distance. When he was slightly indisposed, we made use of this
kind of music with results as successful as if we had administered
purgative medicine."

[378] Der Menschliche Wille, p. 224.

[379] Cf. Romanes. Mental Evolution, etc., p. 156.

[380] In the 'Overland Monthly' for 1887, a most interesting article
on Laura Bridgman's writings has been published by Mr. E. C. Sandford.
Among other reminiscences of her early childhood, while she still knew
nothing of the sign-language, the wonderful blind deaf-mute records the
following item in her quaint language: "My father [he was a farmer and
probably did his own butchering] used to enter his kitchen bringing
some killed animals in and deposited them on one of sides of the room
many times. As I perceived it it make me shudder with terror because
I did not know what the matter was. I hated to approach the dead. One
morning I went to take a short walk with my Mother. I went into a snug
house for some time. They took me into a room where there was a coffin.
I put my hand in the coffin & felt something so queer. It frightened
me unpleasantly. I found something dead wrapped in a silk h'd'k'f so
carefully. It must have been a body that had had vitality.... I did not
like to venture to examine the body for I was confounded."

[381] I lately saw a boy of five (who had been told the story of Hector
and Achilles) teaching his younger brother, aged three, how to play
Hector, while he himself should play Achilles, and chase him round the
walls of Troy. Having armed themselves, Achilles advanced, shouting
"Where's my Patroklos?" Whereupon the would-be Hector piped up, quite
distracted from his _rôle_, "Where's my Patroklos? I want a Patroklos!
I want a Patroklos!"--and broke up the game. Of what kind of a thing
a Patroklos might be he had, of course, no notion--enough that his
brother had one for him to claim one too.

[382] In 'The Nation' for September 3, 1886, President G. S. Hall has
given some account of a statistical research on Boston school-boys,
by Miss Wiltse, from which it appears that only nineteen out of two
hundred and twenty-nine had made no collections.

[383] Quoted in Lindsay, 'Mind in Lower Animals,' vol. ii. p. 151.

[384] Cf. Flint, Mind, vol. i. pp. 330-383; Sully, _ibid._ p. 567. Most
people probably have the _impulse_ to keep bits of useless finery, old
tools, pieces of once useful apparatus, etc.; but it is normally either
inhibited at the outset by reflection, or, if yielded to, the objects
soon grow displeasing and are thrown away.

[385] Der Menschliche Wille, p. 205.

[386] Professor Lazarus (Die Reize des Spieles, Berlin, 1883, p. 44)
denies that we have an _instinct_ to play, and says the root of the
matter is the _aversion to remain unoccupied_, which substitutes a
sham occupation when no real one is ready. No doubt this is true; but
why the particular forms of sham occupation? The _elements_ of all
bodily games and of ceremonial games are given by direct excito-motor
stimulations--just as when puppies chase one another and swallows have
a parliament.

[387] Inquiries into Human Faculty, p. 72.

[388] Expression of the Emotions (New York, 1873), p. 330.

[389] "The certainty that we are well dressed," a charming woman has
said, "gives us a peace of heart compared to which that yielded by the
consolations of religion is as nothing."

[390] Thackeray, in his exquisite Roundabout Paper, 'On a Chalk-Mark
on the Door,' says: "You get truth habitually from equals only; so, my
good Mr. Holyshade, don't talk to me about the habitual candor of the
young Etonian of high birth, or I have my own opinion of _your_ candor
or discernment when you do. No. Tom Bowling is the soul of honor, and
has been true to Black-eyed Syousan since the last time they parted
at Wapping Old Stairs; but do you suppose Tom is perfectly frank,
familiar, and above-board in his conversation with Admiral Nelson, K.
C. B.? There are secrets, prevarications, fibs, if you will, between
Tom and the admiral--between your crew (of servants) and _their_
captain. I know I hire a worthy, clean, agreeable, and conscientious
male or female hypocrite at so many guineas a year to do so and so for
me. Were he other than hypocrite, I would send him about his business."

[391] The insane symptom called "mysophobia," or dread of foulness,
which leads a patient to wash his hands perhaps a hundred times a day,
hardly seems explicable without supposing a primitive impulse to clean
one's self of which it is, as it were, the convulsive exaggeration.

[392] "We often find modesty coming in only in the presence of
foreigners, especially of clothed Europeans. Only before these do the
Indian women in Brazil cover themselves with their girdle, only before
these do the women on Timor conceal their bosom. In Australia we find
the same thing happening." (Th. Waitz, Anthropologie der Naturvölker,
vol. i. p 358.) The author gives bibliographical references, which I
omit.

[393] To most of us it is even unpleasant to sit down in a chair still
warm from occupancy by another person's body. To many, hand-shaking is
disagreeable.

[394] Some will, of course, find the list too large, others too small.
With the boundaries of instinct fading into reflex action below, and
into acquired habit or suggested activity above, it is likely that
there will always be controversy about just what to include under the
class-name. Shall we add the propensity to walk along a curbstone, or
any other narrow path, to the list of instincts? Shall we subtract
secretiveness, as due to shyness or to fear? Who knows? Meanwhile
our physiological method has this inestimable advantage, that such
questions of limit have neither theoretical nor practical importance.
The facts once noted, it matters little how they are named. Most
authors give a shorter list than that in the text. The phrenologists
add adhesiveness, inhabitiveness, love of approbation, etc., etc.,
to their list of 'sentiments,' which in the main agree with our list
of instincts. Fortlage, in his System der Psychologie, classes among
the _Triebe_ all the vegetative physiological functions. Santlus (Zur
Psychologie der Menschlichen Triebe, Leipsic, 1864) says there are at
bottom but three instincts, that of 'Being,' that of 'Function,' and
that of 'Life.' The 'Instinct of Being' he subdivides into _animal_,
embracing the activities of all the senses; and _psychical_, embracing
the acts of the intellect and of the 'transempiric consciousness.'
The 'Instinct of Function' he divides into _sexual, inclinational_
(friendship, attachment, honor); and _moral_ (religion, philanthropy,
faith, truth, moral freedom, etc.). The 'Instinct of Life' embraces
_conservation_ (nutrition, motion); _sociability_ (imitation,
juridical and ethical arrangements); and _personal interest_ (love
of independence and freedom, acquisitiveness, self-defence). Such
a muddled list as this shows how great are the advantages of the
physiological analysis we have used.




CHAPTER XXV.[395]

THE EMOTIONS.


In speaking of the instincts it has been impossible to keep them
separate from the emotional excitements which go with them. Objects
of rage, love, fear, etc., not only prompt a man to outward deeds,
but provoke characteristic alterations in his attitude and visage,
and affect his breathing, circulation, and other organic functions
in specific ways. When the outward deeds are inhibited, these latter
emotional expressions still remain, and we read the anger in the face,
though the blow may not be struck, and the fear betrays itself in
voice and color, though one may suppress all other sign. _Instinctive
reactions and emotional expressions thus shade imperceptibly into
each other. Every object that excites an instinct excites an emotion
as well._ Emotions, however, fall short of instincts, in that the
emotional reaction usually terminates in the subject's own body, whilst
the instinctive reaction is apt to go farther and enter into practical
relations with the exciting object.

Emotional reactions are often excited by objects with which we have no
practical dealings. A ludicrous object, for example, or a beautiful
object are not necessarily objects to which we _do_ anything; we
simply laugh, or stand in admiration, as the case may be. The class of
emotional, is thus rather larger than that of instinctive, impulses,
commonly so called. Its stimuli are more numerous, and its expressions
are more internal and delicate, and often less practical. The
physiological plan and essence of the two classes of impulse, however,
is the same.

As with instincts, so with emotions, the mere memory or imagination of
the object may suffice to liberate the excitement. One may get angrier
in thinking over one's insult than at the moment of receiving it; and
we melt more over a mother who is dead than we ever did when she was
living. In the rest of the chapter I shall use the word _object_ of
emotion indifferently to mean one which is physically present or one
which is merely thought of.

It would be tedious to go through a complete list of the reactions
which characterize the various emotions. For that the special treatises
must be referred to. A few examples of their variety, however, ought to
find a place here. Let me begin with the manifestations of Grief as a
Danish physiologist, C. Lange, describes them:[396]

 "The chief feature in the physiognomy of grief is perhaps its
 paralyzing effect on the voluntary movements. This effect is by no
 means as extreme as that which fright produces, being seldom more than
 that degree of weakening which makes it cost an effort to perform
 actions usually done with ease. It is, in other words, a feeling
 of weariness; and (as in all weariness) movements are made slowly,
 heavily, without strength, unwillingly, and with exertion, and are
 limited to the fewest possible. By this the grieving person gets
 his outward stamp: he walks slowly, unsteadily, dragging his feet
 and hanging his arms. His voice is weak and without resonance, in
 consequence of the feeble activity of the muscles of expiration and
 of the larynx. He prefers to sit still, sunk in himself and silent.
 The tonicity or 'latent innervation' of the muscles is strikingly
 diminished. The neck is bent, the head hangs ('bowed down' with
 grief), the relaxation of the cheek- and jaw-muscles makes the face
 look long and narrow, the jaw may even hang open. The eyes appear
 large, as is always the case where the _orbicularis_ muscle is
 paralyzed, but they may often be partly covered by the upper lid which
 droops in consequence of the laming of its own _levator_. With this
 condition of weakness of the voluntary nerve- and muscle-apparatus of
 the whole body, there coexists, as aforesaid, just as in all states
 of similar motor weakness, a subjective feeling of weariness and
 heaviness, of something which weighs upon one; one feels 'downcast,'
 'oppressed,' 'laden,' one speaks of his 'weight of sorrow,' one
 must 'bear up' under it, just as one must 'keep down' his anger.
 Many there are who 'succumb' to sorrow to such a degree that they
 literally cannot stand upright, but sink or lean against surrounding
 objects, fall on their knees, or, like Romeo in the monk's cell, throw
 themselves upon the earth in their despair.

 "But this weakness of the entire voluntary motor apparatus (the
 so-called apparatus of 'animal' life) is only one side of the
 physiology of grief. Another side, hardly less important, and in its
 consequences perhaps even more so, belongs to another subdivision of
 the motor apparatus, namely, the involuntary or 'organic' muscles,
 especially those which are found in the walls of the blood-vessels,
 and the use of which is, by contracting, to diminish the latter's
 calibre. These muscles and their nerves, forming together the
 'vaso-motor apparatus,' act in grief contrarily to the voluntary
 motor apparatus. Instead of being paralyzed, like the latter, the
 vascular muscles are more strongly contracted than usual, so that
 the tissues and organs of the body become anæmic. The immediate
 consequence of this bloodlessness is pallor and shrunkenness, and the
 pale color and collapsed features are the peculiarities which, in
 connection with the relaxation of the visage, give to the victim of
 grief his characteristic physiognomy, and often give an impression
 of emaciation which ensues too rapidly to be possibly due to real
 disturbance of nutrition, or waste uncompensated by repair. Another
 regular consequence of the bloodlessness of the skin is a feeling of
 cold, and shivering. A constant symptom of grief is sensitiveness
 to cold, and difficulty in keeping warm. In grief, the inner organs
 are unquestionably anæmic as well as the skin. This is of course
 not obvious to the eye, but many phenomena prove it. Such is the
 diminution of the various secretions, at least of such as are
 accessible to observation. The mouth grows dry, the tongue sticky, and
 a bitter taste ensues which, it would appear, is only a consequence
 of the tongue's dryness. [The expression 'bitter sorrow' may possibly
 arise from this.] In nursing women the milk diminishes or altogether
 dries up. There is one of the most regular manifestations of grief,
 which apparently contradicts these other physiological phenomena, and
 that is the weeping, with its profuse secretion of tears, its swollen
 reddened face, red eyes, and augmented secretion from the nasal mucous
 membrane."

Lange goes on to suggest that this may be a reaction from a previously
contracted vaso-motor state. The explanation seems a forced one. The
fact is that there are changeable expressions of grief. The weeping is
as apt as not to be immediate, especially in women and children. Some
men can never weep. The tearful and the dry phases alternate in all who
can weep, sobbing storms being followed by periods of calm; and the
shrunken, cold, and pale condition which Lange describes so well is
more characteristic of a severe settled sorrow than of an acute mental
pain. Properly we have two distinct emotions here, both prompted by the
same object, it is true, but affecting different persons, or the same
person at different times, and _feeling_ quite differently whilst they
last, as anyone's consciousness will testify. There is an excitement
during the crying fit which is not without a certain pungent pleasure
of its own; but it would take a genius for felicity to discover
any dash of redeeming quality in the feeling of dry and shrunken
sorrow.--Our author continues:

 "If the smaller vessels of the lungs contract so that these organs
 become anæmic, we have (as is usual under such conditions) the feeling
 of insufficient breath, and of oppression of the chest, and these
 tormenting sensations increase the sufferings of the griever, who
 seeks relief by long-drawn sighs, instinctively, like every one who
 lacks breath from whatever cause.[397]

 "The anæmia of the brain in grief is shown by intellectual inertia,
 dullness, a feeling of mental weariness, effort, and indisposition to
 work, often by sleeplessness. Indeed it is the anæmia of the motor
 centres of the brain which lies at the bottom of all that weakening
 of the voluntary powers of motion which we described in the first
 instance."

My impression is that Dr. Lange simplifies and universalizes the
phenomena a little too much in this description, and in particular that
he very likely overdoes the anæmia-business. But such as it is, his
account may stand as a favorable specimen of the sort of descriptive
work to which the emotions have given rise.

Take next another emotion, Fear, and read what Mr. Darwin says of its
effects:

 "Fear is often preceded by astonishment, and is so far akin to it
 that both lead to the senses of sight and hearing being instantly
 aroused. In both cases the eyes and mouth are widely opened and the
 eyebrows raised. The frightened man at first stands like a statue,
 motionless and breathless, or crouches down as if instinctively to
 escape observation. The heart beats quickly and violently, so that it
 palpitates or knocks against the ribs; but it is very doubtful if it
 then works more efficiently than usual, so as to send a greater supply
 of blood to all parts of the body; for the skin instantly becomes pale
 as during incipient faintness. This paleness of the surface, however,
 is probably in large part, or is exclusively, due to the vaso-motor
 centre being affected in such a manner as to cause the contraction of
 the small arteries of the skin. That the skin is much affected under
 the sense of great fear, we see in the marvellous manner in which
 perspiration immediately exudes from it. This exudation is all the
 more remarkable, as the surface is then cold, and hence the term, a
 cold sweat; whereas the sudorific glands are properly excited into
 action when the surface is heated. The hairs also on the skin stand
 erect, and the superficial muscles shiver. In connection with the
 disturbed action of the heart the breathing is hurried. The salivary
 glands act imperfectly; the mouth becomes dry and is often opened
 and shut. I have also noticed that under slight fear there is strong
 tendency to yawn. One of the best marked symptoms is the trembling of
 all the muscles of the body; and this is often first seen in the lips.
 From this cause, and from the dryness of the mouth, the voice becomes
 husky or indistinct or may altogether fail. 'Obstupui steteruntque
 comæ, et vox faucibus hæsit.'... As fear increases into an agony of
 terror, we behold, as under all violent emotions, diversified results.
 The heart beats wildly or must fail to act and faintness ensue; there
 is a death-like pallor; the breathing is labored; the wings of the
 nostrils are widely dilated; there is a gasping and convulsive motion
 of the lips, a tremor on the hollow cheek, a gulping and catching of
 the throat; the uncovered and protruding eyeballs are fixed on the
 object of terror; or they may roll restlessly from side to side, _huc
 illuc volens oculos totumque pererrat_. The pupils are said to be
 enormously dilated. All the muscles of the body may become rigid or
 may be thrown into convulsive movements. The hands are alternately
 clenched and opened, often with a twitching movement. The arms may
 be protruded as if to avert some dreadful danger, or may be thrown
 wildly over the head. The Rev. Mr. Hagenauer has seen this latter
 action in a terrified Australian. In other cases there is a sudden and
 uncontrollable tendency to headlong flight; and so strong is this that
 the boldest soldiers may be seized with a sudden panic."[398]

Finally take Hatred, and read the synopsis of its possible effects as
given by Sig. Mantegazza:[399]

 "Withdrawal of the head backwards, withdrawal of the trunk; projection
 forwards of the hands, as if to defend one's self against the hated
 object; contraction or closure of the eyes; elevation of the upper
 lip and closure of the nose,--these are all elementary movements of
 turning away. Next threatening movements, as: intense frowning; eyes
 wide open; display of teeth; grinding teeth and contracting jaws;
 opened mouth with tongue advanced: clenched fists; threatening action
 of arms; stamping with the feet; deep inspirations--panting; growling
 and various cries; automatic repetition of one word or syllable;
 sudden weakness and trembling of voice; spitting. Finally, various
 miscellaneous reactions and vaso-motor symptoms: general trembling;
 convulsions of lips and facial muscles, of limbs and of trunk; acts of
 violence to one's self, as biting fist or nails; sardonic laughter;
 bright redness of face; sudden pallor of face; extreme dilatation of
 nostrils; standing up of hair on head."

Were we to go through the whole list of emotions which have been
named by men, and study their organic manifestations, we should but
ring the changes on the elements which these three typical cases
involve. Rigidity of this muscle, relaxation of that, constriction
of arteries here, dilatation there, breathing of this sort or that,
pulse slowing or quickening, this gland secreting and that one dry,
etc., etc. We should, moreover, find that our descriptions had no
absolute truth; that they only applied to the average man; that every
one of us, almost, has some personal idiosyncrasy of expression,
laughing or sobbing differently from his neighbor, or reddening or
growing pale where others do not. We should find a like variation in
the objects which excite emotion in different persons. Jokes at which
one explodes with laughter nauseate another, and seem blasphemous to
a third; and occasions which overwhelm me with fear or bashfulness
are just what give you the full sense of ease and power. The internal
shadings of emotional feeling, moreover, merge endlessly into each
other. Language has discriminated some of them, as hatred, antipathy,
animosity, dislike, aversion, malice, spite, vengefulness, abhorrence,
etc., etc.; but in the dictionaries of synonyms we find these feelings
distinguished more by their severally appropriate objective stimuli
than by their conscious or subjective tone.

The result of all this flux is that the merely descriptive literature
of the emotions is one of the most tedious parts of psychology. And
not only is it tedious, but you feel that its subdivisions are to a
great extent either fictitious or unimportant, and that its pretences
to accuracy are a sham. But unfortunately there is little psychological
writing about the emotions which is not merely descriptive. As
emotions are described in novels, they interest us, for we are made
to share them. We have grown acquainted with the concrete objects
and emergencies which call them forth, and any knowing touch of
introspection which may grace the page meets with a quick and feeling
response. Confessedly literary works of aphoristic philosophy also
flash lights into our emotional life, and give us a fitful delight. But
as far as "scientific psychology" of the emotions goes, I may have been
surfeited by too much reading of classic works on the subject, but I
should as lief read verbal descriptions of the shapes of the rocks on
a New Hampshire farm as toil through them again. They give one nowhere
a central point of view, or a deductive or generative principle. They
distinguish and refine and specify _in infinitum_, without ever getting
on to another logical level. Whereas the beauty of all truly scientific
work is to get to ever deeper levels. Is there no way out from this
level of individual description in the case of the emotions? I believe
there is a way out, but I fear that few will take it.

The trouble with the emotions in psychology is that they are regarded
too much as absolutely individual things. So long as they are set down
as so many eternal and sacred psychic entities, like the old immutable
species in natural history, so long all that _can_ be done with them
is reverently to catalogue their separate characters, points, and
effects. But if we regard them as products of more general causes (as
'species' are now regarded as products of heredity and variation), the
mere distinguishing and cataloguing becomes of subsidiary importance.
Having the goose which lays the golden eggs, the description of each
egg already laid is a minor matter. Now the general causes of the
emotions are indubitably physiological. Prof. O. Lange, of Copenhagen,
in the pamphlet from which I have already quoted, published in 1885
a physiological theory of their constitution and conditioning, which
I had already broached the previous year in an article in Mind.
None of the criticisms which I have heard of it have made me doubt
its essential truth. I will therefore devote the next few pages to
explaining what it is. I shall limit myself in the first instance to
what may be called the _coarser_ emotions, grief, fear, rage, love,
in which every one recognizes a strong organic reverberation, and
afterwards speak of the _subtler_ emotions, or of those whose organic
reverberation is less obvious and strong.


EMOTION FOLLOWS UPON THE BODILY EXPRESSION IN THE COARSER EMOTIONS AT
LEAST.


Our natural way of thinking about these coarser emotions is that the
mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called
the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the
bodily expression. My theory, on the contrary, is that _the bodily
changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that
our feeling of the same changes as they occur_ IS _the emotion_.
Common-sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a
bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry
and strike. The hypothesis here to be defended says that this order of
sequence is incorrect, that the one mental state is not immediately
induced by the other, that the bodily manifestations must first be
interposed between, and that the more rational statement is that we
feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because
we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are
sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be. Without the bodily states
following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in
form, pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth. We might then
see the bear, and judge it best to run, receive the insult and deem it
right to strike, but we should not actually _feel_ afraid or angry.

Stated in this crude way, the hypothesis is pretty sure to meet
with immediate disbelief. And yet neither many nor far-fetched
considerations are required to mitigate its paradoxical character, and
possibly to produce conviction of its truth.

To begin with, no reader of the last two chapters will be inclined
to doubt the fact that _objects do excite bodily changes_ by a
preorganized mechanism, or the farther fact that _the changes are
so indefinitely numerous and subtle that the entire organism may be
called a sounding-board_, which every change of consciousness, however
slight, may make reverberate. The various permutations and combinations
of which these organic activities are susceptible make it abstractly
possible that no shade of emotion, however slight, should be without
a bodily reverberation as unique, when taken in its totality, as is
the mental mood itself. The immense number of parts modified in each
emotion is what makes it so difficult for us to reproduce in cold blood
the total and integral expression of any one of them. We may catch
the trick with the voluntary muscles, but fail with the skin, glands,
heart, and other viscera. Just as an artificially imitated sneeze lacks
something of the reality, so the attempt to imitate an emotion in the
absence of its normal instigating cause is apt to be rather 'hollow.'

The next thing to be noticed is this, that _every one of the bodily
changes, whatsoever it be, is_ FELT, _acutely or obscurely, the moment
it occurs._ If the reader has never paid attention to this matter, he
will be both interested and astonished to learn how many different
local bodily feelings he can detect in himself as characteristic of his
various emotional moods. It would be perhaps too much to expect him to
arrest the tide of any strong gust of passion for the sake of any such
curious analysis as this; but he can observe more tranquil states, and
that may be assumed here to be true of the greater which is shown to
be true of the less. Our whole cubic capacity is sensibly alive; and
each morsel of it contributes its pulsations of feeling, dim or sharp,
pleasant, painful, or dubious, to that sense of personality that every
one of us unfailingly carries with him. It is surprising what little
items give accent to these complexes of sensibility. When worried
by any slight trouble, one may find that the focus of one's bodily
consciousness is the contraction, often quite inconsiderable, of the
eyes and brows. When momentarily embarrassed, it is something in the
pharynx that compels either a swallow, a clearing of the throat, or a
slight cough; and so on for as many more instances as might be named.
Our concern here being with the general view rather than with the
details, I will not linger to discuss these, but, assuming the point
admitted that every change that occurs must be felt, I will pass on.

I now proceed to urge the vital point of my whole theory, which is
this: _If we fancy some strong emotion, and then try to abstract from
our consciousness of it all the feelings of its bodily symptoms, we
find we have nothing left behind,_ no 'mind-stuff' out of which the
emotion can be constituted, and that a cold and neutral state of
intellectual perception is all that remains. It is true that, although
most people when asked say that their introspection verifies this
statement, some persist in saying theirs does not. Many cannot be made
to understand the question. When you beg them to imagine away every
feeling of laughter and of tendency to laugh from their consciousness
of the ludicrousness of an object, and then to tell you what the
feeling of its ludicrousness would be like, whether it be anything more
than the perception that the object belongs to the class 'funny,'
they persist in replying that the thing proposed is a physical
impossibility, and that they always _must_ laugh if they see a funny
object. Of course the task proposed is not the practical one of seeing
a ludicrous object and annihilating one's tendency to laugh. It is the
purely speculative one of subtracting certain elements of feeling from
an emotional state supposed to exist in its fulness, and saying what
the residual elements are. I cannot help thinking that all who rightly
apprehend this problem will agree with the proposition above laid down.
What kind of an emotion of fear would be left if the feeling neither of
quickened heart-beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling
lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of goose-flesh nor of visceral
stirrings, were present, it is quite impossible for me to think. Can
one fancy the state of rage and picture no ebullition in the chest,
no flushing of the face, no dilatation of the nostrils, no clenching
of the teeth, no impulse to vigorous action, but in their stead limp
muscles, calm breathing, and a placid face? The present writer, for
one, certainly cannot. The rage is as completely evaporated as the
sensation of its so-called manifestations, and the only thing that
can possibly be supposed to take its place is some cold-blooded and
dispassionate judicial sentence, confined entirely to the intellectual
realm, to the effect that a certain person or persons merit
chastisement for their sins. In like manner of grief: what would it be
without its tears, its sobs, its suffocation of the heart, its pang in
the breast-bone? A feelingless cognition that certain circumstances
are deplorable, and nothing more. Every passion in turn tells the
same story. A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity. I do
not say that it is a contradiction in the nature of things, or that
pure spirits are necessarily condemned to cold intellectual lives;
but I say that for _us_, emotion dissociated from all bodily feeling
is inconceivable. The more closely I scrutinize my states, the more
persuaded I become that whatever moods, affections, and passions I have
are in very truth constituted by, and made up of, those bodily changes
which we ordinarily call their expression or consequence; and the more
it seems to me that if I were to become corporeally anæsthetic, I
should be excluded from the life of the affections, harsh and tender
alike, and drag out an existence of merely cognitive or intellectual
form. Such an existence, although it seems to have been the ideal of
ancient sages, is too apathetic to be keenly sought after by those born
after the revival of the worship of sensibility, a few generations ago.

Let not this view be called materialistic. It is neither more nor
less materialistic than any other view which says that our emotions
are conditioned by nervous processes. No reader of this book is
likely to rebel against such a saying so long as it is expressed
in general terms; and if any one still finds materialism in the
thesis now defended, that must be because of the special processes
invoked. They are _sensational_ processes, processes due to inward
currents set up by physical happenings. Such processes have, it is
true, always been regarded by the platonizers in psychology as having
something peculiarly base about them. But our emotions must always be
_inwardly_ what they are, whatever be the physiological ground of their
apparition. If they are deep, pure, worthy, spiritual facts on any
conceivable theory of their physiological source, they remain no less
deep, pure, spiritual, and worthy of regard on this present sensational
theory. They carry their own inner measure of worth with them; and
it is just as logical to use the present theory of the emotions for
proving that sensational processes need not be vile and material, as to
use their vileness and materiality as a proof that such a theory cannot
be true.

If such a theory is true, then each emotion is the resultant of a sum
of elements, and each element is caused by a physiological process of a
sort already well known. The elements are all organic changes, and each
of them is the reflex effect of the exciting object. Definite questions
now immediately arise--questions very different from those which were
the only possible ones without this view. Those were questions of
classification: "Which are the proper genera of emotion, and which the
species under each?" or of description: "By what expression is each
emotion characterized?" The questions now are _causal_: "Just what
changes does this object and what changes does that object excite?"
and "How come they to excite these particular changes and not others?"
We step from a superficial to a deep order of inquiry. Classification
and description are the lowest stage of science. They sink into the
background the moment questions of genesis are formulated, and remain
important only so far as they facilitate our answering these. Now the
moment the genesis of an emotion is accounted for, as the arousal
by an object of a lot of reflex acts which are forthwith felt, _we
immediately see why there is no limit to the number of possible
different emotions which may exist, and why the emotions of different
individuals may vary indefinitely,_ both as to their constitution and
as to objects which call them forth. For there is nothing sacramental
or eternally fixed in reflex action. Any sort of reflex effect is
possible, and reflexes actually vary indefinitely, as we know.

 "We have all seen men dumb, instead of talkative, with joy; we have
 seen fright drive the blood into the head of its victim, instead of
 making him pale; we have seen grief run restlessly about lamenting,
 instead of sitting bowed down and mute; etc., etc., and this naturally
 enough, for one and the same cause can work differently on different
 men's blood-vessels (since these do not always react alike), whilst
 moreover the impulse on its way through the brain to the vaso-motor
 centre is differently influenced by different earlier impressions in
 the form of recollections or associations of ideas."[400]

In short, _any classification of the emotions is seen to be as true and
as 'natural' as any other,_ if it only serves some purpose; and such a
question as "What is the 'real' or 'typical' expression of anger, or
fear?" is seen to have no objective meaning at all. Instead of it we
now have the question as to how any given 'expression' of anger or fear
may have come to exist; and that is a real question of physiological
mechanics on the one hand, and of history on the other, which (like all
real questions) is in essence answerable, although the answer may be
hard to find. On a later page I shall mention the attempts to answer it
which have been made.


DIFFICULTY OF TESTING THE THEORY EXPERIMENTALLY.


I have thus fairly propounded what seems to me the most fruitful way
of conceiving of the emotions. It must be admitted that it is so far
only a hypothesis, only _possibly_ a true conception, and that much is
lacking to its definite proof. The only way coercively to _dis_prove
it, however, would be to take some emotion, and then exhibit qualities
of feeling in it which should be _demonstrably_ additional to all those
which could possibly be derived from the organs affected at the time.
But to detect with certainty such purely spiritual qualities of feeling
would obviously be a task beyond human power. We have, as Professor
Lange says, absolutely no immediate criterion by which to distinguish
between spiritual and corporeal feelings; and, I may add, the more we
sharpen our introspection, the more _localized_ all our qualities of
feeling become (see above, Vol. I. p. 300) and the more difficult the
discrimination consequently grows.[401]

A positive proof of the theory would, on the other hand, be given if
we could find a subject absolutely anæsthetic inside and out, but not
paralytic, so that emotion-inspiring objects might evoke the usual
bodily expressions from him, but who, on being consulted, should say
that no subjective emotional affection was felt. Such a man would be
like one who, because he eats, appears to bystanders to be hungry, but
who afterwards confesses that he had no appetite at all. Cases like
this are extremely hard to find. Medical literature contains reports,
so far as I know, of but three. In the famous one of Remigius Leins no
mention is made by the reporters of his emotional condition. In Dr.
G. Winter's case[402] the patient is said to be inert and phlegmatic,
but no particular attention, as I learn from Dr. W., was paid to his
psychic condition. In the extraordinary case reported by Professor
Strümpell (to which I must refer later in another connection)[403] we
read that the patient, a shoemaker's apprentice of fifteen, entirely
anæsthetic, inside and out, with the exception of one eye and one ear,
had shown _shame_ on the occasion of soiling his bed, and _grief_, when
a formerly favorite dish was set before him, at the thought that he
could no longer taste its flavor. Dr. Strümpell is also kind enough to
inform me that he manifested _surprise, fear,_ and _anger_ on certain
occasions. In observing him, however, no such theory as the present one
seems to have been thought of; and it always remains possible that,
just as he satisfied his natural appetites and necessities in cold
blood, with no inward feeling, so his emotional expressions may have
been accompanied by a quite cold heart.[404] Any new case which turns
up of generalized anæsthesia ought to be carefully examined as to the
inward emotional sensibility as distinct from the 'expressions' of
emotion which circumstances may bring forth.


_Objections Considered_.


Let me now notice a few objections. The replies will make the theory
still more plausible.

_First Objection_. There is no real evidence, it may be said, for the
assumption that particular perceptions _do_ produce wide-spread bodily
effects by a sort of immediate physical influence, antecedent to the
arousal of an emotion or emotional idea.

_Reply._ There is most assuredly such evidence. In listening to
poetry, drama, or heroic narrative we are often surprised at the
cutaneous shiver which like a sudden wave flows over us, and at the
heart-swelling and the lachrymal effusion that unexpectedly catch us at
intervals. In listening to music the same is even more strikingly true.
If we abruptly see a dark moving form in the woods, our heart stops
beating, and we catch our breath instantly and before any articulate
idea of danger can arise. If our friend goes near to the edge of a
precipice, we get the well-known feeling of 'all-overishness,' and we
shrink back, although we positively _know_ him to be safe, and have
no distinct imagination of his fall. The writer well remembers his
astonishment, when a boy of seven or eight, at fainting when he saw
a horse bled. The blood was in a bucket, with a stick in it, and, if
memory does not deceive him, he stirred it round and saw it drip from
the stick with no feeling save that of childish curiosity. Suddenly the
world grew black before his eyes, his ears began to buzz, and he knew
no more. He had never heard of the sight of blood producing faintness
or sickness, and he had so little repugnance to it, and so little
apprehension of any other sort of danger from it, that even at that
tender age, as he well remembers, he could not help wondering how the
mere physical presence of a pailful of crimson fluid could occasion in
him such formidable bodily effects.

Professor Lange writes:

 "No one has ever thought of separating the emotion produced by an
 unusually loud sound from the true inward affections. No one hesitates
 to call it a sort of fright, and it shows the ordinary signs of
 fright. And yet it is by no means combined with the idea of danger,
 or in any way occasioned by associations, memories, or other mental
 processes. The phenomena of flight follow the noise immediately
 without a trace of 'spiritual' fear. Many men can never grow used to
 standing beside a cannon when it is fired off, although they perfectly
 know that there is danger neither for themselves nor for others--the
 bare sound is too much for them."[405]

Imagine two steel knife-blades with their keen edges crossing each
other at right angles, and moving to and fro. Our whole nervous
organization is 'on-edge' at the thought; and yet what emotion can be
there except the unpleasant nervous feeling itself, or the dread that
more of it may come? The entire fund and capital of the emotion here
is the senseless bodily effect which the blades immediately arouse.
This case is typical of a class: where an ideal emotion seems to
precede the bodily symptoms, it is often nothing but an anticipation
of the symptoms themselves. One who has already fainted at the sight
of blood may witness the preparations for a surgical operation with
uncontrollable heart-sinking and anxiety. He anticipates certain
feelings, and the anticipation precipitates their arrival. In cases
of morbid terror the subjects often confess that what possesses them
seems, more than anything, to be fear of the fear itself. In the
various forms of what Professor Bain calls 'tender emotion,' although
the appropriate object must usually be directly contemplated before the
emotion can be aroused, yet sometimes thinking of the symptoms of the
emotion itself may have the same effect. In sentimental natures the
thought of 'yearning' will produce real 'yearning.' And, not to speak
of coarser examples, a mother's imagination of the caresses she bestows
on her child may arouse a spasm of parental longing.

In such cases as these we see plainly how the emotion both begins and
ends with what we call its effects or manifestations. It has no mental
_status_ except as either the vivid feeling of the manifestations, or
the idea of them; and the latter thus constitute its entire material,
and sum and substance. And these cases ought to make us see how in all
cases the feeling of the manifestations may play a much deeper part in
the constitution of the emotion than we are wont to suppose.

       *       *       *       *       *

The best proof that the immediate cause of emotion is a physical effect
on the nerves is furnished by _those pathological cases in which the
emotion is objectless_. One of the chief merits, in fact, of the view
which I propose seems to be that we can so easily formulate by its
means pathological cases and normal cases under a common scheme. In
every asylum we find examples of absolutely unmotived fear, anger,
melancholy, or conceit; and others of an equally unmotived apathy which
persists in spite of the best of outward reasons why it should give
way. In the former cases we must suppose the nervous machinery to be
so 'labile' in some one emotional direction that almost every stimulus
(however inappropriate) causes it to upset in that way, and to engender
the particular complex of feelings of which the psychic body of the
emotion consists. Thus, to take one special instance, if inability to
draw deep breath, fluttering of the heart, and that peculiar epigastric
change felt as 'precordial anxiety,' with an irresistible tendency to
take a somewhat crouching attitude and to sit still, and with perhaps
other visceral processes not now known, all spontaneously occur
together in a certain person; his feeling of their combination _is_ the
emotion of dread, and he is the victim of what is known as morbid fear.
A friend who has had occasional attacks of this most distressing of
all maladies tells me that in his case the whole drama seems to centre
about the region of the heart and respiratory apparatus, that his main
effort during the attacks is to get control of his inspirations and to
slow his heart, and that the moment he attains to breathing deeply and
to holding himself erect, the dread, _ipso facto_, seems to depart.[406]

The emotion here is nothing but the feeling of a bodily state, and it
has a purely bodily cause.

 "All physicians who have been much engaged in general practice have
 seen cases of dyspepsia in which constant low spirits and occasional
 attacks of terror rendered the patient's condition pitiable in the
 extreme. I have observed these cases often, and have watched them
 closely, and I have never seen greater suffering of any kind than
 I have witnessed during these attacks.... Thus, a man is suffering
 from what we call nervous dyspepsia. Some day, we will suppose in the
 middle of the afternoon, without any warning or visible cause, one
 of these attacks of terror comes on. The first thing the man feels
 is great but vague discomfort. Then he notices that his heart is
 beating much too violently. At the same time shocks or flashes as of
 electrical discharges, so violent as to be almost painful, pass one
 after another through his body and limbs. Then in a few minutes he
 falls into a condition of the most intense fear. He is not afraid of
 anything; he is simply afraid. His mind is perfectly clear. He looks
 for a cause of his wretched condition, but sees none. Presently his
 terror is such that he trembles violently and utters low moans; his
 body is damp with perspiration; his mouth is perfectly dry; and at
 this stage there are no tears in his eyes, though his suffering is
 intense. When the climax of the attack is reached and passed, there
 is a copious flow of tears, or else a mental condition in which
 the person weeps upon the least provocation. At this stage a large
 quantity of pale urine is passed. Then the heart's action becomes
 again normal, and the attack passes off."[407]

Again:

 "There are outbreaks of rage so groundless and unbridled that all
 must admit them to be expressions of disease. For the medical layman
 hardly anything can be more instructive than the observation of such a
 pathological attack of rage, especially when it presents itself pure
 and unmixed with other psychical disturbances. This happens in that
 rather rare disease named transitory mania. The patient predisposed
 to this--otherwise an entirely reasonable person--will be attacked
 suddenly without the slightest outward provocation, and thrown (to
 use the words of the latest writer on the subject, O. Schwartzer,
 Die transitorische Tobsucht, Wien, 1880), 'into a paroxysm of the
 wildest rage, with a fearful and blindly furious impulse to do
 violence and destroy.' He flies at those about him; strikes, kicks,
 and throttles whomever he can catch; dashes every object about which
 he can lay his hands on; breaks and crushes what is near him; tears
 his clothes; shouts, howls, and roars, with eyes that flash and roll,
 and shows meanwhile all those symptoms of vaso-motor congestion which
 we have learned to know as the concomitants of anger. His face is
 red, swollen, his cheeks hot, his eyes protuberant and their whites
 bloodshot, the heart beats violently, the pulse marks 100-120 strokes
 a minutes. The arteries of the neck are full and pulsating, the veins
 are swollen, the saliva flows. The fit lasts only a few hours, and
 ends suddenly with a sleep of from 8 to 12 hours, on waking from which
 the patient has entirely forgotten what has happened."[408]

In these (outwardly) causeless emotional conditions the particular
paths which are explosive are discharged by any and every incoming
sensation. Just as, when we are seasick, every smell, every taste,
every sound, every sight, every movement, every sensible experience
whatever, augments our nausea, so the morbid terror or anger is
increased by each and every sensation which stirs up the nerve-centres.
Absolute quiet is the only treatment for the time. It seems impossible
not to admit that in all this the bodily condition takes the lead, and
that the mental emotion follows. The _intellect_ may, in fact, be so
little affected as to play the cold-blooded spectator all the while,
and note the absence of a real object for the emotion.[409]

A few words from Henle may close my reply to this first objection:

 "Does it not seem as if the excitations of the bodily nerves met
 the ideas half way, in order to raise the latter to the height of
 emotions? [Note how justly this expresses our theory!] That they do
 so is proved by the cases in which particular nerves, when specially
 irritable, share in the emotion and determine its quality. When one is
 suffering from an open wound, any grievous or horrid spectacle will
 cause pain in the wound. In sufferers from heart-disease there is
 developed a psychic excitability, which is often incomprehensible to
 the patients themselves, but which comes from the heart's liability to
 palpitate. I said that the very quality of the emotion is determined
 by the organs disposed to participate in it. Just as surely as a dark
 foreboding, rightly grounded on inference from the constellations,
 will be accompanied by a feeling of oppression in the chest, so
 surely will a similar feeling of oppression, when due to disease of
 the thoracic organs, be accompanied by groundless forebodings. So
 small a thing as a bubble of air rising from the stomach through
 the œsophagus, and loitering on its way a few minutes and exerting
 pressure on the heart, is able during sleep to occasion a nightmare,
 and during waking to produce a vague anxiety. On the other hand, we
 see that joyous thoughts dilate our blood-vessels, and that a suitable
 quantity of wine, because it dilates the vessels, also disposes us to
 joyous thoughts. If both the jest and the wine work together, they
 supplement each other in producing the emotional effect, and our
 demands on the jest are the more modest in proportion as the wine
 takes upon itself a larger part of the task."[410]

       *       *       *       *       *

_Second Objection._ If our theory be true, a necessary corollary of
it ought to be this: that any voluntary and cold-blooded arousal of
the so-called manifestations of a special emotion ought to give us the
emotion itself. Now this (the objection says) is not found to be the
case. An actor can perfectly simulate an emotion and yet be inwardly
cold; and we can all pretend to cry and not feel grief; and feign
laughter without being amused.

_Reply._ In the majority of emotions this test is inapplicable;
for many of the manifestations are in organs over which we have no
voluntary control. Few people in pretending to cry can shed real tears,
for example. But, within the limits in which it can be verified,
experience corroborates rather than disproves the corollary from our
theory, upon which the present objection rests. Every one knows how
panic is increased by flight, and how the giving way to the symptoms of
grief or anger increases those passions themselves. Each fit of sobbing
makes the sorrow more acute, and calls forth another fit stronger
still, until at last repose only ensues with lassitude and with the
apparent exhaustion of the machinery. In rage, it is notorious how we
'work ourselves up' to a climax by repeated outbreaks of expression.
Refuse to express a passion, and it dies. Count ten before venting
your anger, and its occasion seems ridiculous. Whistling to keep up
courage is no mere figure of speech. On the other hand, sit all day
in a moping posture, sigh, and reply to everything with a dismal
voice, and your melancholy lingers. There is no more valuable precept
in moral education than this, as all who have experience know: if we
wish to conquer undesirable emotional tendencies in ourselves, we must
assiduously, and in the first instance cold-bloodedly, go through the
_outward movements_ of those contrary dispositions which we prefer
to cultivate. The reward of persistency will infallibly come, in the
fading out of the sullenness or depression, and the advent of real
cheerfulness and kindliness in their stead. Smooth the brow, brighten
the eye, contract the dorsal rather than the ventral aspect of the
frame, and speak in a major key, pass the genial compliment, and your
heart must be frigid indeed if it do not gradually thaw!

This is recognized by all psychologists, only they fail to see its full
import. Professor Bain writes, for example:

 "We find that a feeble [emotional] wave... is suspended inwardly by
 being arrested outwardly; the currents of the brain and the agitation
 of the centres die away if the external vent is resisted at every
 point. It is by such restraint that we are in the habit of suppressing
 pity, anger, fear, pride--on many trifling occasions. If so, it is a
 fact that the suppression of the actual movements has a tendency to
 suppress the nervous currents that incite them, so that the external
 quiescence is followed by the internal. The effect would not happen in
 any case _if there were not some dependence of the cerebral wave upon
 the free outward vent or manifestation_.... By the same interposition
 we may summon up a dormant feeling. By acting out the external
 manifestations, we gradually infect the nerves leading to them,
 and finally waken up the diffusive current by a sort of action _ab
 extra_.... Thus it is that we are sometimes able to assume a cheerful
 tone of mind by forcing a hilarious expression."[411]

We have a mass of other testimony of similar effect. Burke, in his
treatise on the Sublime and Beautiful, writes as follows of the
physiognomist Campanella:

 "This man, it seems, had not only made very accurate observations on
 human faces, but was very expert in mimicking such as were in any way
 remarkable. When he had a mind to penetrate into the inclinations of
 those he had to deal with, he composed his face, his gesture, and
 his whole body, as nearly as he could, into the exact similitude of
 the person he intended to examine; and then carefully observed what
 turn of mind he seemed to acquire by the change. So that, says my
 author, he was able to enter into the dispositions and thoughts of
 people as effectually as if he had been changed into the very men. I
 have often observed [Burke now goes on in his own person] that, on
 mimicking the looks and gestures of angry, or placid, or frightened,
 or daring men, I have involuntarily found my mind turned to that
 passion whose appearance I strove to imitate; nay, I am convinced it
 is hard to avoid it, though one strove to separate the passion from
 its corresponding gestures."[412]

Against this it is to be said that many actors who perfectly mimic the
outward appearances of emotion in face, gait, and voice declare that
they feel no emotion at all. Others, however, according to Mr. Wm.
Archer, who has made a very instructive statistical inquiry among them,
say that the emotion of the part masters them whenever they play it
well.[413] Thus:

 "'I often turn pale,' writes Miss Isabel Bateman, 'in scenes of terror
 or great excitement. I have been told this many times, and I can
 feel myself getting very cold and shivering and pale in thrilling
 situations.' 'When I am playing rage or terror,' writes Mr. Lionel
 Brough, 'I believe I do turn pale. My mouth gets dry, my tongue
 cleaves to my palate. In Bob Acres, for instance (in the last
 act), I have to continually moisten my mouth, or I shall become
 inarticulate. I have to "swallow the lump," as I call it.' All artists
 who have had much experience of emotional parts are absolutely
 unanimous.... 'Playing with the brain,' says Miss Alma Murray, 'is
 far less fatiguing than playing with the heart. An adventuress taxes
 the physique far less than a sympathetic heroine. Muscular exertion
 has comparatively little to do with it.'... 'Emotion while acting,'
 writes Mr. Howe, 'will induce perspiration much more than physical
 exertion. I always perspired profusely while acting Joseph Surface,
 which requires little or no exertion.'... 'I suffer from fatigue,'
 writes Mr. Forbes Robertson, 'in proportion to the amount of emotion
 I may have been called upon to go through, and not from physical
 exertion.'... 'Though I have played Othello,' writes Mr. Coleman,
 'ever since I was seventeen (at nineteen I had the honor of acting
 the Moor to Macready's Iago), husband my resources as I may, this is
 the one part, the part of parts, which always leaves me physically
 prostrate. I have never been able to find a pigment that would stay
 on my face, though I have tried every preparation in existence. Even
 the titanic Edwin Forrest told me that he was always knocked over in
 Othello, and I have heard Charles Kean, Phelps, Brooke, Dillion, say
 the same thing. On the other hand, I have frequently acted Richard
 III. without turning a hair.'"[414]

The explanation for the discrepancy amongst actors is probably that
which these quotations suggest. The _visceral and organic_ part of the
expression can be suppressed in some men, but not in others, and on
this it is probable that the chief part of the felt emotion depends.
Coquelin and the other actors who are inwardly cold are probably able
to affect the dissociation in a complete way. Prof. Sikorsky of Kieff
has contributed an important article on the facial expression of the
insane to the Neurologisches Centralblatt for 1887. Having practised
facial mimicry himself a great deal, he says:

 "When I contract my facial muscles in any mimetic combination, _I
 feel no emotional excitement,_ so that the mimicry is in the fullest
 sense of the word artificial, although quite irreproachable from the
 expressive point of view."[415]

We find, however, from the context that Prof. S.'s practice before the
mirror has developed in him such a virtuosity in the control of his
facial muscles that he can entirely disregard their natural association
and contract them in any order of grouping, on either side of the face
isolatedly, and each one alone. Probably in him the facial mimicry is
an entirely restricted and localized thing, without sympathetic changes
of any sort elsewhere.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Third Objection._ Manifesting an emotion, so far from increasing it,
makes it cease. Rage evaporates after a good outburst; it is _pent-up_
emotions that "work like madness in the brain."

_Reply._ The objection fails to discriminate between what is felt
_during_ and what is felt _after_ the manifestation. _During_ the
manifestation the emotion is always felt. In the normal course of
things this, being the natural channel of discharge, exhausts the
nerve-centres, and emotional calm ensues. But if tears or anger are
simply suppressed, whilst the object of grief or rage remains unchanged
before the mind, the current which would have invaded the normal
channels turns into others, for it must find some outlet of escape.
It may then work different and worse effects later on. Thus vengeful
brooding may replace a burst of indignation; a dry heat may consume
the frame of one who fain would weep, or he may, as Dante says, turn
to stone within; and then tears or a storming fit may bring a grateful
relief. This is when the current is strong enough to strike into a
pathological path when the normal one is dammed. When this is so, an
immediate outpour may be best. But here, to quote Prof. Bain again:

 "There is nothing more implied than the fact that an emotion may be
 too strong to be resisted, and we only waste our strength in the
 endeavor. If we are really able to stem the torrent, there is no more
 reason for refraining from the attempt than in the case of weaker
 feelings. And undoubtedly the _habitual_ control of the emotions is
 not to be attained without a systematic restraint, extended to weak
 and strong."

When we teach children to repress their emotional talk and display,
it is not that they may _feel_ more--quite the reverse. It is that
they may _think_ more; for, to a certain extent, whatever currents
are diverted from the regions below, must swell the activity of the
thought-tracts of the brain. In apoplexies and other brain injuries we
get the opposite condition--an obstruction, namely, to the passage
of currents among the thought-tracts, and with this an increased
tendency of objects to start downward currents into the organs of
the body. The consequence is tears, laughter, and temper-fits, on
the most insignificant provocation, accompanying a proportional
feebleness in logical thought and the power of volitional attention and
decision,--just the sort of thing from which we try to wean our child.
It is true that we say of certain persons that "they would feel more
if they expressed less." And in another class of persons the explosive
energy with which passion manifests itself on critical occasions
seems correlated with the way in which they bottle it up during the
intervals. But these are only eccentric types of character, and within
each type the law of the last paragraph prevails. The sentimentalist is
so constructed that 'gushing' is his or her normal mode of expression.
Putting a stopper on the 'gush' will only to a limited extent cause
more 'real' activities to take its place; in the main it will simply
produce listlessness. On the other hand, the ponderous and bilious
'slumbering volcano,' let him repress the expression of his passions as
he will, will find them expire if they get no vent at all; whilst if
the rare occasions multiply which he deems worthy of their outbreak,
he will find them grow in intensity as life proceeds. On the whole, I
cannot see that this third objection carries any weight.

       *       *       *       *       *

If our hypothesis is true, it makes us realize more deeply than ever
how much our mental life is knit up with our corporeal frame, in the
strictest sense of the term. Rapture, love, ambition, indignation, and
pride, considered as feelings, are fruits of the same soil with the
grossest bodily sensations of pleasure and of pain. But the reader will
remember that we agreed at the outset to affirm this only of what we
then called the 'coarser' emotions, and that those inward states of
emotional sensibility which appeared devoid at first sight of bodily
results should be left out of our account. We must now say a word or
two about these latter feelings, the 'subtler' emotions, as we then
agreed to call them.


THE SUBTLER EMOTIONS.


These are the moral, intellectual, and æsthetic feelings. Concords
of sounds, of colors, of lines, logical consistencies, teleological
fitnesses, affect us with a pleasure that seems ingrained in the very
form of the representation itself, and to borrow nothing from any
reverberation surging up from the parts below the brain. The Herbartian
psychologists have distinguished feelings due to the _form_ in which
ideas may be arranged. A mathematical demonstration may be as 'pretty,'
and an act of justice as 'neat,' as a drawing or a tune, although the
prettiness and neatness seem to have nothing to do with sensation. We
have, then, or some of us seem to have, genuinely _cerebral_ forms
of pleasure and displeasure, apparently not agreeing in their mode
of production with the 'coarser' emotions we have been analyzing.
And it is certain that readers whom our reasons have hitherto failed
to convince will now start up at this admission, and consider that
by it we give up our whole case. Since musical perceptions, since
logical ideas, can immediately arouse a form of emotional feeling,
they will say, is it not more natural to suppose that in the case of
the so-called 'coarser' emotions, prompted by other kinds of objects,
the emotional feeling is equally immediate, and the bodily expression
something that comes later and is added on?

       *       *       *       *       *

In reply to this we must immediately insist that æsthetic emotion,
_pure and simple,_ the pleasure given us by certain lines and masses,
and combinations of colors and sounds, is an absolutely sensational
experience, an optical or auricular feeling that is primary, and
not due to the repercussion backwards of other sensations elsewhere
consecutively aroused. To this simple primary and immediate pleasure
in certain pure sensations and harmonious combinations of them, there
may, it is true, be _added_ secondary pleasures; and in the practical
enjoyment of works of art by the masses of mankind these secondary
pleasures play a great part. The more _classic_ one's taste is,
however, the less relatively important are the secondary pleasures
felt to be in comparison with those of the primary sensation as it
comes in.[416] Classicism and romanticism have their battles over this
point. Complex suggestiveness, the awakening of vistas of memory and
association, and the stirring of our flesh with picturesque mystery
and gloom, make a work of art _romantic_. The classic taste brands
these effects as coarse and tawdry, and prefers the naked beauty of the
optical and auditory sensations, unadorned with frippery or foliage.
To the romantic mind, on the contrary, the immediate beauty of these
sensations seems dry and thin. I am of course not discussing which
view is right, but only showing that the discrimination between the
primary feeling of beauty, as a pure incoming sensible quality, and the
secondary emotions which are grafted thereupon, is one that must be
made.

These secondary emotions themselves are assuredly for the most part
constituted of other incoming sensations aroused by the diffusive wave
of reflex effects which the beautiful object sets up. A glow, a pang
in the breast, a shudder, a fulness of the breathing, a flutter of the
heart, a shiver down the back, a moistening of the eyes, a stirring in
the hypogastrium, and a thousand unnamable symptoms besides, may be
felt the moment the beauty _excites_ us. And these symptoms also result
when we are excited by moral perceptions, as of pathos, magnanimity, or
courage. The voice breaks and the sob rises in the struggling chest, or
the nostril dilates and the fingers tighten, whilst the heart beats,
etc., etc.

As far as _these ingredients_ of the subtler emotions go, then, the
latter form no exception to our account, but rather an additional
illustration thereof. In all cases of intellectual or moral rapture
we find that, unless there be coupled a bodily reverberation of
some kind with the mere thought of the object and cognition of its
quality; unless we actually laugh at the neatness of the demonstration
or witticism; unless we thrill at the case of justice, or tingle
at the act of magnanimity; our state of mind can hardly be called
emotional at all. It is in fact a mere intellectual perception of
how certain things are to be called--neat, right, witty, generous,
and the like. Such a judicial state of mind as this is to be classed
among awarenesses of truth; it is a _cognitive_ act. As a matter of
fact, however, the moral and intellectual cognitions hardly ever do
exist thus unaccompanied. The bodily sounding-board is at work, as
careful introspection will show, far more than we usually suppose.
Still, where long familiarity with a certain class of effects, even
æsthetic ones, has blunted mere emotional excitability as much as it
has sharpened taste and judgment, we do get the intellectual emotion,
if such it can be called, pure and undefiled. And the dryness of it,
the paleness, the absence of all glow, as it may exist in a thoroughly
expert critic's mind, not only shows us what an altogether different
thing it is from the 'coarser' emotions we considered first, but makes
us suspect that almost the entire difference lies in the fact that
the bodily sounding-board, vibrating in the one case, is in the other
mute. "Not so very bad" is, in a person of consummate taste, apt to
be the highest limit of approving expression. "_Rien ne me choque_"
is said to have been Chopin's superlative of praise of new music. A
sentimental layman would feel, and ought to feel, horrified, on being
admitted into such a critic's mind, to see how cold, how thin, how void
of human significance, are the motives for favor or disfavor that there
prevail. The capacity to make a nice spot on the wall will outweigh a
picture's whole content; a foolish trick of words will preserve a poem;
an utterly meaningless fitness of sequence in one musical composition
set at naught any amount of 'expressiveness' in another.

I remember seeing an English couple sit for more than an hour
on a piercing February day in the Academy at Venice before the
celebrated 'Assumption' by Titian; and when I, after being chased
from room to room by the cold, concluded to get into the sunshine
as fast as possible and let the pictures go, but before leaving
drew reverently near to them to learn with what superior forms of
susceptibility they might be endowed, all I overheard was the woman's
voice murmuring: "What a _deprecatory_ expression her face wears!
What self-abneg_ation!_ How _unworthy_ she feels of the honor she is
receiving!" Their honest hearts had been kept warm all the time by
a glow of spurious sentiment that would have fairly made old Titian
sick. Mr. Ruskin somewhere makes the (for him terrible) admission that
religious people as a rule care little for pictures, and that when they
do care for them they generally prefer the worst ones to the best. Yes!
in every art, in every science, there is the keen perception of certain
relations being _right_ or not, and there is the emotional flush and
thrill consequent thereupon. And these are two things, not one. In the
former of them it is that experts and masters are at home. The latter
accompaniments are bodily commotions that they may hardly feel, but
that may be experienced in their fulness by _crétins_ and philistines
in whom the critical judgment is at its lowest ebb. The 'marvels' of
Science, about which so much edifying popular literature is written,
are apt to be 'caviare' to the men in the laboratories. And even
divine Philosophy itself, which common mortals consider so 'sublime'
an occupation, on account of the vastness of its data and outlook, is
too apt to the practical philosopher himself to be but a sharpening and
tightening business, a matter of 'points,' of screwing down things,
of splitting hairs, and of the 'intent' rather than the 'extent' of
conceptions. Very little emotion here!--except the effort of setting
the attention fine, and the feeling of ease and relief (mainly in the
breathing apparatus) when the inconsistencies are overcome and the
thoughts run smoothly for a while. Emotion and cognition seem then
parted even in this last retreat; and cerebral processes are almost
feelingless, so far as we can judge, until they summon help from parts
below.


NO SPECIAL BRAIN-CENTRES FOR EMOTION.


If the neural process underlying emotional consciousness be what I have
now sought to prove it, the physiology of the brain becomes a simpler
matter than has been hitherto supposed. Sensational, associational, and
motor elements are all that the organ need contain. The physiologists
who, during the past few years, have been so industriously exploring
the brain's functions, have limited their explanations to its cognitive
and volitional performances. Dividing the brain into sensory and motor
centres, they have found their division to be exactly paralleled by the
analysis made by empirical psychology of the perceptive and volitional
parts of the mind into their simplest elements. But the emotions
have been so ignored in all these researches that one is tempted to
suppose that if these investigators were asked for a theory of them
in brain-terms, they would have to reply, either that they had as yet
bestowed no thought upon the subject, or that they had found it so
difficult to make distinct hypotheses that the matter lay among the
problems of the future, only to be taken up after the simpler ones of
the present should have been definitively solved.

And yet it is even now certain that of two things concerning the
emotions, one must be true. Either separate and special centres,
affected to them alone, are their brain-seat, or else they correspond
to processes occurring in the motor and sensory centres already
assigned, or in others like them, not yet known. If the former be the
case, we must deny the view that is current, and hold the cortex to be
something more than the surface of 'projection' for every sensitive
spot and every muscle in the body. If the latter be the case, we must
ask whether the emotional _process_ in the sensory or motor centre
be an altogether peculiar one, or whether it resembles the ordinary
perceptive processes of which those centres are already recognized to
be the seat. Now if the theory I have defended be true, the latter
alternative is all that it demands. Supposing the cortex to contain
parts, liable to be excited by changes in each special sense-organ,
in each portion of the skin, in each muscle, each joint, and each
viscus, and to contain absolutely nothing else, we still have a scheme
capable of representing the process of the emotions. An object falls
on a sense-organ, affects a cortical part, and is perceived; or
else the latter, excited inwardly, gives rise to an idea of the same
object. Quick as a flash, the reflex currents pass down through their
preordained channels, alter the condition of muscle, skin, and viscus;
and these alterations, perceived, like the original object, in as many
portions of the cortex, combine with it in consciousness and transform
it from an object-simply-apprehended into an object-emotionally-felt.
No new principles have to be invoked, nothing postulated beyond the
ordinary reflex circuits, and the local centres admitted in one shape
or another by all to exist.


EMOTIONAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN INDIVIDUALS.


_The revivability in memory of the emotions,_ like that of all the
feelings of the lower senses, is very small. We can remember that we
underwent grief or rapture, but not just how the grief or rapture felt.
This difficult _ideal_ revivability is, however, more than compensated
in the case of the emotions by a very easy _actual_ revivability. That
is, we can produce, not remembrances of the old grief or rapture, but
new griefs and raptures, by summoning up a lively thought of their
exciting cause. The cause is now only an idea, but this idea produces
the same organic irradiations, or almost the same, which were produced
by its original, so that the emotion is again a reality. We have
'recaptured' it. Shame, love, and anger are particularly liable to
be thus revived by ideas of their object. Professor Bain admits[417]
that "in their strict character of emotion proper, they [the emotions]
have the minimum of revivability; but being always incorporated with
the sensations of the higher senses, they share in the superior
revivability of sights and sounds." But he fails to point out that
the revived sights and sounds may be _ideal_ without ceasing to be
distinct; whilst the emotion, to be distinct, must become real again.
Prof. Bain seems to forget that an 'ideal emotion' and a real emotion
prompted by an ideal object are two very different things.

_An emotional temperament on the one hand, and a lively imagination
for objects and circumstances on the other, are thus the conditions,
necessary and sufficient, for an abundant emotional life._ No matter
how emotional the temperament may be, if the imagination be poor,
the occasions for touching off the emotional trains will fail to be
realized, and the life will be _pro tanto_ cold and dry. This is
perhaps a reason why it may be better that a man of thought should not
have too strong a visualizing power. He is less likely to have his
trains of meditation disturbed by emotional interruptions. It will be
remembered that Mr. Galton found the members of the Royal Society and
of the French Academy of Sciences to be below par in visualizing power.
If I may speak of myself, I am far less able to visualize now, at the
age of 46, than in my earlier years; and I am strongly inclined to
believe that the relative sluggishness of my emotional life at present
is quite as much connected with this fact as it is with the invading
torpor of hoary eld, or with the omnibus-horse routine of settled
professional and domestic life. I say this because I occasionally have
a flash of the old stronger visual imagery, and I notice that the
emotional commentary, so to call it, is then liable to become much
more acute than is its present wont. Charcot's patient, whose case is
given above on p. 58 ff., complained of his incapacity for emotional
feeling after his optical images were gone. His mother's death, which
in former times would have wrung his heart, left him quite cold;
largely, as he himself suggests, because he could form no definite
visual image of the event, and of the effect of the loss on the rest of
the family at home.

One final generality about the emotions remains to be noted: _They
blunt themselves by repetition more rapidly than any other sort of
feeling._ This is due not only to the general law of 'accommodation'
to their stimulus which we saw to obtain of all feelings whatever,
but to the peculiar fact that the 'diffusive wave' of reflex effects
tends always to become more narrow. It seems as if it were essentially
meant to be a provisional arrangement, on the basis of which precise
and determinate reactions might arise. The more we exercise ourselves
at anything, the fewer muscles we employ; and just so, the oftener
we meet an object, the more definitely we think and behave about it;
and the less is the organic perturbation to which it gives rise.
The first time we saw it we could perhaps neither act nor think at
all, and had no reaction but organic perturbation. The emotions of
startled surprise, wonder, or curiosity were the result. Now we look
on with absolutely no emotion.[418] This tendency to economy in the
nerve-paths through which our sensations and ideas discharge, is
the basis of all growth in efficiency, readiness, and skill. Where
would the general, the surgeon, the presiding chairman, be, if their
nerve-currents kept running down into their viscera, instead of keeping
up amid their convolutions? But what they gain for practice by this
law, they lose, it must be confessed, for feeling. For the world-worn
and experienced man, the sense of pleasure which he gets from the free
and powerful flow of thoughts, overcoming obstacles as they arise,
is the only compensation for that freshness of the heart which he
once enjoyed. This free and powerful flow means that brain-paths of
association and memory have more and more organized themselves in
him, and that through them the stimulus is drafted off into nerves
which lead merely to the writing finger or the speaking tongue.[419]
The trains of _intellectual_ association, the memories, the logical
relations, may, however, be voluminous in the extreme. Past emotions
may be among the things remembered. The more of all these trains an
object can set going in us, the richer our cognitive intimacy with it
is. This cerebral sense of richness seems itself to be a source of
pleasure, possibly even apart from the _euphoria_ which from time to
time comes up from respiratory organs. If there _be_ such a thing as a
purely spiritual emotion, I should be inclined to restrict it to this
cerebral sense of abundance and ease, this feeling, as Sir W. Hamilton
would call it, of unimpeded and not overstrained activity of thought.
Under ordinary conditions, it is a fine and serene but not an excited
state of consciousness. In certain intoxications it becomes exciting,
and it may be intensely exciting. I can hardly imagine a more frenzied
excitement than that which goes with the consciousness of seeing
absolute truth, which characterizes the coming to from nitrous-oxide
drunkenness. Chloroform, ether, and alcohol all produce this deepening
sense of insight into truth; and with all of them it may be a 'strong'
emotion; but then there also come with it all sorts of strange bodily
feelings and changes in the incoming sensibilities. I cannot see my way
to affirming that the emotion is independent of these. I will concede,
however, that if its independence is anywhere to be maintained, these
theoretic raptures seem the place at which to begin the defence.


THE GENESIS OF THE VARIOUS EMOTIONS.


On a former page (pp. 453-4) I said that two questions, and only two,
are important, if we regard the emotions as constituted by feelings due
to the diffusive wave.

(1) _What special diffusive effects do the various special objective
and subjective experiences excite?_ and

(2) _How come they to excite them?_

The works on physiognomy and expression are all of them attempts to
answer question 1. As is but natural, the effects upon the face have
received the most careful attention. The reader who wishes details
additional to those given above on pp. 443-7 is referred to the works
mentioned in the note below.[420]

As regards question 2, some little progress has of recent years been
made in answering it. Two things are certain:

_a._ The facial muscles of expression are not given us simply for
expression's sake;[421]

_b._ Each muscle is not affected to some one emotion exclusively, as
certain writers have thought.

Some movements of expression can be accounted for as _weakened
repetitions of movements which formerly_ (when they were stronger)
_were of utility to the subject._ Others are similarly weakened
repetitions of movements which under other conditions were
_physiologically necessary effects._ Of the latter reactions the
respiratory disturbances in anger and fear might be taken as
examples--organic reminiscences, as it were, reverberations in
imagination of the blowings of the man making a series of combative
efforts, of the pantings of one in precipitate flight. Such at least is
a suggestion made by Mr. Spencer which has found approval. And he also
was the first, so far as I know, to suggest that other movements in
anger and fear could be explained by the nascent excitation of formerly
useful acts.

 "To have in a slight degree," he says, "such psychical states as
 accompany the reception of wounds, and are experienced during flight,
 is to be in a state of what we call fear. And to have in a slight
 degree such psychical states as the processes of catching, killing,
 and eating imply, is to have the desires to catch, kill, and eat. That
 the propensities to the acts are nothing else than nascent excitations
 of the psychical state involved in the acts, is proved by the natural
 language of the propensities. Fear, when strong, expresses itself in
 cries, in efforts to escape, in palpitations, in tremblings; and these
 are just the manifestations that go along with an actual suffering
 of the evil feared. The destructive passion is shown in a general
 tension of the muscular system, in gnashing of teeth and protrusion
 of the claws, in dilated eyes and nostrils, in growls; and these
 are weaker forms of the actions that accompany the killing of prey.
 To such objective evidences every one can add subjective evidences.
 Every one can testify that the psychical state called fear consists of
 mental representations of certain painful results; and that the one
 called anger consists of mental representations of the actions and
 impressions which would occur while inflicting some kind of pain."[422]

About fear I shall have more to say presently. Meanwhile the principle
of _revival in weakened form of reactions useful in more violent
dealings with the object inspiring the emotion,_ has found many
applications. So slight a symptom as the snarl or sneer, the one-sided
uncovering of the upper teeth, is accounted for by Darwin as a survival
from the time when our ancestors had large canines, and unfleshed them
(as dogs now do) for attack. Similarly the raising of the eyebrows in
outward attention, the opening of the mouth in astonishment, come,
according to the same author, from the utility of these movements
in extreme cases. The raising of the eyebrows goes with the opening
of the eye for better vision; the opening of the mouth with the
intensest listening, and with the rapid catching of the breath which
precedes muscular effort. The distention of the nostrils in anger is
interpreted by Spencer as an echo of the way in which our ancestors
had to breathe when, during combat, their "mouth was filled up by a
part of an antagonist's body that had been seized(!)." The trembling
of fear is supposed by Mantegazza to be for the sake of warming the
blood(!). The reddening of the face and neck is called by Wundt a
compensatory arrangement for relieving the brain of the blood-pressure
which the simultaneous excitement of the heart brings with it. The
effusion of tears is explained both by this author and by Darwin to
be a blood-withdrawing agency of a similar sort. The contraction
of the muscles around the eyes, of which the primitive use is to
protect those organs from being too much gorged with blood during the
screaming fits of infancy, survives in adult life in the shape of the
frown, which instantly comes over the brow when anything difficult or
displeasing presents itself either to thought or action.

 "As the habit of contracting the brows has been followed by infants
 during innumerable generations, at the commencement of every crying
 or screaming fit," says Darwin, "it has become firmly associated with
 the incipient sense of something distressing or disagreeable. Hence,
 under similar circumstances, it would be apt to be continued during
 maturity, although never then developed, into a crying fit. Screaming
 or weeping begins to be voluntarily restrained at an early period of
 life, whereas frowning is hardly ever restrained at any age."[423]

The intermittent expirations which constitute laughter have, according
to Dr. Hecker, the purpose of counteracting the anæmia of the brain,
which he supposes to be brought about by the action of the joyous or
comic stimulus upon the vaso-motor nerves.[424] A smile is the weak
vestige of a laugh. The tight closure of the mouth in all effort is
useful for retaining the air in the lungs so as to fix the chest
and give a firm basis of insertion for the muscles of the flanks.
Accordingly, we see the lips compress themselves upon every slight
occasion of resolve. The blood-pressure has to be high during the
sexual embrace; hence the palpitations, and hence also the tendency
to caressing action, which accompanies tender emotion in its fainter
forms. Other examples might be given; but these are quite enough to
show the scope of the principle of revival of useful action in weaker
form.

       *       *       *       *       *

Another principle, to which Darwin perhaps hardly does sufficient
justice, may be called the principle of _reacting similarly to
analogous-feeling stimuli_. There is a whole vocabulary of descriptive
adjectives common to impressions belonging to different sensible
spheres--experiences of all classes are _sweet_, impressions of all
classes _rich_ or _solid_, sensations of all classes _sharp_. Wundt and
Piderit accordingly explain many of our most expressive reactions upon
moral causes as symbolic gustatory movements. As soon as any experience
arises which has an affinity with the feeling of sweet, or bitter, or
sour, the same movements are executed which would result from the taste
in point.[425] "All the states of mind which language designates by the
metaphors bitter, harsh, sweet, combine themselves, therefore, with the
corresponding mimetic movements of the mouth." Certainly the emotions
of disgust and satisfaction do express themselves in this mimetic
way. Disgust is an incipient regurgitation or retching, limiting its
expression often to the grimace of the lips and nose; satisfaction goes
with a sucking smile, or tasting motion of the lips. In Mantegazza's
loose if learned work, the attempt is made, much less successfully,
to bring in the eye and ear as additional sources of symbolically
expressive reaction. The ordinary gesture of negation--among us, moving
the head about its axis from side to side--is a reaction originally
used by babies to keep disagreeables from getting into their mouth,
and may be observed in perfection in any nursery.[426] It is now
evoked where the stimulus is only an unwelcome idea. Similarly the nod
forward in affirmation is after the analogy of taking food into the
mouth. The connection of the expression of moral or social disdain
or dislike, especially in women, with movements having a perfectly
definite original olfactory function, is too obvious for comment.
Winking is the effect of any threatening surprise, not only of what
puts the eyes in danger; and a momentary aversion of the eyes is very
apt to be one's first symptom of response to an unexpectedly unwelcome
proposition.--These may suffice as examples of movements expressive
from analogy.

But if certain of our emotional reactions can be explained by the
two principles invoked--and the reader will himself have felt how
conjectural and fallible in some of the instances the explanation
is--there remain many reactions which cannot so be explained at all,
and these we must write down for the present as purely idiopathic
effects of the stimulus. Amongst them are the effects on the viscera
and internal glands, the dryness of the mouth and diarrhœa and nausea
of fear, the liver-disturbances which sometimes produce jaundice after
excessive rage, the urinary secretion of sanguine excitement, and the
bladder-contraction of apprehension, the gaping of expectancy, the
'lump in the throat' of grief, the tickling there and the swallowing
of embarrassment, the 'precordial anxiety' of dread, the changes in
the pupil, the various sweatings of the skin, cold or hot, local or
general, and its flushings, together with other symptoms which probably
exist but are too hidden to have been noticed or named. It seems as
if even the changes of blood-pressure and heart-beat during emotional
excitement might, instead of being teleologically determined, prove to
be purely mechanical or physiological outpourings through the easiest
drainage-channels--the pneumogastrics and sympathetic nerves happening
under ordinary circumstances to be such channels.

Mr. Spencer argues that the _smallest_ muscles must be such channels;
and instances the tail in dogs, cats, and birds, the ears in horses,
the crest in parrots, the face and fingers in man, as the first organs
to be moved by emotional stimuli.[427] This principle (if it be one)
would apply still more easily to the muscles of the smaller arteries
(though not exactly to the heart); whilst the great variability of the
circulatory symptoms would also suggest that they are determined by
causes into which utility does not enter. The quickening of the heart
lends itself, it is true, rather easily to explanation by inherited
habit, organic memory of more violent excitement; and Darwin speaks in
favor of this view (see his Expression, etc., pp. 74-5). But, on the
other hand, we have so many cases of reaction which are indisputably
pathological, as we may say, and which could never be serviceable or
derived from what was serviceable, that I think we should be cautious
about pushing our explanations of the varied heart-beat too far in the
teleological direction. Trembling, which is found in many excitements
besides that of terror, is, _pace_ Mr. Spencer and Sig. Mantegazza,
quite pathological. So are terror's other strong symptoms. Professor
Mosso, as the total result of his study, writes as follows:

 "We have seen that the graver the peril becomes, the more do the
 reactions which are positively harmful to the animal prevail in number
 and in efficacy. We already saw that the trembling and the palsy make
 it incapable of flight or defence; we have also convinced ourselves
 that in the most decisive moments of danger we are less able to see
 [or to think] than when we are tranquil. In face of such facts we
 must admit that the phenomena of fear cannot all be accounted for by
 'selection.' Their extreme degrees are morbid phenomena which show
 an imperfection in the organism. We might almost say that Nature had
 not been able to frame a substance which should be excitable enough
 to compose the brain and spinal marrow, and yet which should not be
 so excited by exceptional stimulation as to overstep in its reactions
 those physiological bounds which are useful to the conservation of the
 creature."[428]

Professor Bain, if I mistake not, had long previously commented upon
fear in a similar way.

Mr. Darwin accounts for many emotional expressions by what he calls
the principle of antithesis. In virtue of this principle, if a certain
stimulus prompted a certain set of movements, then a contrary-feeling
stimulus would prompt exactly the opposite movements, although these
might otherwise have neither utility nor significance. It is in
this wise that Darwin explains the expression of impotence, raised
eyebrows, and shrugged shoulders, dropped arms and open palms, as
being the antithesis of the frowning brow, the thrown-back shoulders,
and clenched fists of rage, which is the emotion of power. No doubt
a certain number of movements can be formulated under this law; but
whether it expresses a _causal_ principle is more than doubtful. It
has been by most critics considered the least successful of Darwin's
speculations on this subject.

To sum up, we see the reason for a few emotional reactions; for others
a possible species of reason may be guessed; but others remain for
which no plausible reason can even be conceived. These may be reactions
which are purely mechanical results of the way in which our nervous
centres are framed, reactions which, although permanent in us now,
may be called accidental as far as their origin goes. In fact, in an
organism as complex as the nervous system there _must_ be many such
reactions, incidental to others evolved for utility's sake, but which
would never themselves have been evolved independently, for any utility
they might possess. Sea-sickness, the love of music, of the various
intoxicants, nay, the entire æsthetic life of man, shall have to
trace to this accidental origin.[429] It would be foolish to suppose
that none of the reactions called emotional could have arisen in this
_quasi_-accidental way.

This is all I have to say about the emotions. If one should seek
to name each particular one of them of which the human heart is the
seat, it is plain that the limit to their number would lie in the
introspective vocabulary of the seeker, each race of men having
found names for some shade of feeling which other races have left
undiscriminated. If then we should seek to break the emotions, thus
enumerated, into groups, according to their affinities, it is again
plain that all sorts of groupings would be possible, according as
we chose this character or that as a basis, and that all groupings
would be equally real and true. The only question would be, does
this grouping or that suit our purpose best? The reader may then
class the emotions as he will, as sad or joyous, sthenic or asthenic,
natural or acquired, inspired by animate or inanimate things, formal
or material, sensuous or ideal, direct or reflective, egoistic or
non-egoistic, retrospective, prospective or immediate, organismally
or environmentally initiated, or what more besides. All these are
divisions which have been actually proposed. Each of them has its
merits, and each one brings together some emotions which the others
keep apart. For a fuller account, and for other classificatory schemes,
I refer to the Appendix to Bain's Emotions and the Will, and to
Mercier's, Stanley's, and Read's articles on the Emotions, in Mind,
vols. ix, x, and xi. In vol. ix. p. 421 there is also an article by the
lamented Edmund Gurney in criticism of the view which in this chapter I
continue to defend.

       *       *       *       *       *

[395] Parts of this chapter have already appeared in an article
published in 1884 in Mind.

[396] Ueber Gemüthsbewegungen, uebersetzt von H. Kurella (Leipzig,
1887).

[397] The bronchial tubes may be contracted as well as the
ramifications of the pulmonary artery. Professor J. Henle has, amongst
his Anthropologische Vorträge, an exquisite one on the 'Natural History
of the Sigh,' in which he represents our inspirations as the result of
a battle between the red muscles of our skeleton, ribs, and diaphragm,
and the white ones of the lungs, which seek to narrow the calibre of
the air-tubes. "In the normal state the former easily conquer, but
under other conditions they either conquer with difficulty or are
defeated.... The contrasted emotions express themselves in similarly
contrasted wise, by spasm and paralysis of the unstriped muscles, and
for the most part alike in all the organs which are provided with them,
as arteries, skin, and bronchial tubes. The contrast among the emotions
is generally expressed by dividing them into exciting and depressing
ones. It is a remarkable fact that the depressing emotions, like fear,
horror, disgust, increase the contraction of these smooth muscles,
whilst the exciting emotions, like joy, anger, etc., make them relax.
Contrasts of temperature act similarly, cold like the depressing,
and warmth like the exciting, emotions. Cold produces pallor and
goose-flesh, warmth smooths out the skin and widens the vessels. If one
notices the uncomfortable mood brought about by strained expectation,
anxiety before a public address, vexation at an unmerited affront,
etc., one finds that the suffering part of it concentrates itself
principally in the chest, and that it consists in a soreness, hardly
to be called pain, felt in the middle of the breast and due to an
unpleasant resistance which is offered to the movements of inspiration,
and sets a limit to their extent. The insufficiency of the diaphragm
is obtruded upon consciousness, and we try by the aid of the external
voluntary chest-muscles to draw a deeper breath. [This is the sigh.] If
we fail, the unpleasantness of the situation is increased, for then to
our mental distress is added the corporeally repugnant feeling of lack
of air, a slight degree of suffocation. If, on the contrary, the outer
muscles overcome the resistance of the inner ones, the oppressed breast
is lightened. We think we speak symbolically when we speak of a stone
weighing on our heart, or of a burden rolled from off our breast. But
really we only express the exact fact, for we should have to raise the
entire weight of the atmosphere (about 820 kilog.) at each inspiration,
if the air did not balance it by streaming into our lungs." (P. 55.)
It must not be forgotten that an inhibition of the inspiratory centre
similar to that produced by exciting the superior laryngeal nerve
may possibly play a part in these phenomena. For a very interesting
discussion of the respiratory difficulty and its connection with
anxiety and fear, see 'A Case of Hydrophobia' by the lamented Thos. B.
Curtis in the Boston Med. and Surg. Journal, Nov. 7 and 14, 1878, and
remarks thereon by James J. Putnam, _ibid._ Nov. 21.

[398] Origin of the Emotions, Darwin, pp. 290-2.

[399] La Physionomie et l'Expression des Sentiments (Paris, 1885), p.
140.

[400] Lange, _op. cit._ p. 75.

[401] Professor Höffding, in his excellent treatise on Psychology,
admits (p. 342) the mixture of bodily sensation with purely spiritual
affection in the emotions. He does not, however, discuss the
difficulties of discerning the spiritual affection (nor even show that
he has fairly considered them) in his contention that it exists.

[402] Ein Fall von allgemeiner Anæsthesie (Heidelberg, 1882).

[403] Ziemssen's Deutsches Archiv für klinische Medicin, xxii. 321.

[404] The not very uncommon cases of hysterical hemianæsthesia are not
complete enough to be utilized in this inquiry. Moreover, the recent
researches, of which some account was given in Chapter IV, tend to
show that hysterical anæsthesia is not a real absence of sensibility,
but a 'dissociation,' as M. Pierre Janet calls it, or splitting-off
of certain sensations from the rest of the person's consciousness,
this _rest_ forming the self which remains connected with the ordinary
organs of expression. The split-off consciousness forms a secondary
self; and M. Janet writes me that he sees no reason why sensations
whose 'dissociation' from the body of consciousness makes the patient
practically anæsthetic, might not, nevertheless, contribute to the
emotional life of the patient. They do still contribute to the function
of locomotion; for in his patient L. there was no ataxia in spite of
the anæsthesia. M. Janet writes me, apropos of his anæsthetic patient
L., that she seemed to 'suffer by hallucination.' "I have often pricked
or burned her without warning, and when she did not see me. She never
moved, and evidently perceived nothing. But if afterwards in her
movements she caught sight of her wounded arm, and _saw_ on her skin a
little drop of blood resulting from a slight cut, she would begin to
cry out and lament as if she suffered a great deal. 'My blood flows,'
she said one day; 'I _must be_ suffering a great deal!' She suffered
by hallucination. This sort of suffering is very general in hysterics.
It is enough for them to receive the slightest hint of a modification
in their body, when their imagination fills up the rest and invents
changes that were not felt." See the remarks published at a later date
in Janet's Automatisme Psychologique, pp. 214-15.

[405] _Op. cit._ p. 63.

[406] It must be confessed that there are cases of morbid fear in which
objectively the heart is not much perturbed. These, however, fail
to prove anything against our theory, for it is of course possible
that the cortical centres normally percipient of dread as a complex
of cardiac and other organic sensations due to real bodily change,
should become _primarily_ excited in brain-disease, and give rise to
an hallucination of the changes being there,--an hallucination of
dread, consequently, coexistent with a comparatively calm pulse, etc.
I say it is possible, for I am ignorant of observations which might
test the fact. Trance, ecstasy, etc., offer analogous examples,--not
to speak of ordinary dreaming. Under all these conditions one may have
the liveliest subjective feelings, either of eye or ear, or of the
more visceral and emotional sort, as a result of pure nerve-central
activity, and yet, as I believe, with complete peripheral repose.

[407] R. M. Bucke: Man's Moral Nature (N. Y., 1879), p. 97.

[408] Lange, _op. cit._ p. 61.

[409] I am inclined to think that in some hysteriform conditions of
grief, rage, etc., the visceral disturbances are less strong than
those which go to outward expression. We have then a tremendous verbal
display with a hollow inside. Whilst the bystanders are wrung with
compassion, or pale with alarm, the subject all the while lets himself
go, but feels his insincerity, and wonders how long he can keep up the
performance. The attacks are often surprisingly sudden in their onset.
The treatment here is to intimidate the patient by a stronger will.
Take out your temper, if he takes out his--"Nay, if thou'lt mouth, I'll
rant as well as thou." These are the cases of apparently great bodily
manifestation with comparatively little real subjective emotion, which
may be used to throw discredit on the theory advanced in the text.--It
is probable that the _visceral_ manifestations in these cases are quite
disproportionately slight, compared with those of the vocal organs. The
subject's state is somewhat similar to that of an actor who does not
feel his part.

[410] _Op. cit._ p. 73.--Lange lays great stress on the neurotic drugs,
as parts of his proof that influences of a physical nature upon the
body are the first thing in order in the production of emotions.

[411] Emotions and Will, pp. 361-2.

[412] Quoted by Dugald Stewart, Elements, etc. (Hamilton's ed.), iii.
140. Fechner (Vorschule der Aesthetik, 156) says almost the same thing
of himself: "One may find by one's own observation that the _imitation_
of the bodily expression of a mental condition makes us understand it
much better than the merely looking on.... When I walk behind some one
whom I do not know, and imitate as accurately as possible his gait and
carriage, I get the most curious impression of feeling as the person
himself must feel. To go tripping and mincing after the fashion of a
young woman puts one, so to speak, in a feminine mood of mind."

[413] 'The Anatomy of Acting,' in Longman's Magazine, vol. xi. pp. 266,
375, 498 (1888), since republished in book form.

[414] P. 394.

[415] P. 496.

[416] Even the feelings of the lower senses may have this secondary
escort, due to the arousing of associational trains which reverberate.
A flavor may fairly shake us by the ghosts of 'banquet halls deserted,'
which it suddenly calls up; or a smell may make us feel almost sick
with the waft it brings over our memory of 'gardens that are ruins,
and pleasure-houses that are dust.' "In the Pyrenees," says M. Guyau,
"after a summer-day's tramp carried to the extreme of fatigue, I met a
shepherd and asked him for some milk. He went to fetch from his hut,
under which a brook ran, a jar of milk plunged in the water and kept
at a coldness which was almost icy. In drinking this fresh milk _into
which all the mountain had put its perfume_, and of which each savory
swallow seemed to give new life, I certainly experienced a series of
feelings which the word _agreeable_ is insufficient to designate. It
was like a pastoral symphony, apprehended by the taste instead of by
the ear" (quoted by F. Paulhan from 'Les Problèmes de l'Æsthétique
Contemporaine,' p. 63).--Compare the dithyrambic about whiskey of Col.
R. Ingersoll, to which the presidential campaign of 1888 gave such
notoriety: "I send you some of the most wonderful whiskey that ever
drove the skeleton from a feast or painted landscapes in the brain
of man. It is the mingled souls of wheat and corn. In it you will
find the sunshine and shadow that chase each other over the billowy
fields, the breath of June, the carol of the lark, the dews of the
night, the wealth of summer, and autumn's rich content--all golden
with imprisoned light. Drink it, and you will hear the voice of men
and maidens singing the 'Harvest Home,' mingled with the laughter of
children. Drink it, and you will feel within your blood the star-lit
dawns, the dreamy, tawny dusks of many perfect days. For forty years
this liquid joy has been within the happy staves of oak, longing to
touch the lips of man."--It is in this way that I should reply to Mr.
Gurney's criticism on my theory. My "view," this writer says (Mind,
ix. 425), "goes far to confound the two things which in my opinion
it is the prime necessity of musical psychology to distinguish--the
effect chiefly sensuous of mere streams or masses of finely colored
sound, and the distinctive musical emotion to which _the form_ of
a sequence of sound, its melodic and harmonic individuality, even
realized in complete silence, is the vital and essential object. It is
with the former of these two very different things that the physical
reactions, the stirring of the hair--the tingling and the shiver--are
by far most markedly connected.... If I may speak of myself, there is
plenty of music from which I have received as much emotion in silent
representation as when presented by the finest orchestra; but it is
with the latter condition that I almost exclusively associate the
cutaneous tingling and hair-stirring. But to call my enjoyment of
the _form_, of the _note-after-note_ness of a melody a mere critical
'judgment of right' [see below, p. 473] would really be to deny to me
the power of expressing a fact of simple and intimate expression in
English. It is quintessentially emotion.... Now there are hundreds of
other bits of music ... which I judge to be _right_ without receiving
an iota of the emotion. For purposes of emotion they are to me like
geometrical demonstrations or like acts of integrity performed in
Peru." The Beethoven-rightness of which Gurney then goes on to speak,
as something different from the Clementi-rightness (even when the
respective pieces are only heard in idea), is probably a purely
_auditory-sensational_ thing. The Clementi-rightness also; only, for
reasons impossible to assign, the Clementi form does not give the same
sort of purely auditory satisfaction as the Beethoven form, and might
better be described perhaps negatively as _non-wrong_, i.e., free from
positively unpleasant acoustic quality. In organizations as musical
as Mr. Gurney's, purely acoustic form gives so intense a degree of
sensible pleasure that the lower bodily reverberation is of no account.
But I repeat that I see nothing in the facts which Mr. Gurney cites, to
lead one to believe in an emotion divorced from _sensational processes_
of any kind.

[417] In his chapter on 'Ideal Emotion,' to which the reader is
referred for farther details on this subject.

[418] Those feelings which Prof. Bain calls 'emotions of relativity,'
excitement of novelty, wonder, rapture of freedom, sense of power,
hardly survive any repetition of the experience. But as the text goes
on to explain, and as Goethe as quoted by Prof. Höffding says, this is
because "the soul is inwardly grown larger without knowing it, and can
no longer be filled by that first sensation. The man thinks that he has
lost, but really he has gained. What he has lost in rapture, he has
gained in inward growth." "It is," as Prof. Höffding himself adds, in
a beautiful figure of speech, "with our virgin feelings, as with the
first breath drawn by the new-born child, in which the lung expands
itself so that it can never be emptied to the same degree again. No
later breath can feel just like that first one." On this whole subject
of emotional blunting, compare Höffding's Psychologie, vi. E., and
Bain's Emotions and Will, chapter iv. of the first part.

[419] M. Fr. Paulhan, in a little work full of accurate observations
of detail (Les Phénomènes Affectifs et les Lois de leur Apparition),
seems to me rather to turn the truth upside down by his formula
that emotions are due to an inhibition of impulsive tendencies.
_One_ kind of emotion, namely, uneasiness, annoyance, distress, does
occur when any definite impulsive tendency is checked, and all of
M. P.'s illustrations are drawn from this sort. The other emotions
are themselves primary impulsive tendencies, of a diffusive sort
(involving, as M. P. rightly says, a _multiplicité des phénomènes_);
and just in proportion as more and more of these multiple tendencies
are checked, and replaced by some few narrow forms of discharge, does
the original emotion tend to disappear.

[420] A list of the older writings on the subject is given in
Mantegazza's work, La Physionomie et l'Expression, chap. I; others
in Darwin's first chapter. Bell's Anatomy of Expression, Mosso's La
Paura, Piderit's Wissenschaftliches System der Mimik und Physiognomik,
Duchenne's Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine, are, besides Lange and
Darwin, the most useful works with which I am acquainted. Compare also
Sully: Sensation and Intuition, chap. ii.

[421] One must remember, however, that just in so far forth as sexual
selection may have played a part in determining the human organism,
selection of expressive faces must have increased the average mobility
of the human countenance.

[422] Psychol., § 213.

[423] Weeping in childhood is almost as regular a symptom of anger
as it is of grief, which would account (on Darwin's principles) for
the frown of anger. Mr. Spencer has an account of the angry frown as
having arisen through the survival of the fittest, by its utility in
keeping the sun out of one's eyes when engaged in mortal combat(!).
(Principles of Psychology, ii. 546.) Professor Mosso objects to any
explanation of the frown by its utility for vision, that it is coupled,
during emotional excitement, with a dilatation of the pupil which is
very unfavorable for distinct vision, and that this ought to have been
weeded out by natural selection, if natural selection had the power to
fix the frown (see La Paura, chap. ix. § vi). Unfortunately this very
able author speaks as if all the emotions affected the pupil in the
same way. Fear certainly does make it dilate. But Gratiolet is quoted
by Darwin and others as saying that the pupils _contract_ in anger. I
have made no observations of my own on the point, and Mosso's earlier
paper on the pupil (Turin, 1875) I have not seen. I must repeat, with
Darwin, that we need more minute observations on this subject.

[424] Physiologie u. Psychologie des Lachens und des Komischen (Berlin,
1873), pp. 13, 15.

[425] These movements are explained teleologically, in the first
instance, by the efforts which the tongue is forced to make to adapt
itself to the better perception or avoidance of the sapid body. (Cf.
Physiol. Psych., ii. 423.)

[426] Professor Henle derives the negative wag of the head from an
incipient shudder, and remarks how fortunate is the abbreviation, as
when a lady declines a partner in the ball-room. The clapping of the
hands for applause he explains as a symbolic abridgment of an embrace.
The protrusion of the lips (_der prufende Zug_) which goes with all
sorts of dubious and questioning states of mind is derived by Dr.
Piderit from the _tasting_ movement which we can see on any one's mouth
when deciding whether a wine is good or not.

[427] _Loc. cit._ § 497. Why a dog's face-muscles are not more mobile
than they are Mr. Spencer fails to explain, as also why different
stimuli should innervate these small muscles in such different ways, if
easy drainage be the only principle involved. Charles Bell accounted
for the special part played by the facial muscles in expression by
their being _accessory muscles of respiration_, governed by nerves
whose origin is close to the respiratory centre in the medulla
oblongata. They are an adjuvant of _voice_, and like it their function
is _communication_. (See Bell's Anatomy of Expression. Appendix by
Alexander Shaw.)

[428] La Paura, Appendice, p. 295.

[429] See below, p. 627.




CHAPTER XXVI.[430]

WILL.


Desire, wish, will, are states of mind which everyone knows, and which
no definition can make plainer. We desire to feel, to have, to do, all
sorts of things which at the moment are not felt, had, or done. If
with the desire there goes a sense that attainment is not possible,
we simply _wish_; but if we believe that the end is in our power, we
_will_ that the desired feeling, having, or doing shall be real; and
real it presently becomes, either immediately upon the willing or after
certain preliminaries have been fulfilled.

The only ends which follow _immediately_ upon our willing seem to be
movements of our own bodies. Whatever _feelings_ and _havings_ we may
will to get, come in as results of preliminary movements which we make
for the purpose. This fact is too familiar to need illustration; so
that we may start with the proposition that the only _direct_ outward
effects of our will are bodily movements. The mechanism of production
of these voluntary movements is what befalls us to study now. The
subject involves a good many separate points which it is difficult
to arrange in any continuous logical order. I will treat of them
successively in the mere order of convenience; trusting that at the end
the reader will gain a clear and connected view.

       *       *       *       *       *

The movements we have studied hitherto have been automatic and
reflex, and (on the first occasion of their performance, at any rate)
unforeseen by the agent. The movements to the study of which we now
address ourselves, being desired and intended beforehand, are of course
done with full prevision of what they are to be. It follows from this
that _voluntary movements must be secondary, not primary functions
of our organism._ This is the first point to understand in the
psychology of Volition. Reflex, instinctive, and emotional movements
are all primary performances. The nerve-centres are so organized that
certain stimuli pull the trigger of certain explosive parts; and a
creature going through one of these explosions for the first time
undergoes an entirely novel experience. The other day I was standing
at a railroad station with a little child, when an express-train went
thundering by. The child, who was near the edge of the platform,
started, winked, had his breathing convulsed, turned pale, burst out
crying, and ran frantically towards me and hid his face. I have no
doubt that this youngster was almost as much astonished by his own
behavior as he was by the train, and more than I was, who stood by.
Of course if such a reaction has many times occurred we learn what to
expect of ourselves, and can then foresee our conduct, even though it
remain as involuntary and uncontrollable as it was before. But if,
in voluntary action properly so-called, the act must be foreseen, it
follows that no creature not endowed with divinatory power can perform
an act voluntarily for the first time. Well, we are no more endowed
with prophetic vision of what movements lie in our power, than we
are endowed with prophetic vision of what sensations we are capable
of receiving. As we must wait for the sensations to be given us, so
we must wait for the movements to be performed involuntarily,[431]
before we can frame ideas of what either of these things are. We learn
all our possibilities by the way of experience. When a particular
movement, having once occurred in a random, reflex, or involuntary way,
has left an image of itself in the memory, then the movement can be
desired again, proposed as an end, and deliberately willed. But it is
impossible to see how it could be willed before.

_A supply of ideas of the various movements that are possible left in
the memory by experiences of their involuntary performance is thus the
first prerequisite of the voluntary life._

Now the same movement involuntarily performed may leave many different
kinds of ideas of itself in the memory. If performed by another person,
we of course _see_ it, or we _feel_ it if the moving part strikes
another part of our own body. Similarly we have an auditory image of
its effects if it produces sounds, as for example when it is one of the
movements made in vocalization, or in playing on a musical instrument.
All these _remote_ effects of the movement, as we may call them, are
also produced by movements which we ourselves perform; and they leave
innumerable ideas in our mind by which we distinguish each movement
from the rest. It _looks_ distinct; it _feels_ distinct to some distant
part of the body which it strikes; or it _sounds_ distinct. These
remote effects would then, rigorously speaking, suffice to furnish the
mind with the supply of ideas required.

But in addition to these impressions upon remote organs of sense,
we have, whenever we perform a movement ourselves, another set of
impressions, those, namely, which come up from the parts that are
actually moved. These _kinæsthetic_ impressions, as Dr. Bastian has
called them, are so many _resident_ effects of the motion. Not only are
our muscles supplied with afferent as well as with efferent nerves, but
the tendons, the ligaments, the articular surfaces, and the skin about
the joints are all sensitive, and, being stretched and squeezed in ways
characteristic of each particular movement, give us as many distinctive
feelings as there are movements possible to perform.

It is by these resident impressions that we are made conscious of
_passive movements_--movements communicated to our limbs by others.
If you lie with closed eyes, and another person noiselessly places
your arm or leg in any arbitrarily chosen attitude, you receive an
accurate feeling of what attitude it is, and can immediately reproduce
it yourself in the arm or leg of the opposite side. Similarly a man
waked suddenly from sleep in the dark is aware of how he finds himself
lying. At least this is what happens when the nervous apparatus is
normal. But in cases of disease we sometimes find that the resident
impressions do not normally excite the centres, and that then the sense
of attitude is lost. It is only recently that pathologists have begun
to study these anæsthesias with the delicacy which they require; and
we have doubtless yet a great deal to learn about them. The skin may
be anæsthetic, and the muscles may not feel the cramp-like pain which
is produced by faradic currents sent through them, and yet the sense
of passive movement may be retained. It seems, in fact, to persist
more obstinately than the other forms of sensibility, for cases are
comparatively common in which all the other feelings in the limb but
this one of attitude are lost. In Chapter XX I have tried to make
it appear that the articular surfaces are probably the most important
source of the resident kinæsthetic feelings. But the determination of
their special organ is indifferent to our present quest. It is enough
to know that the existence of these feelings cannot be denied.

When the feelings of passive movement as well as all the other feelings
of a limb are lost, we get such results as are given in the following
account by Professor A. Strümpell of his wonderful anæsthetic boy,
whose only sources of feeling were the right eye and the left ear:[432]

 "Passive movements could be imprinted on all the extremities to
 the greatest extent, without attracting the patient's notice. Only
 in violent forced hyperextension of the joints, especially of the
 knees, there arose a dull vague feeling of strain, but this was
 seldom precisely localized. We have often, after bandaging the eyes
 of the patient, carried him about the room, laid him on a table,
 given to his arms and legs the most fantastic and apparently the most
 inconvenient attitudes, without his having a suspicion of it. The
 expression of astonishment in his face, when all at once the removal
 of the handkerchief revealed his situation, is indescribable in words.
 Only when his head was made to hang away down he immediately spoke
 of dizziness, but could not assign its ground. Later he sometimes
 inferred from the sounds connected with the manipulation that
 something special was being done with him.... He had no feelings of
 muscular fatigue. If, with his eyes shut, we told him to raise his
 arm and to keep it up, he did so without trouble. After one or two
 minutes, however, the arm began to tremble and sink without his being
 aware of it. He asserted still his ability to keep it up.... Passively
 holding still his fingers did not affect him. He thought constantly
 that he opened and shut his hand, whereas it was really fixed."

Or we read of cases like this:

 "Voluntary movements cannot be estimated the moment the patient ceases
 to take note of them by his eyes. Thus, after having made him close
 his eyes, if one asks him to move one of his limbs either wholly or
 in part, he does it but cannot tell whether the effected movement
 is large or small, strong or weak, or even if it has taken place at
 all. And when he opens his eyes after moving his leg from right to
 left, for example, he declares that he had a very inexact notion of
 the extent of the effected movement.... If, having the intention of
 executing a certain movement, _I prevent him,_ he does not perceive
 it, and supposes the limb to have taken the position he intended to
 give it."[433]

Or this:

 "The patient, when his eyes were closed in the middle of an
 unpractised movement, remained with the extremity in the position it
 had when the eyes closed and did not complete the movement properly.
 Then after some oscillations the limb gradually sank by reason of
 its weight (the sense of fatigue being absent). Of this the patient
 was not aware, and wondered, when he opened his eyes, at the altered
 position of his limb."[434]

A similar condition can be readily reproduced experimentally in many
hypnotic subjects. All that is needed is to tell a suitably predisposed
person during the hypnotic trance that he cannot feel his limb, and
he will be quite unaware of the attitudes into which you may throw
it.[435]

All these cases, whether spontaneous or experimental, show the absolute
need of _guiding sensations_ of some kind for the successful carrying
out of a concatenated series of movements. It is, in fact, easy to see
that, just as where the chain of movements is automatic (see above,
Vol. I. p. 116), each later movement of the chain has to be discharged
by the impression which the next earlier one makes in being executed,
so also, where the chain is voluntary, we need to know at each movement
just _where we are in it,_ if we are to will intelligently what the
next link shall be. A man with no feeling of his movements might lead
off never so well, and yet be sure to get lost soon and go astray.[436]
But patients like those described, who get no kinæsthetic impressions,
can still be guided by the sense of sight. Thus Strümpell says of his
boy:

 "One could always observe how his eye was directed first to the
 object held before him, then to his own arm; and how it never ceased
 to follow the latter during its entire movement. All his voluntary
 movements took place under the unremitting lead of the eye, which as
 an indispensable guide, was never untrue to its functions."

So in the Landry case:

 "With his eyes open, he easily opposes the thumb to each of the other
 fingers; with his eyes closed, the movement of opposition occurs,
 but the thumb only by chance meets the finger which it seeks. With
 his eyes open he is able, without hesitation, to bring his two hands
 together; but when his eyes are closed his hands seek one another in
 space, and only meet by chance."

In Charles Bell's well-known old case of anæsthesia the woman could
only hold her baby safely in her arms so long as she looked at it. I
have myself reproduced a similar condition in two hypnotic subjects
whose arm and hand were made anæsthetic without being paralyzed. They
could write their names when looking, but not when their eyes were
closed. The modern mode of teaching deaf mutes to articulate consists
in making them attentive to certain laryngeal, labial, thoracic, and
other sensations, the reproduction of which becomes a guide to their
vocalization. Normally it is the remoter sensations which we receive by
the ear which keep us from going astray in our speech. The phenomena of
aphasia show this to be the usual case.[437]

This is perhaps all that need be said about the existence of passive
sensations of movement and their indispensableness for our voluntary
activity. We may consequently set it down as certain that, _whether or
no there be anything else in the mind at the moment when we consciously
will a certain act, a mental conception made up of memory-images of
these sensations, defining which special act it is, must be there._

       *       *       *       *       *

Now _is there anything else in the mind when we will to do an act?_ We
must proceed in this chapter from the simpler to the more complicated
cases. My first thesis accordingly is, that _there need be nothing
else_, and that _in perfectly simple_ _voluntary acts there is nothing
else, in the mind but the kinæsthetic idea, thus defined, of what the
act is to be._

A powerful tradition in Psychology will have it that something
additional to these images of passive sensation is essential to the
mental determination of a voluntary act. There must, of course, be a
special current of energy going out from the brain into the appropriate
muscles during the act; and this outgoing current (it is supposed) must
have in each particular case a feeling _sui generis_ attached to it, or
else (it is said) the mind could never tell which particular current,
the current to this muscle or the current to that one, was the right
one to use. This feeling of the current of outgoing energy has received
from Wundt the name of the _feeling of innervation. I disbelieve in its
existence,_ and must proceed to criticise the notion of it, at what I
fear may to some prove tedious length.

At first sight there is something extremely plausible in the feeling
of innervation. The passive feelings of movement with which we have
hitherto been dealing all come after the movement's performance. But
wherever a movement is difficult and precise, we become, as a matter
of fact, acutely aware _in advance_ of the amount and direction
of energy which it is to involve. One has only to play tenpins or
billiards, or throw a ball, to catch his will in the act, as it were,
of balancing tentatively its possible efforts, and ideally rehearsing
various muscular contractions nearly correct, until it gets just the
right one before it, when it says 'Now go!' This premonitory weighing
feels so much like a succession of tentative sallyings forth of power
into the outer world, followed by correction just in time to avoid the
irrevocable deed, that the notion that _outgoing_ nerve-currents rather
than mere vestiges of former passive sensibility accompany it, is a
most natural one to entertain.

We find accordingly that most authors have taken the existence of
feelings of innervation as a matter of course. Bain, Wundt, Helmholtz,
and Mach defend them most explicitly. But in spite of the authority
which such writers deservedly wield, I cannot help thinking that they
are in this instance wrong,--that the discharge into the motor nerves
is insentient, and that _all our ideas of movement_, including those
of the effort which it requires, as well as those of its direction,
its extent, its strength, and its velocity, _are images of peripheral
sensations, either 'remote,' or resident in the moving parts, or in
other parts which sympathetically act with them in consequence of the
'diffusive wave.'_

_A priori_, as I shall show, there is no reason why there should be a
consciousness of the motor discharge, and there is a reason why there
should not be such a consciousness. The _presumption_ is thus against
the existence of the feeling of innervation; and the burden of proving
it falls upon those who believe in it. If the positive empirical
evidence which they offer prove also insufficient, then their case
falls to the ground, and the feeling in question must be ruled out of
court.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the first place, then, let me show that _the assumption of the
feeling of innervation is unnecessary._

I cannot help suspecting that the scholastic prejudice that 'the
effect must be already in some way _contained in_ the cause' has had
something to do with making psychologists so ready to admit the feeling
of innervation. The outgoing current being the effect, what psychic
antecedent could contain or prefigure it better than a feeling of it?
But if we take a wide view, and consider the psychic antecedents of
our activities at large, we see that the scholastic maxim breaks down
everywhere, and that its verification in this instance would rather
violate than illustrate the general rule. In the diffusive wave,
in reflex action, and in emotional expression, the movements which
are the effects are in no manner contained by anticipation in the
stimuli which are their cause. The latter are subjective sensations or
objective perceptions, which do not in the slightest degree resemble
or prefigure the movements. But we get them, and, presto! there the
movements are! They are knocked out of us, they surprise us. It is just
cause for wonder, as our chapter on Instinct has shown us, that such
bodily consequences should follow such mental antecedents. We explain
the mystery _tant bien que mal_ by our evolutionary theories, saying
that lucky variations and heredity have gradually brought it about
that this particular pair of terms should have grown into a uniform
sequence. Meanwhile why any state of consciousness _at all_ should
precede a movement, we know not--the two things seem so essentially
discontinuous. But if a state of consciousness there must be, why then
it may, for aught we can see, as easily be one sort of a state as
another. It is swallowing a camel and straining at a gnat for a man
(all of whose muscles will on certain occasions contract at a sudden
touch or sound) to suppose that on another occasion the idea of the
feelings about to be produced by their contraction is an insufficient
mental signal for the latter, and to insist that an additional
antecedent is needed in the shape of 'a feeling of the outgoing
discharge.'

No! for aught we can see, and in the light of general analogy, the
kinæsthetic ideas, as we have defined them, or images of incoming
feelings of attitude and motion, are as _likely_ as any feelings of
innervation are, to be the last psychic antecedents and determiners
of the various currents downwards into the muscles from the brain.
The question "What _are_ the antecedents and determinants?" is a
question of fact, to be decided by whatever empirical evidence may be
found.[438]

But before considering the empirical evidence, let me go on to show
that there is _a certain a priori reason why the kinæsthetic images_
OUGHT _to be the last psychic antecedents of the outgoing currents, and
why we should expect these currents to be insentient; why, in short,
the soi-disant feelings of innervation should_ NOT _exist_.

It is a general principle in Psychology that consciousness deserts
all processes where it can no longer be of use. The tendency of
consciousness to a minimum of complication is in fact a dominating
law. The law of parsimony in logic is only its best known case. We
grow unconscious of every feeling which is useless as a sign to lead
us to our ends, and where one sign will suffice others drop out, and
that one remains, to work alone. We observe this in the whole history
of sense-perception, and in the acquisition of every art. We ignore
which eye we see with, because a fixed mechanical association has been
formed between our motions and each retinal image. Our motions are
the ends of our seeing, our retinal images the signals to these ends.
If each retinal image, whichever it be, can suggest automatically a
motion in the right direction, what need for us to know whether it be
in the right eye or the left? That knowledge would be superfluous
complication. So in acquiring any art or voluntary function. The
marksman ends by thinking only of the exact position of the goal, the
singer only of the perfect sound, the balancer only of the point of the
pole whose oscillations he must counteract. The associated mechanism
has become so perfect in all these persons that each variation in the
thought of the end is functionally correlated with the one movement
fitted to bring the latter about. Whilst they were tyros, they thought
of their means as well as their end: the marksman of the position of
his gun or bow, or the weight of his stone; the pianist of the visible
position of the note on the keyboard; the singer of his throat or
breathing; the balancer of his feet on the rope, or his hand or chin
under the pole. But little by little they succeeded in dropping all
this supernumerary consciousness, and they became secure in their
movements exactly in proportion as they did so.

Now if we analyze the nervous mechanism of voluntary action, we shall
see that by virtue of this principle of parsimony in consciousness
the motor discharge _ought_ to be devoid of sentience. If we call the
immediate psychic antecedent of a movement the latter's _mental cue_,
all that is needed for invariability of sequence on the movement's
part is a _fixed connection_ between each several mental cue, and
one particular movement. For a movement to be produced with perfect
precision, it suffices that it obey instantly its own mental cue and
nothing else, and that this mental cue be incapable of awakening any
other movement. Now the _simplest_ possible arrangement for producing
voluntary movements would be that the memory-images of the movement's
distinctive peripheral effects, whether resident or remote,[439]
themselves should severally constitute the mental cues, and that no
other psychic facts should intervene or be mixed up with them. For a
million different voluntary movements, we should then need a million
distinct processes in the brain-cortex (each corresponding to the
idea or memory-image of one movement), and a million distinct paths
of discharge. Everything would then be unambiguously determined, and
if the idea were right, the movement-would be right too. Everything
_after_ the idea might then be quite insentient, and the motor
discharge itself could be unconsciously performed.

The partisans of the feeling of innervation, however, say that the
motor discharge itself must be felt, and that it, and not the idea
of the movement's distinctive effects, must be the proper mental
cue. Thus the principle of parsimony is sacrificed, and all economy
and simplicity are lost. For what can be gained by the interposition
of this relay of feeling between the idea of the movement and the
movement? Nothing on the score of economy of nerve-tracts; for it takes
just as many of them to associate a million ideas of movement with a
million motor centres, each with a specific feeling of innervation
attached to its discharge, as to associate the same million ideas
with a million insentient motor centres. And nothing on the score
of precision; for the only conceivable way in which the feelings of
innervation might further precision would be by giving to a mind whose
idea of a movement was vague, a sort of halting stage with sharper
imagery on which to collect its wits before uttering its _fiat_. But
not only are the conscious discriminations between our kinæsthetic
ideas much sharper than any one pretends the shades of difference
between feelings of innervation to be, but even were this not the case,
it is impossible to see how a mind with its idea vaguely conceived
could tell out of a lot of _Innervationsgefühle_, were they never so
sharply differentiated, which one fitted that idea exactly, and which
did not. A sharply conceived idea will, on the other hand, _directly_
awaken a distinct movement as easily as it will awaken a distinct
feeling of innervation. If feelings can go astray through vagueness,
surely the fewer steps of feeling there are interposed the more
securely we shall act. We ought then, on _a priori_ grounds alone, to
regard the _Innervationsgefühl_ as a pure encumbrance, and to presume
that the peripheral ideas of movement are sufficient mental cues.

The presumption being thus against the feelings of innervation, those
who defend their existence are bound to prove it by positive evidence.
The evidence might be direct or indirect. If we could introspectively
feel them as something plainly distinct from the peripheral feelings
and ideas of movement which nobody denies to be there, that would be
evidence both direct and conclusive. Unfortunately it does not exist.

_There is no introspective evidence of the feeling of innervation._
Wherever we look for it and think we have grasped it, we find that we
have really got a peripheral feeling or image instead--an image of the
way in which we feel when the innervation is over, and the movement
is in process of doing or is done. Our idea of raising our arm, for
example, or of crooking our finger, is a sense, more or less vivid,
of how the raised arm or the crooked finger feels. There is no other
mental material out of which such an idea might be made. We cannot
possibly have any idea of our ears' motion until our ears have moved;
and this is true of every other organ as well.

Since the time of Hume it has been a commonplace in psychology that
we are only conversant with the outward results of our volition, and
not with the hidden inner machinery of nerves and muscles which are
what it primarily sets at work.[440] The believers in the feeling
of innervation readily admit this, but seem hardly alive to its
consequences. It seems to me that one immediate consequence ought to
be to make us doubt the existence of the feeling in dispute. Whoever
says that in raising his arm he is ignorant of how many muscles
he contracts, in what order of sequence, and in what degrees of
intensity, expressively avows a colossal amount of unconsciousness of
the processes of motor discharge. Each separate muscle at any rate
cannot have its distinct feeling of innervation. Wundt,[441] who makes
such enormous use of these hypothetical feelings in his psychologic
construction of space, is himself led to admit that they have no
differences of quality, but feel alike in all muscles, and vary only
in their degrees of intensity. They are used by the mind as guides,
not of _which_ movement, but of _how strong_ a movement, it is making,
or shall make. But does not this virtually surrender their existence
altogether?[442]

For if anything be obvious to introspection it is that the degree of
strength of our muscular contractions is completely revealed to us
by afferent feelings coming from the muscles themselves and their
insertions, from the vicinity of the joints, and from the general
fixation of the larynx, chest, face, and body, in the phenomenon of
effort, objectively considered. When a certain degree of energy of
contraction rather than another is thought of by us, this complex
aggregate of afferent feelings, forming the material of our thought,
renders absolutely precise and distinctive our mental image of the
exact strength of movement to be made, and the exact amount of
resistance to be overcome.

Let the reader try to direct his will towards a particular movement,
and then notice what _constituted_ the direction of the will. Was
it anything over and above the notion of the different feelings to
which the movement when effected would give rise? If we abstract from
these feelings, will any sign, principle, or means of orientation
be left by which the will may innervate the right muscles with the
right intensity, and not go astray into the wrong ones? Strip off
these images of result, and so far from leaving us with a complete
assortment of directions into which our will may launch itself, you
leave our consciousness in an absolute and total vacuum. If I will to
write "Peter" rather than "Paul," it is the thought of certain digital
sensations, of certain alphabetic sounds, of certain appearances on the
paper, and of no others, which immediately precedes the motion of my
pen.

If I will to utter the word _Paul_ rather than _Peter_, it is the
thought of my voice falling on my ear, and of certain muscular feelings
in my tongue, lips, and larynx, which guide the utterance. All these
are incoming feelings, and between the thought of them, by which the
act is mentally specified with all possible completeness, and the act
itself, there is no room for any third order of mental phenomenon.
There is indeed the _fiat_, the element of consent, or resolve that the
act shall ensue. This, doubtless, to the reader's mind, as to my own,
constitutes the essence of the voluntariness of the act. This _fiat_
will be treated of in detail farther on. It may be entirely neglected
here, for it is a constant coefficient, affecting all voluntary
actions alike, and incapable of serving to distinguish them. No one
will pretend that its quality varies according as the right arm, for
example, or the left is used.

_An anticipatory image, then, of the sensorial consequences of a
movement, plus (on certain occasions) the fiat that these consequences
shall become actual, is the only psychic state which introspection
lets us discern as the forerunner of our voluntary acts._ There is
no introspective evidence whatever of any still later or concomitant
feeling attached to the efferent discharge. The various degrees of
difficulty with which the fiat is given form a complication of the
utmost importance, to be discussed farther on.

Now the reader may still shake his head and say: "But can you
seriously mean that all the wonderfully exact adjustment of my
action's strength to its ends is not a matter of outgoing innervation?
Here is a cannon-ball, and here a pasteboard box: instantly and
accurately I lift each from the table, the ball not refusing to rise
because my innervation was too weak, the box not flying abruptly
into the air because it was too strong. Could representations of the
movement's different sensory effects in the two cases be so delicately
foreshadowed in the mind? or being there, is it credible that they
should, all unaided, so delicately graduate the stimulation of the
unconscious motor centres to their work?" Even so! I reply to both
queries. We have a most extremely delicate foreshadowing of the sensory
effects. Why else the start of surprise that runs through us if some
one has filled the light-seeming box with sand before we try to lift
it, or has substituted for the cannon-ball which we know a painted
wooden imitation? _Surprise_ can only come from getting a sensation
which differs from the one we expect. But the truth is that when we
know the objects well, the very slightest difference from the expected
weight will surprise us, or at least attract our notice. With unknown
objects we begin by expecting the weight made probable by their
appearance. The expectation of this sensation innervates our lift,
and we 'set' it rather small at first. An instant verifies whether it
is too small. Our expectation rises, i.e., we think in a twinkling of
a setting of the chest and teeth, a bracing of the back, and a more
violent feeling in the arms. Quicker than thought we have them, and
with them the burden ascends into the air.[443] Bernhardt[444] has
shown in a rough experimental way that our estimation of the amount of
a resistance is as delicately graduated when our wills are passive,
and our limbs made to contract by direct local faradization, as when
we ourselves innervate them. Ferrier[445] has repeated and verified
the observations. They admit of no great precision, and too much stress
should not be laid upon them either way; but at the very least they
tend to show that no added delicacy would accrue to our perception from
the consciousness of the efferent process, even if it existed.

Since there is no direct introspective evidence for the feelings of
innervation, is there any indirect or circumstantial evidence? Much is
offered; but on critical examination it breaks down. Let us see what it
is. Wundt says that were our motor feelings of an afferent nature,

 "it ought to be expected that they would increase and diminish with
 the amount of outer or inner work actually effected in contraction.
 This, however, is not the case, but the strength of the motor
 sensation is purely proportional to the strength of the _impulse_ to
 movement, which starts from the central organ innervating the motor
 nerves. This may be proved by observations made by physicians in
 cases of morbid alteration in the muscular effect. A patient whose
 arm or leg is half paralyzed, so that he can only move the limb with
 great effort, has a distinct feeling of this effort: the limb seems
 to him heavier than before, appearing as if weighted with lead; he
 has, therefore, a sense of more work effected than formerly, and yet
 the effected work is either the same or even less. Only he must, to
 get even this effect, exert a stronger innervation, a stronger motor
 impulse, than formerly."[446]

In complete paralysis, also, patients will be conscious of putting
forth the greatest exertion to move a limb which remains absolutely
still upon the bed, and from which of course no afferent muscular or
other feelings can come.[447]

But Dr. Ferrier in his Functions of the Brain (Am. Ed. pp. 222-4)
disposes very easily of this line of argument. He says:

 "It is necessary, however, to exclude movements _altogether_ before
 such an explanation [as Wundt's] can be adopted. Now, though the
 hemiplegic patient cannot move his paralyzed limb, though he is
 conscious of trying hard, yet he will be found to be making powerful
 muscular exertion of some kind. Vulpian has called attention to the
 fact, and I have repeatedly verified it, that when a hemiplegic
 patient is desired to close his paralyzed fist, in his endeavors to do
 so he unconsciously performs this action with the sound one. It is,
 in fact, almost impossible to exclude such a source of complication,
 and unless this is taken into account very erroneous conclusions as
 to the cause of the sense of effort may be drawn. In the fact of
 muscular contraction and the concomitant centripetal impressions, even
 though the action is not such as is desired, the conditions of the
 consciousness of effort exist without our being obliged to regard it
 as depending on central innervation or outgoing currents.

 "It is, however, easy to make an experiment of a simple nature which
 will satisfactorily account for the sense of effort, even when these
 unconscious contractions of the other side, such as hemiplegics make,
 are entirely excluded.

 "If the reader will extend his right arm and hold his forefinger in
 the position required for pulling the trigger of a pistol, he may
 without actually moving his finger, but by simply making believe,
 experience a consciousness of energy put forth. Here, then, is a
 clear case of consciousness of energy without actual contraction
 of the muscles either of the one hand or the other, and without
 any perceptible bodily strain. If the reader will again perform
 the experiment, and pay careful attention to the condition of his
 respiration, he will observe that his consciousness of effort
 coincides with a fixation of the muscles of his chest, and that in
 proportion to the amount of energy he feels he is putting forth, he is
 keeping his glottis closed and actively contracting his respiratory
 muscles. Let him place his finger as before, and _continue breathing_
 all the time, and he will find that however much he may direct his
 attention to his finger, he will experience not the slightest trace
 of consciousness of effort until he has actually moved the finger
 itself, and then it is referred locally to the muscles in action. It
 is only when this essential and ever-present respiratory factor is,
 as it has been, overlooked, that the consciousness of effort can with
 any degree of plausibility be ascribed to the outgoing current. In
 the contraction of the respiratory muscles there are the necessary
 conditions of centripetal impressions, and these are capable of
 originating the general sense of effort. When these active efforts
 are withheld, no consciousness of effort ever arises, except in so
 far as it is conditioned by the local contraction of the group of
 muscles towards which the attention is directed, or by other muscular
 contractions called unconsciously into play in the attempt.

 "I am unable to find a single case of consciousness of effort which is
 not explicable in one or other of the ways specified. In all instances
 the consciousness of effort is conditioned by the actual fact of
 muscular contraction. That it is dependent on centripetal impressions
 generated by the act of contraction, I have already endeavored to
 show. When the paths of the centripetal impressions or the cerebral
 centres of the same are destroyed, there is no vestige of a muscular
 sense. That the central organs for the apprehension of the impressions
 originating from muscular contraction are different from those which
 send out the motor impulse, has already been established. But when
 Wundt argues that this cannot be so, because then the sensation would
 always keep pace with the energy of muscular contraction, he overlooks
 the important factor of the fixation of the respiratory muscles,
 which is the basis of the general sense of effort in all its varying
 degrees."

To these remarks of Ferrier's I have nothing to add.[448] Any one
may verify them, and they prove conclusively that the consciousness
of muscular exertion, being impossible without movement _effected
somewhere_, must be an afferent and not an efferent sensation; a
consequence, and not an antecedent, of the movement itself. An idea of
the amount of muscular exertion requisite to perform a certain movement
can consequently be nothing other than an anticipatory image of the
movement's sensible effects.

Driven thus from the body at large, where next shall the circumstantial
evidence for the feeling of innervation lodge itself? Where but in
the muscles of the eye, from which small retreat it judges itself
inexpugnable. Nevertheless, that fastness too must fall, and by the
lightest of bombardments. But, before trying the bombardment, let
us recall our general principles about optical vertigo, or illusory
appearance of movement in objects.

We judge that an object moves under two distinct sets of circumstances:

1. When its image moves on the retina, and we know that the eye is
still.

2. When its image is stationary on the retina, and we know that the eye
is moving. In this case we feel that we _follow_ the object.

In either of these cases a mistaken judgment about the state of the eye
will produce optical vertigo.

If in case 1 we think our eye is still when it is really moving, we
get a movement of the retinal image which we judge to be due to a
real outward motion of the object. This is what happens after looking
at rushing water, or through the windows of a moving railroad car,
or after turning on one's heel to giddiness. The eyes, without our
intending to move them, go through a series of involuntary rotations,
continuing those they were previously obliged to make to keep objects
in view. If the objects had been whirling by to our right, our eyes
when turned to stationary objects will still move slowly towards the
right. The retinal image upon them will then move like that of an
object passing to the left. We then try to catch it by voluntarily and
rapidly rotating the eyes to the left, when the involuntary impulse
again rotates the eyes to the right, continuing the apparent motion;
and so the game goes on. (See above, pp. 89-91.)

If in case 2 we think our eyes moving when they are in reality still,
we shall judge that we are following a moving object when we are but
fixating a steadfast one. Illusions of this kind occur after sudden
and complete paralysis of special eye muscles, and the partisans of
feelings of efferent innervation regard them as _experimenta crucis_.
Helmholtz writes:[449]

 "When the external rectus muscle of the right eye, or its nerve, is
 paralyzed, the eye can no longer be rotated to the right side. So
 long as the patient turns it only to the nasal side it makes regular
 movements, and he perceives correctly the position of objects in the
 visual field. So soon, however, as he tries to rotate it outwardly,
 i.e., towards the right, it ceases to obey his will, stands motionless
 in the middle of its course, and the objects appear flying to the
 right, although position of eye and retinal image are unaltered.[450]

 "In such a case the exertion of the will is followed neither by actual
 movement of the eye, nor by contraction of the muscle in question,
 nor even by increased tension in it. The act of will _produced
 absolutely no effect_ beyond the nervous system, and yet we judge of
 the direction of the line of vision as if the will had exercised its
 normal effects. We believe it to have moved to the right, and since
 the retinal image is unchanged, we attribute to the object the same
 movement we have erroneously ascribed to the eye.... These phenomena
 leave no room for doubt that we only judge the direction of the line
 of sight by the effort of will with which we strive to change the
 position of our eyes. There are also certain weak feelings in our
 eyelids,... and furthermore in excessive lateral rotations we feel a
 fatiguing strain in the muscles. But all these feelings are too faint
 and vague to be of use in the perception of direction. We feel then
 what impulse of the will, and how strong a one, we apply to turn our
 eye into a given position."

_Partial_ paralysis of the same muscle, _paresis_, as it has been
called, seems to point even more conclusively to the same inference,
that the will to innervate is felt independently of all its afferent
results. I will quote the account given by a recent authority,[451] of
the effects of this accident:

 "When the nerve going to an eye muscle, e.g., the external rectus of
 one side, falls into a state of paresis, the first result is that
 the same volitional stimulus, which under normal circumstances would
 have perhaps rotated the eye to its extreme position outwards, now is
 competent to effect only a moderate outward rotation, say of 20º. If
 now, shutting the sound eye, the patient looks at an object situated
 just so far outwards from the paretic eye that this latter must turn
 20º in order to see it distinctly, the patient will feel as if he had
 moved it not only 20º towards the side, but into its extreme lateral
 position, for the impulse of innervation requisite for bringing it
 into view is a perfectly conscious act, whilst the diminished state
 of contraction of the paretic muscle lies for the present out of the
 ken of consciousness. The test proposed by von Graefe, of localization
 by the sense of touch, serves to render evident the error which the
 patient now makes. If we direct him to touch rapidly the object looked
 at, with the forefinger of the hand of the same side, the line through
 which the finger moves will not be the line of sight directed 20º
 outward, but will approach more nearly to the extreme possible outward
 line of vision."

A stone-cutter with the external rectus of the left eye paralyzed, will
strike his hand instead of his chisel with his hammer, until experience
has taught him wisdom.

It appears as if here the judgment of direction _could_ only arise from
the excessive innervation of the rectus when the object is looked at.
All the afferent feelings must be identical with those experienced when
the eye is sound and the judgment is correct. The eyeball is rotated
just 20º in the one case as in the other, the image falls on the same
part of the retina, the pressures on the eyeball and the tensions of
the skin and conjunctiva are identical. There is only one feeling which
_can_ vary, and lead us to our mistake. That feeling must be the effort
which the will makes, moderate in the one case, excessive in the other,
but in both cases an efferent feeling, pure and simple.

Beautiful and clear as this reasoning seems to be, it is based on
an incomplete inventory of the afferent data. The writers have all
omitted to consider what is going on in the _other eye_. This is kept
covered during the experiments, to prevent double images, and other
complications. But if its condition under these circumstances be
examined, it will be found to present changes which must result in
strong afferent feelings. And the taking account of these feelings
demolishes in an instant all the conclusions which the authors from
whom I have quoted base upon their supposed absence. This I will now
proceed to show.[452]

Take first the case of complete paralysis and assume the right eye
affected. Suppose the patient desires to rotate his gaze to an object
situated in the extreme right of the field of vision. As Hering has so
beautifully shown, both eyes move by a common act of innervation, and
in this instance both move towards the right. But the paralyzed right
eye stops short in the middle of its course, the object still appearing
far to the sight of its fixation point. The left sound eye, meanwhile,
although covered, continues its rotation until the extreme rightward
limit thereof has been reached. To an observer looking at both eyes the
left will seem to squint. Of course this continued and extreme rotation
produces afferent feelings of rightward motion in the eyeball, which
momentarily overpower the faint feelings of central position in the
diseased and uncovered eye. The patient feels by his left eyeball as
if he were following an object which by his right retina he perceives
he does not overtake. All the conditions of optical vertigo are
here present: the image stationary on the retina, and the erroneous
conviction that the eyes are moving.

The objection that a feeling in the left eyeball ought not to produce
a conviction that the right eye moves, will be considered in a moment.
Let us meanwhile turn to the case of simple paresis with apparent
translocation of the field.

Here the right eye succeeds in fixating the object, but observation of
the left eye will reveal to an observer the fact that it squints just
as violently inwards as in the former case. The direction which the
finger of the patient takes in pointing to the object, is the direction
of this squinting and covered left eye. As Graefe says (although he
fails to seize the true import of his own observation), "It appears
to have been by no means sufficiently noticed how significantly the
direction of the line of sight of the secondarily deviating eye [i.e.,
of the left,] and the line of direction of the pointed finger agree."

The translocation would, in a word, be perfectly explained could we
suppose that the sensation of a certain degree of rotation in the
left eyeball were able to suggest to the patient the position of an
object whose image falls on the right retina alone.[453] Can, then, a
feeling in one eye be confounded with a feeling in the other? It most
assuredly can, for not only Donders and Adamük, by their vivisections,
but Hering by his exquisite optical experiments, have proved that
the apparatus of innervation for both eyes is single, and that they
function as one organ--a double eye, according to Hering, or what
Helmholtz calls a _Cyclopenauge_. The retinal feelings of this double
organ, singly innervated, are naturally undistinguished as respects
our knowing whether they belong to the left retina or to the right.
We use them only to tell us where their objects lie. It takes long
practice directed specially _ad hoc_ to teach us on which retina the
sensations severally fall. Similarly the different sensations which
arise from the positions of the eyeballs are used exclusively as signs
of the position of objects; an object directly fixated being localized
habitually at the intersection of the two optical axes, but without any
separate consciousness on our part that the position of one axis is
different from another. All we are aware of is a consolidated feeling
of a certain 'strain' in the eyeballs, accompanied by the perception
that just so far in front and so far to the right or to the left there
is an object which we see. So that a 'muscular' process in one eye is
as likely to combine with a retinal process in the other eye to effect
a perceptive judgment, as two processes in one eye are likely so to
combine.

       *       *       *       *       *

Another piece of circumstantial evidence for the feelings of
innervation is that adduced by Professor Mach, as follows:

 "If we stand on a bridge, and look at the water flowing beneath, we
 usually feel ourselves at rest, whilst the water seems in motion.
 Prolonged looking at the water, however, commonly has for its result
 to make the bridge with the observer and surroundings suddenly seem to
 move in the direction opposed to that of the water, whilst the water
 itself assumes the appearance of standing still. The _relative_ motion
 of the objects is in both cases the same, and there must therefore be
 some adequate _physiological_ ground why sometimes one, sometimes
 the other part of them is felt to move. In order to investigate the
 matter conveniently, I had the simple apparatus constructed which
 is represented in Fig. 86. An oil-cloth with a simple pattern is
 horizontally stretched over two cylinders (each 2 metres long and
 3 feet apart) and kept in uniform motion by the help of a crank.
 Across the cloth, and some 30 cm. above it, is stretched a string,
 with a knot _x_, which serves as a fixation-point for the eye of
 the observer. If the observer _follow_ with his eyes the pattern
 of the cloth as it moves, he sees it in movement, himself and the
 surroundings at rest. But if he looks at the _knot_, he soon feels as
 if the entire room were moving contrary to the direction of the cloth,
 whilst the latter seems to stand still. This change in the mode of
 looking comes about in more or less time according to one's momentary
 disposition, but usually it takes but a few seconds. If one once
 understands the point, one can make the two appearances alternate at
 will. Every following of the oil-cloth makes the observer stationary;
 every fixation of the knot or _inattention to the oil-cloth, so that
 its pattern becomes blurred,_, sets him in apparent motion."[454]

[Illustration: FIG. 86.]

Professor Mach proceeds to explain the phenomenon as follows:

 "Moving objects exert, as is well known, a peculiar motor stimulation
 upon the eye, they draw our attention and our look after them. If
 the look really follows them ... we assume that they move. But if the
 eye, instead of following the moving objects, remains steadfastly
 at rest, it must be that the constant stimulus to motion which it
 receives is neutralized by an equally constant current of innervation
 flowing into its motor apparatus. But this is just what would happen
 if the steadfastly fixated point were itself moving uniformly in the
 other direction, and we were following it with our eyes. When this
 comes about, whatever motionless things are looked at must appear in
 motion."[455]

The knot _x_, the string, we ourselves, and all our stationary
surroundings thus appear in movement, according to Mach, because we are
constantly innervating our eyeballs to resist the _drag_ exerted upon
them by the pattern or the flowing waves. I have myself repeated the
observation many times above flowing streams, but have never succeeded
in getting the full illusion as described by Mach. I gain a sense of
the movement of the bridge and of my own body, but the river never
seems absolutely to stop: it still moves in one direction, whilst I
float away in the other. But, be the illusion partial or complete,
a different explanation of it from Professor Mach's seems to me the
more natural one to adopt. The illusion is said to cease when, our
attention being fully fixed on the moving oil-cloth, we perceive the
latter for what it is; and to recommence, on the contrary, when we
perceive the oil-cloth as a vaguely moving background behind an object
which we directly fixate and whose position with regard to our own
body is unchanged. This, however, is the sort of consciousness which
we have whenever we are ourselves borne in a vehicle, on horseback, or
in a boat. As we and our belongings go one way, the _whole background_
goes the other. I should rather, therefore, explain Professor Mach's
illusion as similar to the illusion at railroad-stations described
above on page 90. The other train moves, but it makes ours seem to
move, because, filling the window as it does, it stands for the time
being as the total background. So here, the water or oil-cloth stands
for us as background _überhaupt_ whenever we seem to ourselves to be
moving over it. The relative motion felt by the retina is assigned to
that one of its components which we look at more in itself and less
as a mere _repoussoir_. This may be the knot above the oil-cloth or
the bridge beneath our feet, or it may be, on the other hand, the
oil-cloth's pattern or the surface of the swirling stream. Similar
changes may be produced in the apparent motion of the moon and the
clouds through which it shines, by similarly altering the attention.
Such alterations, however, in our conception of which part of the
visual field is substantive object and which part background, seem to
have no connection with feelings of innervation. I cannot, therefore,
regard the observation of Prof. Mach as any proof that the latter
feelings exist.[456]

       *       *       *       *       *

The circumstantial evidence for the feeling of innervation thus seems
to break down like the introspective evidence. But not only can we
rebut experiments intended to prove it, we can also adduce experiments
which disprove it. A person who moves a limb voluntarily must innervate
it in any case, and if he feels the innervation he ought to be able to
use the feeling to define what his limb is about, even though the limb
itself were anæsthetic. If, however, the limb be totally anæsthetic,
it turns out that he does not know at all how much work it performs in
its contraction--in other words, he has no perception of the amount of
innervation which he exerts. A patient examined by Messrs. Gley and
Marillier beautifully showed this. His entire arms, and his trunk down
to the navel, were insensible both superficially and deeply, but his
arms were not paralyzed:

 "We take three stone bottles--two of them are empty and weigh each 350
 grams; the third is full of mercury and weighs 1850 grams. We ask L...
 to estimate their weight and tell us which is heaviest. He declares
 that he finds them all three alike. With many days of interval we
 made two series of six experiments each. The result was always the
 same. The experiment, it need hardly be said, was arranged in such
 wise that he could be informed neither by sight nor by hearing. He
 even declared, holding in his hand the bottleful of mercury, that he
 found it to have no weight.... We place successively in his hand (his
 eyes being still bandaged) a piece of modelling wax, a stick of hard
 wood, a thick India-rubber tube, a newspaper folded up lengthwise and
 rumpled, and we make him squeeze these several objects. He feels no
 difference of resistance and does not even perceive that anything is
 in his hand."[457]

M. Gley in another place[458] quotes experiments by Dr. Bloch which
prove that the sense which we have of our limbs' position owes
absolutely nothing to the feeling of innervation put forth. Dr. Bloch
stood opposite the angle of a screen whose sides made an angle of
about 90º, and tried to place his hands symmetrically, or so that both
should fall on corresponding spots of the two screen-sides, which were
marked with squares for the purpose. The average error being noted,
one hand was then passively carried by an assistant to a spot on its
screen-side, and the other actively sought the corresponding spot on
the opposite side. The accuracy of the correspondence proved to be
as great as when both arms were innervated voluntarily, showing that
the consciousness of innervation in the first of the two experiments
added nothing to the sense of the limbs' position. Dr. Bloch then
tried, pressing a certain number of pages of a book between the thumb
and forefinger of one hand, to press an equal number between the same
fingers of the other hand. He did this just as well when the fingers
in question were drawn apart by India-rubber bands as when they were
uninterfered with, showing that the physiologically much greater
innervation-current required in the former case had no effect upon the
consciousness of the movement made, so far as its spatial character at
any rate was concerned.[459]

On the whole, then, it seems as probable as anything can well be, that
these feelings of innervation do not exist. If the motor cells are
distinct structures, they are as insentient as the motor nerve-trunks
are after the posterior roots are cut. If they are not distinct
structures, but are only the last sensory cells, those at the 'mouth
of the funnel,'[460] then their consciousness is that of kinæsthetic
ideas and sensations merely, and this consciousness accompanies the
rise of activity in them rather than its discharge. The entire content
and material of our consciousness--consciousness of movement, as of
all things else--is thus of peripheral origin, and came to us in the
first instance through the peripheral nerves. If it be asked what we
gain by this sensationalistic conclusion, I reply that we gain at any
rate simplicity and uniformity. In the chapters on Space, on Belief,
on the Emotions, we found sensation to be a much richer thing than is
commonly supposed; and this chapter seems at this point to fall into
line with those. Then, as for sensationalism being a degrading belief,
which abolishes all inward originality and spontaneity, there is this
to be said, that the advocates of inward spontaneity may be turning
their backs on its real citadel, when they make a fight, on its behalf,
for the consciousness of energy put forth in the outgoing discharge.
Let there be no such consciousness; let all our thoughts of movements
be of sensational constitution; still in the emphasizing, choosing,
and espousing of one of them rather than another, in the saying to
it, 'be thou the reality for me,' there is ample scope for our inward
initiative to be shown. Here, it seems to me, the true line between the
passive materials and the activity of the spirit should be drawn. It is
certainly false strategy to draw it between such ideas as are connected
with the outgoing and such as are connected with the incoming neural
wave.[461]

       *       *       *       *       *

If the ideas by which we discriminate between one movement and
another, at the instant of deciding in our mind which one we shall
perform, are always of sensorial origin, then the question arises, "Of
which sensorial order need they be?" It will be remembered that we
distinguished two orders of kinæsthetic impression, the _remote_ ones,
made by the movement on the eye or ear or distant skin, etc., and the
_resident_ ones, made on the moving parts themselves, muscles, joints,
etc. Now do resident images, exclusively, form what I have called the
mental cue, or will remote ones equally suffice?

_There can be no doubt whatever that the mental cue may be either an
image of the resident or of the remote kind._ Although, at the outset
of our learning a movement, it would seem that the resident feelings
must come strongly before consciousness (cf. p. 487), later this need
not be the case. The rule, in fact, would seem to be that they tend to
lapse more and more from consciousness, and that the more practised
we become in a movement, the more 'remote' do the ideas become which
form its mental cue. What we are _interested_ in is what sticks in our
consciousness; everything else we get rid of as quickly as we can. Our
resident feelings of movement have no substantive interest for us at
all, as a rule. What interest us are the ends which the movement is
to attain. Such an end is generally an outer impression on the eye or
ear, or sometimes on the skin, nose, or palate. Now let the idea of
the end associate itself definitely with the right motor innervation,
and the thought of the innervation's _resident_ effects will become as
great an encumbrance as we formerly concluded that the feeling of the
innervation itself would be. The mind does not need it; the end alone
is enough.

The idea of the end, then, tends more and more to make itself
all-sufficient. Or, at any rate, if the kinæsthetic ideas are called
up at all, they are so swamped in the vivid kinæsthetic feelings by
which they are immediately overtaken that we have no time to be aware
of their separate existence. As I write, I have no anticipation, as a
thing distinct from my sensation, of either the look or the digital
feel of the letters which flow from my pen. The words chime on my
mental _ear_, as it were, before I write them, but not on my mental
eye or hand. This comes from the rapidity with which often-repeated
movements follow on their mental cue. An end consented to as soon as
conceived innervates directly the centre of the first movement of the
chain which leads to its accomplishment, and then the whole chain
rattles off _quasi_-reflexly, as was described on pp. 115-6 of Vol. I.

The reader will certainly recognize this to be true in all fluent and
unhesitating voluntary acts. The only special fiat there is at the
outset of the performance. A man says to himself, "I must change my
shirt," and involuntarily he has taken off his coat, and his fingers
are at work in their accustomed manner on his waistcoat-buttons, etc.;
or we say, "I must go downstairs," and ere we know it we have risen,
walked, and turned the handle of the door;--all through the idea of an
end coupled with a series of guiding sensations which successively
arise. It would seem indeed that we fail of accuracy and certainty in
our attainment of the end whenever we are preoccupied with much ideal
consciousness of the means. We walk a beam the better the less we think
of the position of our feet upon it. We pitch or catch, we shoot or
chop the better the less tactile and muscular (the less resident),
and the more exclusively optical, (the more remote) our consciousness
is. Keep your _eye_ on the place aimed at, and your hand will fetch
it; think of your hand, and you will very likely miss your aim. Dr.
Southard found that he could touch a spot with a pencil-point more
accurately with a visual than with a tactile mental cue. In the former
case he looked at a small object and closed his eyes before trying
to touch it. In the latter case he _placed_ it with closed eyes, and
then after removing his hand tried to touch it again. The average
error with touch (when the results were most favorable) was 17.13 mm.
With sight it was only 12.37 mm.[462]--All these are plain results of
introspection and observation. By what neural machinery they are made
possible we need not, at this present stage, inquire.

In Chapter XVIII we saw how enormously individuals differ in respect
to their mental imagery. In the type of imagination called _tactile_ by
the French authors, it is probable that the kinæsthetic ideas are more
prominent than in my account. We must not expect too great a uniformity
in individual accounts, nor wrangle overmuch as to which one 'truly'
represents the process.[463]

I trust that I have now made clear what that 'idea of a movement' is
which must precede it in order that it be voluntary. It is not the
thought of the innervation which the movement requires. It is the
anticipation of the movement's sensible effects, resident or remote,
and sometimes very remote indeed. Such anticipations, to say the least,
determine _what_ our movements shall be. I have spoken all along as
if they also might determine _that_ they shall be. This, no doubt,
has disconcerted many readers, for it certainly seems as if a special
fiat, or consent to the movement were required in addition to the mere
conception of it, in many cases of volition; and this fiat I have
altogether left out of my account. This leads us to the next point in
the psychology of the Will. It can be the more easily treated now that
we have got rid of so much tedious preliminary matter.


IDEO-MOTOR ACTION.


The question is this: _Is the bare idea of a movement's sensible
effects its sufficient mental cue_ (p. 497), _or must there be
an additional mental antecedent, in the shape of a fiat, decision,
consent, volitional mandate, or other synonymous phenomenon of
consciousness, before the movement can follow?_

I answer: Sometimes the bare idea is sufficient, but sometimes an
additional conscious element, in the shape of a fiat, mandate, or
express consent, has to intervene and precede the movement. The cases
without a fiat constitute the more fundamental, because the more
simple, variety. The others involve a special complication, which must
be fully discussed at the proper time. For the present let us turn to
_ideo-motor action_, as it has been termed, or the sequence of movement
upon the mere thought of it, as the type of the process of volition.

Wherever movement follows _unhesitatingly and immediately_ the
notion of it in the mind, we have ideo-motor action. We are then
aware of nothing between the conception and the execution. All sorts
of neuro-muscular processes come between, of course, but we know
absolutely nothing of them. We think the act, and it is done; and that
is all that introspection tells us of the matter. Dr. Carpenter, who
first used, I believe, the name of ideo-motor action, placed it, if I
mistake not, among the curiosities of our mental life. The truth is
that it is no curiosity, but simply the normal process stripped of
disguise. Whilst talking I become conscious of a pin on the floor,
or of some dust on my sleeve. Without interrupting the conversation
I brush away the dust or pick up the pin. I make no express resolve,
but the mere perception of the object and the fleeting notion of the
act seem of themselves to bring the latter about. Similarly, I sit at
table after dinner and find myself from time to time taking nuts or
raisins out of the dish and eating them. My dinner properly is over,
and in the heat of the conversation I am hardly aware of what I do,
but the perception of the fruit and the fleeting notion that I may eat
it seem fatally to bring the act about. There is certainly no express
fiat here; any more than there is in all those habitual goings and
comings and rearrangements of ourselves which fill every hour of the
day, and which incoming sensations instigate so immediately that it is
often difficult to decide whether not to call them reflex rather than
voluntary acts. We have seen in Chapter IV that the intermediary terms
of an habitual series of acts leading to an end are apt to be of this
_quasi_-automatic sort. As Lotze says:

 "We see in writing or piano-playing a great number of very complicated
 movements following quickly one upon the other, the instigative
 representations of which remained scarcely a second in consciousness,
 certainly not long enough to awaken any other volition than the
 general one of resigning one's self without reserve to the passing
 over of representation into action. All the acts of our daily life
 happen in this wise: Our standing up, walking, talking, all this never
 demands a distinct impulse of the will, but is adequately brought
 about by the pure flux of thought."[464]

In all this the determining condition of the unhesitating and
resistless sequence of the act seems to be _the absence of my
conflicting notion in the mind_. Either there is nothing else at all
in the mind, or what is there does not conflict. The hypnotic subject
realizes the former condition. Ask him what he is thinking about,
and ten to one he will reply 'nothing.' The consequence is that he
both believes everything he is told, and performs every act that is
suggested. The suggestion may be a vocal command, or it may be the
performance before him of the movement required. Hypnotic subjects in
certain conditions repeat whatever they hear you say, and imitate
whatever they see you do. Dr. Féré says that certain waking persons
of neurotic type, if one repeatedly close and open one's hand before
their eyes, soon begin to have corresponding feelings in their own
fingers, and presently begin irresistibly to execute the movements
which they see. Under these conditions of 'preparation' Dr. Féré found
that his subjects could squeeze the hand-dynamometer much more strongly
than when abruptly invited to do so. A few _passive_ repetitions of a
movement will enable many enfeebled patients to execute it actively
with greater strength. These observations beautifully show how the mere
quickening of kinæsthetic ideas is equivalent to a certain amount of
tension towards discharge in the centres.[465]

       *       *       *       *       *

We know what it is to get out of bed on a freezing morning in a room
without a fire, and how the very vital principle within us protests
against the ordeal. Probably most persons have lain on certain mornings
for an hour at a time unable to brace themselves to the resolve. We
think how late we shall be, how the duties of the day will suffer; we
say, "I _must_ get up, this is ignominious," etc.; but still the warm
couch feels too delicious, the cold outside too cruel, and resolution
faints away and postpones itself again and again just as it seemed
on the verge of bursting the resistance and passing over into the
decisive act. Now how do we _ever_ get up under such circumstances? If
I may generalize from my own experience, we more often than not get
up without any struggle or decision at all. We suddenly find that we
_have_ got up. A fortunate lapse of consciousness occurs; we forget
both the warmth and the cold; we fall into some revery connected with
the day's life, in the course of which the idea flashes across us,
"Hollo! I must lie here no longer"--an idea which at that lucky instant
awakens no contradictory or paralyzing suggestions, and consequently
produces immediately its appropriate motor effects. It was our acute
consciousness of both the warmth and the cold during the period of
struggle, which paralyzed our activity then and kept our idea of
rising in the condition of _wish_ and not of _will_. The moment these
inhibitory ideas ceased, the original idea exerted its effects.

This case seems to me to contain in miniature form the data for an
entire psychology of volition. It was in fact through meditating on
the phenomenon in my own person that I first became convinced of the
truth of the doctrine which these pages present, and which I need here
illustrate by no farther examples.[466] The reason why that doctrine
is not a self-evident truth is that we have so many ideas which _do
not_ result in action. But it will be seen that in every such case,
without exception, that is because other ideas simultaneously present
rob them of their impulsive power. But even here, and when a movement
is inhibited from _completely_ taking place by contrary ideas, it will
_incipiently_ take place. To quote Lotze once more:

 "The spectator accompanies the throwing of a billiard-ball, or the
 thrust of the swordsman, with slight movements of his arm; the
 untaught narrator tells his story with many gesticulations; the reader
 while absorbed in the perusal of a battle-scene feels a slight tension
 run through his muscular system, keeping time as it were with the
 actions he is reading of. These results become the more marked the
 more we are absorbed in thinking of the movements which suggest them;
 they grow fainter exactly in proportion as a complex consciousness,
 under the dominion of a crowd of other representations, withstands the
 passing over of mental contemplation into outward action."

The 'willing-game,' the exhibitions of so-called 'mind-reading,' or
more properly muscle-reading, which have lately grown so fashionable,
are based on this incipient obedience of muscular contraction to
idea, even when the deliberate intention is that no contraction shall
occur.[467]

We may then lay it down for certain that _every representation of
a movement awakens in some degree the actual movement which is its
object; and awakens it in a maximum degree whenever it is not kept from
so doing by an antagonistic representation present simultaneously to
the mind._

       *       *       *       *       *

The express fiat, or act of mental consent to the movement, comes in
when the neutralization of the antagonistic and inhibitory idea is
required. But that there is no express fiat needed when the conditions
are simple, the reader ought now to be convinced. Lest, however, he
should still share the common prejudice that voluntary action without
'exertion of will-power' is Hamlet with the prince's part left out,
I will make a few farther remarks. The first point to start from in
understanding voluntary action, and the possible occurrence of it with
no fiat or express resolve, is the fact that consciousness is _in its
very nature impulsive_.[468] We do not have a sensation or a thought
and then have to _add_ something dynamic to it to get a movement. Every
pulse of feeling which we have is the correlate of some neural activity
that is already on its way to instigate a movement. Our sensations
and thoughts are but cross-sections, as it were, of currents whose
essential consequence is motion, and which no sooner run in at one
nerve than they run out again at another. The popular notion that mere
consciousness as such is not essentially a forerunner of activity, that
the latter must result from some superadded 'will-force,' is a very
natural inference from those special cases in which we think of an
act for an indefinite length of time without the action taking place.
These cases, however, are not the norm; they are cases of inhibition
by antagonistic thoughts. When the blocking is released we feel as if
an inward spring were let loose, and this is the additional impulse
or _fiat_ upon which the act effectively succeeds. We shall study
anon the blocking and its release. Our higher thought is full of it.
But where there is no blocking, there is naturally no hiatus between
the thought-process and the motor discharge. _Movement is the natural
immediate effect of feeling, irrespective of what the quality of the
feeling may be. It is so in reflex action, it is so in emotional
expression, it is so in the voluntary life._ Ideo-motor action is thus
no paradox, to be softened or explained away. It obeys the type of all
conscious action, and from it one must start to explain action in which
a special fiat is involved.

It may be remarked in passing, that the inhibition of a movement no
more involves an express effort or command than its execution does.
Either of them _may_ require it. But in all simple and ordinary cases,
just as the bare presence of one idea prompts a movement, so the bare
presence of another idea will prevent its taking place. Try to feel
as if you were crooking your finger, whilst keeping it straight. In a
minute it will fairly tingle with the imaginary change of position; yet
it will not sensibly move, because _its not really moving_ is also a
part of what you have in mind. Drop _this_ idea, think of the movement
purely and simply, with all breaks off; and, presto! it takes place
with no effort at all.

A waking man's behavior is thus at all times the resultant of two
opposing neural forces. With unimaginable fineness some currents
among the cells and fibres of his brain are playing on his motor
nerves, whilst other currents, as unimaginably fine, are playing on
the first currents, damming or helping them, altering their direction
or their speed. The upshot of it all is, that whilst the currents
must always end by being drained off through _some_ motor nerves,
they are drained off sometimes through one set and sometimes through
another; and sometimes they keep each other in equilibrium so long
that a superficial observer may think they are not drained off at all.
Such an observer must remember, however, that from the physiological
point of view a gesture, an expression of the brow, or an expulsion
of the breath are movements as much as an act of locomotion is. A
king's breath slays as well as an assassin's blow; and the outpouring
of those currents which the magic imponderable streaming of our ideas
accompanies need not always be of an explosive or otherwise physically
conspicuous kind.


ACTION AFTER DELIBERATION.


We are now in a position to describe _what happens in deliberate
action_, or when the mind is the seat of many ideas related to each
other in antagonistic or in favorable ways.[469] One of the ideas
is that of an act. By itself this idea would prompt a movement;
some of the additional considerations, however, which are present
to consciousness block the motor discharge, whilst others, on the
contrary, solicit it to take place. The result is that peculiar feeling
of inward unrest known as _indecision_. Fortunately it is too familiar
to need description, for to describe it would be impossible. As long as
it lasts, with the various objects before the attention, we are said to
_deliberate_; and when finally the original suggestion either prevails
and makes the movement take place, or gets definitively quenched by its
antagonists, we are said to _decide_, or to _utter our voluntary fiat_
in favor of one or the other course. The reinforcing and inhibiting
ideas meanwhile are termed the _reasons or motives_ by which the
decision is brought about.

The process of deliberation contains endless degrees of complication.
At every moment of it our consciousness is of an extremely complex
object, namely the existence of the whole set of motives and their
conflict, as explained on p. 275 of Vol. I. Of this object, the
totality of which is realized more or less dimly all the while, certain
parts stand out more or less sharply at one moment in the foreground,
and at another moment other parts, in consequence of the oscillations
of our attention, and of the 'associative' flow of our ideas. But no
matter how sharp the foreground-reasons may be, or how imminently
close to bursting through the dam and carrying the motor consequences
their own way, the background, however dimly felt, is always there;
and its presence (so long as the indecision actually lasts) serves as
an effective check upon the irrevocable discharge. The deliberation
may last for weeks or months, occupying at intervals the mind. The
motives which yesterday seemed full of urgency and blood and life
to-day feel strangely weak and pale and dead. But as little to-day as
to-morrow is the question finally resolved. Something tells us that
all this is provisional; that the weakened reasons will wax strong
again, and the stronger weaken; that equilibrium is unreached; that
testing our reasons, not obeying them, is still the order of the day,
and that we must wait awhile, patient or impatiently, until our mind
is made up 'for good and all.' This inclining, first to one then to
another future, both of which we represent as possible, resembles the
oscillations to and fro of a material body within the limits of its
elasticity. There is inward strain, but no outward rupture. And this
condition, plainly enough, is susceptible of indefinite continuance, as
well in the physical mass as in the mind. If the elasticity give way,
however, if the dam ever do break, and the currents burst the crust,
vacillation is over and decision is irrevocably there.

The decision may come in any one of many modes. I will try briefly to
sketch the most characteristic types of it, merely warning the reader
that this is only an introspective account of symptoms and phenomena,
and that all questions of causal agency, whether neural or spiritual,
are relegated to a later page.

       *       *       *       *       *

The particular reasons for or against action are of course infinitely
various in concrete cases. But certain motives are more or less
constantly in play. One of these is _impatience of the deliberative
state_; or to express it otherwise, proneness to act or to decide
merely because action and decision are, as such, agreeable, and
relieve the tension of doubt and hesitancy. Thus it comes that we will
often take any course whatever which happens to be most vividly before
our minds, at the moment when this impulse to decisive action becomes
extreme.

Against this impulse we have the _dread of the irrevocable_, which
often engenders a type of character incapable of prompt and vigorous
resolve, except perhaps when surprised into sudden activity. These two
opposing motives twine round whatever other motives may be present at
the moment when decision is imminent, and tend to precipitate or retard
it. The conflict of these motives so far as they alone affect the
matter of decision is a conflict as to _when_ it shall occur. One says
'now,' the other says 'not yet.'

Another constant component of the web of motivation is the impulse to
persist in a decision once made. There is no more remarkable difference
in human character than that between resolute and irresolute natures.
Neither the physiological nor the psychical grounds of this difference
have yet been analyzed. Its symptom is that whereas in the irresolute
all decisions are provisional and liable to be reversed, in the
resolute they are settled once for all and not disturbed again. Now
into every one's deliberations the representation of one alternative
will often enter with such sudden force as to carry the imagination
with itself exclusively, and to produce an apparently settled decision
in its own favor. These premature and spurious decisions are of course
known to everyone. They often seem ridiculous in the light of the
considerations that succeed them. But it cannot be denied that in the
resolute type of character the accident that one of them has once been
made does afterwards enter as a motive additional to the more genuine
reasons why it should not be revoked, or if provisionally revoked, why
it should be made again. How many of us persist in a precipitate course
which, but for a moment of heedlessness, we might never have entered
upon, simply because we hate to 'change our mind.'


FIVE TYPES OF DECISION.


Turning now to the form of the decision itself, we may distinguish four
chief types. The first may be called _the reasonable type_. It is that
of those cases in which the arguments for and against a given course
seem gradually and almost insensibly to settle themselves in the mind
and to end by leaving a clear balance in favor of one alternative,
which alternative we then adopt without effort or constraint. Until
this rational balancing of the books is consummated we have a calm
feeling that the evidence is not yet all in, and this keeps action in
suspense. But some day we wake with the sense that we see the thing
rightly, that no new light will be thrown on the subject by farther
delay, and that the matter had better be settled _now_. In this
easy transition from doubt to assurance we seem to ourselves almost
passive; the 'reasons' which decide us appearing to flow in from the
nature of things, and to owe nothing to our will. We have, however, a
perfect sense of being _free_, in that we are devoid of any feeling
of coercion. The conclusive reason for the decision in these cases
usually is the discovery that we can refer the case to a _class_ upon
which we are accustomed to act unhesitatingly in a certain stereotyped
way. It may be said in general that a great part of every deliberation
consists in the turning over of all the possible modes of _conceiving_
the doing or not doing of the act in point. The moment we hit upon a
conception which lets us apply some principle of action which is a
fixed and stable part of our Ego, our state of doubt is at an end.
Persons of authority, who have to make many decisions in the day, carry
with them a set of heads of classification, each bearing its motor
consequence, and under these they seek as far as possible to range
each new emergency as it occurs. It is where the emergency belongs to
a species without precedent, to which consequently no cut-and-dried
maxim will apply, that we feel most at a loss, and are distressed at
the indeterminateness of our task. As soon, however, as we see our way
to a familiar classification, we are at ease again. _In action as in
reasoning, then, the great thing is the quest of the right conception._
The concrete dilemmas do not come to us with labels gummed upon their
backs. We may name them by many names. The wise man is he who succeeds
in finding the name which suits the needs of the particular occasion
best. A 'reasonable' character is one who has a store of stable and
worthy ends, and who does not decide about an action till he has calmly
ascertained whether it be ministerial or detrimental to any one of
these.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the next two types of decision, the final fiat occurs before
the evidence is all 'in.' It often happens that no paramount and
authoritative reason for either course will come. Either seems a
case of a Good, and there is no umpire as to which good should
yield its place to the other. We grow tired of long hesitation and
inconclusiveness, and the hour may come when we feel that even a bad
decision is better than no decision at all. Under these conditions it
will often happen that some accidental circumstance, supervening at a
particular movement upon our mental weariness, will upset the balance
in the direction of one of the alternatives, to which then we feel
ourselves committed, although an opposite accident at the same time
might have produced the opposite result.

In the _second type_ of case our feeling is to a certain extent that of
letting ourselves drift with a certain indifferent acquiescence in a
direction accidentally determined _from without_, with the conviction
that, after all, we might as well stand by this course as by the other,
and that things are in any event sure to turn out sufficiently right.

_In the third type_ the determination seems equally accidental, but it
comes from within, and not from without. It often happens, when the
absence of imperative principle is perplexing and suspense distracting,
that we find ourselves acting, as it were, automatically, and as if by
a spontaneous discharge of our nerves, in the direction of one of the
horns of the dilemma. But so exciting is this sense of motion after
our intolerable pent-up state, that we eagerly throw ourselves into
it. 'Forward now!' we inwardly cry, 'though the heavens fall.' This
reckless and exultant espousal of an energy so little premeditated
by us that we feel rather like passive spectators cheering on the
display of some extraneous force than like voluntary agents, is a type
of decision too abrupt and tumultuous to occur often in humdrum and
cool-blooded natures. But it is probably frequent in persons of strong
emotional endowment and unstable or vacillating character. And in
men of the world-shaking type, the Napoleons, Luthers, etc., in whom
tenacious passion combines with ebullient activity, when by any chance
the passion's outlet has been dammed by scruples or apprehensions,
the resolution is probably often of this catastrophic kind. The flood
breaks quite unexpectedly through the dam. That it should so often do
so is quite sufficient to account for the tendency of these characters
to a fatalistic mood of mind. And the fatalistic mood itself is sure to
reinforce the strength of the energy just started on its exciting path
of discharge.

There is a _fourth form_ of decision, which often ends deliberation
as suddenly as the third form does. It comes when, in consequence of
some outer experience or some inexplicable inward charge, _we suddenly
pass from the easy and careless to the sober and strenuous mood,_
or possibly the other way. The whole scale of values of our motives
and impulses then undergoes a change like that which a change of the
observer's level produces on a view. The most sobering possible agents
are objects of grief and fear. When one of these affects us, all 'light
fantastic' notions lose their motive power, all solemn ones find theirs
multiplied many-fold. The consequence is an instant abandonment of the
more trivial projects with which we had been dallying, and an instant
practical acceptance of the more grim and earnest alternative which
till then could not extort our mind's consent. All those 'changes of
heart,' 'awakenings of conscience,' etc., which make new men of so many
of us, may be classed under this head. The character abruptly rises to
another 'level,' and deliberation comes to an immediate end.[470]

In the _fifth and final type_ of decision, the feeling that the
evidence is all in, and that reason has balanced the books, may be
either present or absent. But in either case we feel, in deciding, as
if we ourselves by our own wilful act inclined the beam; in the former
case by adding our living effort to the weight of the logical reason
which, taken alone, seems powerless to make the act discharge; in the
latter by a kind of creative contribution of something instead of a
reason which does a reason's work. The slow dead heave of the will that
is felt in these instances makes of them a class altogether different
subjectively from all the three preceding classes. What the heave of
the will betokens metaphysically, what the effort might lead us to
infer about a will-power distinct from motives, are not matters that
concern us yet. Subjectively and phenomenally, the _feeling of effort_,
absent from the former decisions, accompanies these. Whether it be the
dreary resignation for the sake of austere and naked duty of all sorts
of rich mundane delights, or whether it be the heavy resolve that of
two mutually exclusive trains of future fact, both sweet and good, and
with no strictly objective or imperative principle of choice between
them, one shall forevermore become impossible, while the other shall
become reality, it is a desolate and acrid sort of act, an excursion
into a lonesome moral wilderness. If examined closely, its chief
difference from the three former cases appears to be that in those
cases the mind at the moment of deciding on the triumphant alternative
dropped the other one wholly or nearly out of sight, whereas here
both alternatives are steadily held in view, and in the very act of
murdering the vanquished possibility the chooser realizes how much in
that instant he is making himself lose. It is deliberately driving a
thorn into one's flesh; and the sense of _inward effort_ with which the
act is accompanied is an element which sets the fourth type of decision
in strong contrast with the previous three varieties, and makes of it
an altogether peculiar sort of mental phenomenon. The immense majority
of human decisions are decisions without effort. In comparatively few
of them, in most people, does effort accompany the final act. We are,
I think, misled into supposing that effort is more frequent than it
is, by the fact that _during deliberation_ we so often have a feeling
of how great an effort it would take to make a decision _now_. Later,
after the decision has made itself with ease, we recollect this and
erroneously suppose the effort also to have been made then.

The existence of the effort as a phenomenal fact in our consciousness
cannot of course be doubted or denied. Its significance, on the other
hand, is a matter about which the gravest difference of opinion
prevails. Questions as momentous as that of the very existence of
spiritual causality, as vast as that of universal predestination or
free-will, depend on its interpretation. It therefore becomes essential
that we study with some care the conditions under which the feeling of
volitional effort is found.


THE FEELING OF EFFORT.


When, awhile back (p. 526), I said that _consciousness_ (or the
neural process which goes with it) _is in its very nature impulsive,_
I added in a note the proviso that _it must be sufficiently intense_.
Now there are remarkable differences in the power of different sorts
of consciousness to excite movement. The intensity of some feelings
is practically apt to be below the discharging point, whilst that
of others is apt to be above it. By practically apt, I mean apt
under ordinary circumstances. These circumstances may be habitual
inhibitions, like that comfortable feeling of the _dolce far niente_
which gives to each and all of us a certain dose of laziness only
to be overcome by the acuteness of the impulsive spur; or they may
consist in the native inertia, or internal resistance, of the motor
centres themselves making explosion impossible until a certain inward
tension has been reached and overpast. These conditions may vary from
one person to another and in the same person from time to time. The
neural inertia may wax or wane, and the habitual inhibitions dwindle or
augment. The intensity of particular thought-processes and stimulations
may also change independently, and particular paths of association
grow more pervious or less so. There thus result great possibilities
of alteration in the actual impulsive efficacy of particular motives
compared with others. It is where the normally less efficacious motive
becomes more efficacious and the normally more efficacious one less so
that actions ordinarily effortless, or abstinences ordinarily easy,
either become impossible or are effected, if at all, by the expenditure
of effort. A little more description will make it plainer what these
cases are.

       *       *       *       *       *

_There is a certain normal ratio in the impulsive power of different
sorts of motive, which characterizes what may be called ordinary
healthiness of will,_ and which is departed from only at exceptional
times or by exceptional individuals. The states of mind which normally
possess the most impulsive quality are either those which represent
objects of passion, appetite, or emotion--objects of instinctive
reaction, in short; or they are feelings or ideas of pleasure or of
pain; or ideas which for any reason we have grown accustomed to obey
so that the habit of reacting on them is ingrained; or finally, in
comparison with ideas of remoter objects, they are ideas of objects
present or near in space and time. Compared with these various
objects, all far-off considerations, all highly abstract conceptions,
unaccustomed reasons, and motives foreign to the instinctive history
of the race, have little or no impulsive power. They prevail, when
they ever do prevail, _with effort; and the normal,_ as distinguished
from the pathological, _sphere of effort is thus found wherever
non-instinctive motives to behavior are to rule the day._

Healthiness of will moreover requires a certain amount of complication
in the process which precedes the fiat or the act. Each stimulus or
idea, at the same time that it wakens its own impulse, must arouse
other ideas (associated and consequential) with their impulses,
and action must follow, neither too slowly nor too rapidly, as the
resultant of all the forces thus engaged. Even when the decision is
very prompt, there is thus a sort of preliminary survey of the field
and a vision of which course is best before the fiat comes. And where
the will is healthy, _the vision must be right_ (i.e., the motives must
be on the whole in a normal or not too unusual ratio to each other),
_and the action must obey the vision's lead._

       *       *       *       *       *

_Unhealthiness of will may thus come about in many ways._ The action
may follow the stimulus or idea too rapidly, leaving no time for the
arousal of restraining associates--_we then have a precipitate will_.
Or, although the associates may come, the ratio which the impulsive and
inhibitive forces normally bear to each other may be distorted, and
we then have _a will which is perverse_. The perversity, in turn, may
be due to either of many causes--too much intensity, or too little,
here; too much or too little inertia there; or elsewhere too much
or too little inhibitory power. _If we compare the outward symptoms
of perversity together, they fall into two groups,_ in one of which
normal actions are impossible, and in the other abnormal ones are
irrepressible. Briefly, _we may call them respectively the obstructed
and the explosive will._

It must be kept in mind, however, that since the resultant action is
always due to the _ratio_ between the obstructive and the explosive
forces which are present, we never can tell by the mere outward
symptoms to what _elementary_ cause the perversion of a man's will may
be due, whether to an increase of one component or a diminution of the
other. One may grow explosive as readily by losing the usual brakes
as by getting up more of the impulsive steam; and one may find things
impossible as well through the enfeeblement of the original desire as
through the advent of new lions in the path. As Dr. Clouston says,
"the driver may be so weak that he cannot control well-broken horses,
or the horses may be so hard-mouthed that no driver can pull them up."
In some concrete cases (whether of explosive or of obstructed will) it
is difficult to tell whether the trouble is due to inhibitory or to
impulsive change. Generally, however, we can make a plausible guess at
the truth.


THE EXPLOSIVE WILL.


There is a normal type of character, for example, in which impulses
seem to discharge so promptly into movements that inhibitions get
no time to arise. These are the 'dare-devil' and 'mercurial'
temperaments, overflowing with animation, and fizzling with talk,
which are so common in the Latin and Celtic races, and with which
the cold-blooded and long-headed English character forms so marked
a contrast. Monkeys these people seem to us, whilst we seem to them
reptilian. It is quite impossible to judge, as between an obstructed
and an explosive individual, which has the greatest sum of vital
energy. An explosive Italian with good perception and intellect will
cut a figure as a perfectly tremendous fellow, on an inward capital
that could be tucked away inside of an obstructed Yankee and hardly
let you know that it was there. He will be the king of his company,
sing all the songs and make all the speeches, lead the parties, carry
out the practical jokes, kiss all the girls, fight the men, and, if
need be, lead the forlorn hopes and enterprises, so that an onlooker
would think he has more life in his little finger than can exist in the
whole body of a correct judicious fellow. But the judicious fellow all
the while may have all these possibilities and more besides, ready to
break out in the same or even a more violent way, if only the brakes
were taken off. It is the absence of scruples, of consequences, of
considerations, the extraordinary simplification of each moment's
mental outlook, that gives to the explosive individual such motor
energy and ease; it need not be the greater intensity of any of his
passions, motives, or thoughts. As mental evolution goes on, the
complexity of human consciousness grows ever greater, and with it the
multiplication of the inhibitions to which every impulse is exposed.
But this predominance of inhibition has a bad as well as a good side;
and if a man's impulses are in the main orderly as well as prompt, if
he has courage to accept their consequences, and intellect to lead
them to a successful end, he is all the better for his hair-trigger
organization, and for not being 'sicklied o'er with the pale cast
of thought.' Many of the most successful military and revolutionary
characters in history have belonged to this simple but quick-witted
impulsive type. Problems come much harder to reflective and inhibitive
minds. They can, it is true, solve much vaster problems; and they can
avoid many a mistake to which the men of impulse are exposed. But
when the latter do not make mistakes, or when they are always able to
retrieve them, theirs is one of the most engaging and indispensable of
human types.[471]

In infancy, and in certain conditions of exhaustion as well as in
peculiar pathological states, the inhibitory power may fail to arrest
the explosions of the impulsive discharge. We have then an explosive
temperament temporarily realized in an individual who at other times
may be of a relatively obstructed type. I cannot do better here than
copy a few pages from Dr. Clouston's excellent work:[472]

 "Take a child of six months, and there is absolutely no such
 brain-power existent as mental inhibition; no desire or tendency is
 stopped by a mental act.... At a year old the rudiments of the great
 faculty of self-control are clearly apparent in most children. They
 will resist the desire to seize the gas-flame, they will not upset
 the milk-jug, they will obey orders to sit still when they want to
 run about, all through a higher mental inhibition. But the power
 of control is just as gradual a development as the motions of the
 hands.... Look at a more complicated act, that will be recognized by
 any competent physiologist to be automatic and beyond the control of
 any ordinary inhibitory power, e.g., irritate and tease a child of
 one or two years sufficiently, and it will suddenly strike out at
 you; suddenly strike at a man, and he will either perform an act of
 defence or offence, or both, quite automatically, and without power
 of controlling himself. Place a bright tempting toy before a child
 of a year, and it will be instantly appropriated. Place cold water
 before a man dying of thirst, and he will take and drink it without
 power of doing otherwise. Exhaustion of nervous energy always lessens
 the inhibitory power. Who is not conscious of this? 'Irritability'
 is one manifestation of this. Many persons have so small a stock of
 reserve brain-power--that most valuable of all brain-qualities--that
 it is soon used up, and you see at once that they lose their power
 of self-control very soon. They are angels or demons just as they
 are fresh or tired. That surplus store of energy or resistive force
 which provides, in persons normally constituted, that moderate
 excesses in all directions shall do no great harm so long as they
 are not too often repeated, not being present in these people,
 overwork, over-drinking, or small debauches leave them at the mercy
 of their morbid impulses without power of resistance.... Woe to the
 man who uses up his surplus stock of brain-inhibition too near the
 bitter end, or too often!... The physiological word inhibition can
 be used synonymously with the psychological and ethical expression
 self-control, or with the will when exercised in certain directions.
 It is the characteristic of most forms of mental disease for
 self-control to be lost, but this loss is usually part of a general
 mental affection with melancholic, maniacal, demented, or delusional
 symptoms as the chief manifestation of the disease. There are other
 cases, not so numerous, where the loss of the power of inhibition is
 the chief and by far the most marked symptom.... I shall call this
 form 'Inhibitory Insanity.' Some of these cases have uncontrollable
 impulses to violence and destruction, others to homicide, others to
 suicide prompted by no depressed feelings, others to acts of animal
 gratification (satyriasis, nymphomania, erotomania, bestiality),
 others to drinking too much alcohol (dipsomania), others towards
 setting things on fire (pyromania), others to stealing (kleptomania),
 and others towards immoralities of all sorts. The impulsive tendencies
 and morbid desires are innumerable in kind. Many of these varieties
 of Insanity have been distinguished by distinct names. To dig up and
 eat dead bodies (necrophilism), to wander from home and throw off
 the restraints of society (planomania), to act like a wild beast
 (lycanthropia), etc. Action from impulse in all these directions may
 take place from a loss of controlling power in the higher regions of
 the brain, or from an over-development of energy in certain portions
 of the brain, which the normal power of inhibition cannot control.
 The driver may be so weak that he cannot control well-broken horses,
 or the horses may be so hard-mouthed that no driver can pull them
 up. Both conditions may arise from purely cerebral disorder ... or
 may be reflex.... The _ego_, the man, the will, may be non-existent
 for the time. The most perfect examples of this are murders done
 during somnambulism or epileptic unconsciousness, or acts done in the
 hypnotic state. There is no conscious desire to attain the object at
 all in such cases. In other cases there is consciousness and memory
 present, but no power of restraining action. The simplest example of
 this is where an imbecile or dement, seeing something glittering,
 appropriates it to himself, or when he commits indecent sexual acts.
 Through disease a previously sane and vigorous-minded person may get
 into the same state. The motives that would lead other persons not to
 do such acts do not operate in such persons. I have known a man steal
 who said he had no intense longing for the article he appropriated
 at all, at least consciously, but his will was in abeyance, and he
 could not resist the ordinary desire of possession common to all human
 nature."

It is not only those technically classed imbeciles and dements who
exhibit this promptitude of impulse and tardiness of inhibition. Ask
half the common drunkards you know why it is that they fall so often a
prey to temptation, and they will say that most of the time they cannot
tell. It is a sort of vertigo with them. Their nervous centres have
become a sluice-way pathologically unlocked by every passing conception
of a bottle and a glass. They do not thirst for the beverage; the
taste of it may even appear repugnant; and they perfectly foresee
the morrow's remorse. But when they think of the liquor or see it,
they find themselves preparing to drink, and do not stop themselves:
and more than this they cannot say. Similarly a man may lead a life
of incessant love-making or sexual indulgence, though what spurs him
thereto seems rather to be suggestions and notions of possibility than
any overweening strength in his affections or lusts. He may even be
physically impotent all the while. The paths of natural (or it may
be unnatural) impulse are so pervious in these characters that the
slightest rise in the level of innervation produces an overflow. It
is the condition recognized in pathology as 'irritable weakness.' The
phase known as nascency or latency is so short in the excitement of
the neural tissues that there is no opportunity for strain or tension
to accumulate within them; and the consequence is that with all the
agitation and activity, the amount of real feeling engaged may be very
small. The hysterical temperament is the playground _par excellence_ of
this unstable equilibrium. One of these subjects will be filled with
what seems the most genuine and settled aversion to a certain line of
conduct, and the very next _instant_ follow the stirring of temptation
and plunge in it up to the neck. Professor Ribot well gives the name
of 'Le Règne des Caprices' to the chapter in which he describes the
hysterical temperament in his interesting little monograph 'The
Diseases of the Will.'

Disorderly and impulsive conduct may, on the other hand, come about
where the neural tissues preserve their proper inward tone, and where
the inhibitory power is normal or even unusually great. In such cases
_the strength of the impulsive idea is preternaturally exalted_, and
what would be for most people the passing suggestion of a possibility
becomes a gnawing, craving urgency to act. Works on insanity are full
of examples of these morbid insistent ideas, in obstinately struggling
against which the unfortunate victim's soul often sweats with agony,
ere at last it gets swept away. One instance will stand for many; M.
Ribot quotes it from Calmeil:[473]

 "Glénadal, having lost his father in infancy, was brought up by his
 mother, whom he adored. At sixteen, his character, till then good
 and docile, changed. He became gloomy and taciturn. Pressed with
 questions by his mother, he decided at last to make a confession.
 'To you,' said he, 'I owe everything; I love you with all my soul;
 yet for some time past an incessant idea drives me to kill you.
 Prevent so terrible a misfortune from happening, in case some day the
 temptation should overpower me: allow me to enlist.' Notwithstanding
 pressing solicitations, he was firm in his resolve, went off, and
 was a good soldier. Still a secret impulse stimulated him without
 cessation to desert in order to come home and kill his mother. At
 the end of his term of service the idea was as strong as on the
 first day. He enlisted for another term. The murderous instinct
 persisted, but substituted another victim. He no longer thought
 of killing his mother--the horrible impulse pointed day and night
 towards his sister-in-law. In order to resist the second impulse,
 he condemned himself to perpetual exile. At this time one of his
 old neighbors arrived in the regiment. Glénadal confesses all his
 trouble. 'Be at rest,' said the other. 'Your crime is impossible;
 your sister-in-law has just died.' At these words Glénadal rises like
 a delivered captive. Joy fills his heart. He travels to the home of
 his childhood, unvisited for so many years. But as he arrives he sees
 his sister-in-law living. He gives a cry, and the terrible impulse
 seizes him again as a prey. That very evening he makes his brother tie
 him fast. 'Take a solid rope, bind me like a wolf in the barn, and
 go and tell Dr. Calmeil....' From him he got admission to an insane
 asylum. The evening before his entrance he wrote to the director of
 the establishment: 'Sir, I am to become an inmate of your house. I
 shall behave there as if I were in the regiment. You will think me
 cured. At moments perhaps I shall pretend to be so. Never believe me.
 Never let me out on any pretext. If I beg to be released, double
 your watchfulness; the only use I shall make of my liberty will be to
 commit a crime which I abhor.'"[474]

The craving for drink in real dipsomaniacs, or for opium or chloral in
those subjugated, is of a strength of which normal persons can form
no conception. "Were a keg of rum in one corner of a room and were a
cannon constantly discharging balls between me and it, I could not
refrain from passing before that cannon in order to get the rum;" "If
a bottle of brandy stood at one hand and the pit of hell yawned at
the other, and I were convinced that I should be pushed in as sure
as I took one glass, I could not refrain:" such statements abound in
dipsomaniacs' mouths. Dr. Mussey of Cincinnati relates this case:

 "A few years ago a tippler was put into an almshouse in this State.
 Within a few days he had devised various expedients to procure rum,
 but failed. At length, however, he hit upon one which was successful.
 He went into the wood-yard of the establishment, placed one hand upon
 the block, and with an axe in the other, struck it off at a single
 blow. With the stump raised and streaming he ran into the house and
 cried, 'Get some rum! get some rum! my hand is off!' In the confusion
 and bustle of the occasion a bowl of rum was brought, into which he
 plunged the bleeding member of his body, then raising the bowl to his
 mouth, drank freely, and exultingly exclaimed, 'Now I am satisfied.'
 Dr. J. E. Turner tells of a man who, while under treatment for
 inebriety, during four weeks secretly drank the alcohol from six jars
 containing morbid specimens. On asking him why he had committed this
 loathsome act, he replied: 'Sir, it is as impossible for me to control
 this diseased appetite as it is for me to control the pulsations of my
 heart.'"[475]

The passion of love may be called a monomania to which all of us are
subject, however otherwise sane. It can coexist with contempt and
even hatred for the 'object' which inspires it, and whilst it lasts
the whole life of the man is altered by its presence. Alfieri thus
describes the struggles of his unusually powerful inhibitive power with
his abnormally excited impulses toward a certain lady:

 "Contemptible in my own eyes, I fell into such a state of melancholy
 as would, if long continued, inevitably have led to insanity or
 death. I continued to wear my disgraceful fetters till towards the
 end of January, 1775, when my rage, which had hitherto so often been
 restrained within bounds, broke forth with the greatest violence. On
 returning one evening from the opera (the most insipid and tiresome
 amusement in Italy), where I had passed several hours in the box of
 the woman who was by turns the object of my antipathy and my love, I
 took the firm determination of emancipating myself forever from her
 yoke. Experience had taught me that flight, so far from enabling me
 to persevere in my resolutions, tended on the contrary to weaken and
 destroy them; I was inclined therefore to subject myself to a still
 more severe trial, imagining from the obstinacy and peculiarity of my
 character that I should succeed most certainly by the adoption of such
 measures as would compel me to make the greatest efforts. I determined
 never to leave the house, which, as I have already said, was exactly
 opposite that of the lady; to gaze at her windows, to see her go in
 and out every day, to listen to the sound of her voice, though firmly
 resolved that no advances on her part, either direct or indirect,
 no tender remembrances, nor in short any other means which might be
 employed, should ever again tempt me to a revival of our friendship. I
 was determined to die or liberate myself from my disgraceful thraldom.
 In order to give stability to my purpose, and to render it impossible
 for me to waver without the imputation of dishonor, I communicated my
 determination to one of my friends, who was greatly attached to me,
 and whom I highly esteemed. He had lamented the state of mind into
 which I had fallen, but not wishing to give countenance to my conduct,
 and seeing the impossibility of inducing me to abandon it, he had
 for some time ceased to visit at my house. In the few lines which I
 addressed to him, I briefly stated the resolution I had adopted, and
 as a pledge of my constancy I sent him a long tress of my ugly red
 hair. I had purposely caused it to be cut off in order to prevent my
 going out, as no one but clowns and sailors then appeared in public
 with short hair. I concluded my billet by conjuring him to strengthen
 and aid my fortitude by his presence and example. Isolated in this
 manner in my own house, I prohibited all species of intercourse,
 and passed the first fifteen days in uttering the most frightful
 lamentations and groans. Some of my friends came to visit me, and
 appeared to commiserate my situation, perhaps because I did not myself
 complain; but my figure and whole appearance bespoke my sufferings.
 Wishing to read something I had recourse to the gazettes, whole pages
 of which I frequently ran over without understanding a single word....
 I passed more than two months till the end of March 1775, in a state
 bordering on frenzy; but about this time a new idea darted into my
 mind, which tended to assuage my melancholy."

This was the idea of poetical composition, at which Alfieri describes
his first attempts, made under these diseased circumstances, and goes
on:

 "The only good that occurred to me from this whim was that of
 gradually detaching me from love, and of awakening my reason which
 had so long lain dormant. I no longer found it necessary to cause
 myself to be tied with cords to a chair, in order to prevent me from
 leaving my house and returning to that of my lady. This had been
 one of the expedients I devised to render myself wise by force. The
 cords were concealed under a large mantle in which I was enveloped,
 and only one hand remained at liberty. Of all those who came to see
 me, not one suspected I was bound down in this manner. I remained in
 this situation for whole hours; Elias, who was my jailer, was alone
 intrusted with the secret. He always liberated me, as he had been
 enjoined, whenever the paroxysms of my rage subsided. Of all the
 whimsical methods which I employed, however, the most curious was
 that of appearing in masquerade at the theatre towards the end of the
 carnival. Habited as Apollo, I ventured to present myself with a lyre,
 on which I played as well as I was able and sang some bad verses of
 my own composing. Such effrontery was diametrically opposite to my
 natural character. The only excuse I can offer for such scenes was my
 inability to resist an imperious passion. I felt that it was necessary
 to place an insuperable barrier between its object and me; and I saw
 that the strongest of all was the shame to which I should expose
 myself by renewing an attachment which I had so publicly turned into
 ridicule."[476]

Often the insistent idea is of a trivial sort, but it may wear the
patient's life out. His hands feel dirty, they must be washed. He
_knows_ they are not dirty; yet to get rid of the teasing idea
he washes them. The idea, however, returns in a moment, and the
unfortunate victim, who is not in the least deluded _intellectually_,
will end by spending the whole day at the wash-stand. Or his clothes
are not 'rightly' put on; and to banish the thought he takes them off
and puts them on again, till his toilet consumes two or three hours of
time. Most people have the potentiality of this disease. To few has it
not happened to conceive, after getting into bed, that they may have
forgotten to lock the front door, or to turn out the entry gas. And few
of us have not on some occasion got up to repeat the performance, less
because they believed in the reality of its omission than because only
so could they banish the worrying doubt and get to sleep.[477]


THE OBSTRUCTED WILL.


In striking contrast with the cases in which inhibition is insufficient
or impulsion in excess are those in which impulsion is insufficient
or inhibition of in excess. We all know the condition described on
p. 404 of Vol. I, in which the mind for a few moments seems to lose
its focussing power and to be unable to rally its attention to any
determinate thing. At such times we sit blankly staring and do nothing.
The objects of consciousness fail to touch the quick or break the skin.
They are there, but do not reach the level of effectiveness. This
state of non-efficacious presence is the normal condition of _some_
objects, in all of us. Great fatigue or exhaustion may make it the
condition of almost all objects; and an apathy resembling that then
brought about is recognized in asylums under the name of _abulia_ as
a symptom of mental disease. The healthy state of the will requires,
as aforesaid, both that vision should be right, and that action should
obey its lead. But in the morbid condition in question the vision may
be wholly unaffected, and the intellect clear, and yet the act either
fails to follow or follows in some other way. "_Video meliora proboque,
deteriora sequor_" is the classic expression of the latter condition of
mind. The former it is to which the name _abulia_ peculiarly applies.
The patients, says Guislain,

 "are able to will inwardly, mentally, according to the dictates of
 reason. They experience the desire to act, but they are powerless to
 act as they should.... Their will cannot overpass certain limits:
 one would say that the force of action within them is blocked up:
 the _I will_ does not transform itself into impulsive volition, into
 active determination. Some of these patients wonder themselves at
 the impotence with which their will is smitten. If you abandon them
 to themselves, they pass whole days in their bed or on a chair. If
 one speaks to them or excites them, they express themselves properly
 though briefly; and judge of things pretty well."[478]

In Chapter XXI, as will be remembered, it was said that the sentiment
of reality with which an object appealed to the mind is proportionate
(amongst other things) to its efficacy as a stimulus to the will.
Here we get the obverse side of the truth. Those ideas, objects,
considerations, which (in these lethargic states) fail to _get to_ the
will, fail to draw blood, seem, in so far forth, distant and unreal.
The connection of the reality of things with their effectiveness
as motives is a tale that has never yet been fully told. The moral
tragedy of human life comes almost wholly from the fact that the
link is ruptured which normally should hold between vision of the
truth and action, and that this pungent sense of effective reality
will not attach to certain ideas. Men do not differ so much in
their mere feelings and conceptions. Their notions of possibility
and their ideals are not as far apart as might be argued from their
differing fates. No class of them have better sentiments or feel more
constantly the difference between the higher and the lower path in
life than the hopeless failures, the sentimentalists, the drunkards,
the schemers, the 'dead-beats,' whose life is one long contradiction
between knowledge and action, and who, with full command of theory,
never get to holding their limp characters erect. No one eats of the
fruit of the tree of knowledge as they do; as far as moral insight
goes, in comparison with them, the orderly and prosperous philistines
whom they scandalize are sucking babes. And yet their moral knowledge,
always there grumbling and rumbling in the background,--discerning,
commenting, protesting, longing, half resolving,--never wholly
resolves, never gets its voice out of the minor into the major key,
or its speech out of the subjunctive into the imperative mood, never
breaks the spell, never takes the helm into its hands. In such
characters as Rousseau and Restif it would seem as if the lower motives
had all the impulsive efficacy in their hands. Like trains with the
right of way, they retain exclusive possession of the track. The more
ideal motives exist alongside of them in profusion, but they never get
switched on, and the man's conduct is no more influenced by them than
an express train is influenced by a wayfarer standing by the roadside
and calling to be taken aboard. They are an inert accompaniment to the
end of time; and the consciousness of inward hollowness that accrues
from habitually seeing the better only to do the worse, is one of the
saddest feelings one can bear with him through this vale of tears.

       *       *       *       *       *

We now see at one view when it is that effort complicates volition.
It does so whenever a rarer and more ideal impulse is called upon to
neutralize others of a more instinctive and habitual kind; it does
so whenever strongly explosive tendencies are checked, or strongly
obstructive conditions overcome. The _âme bien née_, the child of the
sunshine, at whose birth the fairies made their gifts, does not need
much of it in his life. The hero and the neurotic subject, on the other
hand, do. Now our spontaneous way of conceiving the effort, under all
these circumstances, is as an active force adding its strength to that
of the motives which ultimately prevail. When outer forces impinge
upon a body, we say that the resultant motion is in the line of least
resistance, or of greatest traction. But it is a curious fact that
our spontaneous language never speaks of volition with effort in this
way. Of course if we proceed _a priori_ and define the line of least
resistance as the line that is followed, the physical law must also
hold good in the mental sphere. But we _feel_, in all hard cases of
volition, as if the line taken, when the rarer and more ideal motives
prevail, were the line of greater resistance, and as if the line of
coarser motivation were the more pervious and easy one, even at the
very moment when we refuse to follow it. He who under the surgeon's
knife represses cries of pain, or he who exposes himself to social
obloquy for duty's sake, feels as if he were following the line of
greatest temporary resistance. He speaks of conquering and overcoming
his impulses and temptations.

But the sluggard, the drunkard, the coward, never talk of their conduct
in that way or say they resist their energy, overcome their sobriety,
conquer their courage, and so forth. If in general we class all springs
of action as propensities on the one hand and ideals on the other, the
sensualist never says of his behavior that it results from a victory
over his ideals, but the moralist always speaks of his as a victory
over his propensities. The sensualist uses terms of inactivity, says he
forgets his ideals, is deaf to duty, and so forth; which terms seem to
imply that the ideal motives _per se_ can be annulled without energy
or effort, and that the strongest mere traction lies in the line of
the propensities. The ideal impulse appears, in comparison with this,
a still small voice which must be artificially reinforced to prevail.
Effort is what reinforces it, making things seem as if, while the force
of propensity were essentially a fixed quantity, the ideal force might
be of various amount. But what determines the amount of the effort
when, by its aid, an ideal motive becomes victorious over a great
sensual resistance? The very greatness of the resistance itself. If the
sensual propensity is small, the effort is small. The latter is _made
great_ by the presence of a great antagonist to overcome. And if a
brief definition of ideal or moral action were required, none could be
given which would better fit the appearances than this: _It is action
in the line of the greatest resistance._.

The facts may be most briefly symbolized thus, P standing for the
propensity, I for the ideal impulse, and E for the effort:

    I _per se_ < P.
    I + E > P.

In other words, if E adds itself to I, P immediately offers the least
resistance, and motion occurs in spite of it.

But the E does not seem to form an integral part of the I. It appears
adventitious and indeterminate in advance. We can make more or less as
we please, and _if_ we make enough we can convert the greatest mental
resistance into the least. Such, at least, is the impression which the
facts spontaneously produce upon us. But we will not discuss the truth
of this impression at present; let us rather continue our descriptive
detail.


PLEASURE AND PAIN AS SPRINGS OF ACTION.


Objects and thoughts of objects start our action, but the pleasures
and pains which action brings modify its course and regulate it; and
later the thoughts of the pleasures and the pains acquire themselves
impulsive and inhibitive power. Not that the thought of a pleasure
need be itself a pleasure, usually it is the reverse--_nessun
maggior dolore_--as Dante says--and not that the thought of pain
need be a pain, for, as Homer says, "griefs are often afterwards an
entertainment." But as present pleasures are tremendous reinforcers,
and present pains tremendous inhibitors of whatever action leads to
them, so the thoughts of pleasures and pains take rank amongst the
thoughts which have most impulsive and inhibitive power. The precise
relation which these thoughts hold to other thoughts is thus a matter
demanding some attention.

       *       *       *       *       *

If a movement feels agreeable, we repeat and repeat it as long as
the pleasure lasts. If it hurts us, our muscular contractions at the
instant stop. So complete is the inhibition in this latter case that
it is almost impossible for a man to cut or mutilate himself slowly
and deliberately--his hand invincibly refusing to bring on the pain.
And there are many pleasures which, when once we have begun to taste
them, make it all but obligatory to keep up the activity to which they
are due. So widespread and searching is this influence of pleasures
and pains upon our movements that a premature philosophy has decided
that these are our only spurs to action, and that wherever they seem to
be absent, it is only because they are so far on among the 'remoter'
images that prompt the action that they are overlooked.

This is a great mistake, however. Important as is the influence of
pleasures and pains upon our movements, they are far from being our
only stimuli. With the manifestations of instinct and emotional
expression, for example, they have absolutely nothing to do. Who smiles
for the pleasure of the smiling, or frowns for the pleasure of the
frown? Who blushes to escape the discomfort of not blushing? Or who in
anger, grief, or fear is actuated to the movements which he makes by
the pleasures which they yield? In all these cases the movements are
discharged fatally by the _vis a tergo_ which the stimulus exerts upon
a nervous system framed to respond in just that way. The objects of our
rage, love, or terror, the occasions of our tears and smiles, whether
they be present to our senses, or whether they be merely represented
in idea, have this peculiar sort of impulsive power. The _impulsive
quality_ of mental states is an attribute behind which we cannot go.
Some states of mind have more of it than others, some have it in this
direction, and some in that. Feelings of pleasure and pain have it,
and perceptions and imaginations of fact have it, but neither have it
exclusively or peculiarly. It is of the essence of all consciousness
(or of the neural process which underlies it) to instigate movement of
some sort. That with one creature and object it should be of one sort,
with others of another sort, is a problem for evolutionary history to
explain. However the actual impulsions may have arisen, they must now
be described as they exist; and those persons obey a curiously narrow
teleological superstition who think themselves bound to interpret them
in every instance as effects of the secret solicitancy of pleasure and
repugnancy of pain.[479]

It might be that to _reflection_ such a narrow teleology would justify
itself, that pleasures and pains might seem the only _comprehensible
and reasonable_ motives for action, the only motives on which we
_ought_ to act. That is an _ethical_ proposition, in favor of which a
good deal may be said. But it is not a _psychological_ proposition; and
nothing follows from it as to the motives upon which as a matter of
fact we _do_ act. These motives are supplied by innumerable objects,
which innervate our voluntary muscles by a process as automatic as that
by which they light a fever in our breasts. If the thought of pleasure
can impel to action, surely other thoughts may. Experience only can
decide which thoughts do. The chapters on Instinct and Emotion have
shown us that their name is legion; and with this verdict we ought to
remain contented, and not seek an illusory simplification at the cost
of half the facts.

If in these our _first_ acts pleasures and pains bear no part, as
little do they bear in our last acts, or those artificially acquired
performances which have become habitual. All the daily routine of
life, our dressing and undressing, the coming and going from our work
or carrying through of its various operations, is utterly without
mental reference to pleasure and pain, except under rarely realized
conditions. It is ideo-motor action. As I do not breathe for the
pleasure of the breathing, but simply find that I _am_ breathing, so
I do not write for the pleasure of the writing, but simply because I
have once begun, and being in a state of intellectual excitement which
keeps venting itself in that way, find that I _am_ writing still. Who
will pretend that when he idly fingers his knife-handle at the table,
it is for the sake of any pleasure which it gives him, or pain which he
thereby avoids. We do all these things because at the moment we cannot
help it; our nervous systems are so shaped that they overflow in just
that way; and for many of our idle or purely 'nervous' and fidgety
performances we can assign absolutely no _reason_ at all.

Or what shall be said of a shy and unsociable man who receives
point-blank an invitation to a small party? The thing is to him an
abomination; but your presence exerts a compulsion on him, he can think
of no excuse, and so says yes, cursing himself the while for what he
does. He is unusually _sui compos_ who does not every week of his life
fall into some such blundering act as this. Such instances of _voluntas
invita_ show not only that our acts cannot all be conceived as effects
of represented pleasure, but that they cannot even be classed as
cases of represented _good_. The class 'goods' contains many more
generally influential motives to action than the class 'pleasants.'
Pleasures often attract us only because we deem them goods. Mr.
Spencer, e.g., urges us to court pleasures for their influence upon
health, which comes to us as a good. But almost as little as under the
form of pleasures do our acts invariably appear to us under the form
of _goods_. All diseased impulses and pathological fixed ideas are
instances to the contrary. It is the very badness of the act that gives
it then its vertiginous fascination. Remove the prohibition, and the
attraction stops. In my university days a student threw himself from
an upper entry window of one of the college buildings and was nearly
killed. Another student, a friend of my own, had to pass the window
daily in coming and going from his room, and experienced a dreadful
temptation to imitate the deed. Being a Catholic, he told his director,
who said, 'All right! if you must, you must,' and added, 'Go ahead and
do it,' thereby instantly quenching his desire. This director knew how
to minister to a mind diseased. But we need not go to minds diseased
for examples of the occasional tempting-power of simple badness and
unpleasantness as such. Every one who has a wound or hurt anywhere, a
sore tooth, e.g., will ever and anon press it just to bring out the
pain. If we are near a new sort of stink, we must sniff it again just
to verify once more how bad it is. This very day I have been repeating
over and over to myself a verbal jingle whose mawkish silliness was the
secret of its haunting power. I loathed yet could not banish it.

Believers in the pleasure-and-pain theory must thus, if they are
candid, make large exceptions in the application of their creed. Action
from 'fixed ideas' is accordingly a terrible stumbling-block to the
candid Professor Bain. Ideas have in his psychology no impulsive but
only a 'guiding' function, whilst

 "The proper stimulus of the will, namely, some variety of pleasure
 and pain, is needed to give the impetus.... The intellectual link is
 not sufficient for causing the deed to rise at the beck of the idea
 (except in case of an 'idée fixe');" but "should any _pleasure_ spring
 up or be continued, by performing an action that we clearly conceive,
 the causation is then complete; both the directing and the moving
 powers are present."[480]

Pleasures and pains are for Professor Bain the '_genuine_ impulses of
the will.'[481]

 "Without an antecedent of pleasurable or painful feeling--actual or
 ideal, primary or derivative--the will cannot be stimulated. Through
 all the disguises that wrap up what we call motives, something of one
 or other of these two grand conditions can be detected."[482]

Accordingly, where Professor Bain finds an exception to this rule, he
refuses to call the phenomenon a 'genuinely voluntary impulse.' The
exceptions, he admits, 'are those furnished by never-dying spontaneity,
habits, and fixed ideas.'[483] Fixed ideas 'traverse the proper course
of volition.'[484]

 "_Disinterested impulses_ are wholly distinct from the attainment of
 pleasure and the avoidance of pain.... The theory of disinterested
 action, in the only form that I can conceive it, supposes that the
 action of the will and the attainment of happiness do not square
 throughout."[485]

_Sympathy_ "has this in common with the Fixed Idea, that it clashes
with the regular outgoings of the will in favor, of our pleasures."[486]

Prof. Bain thus admits all the essential facts. Pleasure and pain are
motives of only part of our activity. But he prefers to give to that
part of the activity exclusively which these feelings prompt the name
of '_regular_ outgoings' and '_genuine_ impulses' of the will,[487]
and to treat all the rest as mere paradoxes and anomalies, of which
nothing rational can be said. This amounts to taking one species of a
genus, calling it alone by the generic name, and ordering the other
co-ordinate species to find what names they may. At bottom this is only
verbal play. How much more conducive to clearness and insight it is to
take the _genus_ 'springs of action' and treat it as a whole; and then
to distinguish within it the species 'pleasure and pain' from whatever
other species may be found!

       *       *       *       *       *

There is, it is true, a complication in the relation of pleasure to
action, which partly excuses those who make it the exclusive spur. This
complication deserves some notice at our hands.

An impulse which discharges itself immediately is generally quite
_neutral_ as regards pleasure or pain--the breathing impulse, for
example. If such an impulse is arrested, however, by an extrinsic
force, a great feeling of _uneasiness_ is produced--for instance, the
dyspnœa of asthma. And in proportion as the arresting force is then
overcome, _relief_ accrues--as when we draw breath again after the
asthma subsides. The relief is a pleasure and the uneasiness a pain;
and thus it happens that round all our impulses, merely as such, there
twine, as it were, secondary possibilities of pleasant and painful
feeling, involved in the manner in which the act is allowed to occur.
These _pleasures and pains of achievement, discharge, or fruition_
exist, no matter what the original spring of action be. We are glad
when we have successfully got ourselves out of a danger, though the
thought of the gladness was surely not what suggested to us to escape.
To have compassed the steps towards a proposed sensual indulgence
also makes us glad, and this gladness is a pleasure additional to the
pleasure originally proposed. On the other hand, we are chagrined and
displeased when any activity, however instigated, is hindered whilst in
process of actual discharge. We are 'uneasy' till the discharge starts
up again. And this is just as true when the action is neutral, or has
nothing but pain in view as its result, as when it was undertaken for
pleasure's express sake. The moth is probably as annoyed if hindered
from getting into the lamp-flame as the _roué_ is if interrupted in
his debauch; and we are chagrined if prevented from doing some quite
unimportant act which would have given us no noticeable pleasure if
done, merely because the prevention itself is disagreeable.

Let us now call the pleasure _for the sake_ of which the act may be
done the _pursued pleasure_. It follows that, even when no pleasure
is pursued by an act, the act itself may be the _pleasantest line_ of
conduct when once the impulse has begun, on account of the incidental
pleasure which then attends its successful achievement and the pain
which would come of interruption. A _pleasant act_ and an act _pursuing
a pleasure_ are in themselves, however, two perfectly distinct
conceptions, though they coalesce in one concrete phenomenon whenever
a pleasure is deliberately pursued. I cannot help thinking that it is
the _confusion of pursued pleasure with mere pleasure of achievement_
which makes the pleasure-theory of action so plausible to the ordinary
mind. We feel an impulse, no matter whence derived; we proceed to act;
if hindered, we feel displeasure; and if successful, relief. Action
_in the line of the present impulse_ is always for the time being the
pleasant course; and the ordinary hedonist expresses this fact by
saying that we act for the _sake_ of the pleasantness involved. But
who does not see that for this sort of pleasure to be possible, _the
impulse must be there already as an independent fact?_ The pleasure of
successful performance is the _result_ of the impulse, not its _cause_.
You cannot have your pleasure of achievement unless you have managed to
get your impulse under headway beforehand by some previous means.

It is true that on special occasions (so complex is the human mind)
_the pleasure of achievement may itself become a pursued pleasure;_
and these cases form another point on which the pleasure-theory is apt
to rally. Take a foot-ball game or a fox-hunt. Who in cold blood wants
the fox for its own sake, or cares whether the ball be at this goal
or that? We know, however, by experience, that if we can once rouse
a certain impulsive excitement in ourselves, whether to overtake the
fox, or to get the ball to one particular goal, the successful venting
of it over the counteracting checks will fill us with exceeding joy.
We therefore get ourselves deliberately and artificially into the hot
impulsive state. It takes the presence of various instinct-arousing
conditions to excite it; but little by little, once we are in the
field, it reaches its paroxysm; and we reap the reward of our exertions
in that pleasure of successful achievement which, far more than the
dead fox or the goal-got ball, was the object we originally pursued. So
it often is with duties. Lots of actions are done with heaviness all
through, and not till they are completed does pleasure emerge, in the
joy of being done with them. Like Hamlet we say of each such successive
task,

                    "O cursed spite,
    That ever I was born to set it right!"

and then we often add to the original impulse that set us on, this
additional one, that "we shall feel so glad when well through
with it," that thought also having its impulsive spur. But because
a pleasure of achievement _can_ thus become a pursued pleasure
upon occasion, it does not follow that everywhere and always that
pleasure must be what is pursued. This, however, is what the
pleasure-philosophers seem to suppose. As well might they suppose,
because no steamer can go to sea without incidentally consuming coal,
and because some steamers may occasionally go to sea to _try_ their
coal, that therefore no steamer _can_ go to sea for any other motive
than that of coal-consumption.[488]

As we need not act for the sake of gaining the pleasure of achievement,
so neither need we act for the sake of escaping the uneasiness of
arrest. This uneasiness is altogether due to the fact that the act is
_already tending to occur_ on other grounds. And these original grounds
are what impel to its continuance, even though the uneasiness of the
arrest may upon occasion add to their impulsive power.

To conclude, I am far from denying the exceeding prominence and
importance of the part which pleasures and pains, both felt and
represented, play in the motivation of our conduct. But I must insist
that it is no exclusive part, and that co-ordinately with these mental
objects innumerable others have an exactly similar impulsive and
inhibitive power.[489]

If one must have a single name for the condition upon which the
impulsive and inhibitive quality of objects depends, one had better
call it their _interest_. 'The interesting' is a title which
covers not only the pleasant and the painful, but also the morbidly
fascinating, the tediously haunting, and even the simply habitual,
inasmuch as the attention usually travels on habitual lines, and
what-we-attend-to and what-interests-us are synonymous terms. It seems
as if we ought to look for the secret of an idea's impulsiveness,
not in any peculiar relations which it may have with paths of motor
discharge,--for _all_ ideas have relations with some such paths,--but
rather in a preliminary phenomenon, the _urgency, namely, with which it
is able to compel attention and dominate in consciousness._ Let it once
so dominate, let no other ideas succeed in displacing it, and whatever
motor effects belong to it by nature will inevitably occur--its
impulsion, in short, will be given to boot, and will manifest itself
as a matter of course. This is what we have seen in instinct, in
emotion, in common ideo-motor action, in hypnotic suggestion, in morbid
impulsion, and in _voluntas invita_,--the impelling idea is simply the
one which possesses the attention. It is the same where pleasure and
pain are the motor spurs--they drive other thoughts from consciousness
at the same time that they instigate their own characteristic
'volitional' effects. And this is also what happens at the moment
of the _fiat_, in all the five types of 'decision' which we have
described. In short, one does not see any case in which the steadfast
occupancy of consciousness does not appear to be the prime condition
of impulsive power. It is still more obviously the prime condition of
inhibitive power. What checks our impulses is the mere thinking of
reasons to the contrary--it is their bare presence to the mind which
gives the veto, and makes acts, otherwise seductive, impossible to
perform. If we could only _forget_ our scruples, our doubts, our fears,
what exultant energy we should for a while display!


WILL IS A RELATION BETWEEN THE MIND AND ITS 'IDEAS.'


In closing in, therefore, after all these preliminaries, upon the more
_intimate_ nature of the volitional process, we find ourselves driven
more and more exclusively to consider the conditions which make ideas
prevail in the mind. With the prevalence, once there as a fact, of the
motive idea the _psychology_ of volition properly stops. The movements
which ensue are exclusively physiological phenomena, following
according to physiological laws upon the neural events to which the
idea corresponds. The _willing_ terminates with the prevalence of
the idea; and whether the act then follows or not is a matter quite
immaterial, so far as the willing itself goes. I will to write, and the
act follows. I will to sneeze, and it does not. I will that the distant
table slide over the floor towards me; it also does not. My willing
representation can no more instigate my sneezing-centre than it can
instigate the table to activity. But in both cases it is as true and
good willing as it was when I willed to write.[490] In a word, volition
is a psychic or moral fact pure and simple, and is absolutely completed
when the stable state of the idea is there. The supervention of motion
is a supernumerary phenomenon depending on executive ganglia whose
function lies outside the mind.

In St. Vitus' dance, in locomotor ataxy, the representation of a
movement and the consent to it take place normally. But the inferior
executive centres are deranged, and although the ideas discharge them,
they do not discharge them so as to reproduce the precise sensations
anticipated. In aphasia the patient has an image of certain words which
he wishes to utter, but when he opens his mouth he hears himself making
quite unintended sounds. This may fill him with rage and despair--which
passions only show how intact his will remains. Paralysis only goes
a step farther. The associated mechanism is not only deranged but
altogether broken through. The volition occurs, but the hand remains
as still as the table. The paralytic is made aware of this by the
absence of the expected change in his afferent sensations. He tries
harder, i.e., he mentally frames the sensation of muscular 'effort,'
with consent that it shall occur. It does so: he frowns, he heaves his
chest, he clinches his other fist, but the palsied arm lies passive as
before.[491]

We thus find that _we reach the heart of our inquiry into volition
when we ask by what process it is that the thought of any given object
comes to prevail stably in the mind._ Where thoughts prevail without
effort, we have sufficiently studied in the several chapters on
sensation, association, and attention, the laws of their advent before
consciousness and of their stay. We will not go over that ground again,
for we know that interest and association are the words, let their
worth be what it may, on which our explanations must perforce rely.
Where, on the other hand, the prevalence of the thought is accompanied
by the phenomenon of effort, the case is much less clear. Already
in the chapter on attention we postponed the final consideration of
voluntary attention with effort to a later place. We have now brought
things to a point at which we see that attention with effort is all
that any case of volition implies. _The essential achievement of
the will, in short, when it is most 'voluntary,' is to_ ATTEND _to
a difficult object and hold it fast before the mind._ The so-doing
_is_ the _fiat_; and it is a mere physiological incident that when
the object is thus attended to, immediate motor consequences should
ensue. A _resolve_, whose contemplated motor consequences are not to
ensue until some possibly far distant future condition shall have
been fulfilled, involves all the psychic elements of a motor fiat
except the word '_now_;' and it is the same with many of our purely
theoretic beliefs. We saw in effect in the appropriate chapter, how in
the last resort belief means only a peculiar sort of occupancy of the
mind, and relation to the self felt in the thing believed; and we know
in the case of many beliefs how constant an effort of the attention
is required to keep them in this situation and protect them from
displacement by contradictory ideas.[492] (Compare above, p. 321.)

_Effort of attention is thus the essential phenomenon of will._[493]
Every reader must know by his own experience that this is so, for every
reader must have felt some fiery passion's grasp. What constitutes the
difficulty for a man laboring under an unwise passion of acting as if
the passion were unwise? Certainly there is no physical difficulty.
It is as easy physically to avoid a fight as to begin one, to pocket
one's money as to squander it on one's cupidities, to walk away from
as towards a coquette's door. The difficulty is mental; it is that of
getting the idea of the wise action to stay before our mind at all.
When any strong emotional state whatever is upon us the tendency is for
no images but such as are congruous with it to come up. If others by
chance offer themselves, they are instantly smothered and crowded out.
If we be joyous, we cannot keep thinking of those uncertainties and
risks of failure which abound upon our path; if lugubrious, we cannot
think of new triumphs, travels, loves, and joys; nor if vengeful, of
our oppressor's community of nature with ourselves. The cooling advice
which we get from others when the fever-fit is on us is the most
jarring and exasperating thing in life. Reply we cannot, so we get
angry; for by a sort of self-preserving instinct which our passion has,
it feels that these chill objects, if they once but gain a lodgment,
will work and work until they have frozen the very vital spark from out
of all our mood and brought our airy castles in ruin to the ground.
Such is the inevitable effect of reasonable ideas over others--_if they
can once get a quiet hearing;_ and passion's cue accordingly is always
and everywhere to prevent their still small voice from being heard at
all. "Let me not think of that! Don't speak to me of that!" This is
the sudden cry of all those who in a passion perceive some sobering
considerations about to check them in mid-career. "_Hæc tibi erit janua
leti_," we feel. There is something so icy in this cold-water bath,
something which seems so hostile to the movement of our life, so purely
negative, in Reason, when she lays her corpse-like finger on our heart
and says, "Halt! give up! leave off! go back! sit down!" that it is no
wonder that to most men the steadying influence seems, for the time
being, a very minister of death.

The strong-willed man, however, is the man who hears the still small
voice unflinchingly, and who, when the death-bringing consideration
comes, looks at its face, consents to its presence, clings to it,
affirms it, and holds it fast, in spite of the host of exciting mental
images which rise in revolt against it and would expel it from
the mind. Sustained in this way by a resolute effort of attention,
the difficult object erelong begins to call up its own congeners
and associates and ends by changing the disposition of the man's
consciousness altogether. And with his consciousness, his action
changes, for the new object, once stably in possession of the field
of his thoughts, infallibly produces its own motor effects. The
difficulty lies in the gaining possession of that field. Though the
spontaneous drift of thought is all the other way, the attention must
be kept strained on that one object until at last it _grows_, so as
to maintain itself before the mind with ease. This strain of the
attention is the fundamental act of will. And the will's work is in
most cases practically ended when the bare presence to our thought of
the naturally unwelcome object has been secured. For the mysterious tie
between the thought and the motor centres next comes into play, and, in
a way which we cannot even guess at, the obedience of the bodily organs
follows as a matter of course.

In all this one sees how the immediate point of application of the
volitional effort lies exclusively in the mental world. The whole drama
is a mental drama. The whole difficulty is a mental difficulty, a
difficulty with an object of our thought. If I may use the word _idea_
without suggesting associationist or Herbartian fables, I will say
that it is an idea to which our will applies itself, an idea which if
we let it go would slip away, but which we will not let go. Consent to
the idea's undivided presence, this is effort's sole achievement. Its
only function is to get this feeling of consent into the mind. And for
this there is but one way. The idea to be consented to must be kept
from flickering and going out. It must be held steadily before the mind
until it _fills_ the mind. Such filling of the mind by an idea, with
its congruous associates, _is_ consent to the idea and to the fact
which the idea represents. If the idea be that, or include that, of a
bodily movement of our own, then we call the consent thus laboriously
gained a motor volition. For Nature here 'backs' us instantaneously
and follows up our inward willingness by outward changes on her own
part. She does this in no other instance. Pity she should not have been
more generous, nor made a world whose other parts were as immediately
subject to our will!

       *       *       *       *       *

On page 531, in describing the 'reasonable type' of decision, it was
said that it usually came when the right conception of the case was
found. Where, however, the right conception is an anti-inpulsive one,
the whole intellectual ingenuity of the man usually goes to work to
crowd it out of sight, and to find names for the emergency, by the help
of which the dispositions of the moment may sound sanctified, and sloth
or passion may reign unchecked. How many excuses does the drunkard find
when each new temptation comes! It is a new brand of liquor which the
interests of intellectual culture in such matters oblige him to test;
moreover it is poured out and it is sin to waste it; or others are
drinking and it would be churlishness to refuse; or it is but to enable
him to sleep, or just to get through this job of work; or it isn't
drinking, it is because he feels so cold; or it is Christmas-day; or
it is a means of stimulating him to make a more powerful resolution in
favor of abstinence than any he has hitherto made; or it is just this
once, and once doesn't count, etc., etc., _ad libitum_--it is, in fact,
anything you like except _being a drunkard. That_ is the conception
that will not stay before the poor soul's attention. But if he once
gets able to pick out that way of conceiving, from all the other
possible ways of conceiving the various opportunities which occur, if
through thick and thin he holds to it that this is being a drunkard and
is nothing else, he is not likely to remain one long. The effort by
which he succeeds in keeping the right _name_ unwaveringly present to
his mind proves to be his saving moral act.[494]

Everywhere then the function of the effort is the same: to keep
affirming and adopting a thought which, if left to itself, would slip
away. It may be cold and flat when the spontaneous mental drift is
towards excitement, or great and arduous when the spontaneous drift is
towards repose. In the one case the effort has to inhibit an explosive,
in the other to arouse an obstructed will. The exhausted sailor on a
wreck has a will which is obstructed. One of his ideas is that of his
sore hands, of the nameless exhaustion of his whole frame which the act
of farther pumping involves, and of the deliciousness of sinking into
sleep. The other is that of the hungry sea ingulfing him. "Rather the
aching toil!" he says; and it becomes reality then, in spite of the
inhibiting influence of the relatively luxurious sensations which he
gets from lying still. But exactly similar in form would be his consent
to lie and sleep. Often it is the thought of sleep and what leads to it
which is the hard one to keep before the mind. If a patient afflicted
with insomnia can only control the whirling chase of his thoughts so
far as to think of _nothing at all_ (which can be done), or so far as
to imagine one letter after another of a verse of scripture or poetry
spelt slowly and monotonously out, it is almost certain that here,
too, specific bodily effects will follow, and that sleep will come.
The trouble is to keep the mind upon a train of objects naturally so
insipid. _To sustain a representation, to think,_ is, in short, the
only moral act, for the impulsive and the obstructed, for sane and
lunatics alike. Most maniacs know their thoughts to be crazy, but find
them too pressing to be withstood. Compared with them the sane truths
are so deadly sober, so cadaverous, that the lunatic cannot bear to
look them in the face and say, "Let these alone be my reality!" But
with sufficient effort, as Dr. Wigan says,

 "Such a man can for a time _wind himself up_, as it were, and
 determine that the notions of the disordered brain shall not be
 manifested. Many instances are on record similar to that told
 by Pinel, where an inmate of the Bicêtre, having stood a long
 cross-examination, and given every mark of restored reason, signed
 his name to the paper authorizing his discharge 'Jesus Christ,' and
 then went off into all the vagaries connected with that delusion. In
 the phraseology of the gentleman whose case is related in an early
 part of this [Wigan's] work he had 'held himself tight' during the
 examination in order to attain his object; this once accomplished he
 'let himself down' again, and, if even _conscious_ of his delusion,
 could not control it. I have observed with such persons that it
 requires a considerable time to wind themselves up to the pitch of
 complete self-control, that the effort is a painful tension of the
 mind.... When thrown off their guard by any accidental remark or worn
 out by the length of the examination, they _let themselves go_, and
 cannot gather themselves up again without preparation. Lord Erskine
 relates the story of a man who brought an action against Dr. Munro for
 confining him without cause. He underwent the most rigid examination
 by the counsel for the defendant without discovering any appearance
 of insanity, till a gentleman asked him about a princess with whom he
 corresponded in cherry-juice, and he became instantly insane."[495]

To sum it all up in a word, _the terminus of the psychological process
in volition, the point to which the will is directly applied, is always
an idea._ There are at all times _some_ ideas from which we shy away
like frightened horses the moment we get a glimpse of their forbidding
profile upon the threshold of our thought. _The only resistance which
our will can possibly experience is the resistance which such an idea
offers to being attended to at all._ To attend to it is the volitional
act, and the only inward volitional act which we ever perform.

       *       *       *       *       *

I have put the thing in this ultra-simple way because I want more
than anything else to emphasize the fact that volition is primarily
a relation, not between our Self and extra-mental matter (as many
philosophers still maintain) but between our Self and our own states of
mind. But when, a short while ago, I spoke of the filling of the mind
with an idea as being equivalent to consent to the idea's object, I
said something which the reader doubtless questioned at the time, and
which certainly now demands some qualification ere we pass beyond.

It is unqualifiedly true that if any thought _do_ fill the mind
exclusively, such filling is consent. The thought, for that time at any
rate, carries the man and his will with it. But it is not true that the
thought _need_ fill the mind exclusively for consent to be there; for
we often consent to things whilst thinking of other things, even of
hostile things; and we saw in fact that precisely what distinguishes
our 'fifth type' of decision from the other types (see p. 534) is
just this coexistence with the triumphant thought of other thoughts
which would inhibit it but for the effort which makes it prevail.
The effort to _attend_ is therefore only a part of what the word
'will' covers; it covers also the effort to _consent_ to something to
which our attention is not quite complete. Often, when an object has
gained our attention exclusively, and its motor results are just on
the point of setting in, it seems as if the sense of their imminent
irrevocability were enough of itself to start up the inhibitory ideas
and to make us pause. Then we need a new stroke of effort to break down
the sudden hesitation which seizes upon us, and to persevere. So that
although attention is the first and fundamental thing in volition,
_express consent to the reality of what is attended to_ is often an
additional and quite distinct phenomenon involved.

The reader's own consciousness tells him of course just what these
words of mine denote. And I freely confess that I am impotent to carry
the analysis of the matter any farther, or to explain in other terms
of what this consent consists. It seems a subjective experience _sui
generis_, which we can designate but not define. We stand here exactly
where we did in the case of belief. When an idea _stings_ us in a
certain way, makes as it were a certain electric connection with our
self, we believe that it _is_ a reality. When it stings us in another
way, makes another connection with our Self, we say, _let it be_ a
reality. To the word 'is' and to the words 'let it be' there correspond
peculiar attitudes of consciousness which it is vain to seek to
explain. The indicative and the imperative moods are as much ultimate
categories of thinking as they are of grammar. The 'quality of reality'
which these moods attach to things is not like other qualities. It is
a relation to our life. It means _our_ adoption of the things, _our_
caring for them, _our_ standing by them. This at least is what it
practically means for us; what it may mean beyond that we do not know.
And the transition from merely considering an object as possible, to
deciding or willing it to be real; the change from the fluctuating
to the stable personal attitude concerning it; from the 'don't care'
state of mind to that in which 'we mean business,' is one of the most
familiar things in life. We can partly enumerate its conditions; and
we can partly trace its consequences, especially the momentous one
that when the mental object is a movement of our own body, it realizes
itself outwardly when the mental change in question has occurred. But
the change itself as a subjective phenomenon is something which we can
translate into no simpler terms.


THE QUESTION OF 'FREE-WILL.'

Especially must we, when talking about it, rid our mind of
the fabulous warfare of separate agents called 'ideas.' The
brain-processes may be agents, and the thought as such may be an
agent. But what the ordinary psychologies call 'ideas' are nothing
but parts of the total _object_ of representation. All that is
before the mind at once, no matter how complex a system of things
and relations it may be, is one object for the thought. Thus,
'A-and-B-and-their-mutual-incompatibility-and-the-fact-that-only-one-
can-be-true-or-can-become-real-notwithstanding-the-probability-or-
desirability-of-both' may be such a complex object; and where the
thought is deliberative its object has always some such form as
this. When, now, we pass from deliberation to decision, that total
object undergoes a change. We either dismiss A altogether and its
relations to B, and think of B exclusively; or after thinking of both
as possibilities, we next think that A is impossible, and that B is
or forthwith shall be real. In either case a _new_ object is before
our thought; and where effort exists, it is where the change from the
first object to the second one is hard. Our thought seems to turn in
this case like a heavy door on rusty hinges; only, so far as the effort
feels spontaneous, it turns, not as if by some one helping, but as if
by an inward activity, born for the occasion, of its own.

The psychologists who discussed 'the muscular sense' at the
international congress at Paris in 1889 agreed at the end that they
needed to come to a better understanding in regard to this appearance
of internal activity at the moment when a decision is made. M.
Fouillée, in an article which I find more interesting and suggestive
than coherent or conclusive,[496] seems to resolve our sense of
activity into that of our very _existence as thinking entities_. At
least so I translate his words.[497] But we saw in Chapter X how hard
it is to lay a verifying finger plainly upon the thinking process as
such, and to distinguish it from certain objects of the stream. M.
Fouillée admits this; but I do not think he fully realizes how strong
would be the position of a man who should suggest (see Vol. I. p.
301) that the feeling of moral activity itself which accompanies the
advent of certain 'objects' before the mind is nothing but certain
other objects,--constrictions, namely, in the brows, eyes, throat, and
breathing apparatus, present then, but absent from other pulses of
subjective change. Were this the truth, then a part, at any rate, of
the activity of which we become aware in effort would seem merely to be
that of our body; and many thinkers would probably thereupon conclude
that this 'settles the claims' of inner activity, and dismisses the
whole notion of such a thing as a superfluity in psychological science.

I cannot see my way to so extreme a view; even although I must
repeat the confession made on pp. 296-7 of Vol. I, that I do not
_fully_ understand how we come to our unshakable belief that thinking
exists as a special kind of immaterial process alongside of the
material processes of the world. It is certain, however, that only by
_postulating_ such thinking do we make things currently intelligible;
and it is certain that no psychologist has as yet denied the _fact_ of
thinking, the utmost that has been denied being its dynamic power. But
if we postulate the fact of the thinking at all, I believe that we must
postulate its power as well; nor do I see how we can rightly equalize
its power with its mere existence, and say (as M. Fouillée seems to
say) that for the thought-process to _go on at all_ is an activity,
and an activity everywhere the same; for certain steps forward in this
process seem _prima facie_ to be passive, and other steps (as where an
object comes with effort) seem _prima facie_ to be active in a supreme
degree. If we admit, therefore, that our thoughts _exist_, we ought
to admit that they exist after the fashion in which they appear, as
things, namely, that supervene upon each other, sometimes with effort
and sometimes with ease; the only questions being, is the effort where
it exists a fixed function of the _object_, which the latter imposes
on the thought? or is it such an independent 'variable' that with a
constant object more or less of it may be made?

It certainly appears to us indeterminate, and as if, even with an
unchanging object, we might make more or less, as we choose. If it be
really indeterminate, our future acts are ambiguous or unpredestinate:
in common parlance, _our wills are free_. If the amount of effort be
not indeterminate, but be related in a fixed manner to the objects
themselves, in such wise that whatever object at any time fills our
consciousness was from eternity bound to fill it then and there, and
compel from us the exact effort, neither more nor less, which we
bestow upon it,--then our wills are not free, and all our acts are
foreordained. _The question of fact in the free-will controversy is
thus extremely simple._ It relates solely to the amount of effort
of attention or consent which we can at any time put forth. Are the
duration and intensity of this effort fixed functions of the object,
or are they not? Now, as I just said, it _seems_ as if the effort were
an independent variable, as if we might exert more or less of it in
any given case. When a man has let his thoughts go for days and weeks
until at last they culminate in some particularly dirty or cowardly or
cruel act, it is hard to persuade him, in the midst of his remorse,
that he might not have reined them in; hard to make him believe that
this whole goodly universe (which his act so jars upon) required
and exacted it of him at that fatal moment, and from eternity made
aught else impossible. But, on the other hand, there is the certainty
that all his _effortless_ volitions are resultants of interests and
associations whose strength and sequence are mechanically determined
by the structure of that physical mass, his brain; and the general
continuity of things and the monistic conception of the world may lead
one irresistibly to postulate that a little fact like effort can form
no real exception to the overwhelming reign of deterministic law. Even
in effortless volition we have the consciousness of the alternative
being also possible. This is surely a delusion here; why is it not a
delusion everywhere?

My own belief is that the question of free-will is insoluble on
strictly psychologic grounds. After a certain amount of effort of
attention has been given to an idea, it is manifestly impossible to
tell whether either more or less of it _might_ have been given or
not. To tell that, we should have to ascend to the antecedents of the
effort, and defining them with mathematical exactitude, prove, by
laws of which we have not at present even an inkling, that the only
amount of sequent effort which could _possibly_ comport with them
was the precise amount which actually came. Measurements, whether of
psychic or of neural quantities, and deductive reasonings such as this
method of proof implies, will surely be forever beyond human reach.
No serious psychologist or physiologist will venture even to suggest
a notion of how they might be practically made. We are thrown back
therefore upon the crude evidences of introspection on the one hand,
with all its liabilities to deception, and, on the other hand, upon
_a priori_ postulates and probabilities. He who loves to balance nice
doubts need be in no hurry to decide the point. Like Mephistopheles
to Faust, he can say to himself, "_dazu hast du noch eine lange
Frist_," for from generation to generation the reasons adduced on both
sides will grow more voluminous, and the discussion more refined.
But if our speculative delight be less keen, if the love of a _parti
pris_ outweighs that of keeping questions open, or if, as a French
philosopher of genius says, "_l'amour de la vie qui s'indigne de tant
de discours_," awakens in us, craving the sense of either peace or
power,--then, taking the risk of error on our head, we must project
upon one of the alternative views the attribute of reality for us; we
must so fill our mind with the idea of it that it becomes our settled
creed. The present writer does this for the alternative of freedom, but
since the grounds of his opinion are ethical rather than psychological,
he prefers to exclude them from the present book.[498]

       *       *       *       *       *

A few words, however, may be permitted about the logic of the question.
The most that any argument can do for determinism is to make it a clear
and seductive conception, which a man is foolish not to espouse, so
long as he stands by the great scientific postulate that the world
must be one unbroken fact, and that prediction of all things without
exception must be ideally, even if not actually, possible. It is a
_moral_ postulate about the Universe, the postulate that _what ought
to be can be, and that bad acts cannot be fated, but that good ones
must be possible in their place,_ which would lead one to espouse
the contrary view. But when scientific and moral postulates war thus
with each other and objective proof is not to be had, the only course
is voluntary choice, for scepticism itself, if systematic, is also
voluntary choice. If, meanwhile, the will _be_ undetermined, it would
seem only fitting that the belief in its indetermination should be
voluntarily chosen from amongst other possible beliefs. Freedom's first
deed should be to affirm itself. We ought never to hope for any other
method of getting at the truth if indeterminism be a fact. Doubt of
this particular truth will therefore probably be open to us to the end
of time, and the utmost that a believer in free-will can _ever_ do
will be to show that the deterministic arguments are not coercive. That
they are seductive, I am the last to deny; nor do I deny that effort
may be needed to keep the faith in freedom, when they press upon it,
upright in the mind.

There is a _fatalistic argument_ for determinism, however, which is
radically vicious. When a man has let himself go time after time, he
easily becomes impressed with the enormously preponderating influence
of circumstances, hereditary habits, and temporary bodily dispositions
over what might seem a spontaneity born for the occasion. "All is
fate," he then says; "all is resultant of what pre-exists. Even if
the moment seems original, it is but the instable molecules passively
tumbling in their preappointed way. It is hopeless to resist the
drift, vain to look for any new force coming in; and less, perhaps,
than anywhere else under the sun is there anything really mine in
the decisions which I make." This is really no argument for simple
determinism. There runs throughout it the sense of a force which might
make things otherwise from one moment to another, if it were only
strong enough to breast the tide. A person who feels the _impotence_
of free effort in this way has the acutest notion of what is meant
by it, and of its possible independent power. How else could he be
so conscious of its absence and of that of its effects? But genuine
determinism occupies a totally different ground; not the _impotence_
but the _unthinkability_ of free-will is what it affirms. It admits
something phenomenal _called_ free effort, which _seems_ to breast the
tide, but it claims this as a _portion of the tide_. The variations
of the effort cannot be independent, it says; they cannot originate
_ex nihilo_, or come from a fourth dimension; they are mathematically
fixed functions of the ideas themselves, which are the tide. Fatalism,
which conceives of effort clearly enough as an independent variable
that might come from a fourth dimension if it _would_ come, but that
does _not_ come, is a very dubious ally for determinism. It strongly
imagines that very possibility which determinism denies.

But what, quite as much as the inconceivability of absolutely
independent variables, persuades modern men of science that their
efforts must be predetermined, is the continuity of the latter with
other phenomena whose predetermination no one doubts. Decisions with
effort merge so gradually into those without it that it is not easy to
say where the limit lies. Decisions without effort merge again into
ideo-motor, and these into reflex acts; so that the temptation is
almost irresistible to throw the formula which covers so many cases
over absolutely all. Where there is effort just as where there is
none, the ideas themselves which furnish the matter of deliberation
are brought before the mind by the machinery of association. And this
machinery is essentially a system of arcs and paths, a reflex system,
whether effort be amongst its incidents or not. The reflex way is,
after all, the universal way of conceiving the business. The feeling
of _ease_ is a passive result of the way in which the thoughts unwind
themselves. Why is not the feeling of effort the same? Professor
Lipps, in his admirably clear deterministic statement, so far from
admitting that the feeling of effort testifies to an increment of force
exerted, explains it as a sign that force is lost. We speak of effort,
according to him, whenever a force expends itself (wholly or partly) in
neutralizing another force, and so fails of its own possible outward
effect. The outward effect of the antagonistic force, however, also
fails in corresponding measure, "so that there is no effort without
counter-effort,... and effort and counter-effort signify only that
causes are mutually robbing each other of effectiveness."[499] Where
the forces are ideas, both sets of them, strictly speaking, are the
seat of effort--both those which tend to explode, and those which
tend to check them. We, however, call the more abundant mass of ideas
_ourselves_; and, talking of its effort as _our_ effort, and of that
of the smaller mass of ideas as the _resistance_,[500] we say that our
effort sometimes overcomes the resistances offered by the inertias of
an obstructed, and sometimes those presented by the impulsions of an
explosive, will. Really both effort and resistance are ours, and the
identification of our _self_ with one of these factors is an illusion
and a trick of speech. I do not see how anyone can fail (especially
when the mythologic dynamism of separate 'ideas,' which Professor Lipps
cleaves to, is translated into that of brain-processes) to recognize
the fascinating simplicity of some such view as his. Nor do I see why
_for scientific purposes_ one need give it up even if indeterminate
amounts of effort really do occur. Before their indeterminism, science
simply _stops_. She can abstract from it altogether, then; for in the
impulses and inhibitions with which the effort has to cope there is
already a larger field of uniformity than she can ever practically
cultivate. Her prevision will never foretell, even if the effort be
completely predestinate, the actual way in which each individual
emergency is resolved. Psychology will be Psychology,[501] and Science
Science, as much as ever (as much and no more) in this world, whether
free will be true in it or not. Science, however, must be constantly
reminded that her purposes are not the only purposes, and that the
order of uniform causation which she has use for, and is therefore
right in postulating, may be enveloped in a wider order, on which she
has no claims at all.

We can therefore leave the free-will question altogether out of our
account. As we said in Chapter VI (vol. I. p. 453), the operation
of free effort, if it existed, could only be to hold some one
ideal object, or part of an object, a little longer or a little
more intensely before the mind. Amongst the alternatives which
present themselves as _genuine possibles_, it would thus make one
effective.[502] And although such quickening of one idea might be
_morally and historically momentous_, yet, if considered _dynamically_,
it would be an operation amongst those physiological infinitesimals
which calculation must forever neglect.

But whilst eliminating the question about the amount of our effort as
one which psychology will never have a practical call to decide, I must
say one word about the extraordinarily intimate and important character
which the phenomenon of effort assumes in our own eyes as individual
men. Of course we measure ourselves by many standards. Our strength and
our intelligence, our wealth and even our good luck, are things which
warm our heart and make us feel ourselves a match for life. But deeper
than all such things, and able to suffice unto itself without them, is
the sense of the amount of effort which we can put forth. Those are,
after all, but effects, products, and reflections of the outer world
within. But the effort seems to belong to an altogether different
realm, as if it were the substantive thing which we _are_, and those
were but externals which we _carry_. If the 'searching of our heart and
reins' be the purpose of this human drama, then what is sought seems
to be what effort we can make. He who can make none is but a shadow;
he who can make much is a hero. The huge world that girdles us about
puts all sorts of questions to us, and tests us in all sorts of ways.
Some of the tests we meet by actions that are easy, and some of the
questions we answer in articulately formulated words. But the deepest
question that is ever asked admits of no reply but the dumb turning of
the will and tightening of our heartstrings as we say, "_Yes, I will
even have it so!_" When a dreadful object is presented, or when life
as a whole turns up its dark abysses to our view, then the worthless
ones among us lose their hold on the situation altogether, and either
escape from its difficulties by averting their attention, or if they
cannot do that, collapse into yielding masses of plaintiveness and
fear. The effort required for facing and consenting to such objects is
beyond their power to make. But the heroic mind does differently. To
it, too, the objects are sinister and dreadful, unwelcome, incompatible
with wished-for things. But it can face them if necessary, without for
that losing its hold upon the rest of life. The world thus finds in the
heroic man its worthy match and mate; and the effort which he is able
to put forth to hold himself erect and keep his heart unshaken is the
direct measure of his worth and function in the game of human life. He
can _stand_ this Universe. He can meet it and keep up his faith in it
in presence of those same features which lay his weaker brethren low.
He can still find a zest in it, not by 'ostrich-like forgetfulness,'
but by pure inward willingness to face the world with those deterrent
objects there. And hereby he becomes one of the masters and the lords
of life. He must be counted with henceforth; he forms a part of human
destiny. Neither in the theoretic nor in the practical sphere do we
care for, or go for help to, those who have no head for risks, or sense
for living on the perilous edge. Our religious life lies more, our
practical life lies less, than it used to, on the perilous edge. But
just as our courage is so often a reflex of another's courage, so our
faith is apt to be, as Max Müller somewhere says, a faith in some one
else's faith. We draw new life from the heroic example. The prophet
has drunk more deeply than anyone of the cup of bitterness, but his
countenance is so unshaken and he speaks such mighty words of cheer
that his will becomes our will, and our life is kindled at his own.

Thus not only our morality but our religion, so far as the latter is
deliberate, depend on the effort which we can make. "_Will you or won't
you have it so_?" is the most probing question we are ever asked; we
are asked it every hour of the day, and about the largest as well as
the smallest, the most theoretical as well as the most practical,
things. We answer by _consents or non-consents_ and not by words.
What wonder that these dumb responses should seem our deepest organs
of communication with the nature of things! What wonder if the effort
demanded by them be the measure of our worth as men! What wonder if the
amount which we accord of it be the one strictly underived and original
contribution which we make to the world!


THE EDUCATION OF THE WILL.


The education of the will may be taken in a broader or a narrower
sense. In the broader sense, it means the whole of one's training
to moral and prudential conduct, and of one's learning to adapt
means to ends, involving the 'association of ideas,' in all its
varieties and complications, together with the power of inhibiting
impulses irrelevant to the ends desired, and of initiating movements
contributory thereto. It is the acquisition of these latter powers
which I mean by the education of the will in the narrower sense. And
it is in this sense alone that it is worth while to treat the matter
here.[503]

Since a willed movement is a movement preceded by an idea of itself,
the problem of the will's education is the problem of how the idea of
a movement can arouse the movement itself. This, as we have seen, is
a secondary kind of process; for framed as we are, we can have no _a
priori_ idea of a movement, no idea of a movement which we have not
already performed. Before the idea can be generated, the movement must
have occurred in a blind, unexpected way, and left its idea behind.
_Reflex, instinctive,_ or _random execution_ of a _movement_ must, in
other words, precede its voluntary execution. Reflex and instinctive
movements have already been considered sufficiently for the purposes
of this book. 'Random' movements are mentioned so as to include
_quasi_-accidental reflexes from inner causes, or movements possibly
arising from such overflow of nutrition in special centres as Prof.
Bain postulates in his explanation of those 'spontaneous discharges'
by which he sets such great store in his derivation of the voluntary
life.[504]

Now _how can the sensory process which a movement has previously
produced, discharge, when excited again, into the centre for the
movement itself?_ On the movement's original occurrence the motor
discharge came first and the sensory process second; now in the
voluntary repetition the sensory process (excited in weak or
'ideational' form) comes first, and the motor discharge comes second.
To tell how this comes to pass would be to answer the problem of the
education of the will in physiological terms. Evidently the problem is
that of the formation of _new paths_; and the only thing to do is to
make hypotheses, till we find some which seem to cover all the facts.

How is a fresh path ever formed? All paths are paths of discharge,
and the discharge always takes place in the direction of least
resistance, whether the cell which discharges be 'motor' or 'sensory.'
The _connate_ paths of least resistance are the paths of instinctive
reaction; and I submit as my first hypothesis that _these paths all
run one way, that is from 'sensory' cells into 'motor' cells and from
motor cells into muscles, without ever taking the reverse direction._
A motor cell, for example, never awakens a sensory cell directly,
but only through the incoming current caused by the bodily movements
to which its discharge gives rise. And a sensory cell _always_
discharges or normally tends to discharge towards the motor region.
Let this direction be called the 'forward' direction. I call the law
an hypothesis, but really it is an indubitable truth. No impression or
idea of eye, ear, or skin comes to us without occasioning a movement,
even though the movement be no more than the accommodation of the
sense-organ; and all our trains of sensation and sensational imagery
have their terms alternated and interpenetrated with motor processes,
of most of which we practically are unconscious. Another way of stating
the rule is to say that, primarily or connately, all currents through
the brain run towards the Rolandic region, and that there they run
out, and never return upon themselves. From this point of view the
distinction of sensory and motor cells has no fundamental significance.
All cells are motor; we simply call those of the Rolandic region, those
nearest the mouth of the funnel, the motor cells _par excellence_.

A corollary of this law is that 'sensory' cells do not awaken each
other connately; that is, that no one sensible property of things has
any tendency, in advance of experience, to awaken in us the idea of any
other sensible properties which in the nature of things may go with
it. _There is no a priori calling up of one 'idea' by another;_ the
only _a priori_ couplings are of ideas with movements. All suggestions
of one sensible fact by another take place by secondary paths which
experience has formed.

[Illustration: FIG. 87.]

The diagram (Fig. 87)[505] shows what happens in a nervous system
ideally reduced to the fewest possible terms. A stimulus reaching
the sense-organ awakens the sensory cell, S; this by the connate or
instinctive path discharges the motor cell, M, which makes the muscle
contract; and the contraction arouses the second sensory cell, K,
which may be the organ either of a 'resident' or 'kinæsthetic,' or
of a 'remote,' sensation. (See above, p. 488.) This cell K again
discharges into M. If this were the entire nervous mechanism, the
movement, once begun, would be self-maintaining, and would stop only
when the parts were exhausted. And this, according to M. Pierre
Janet, is what actually happens in _catalepsy_. A cataleptic patient
is anæsthetic, speechless, motionless. Consciousness, so far as we
can judge, is abolished. Nevertheless the limbs will retain whatever
position is impressed upon them from without, and retain it so long
that if it be a strained and unnatural position, the phenomenon is
regarded by Charcot as one of the few conclusive tests against hypnotic
subjects shamming, since hypnotics can be made cataleptic, and then
keep their limbs outstretched for a length of time quite unattainable
by the waking will. M. Janet thinks that in all these cases the
outlying ideational processes in the brain are temporarily thrown out
of gear. The kinæsthetic sensation of the raised arm, for example,
is produced in the patient when the operator raises the arm, this
sensation discharges into the motor cell, which through the muscle
reproduces the sensation, etc., the currents running in this closed
circle until they grow so weak, by exhaustion of the parts, that the
member slowly drops. We may call this circle from the muscle to K, from
K to M, and from M to the muscle again, the 'motor circle.' _We should
all be cataleptics and never stop a muscular contraction once begun,
were it not that other processes simultaneously going on inhibit the
contraction. Inhibition is therefore not an occasional accident; it
is an essential and unremitting element of our cerebral life._ It is
interesting to note that Dr. Mercier, by a different path of reasoning,
is also led to conclude that we owe to outside inhibitions exclusively
our power to arrest a movement once begun.[506]

One great inhibitor of the discharge of K into M seems to be the
painful or otherwise displeasing quality of the sensation itself of
K; and conversely, when this sensation is distinctly pleasant, that
fact tends to further K's discharge into M, and to keep the primordial
motor circle agoing. Tremendous as the part is which pleasure and pain
play in our psychic life, we must confess that absolutely nothing is
known of their cerebral conditions. It is hard to imagine them as
having special centres; it is harder still to invent peculiar forms
of process in each and every centre, to which these feelings may be
due. And let one try as one will to represent the cerebral activity
in exclusively mechanical terms, I, for one, find it quite impossible
to enumerate what seem to be the facts and yet to make no mention of
the psychic side which they possess. However it be with other drainage
currents and discharges, the drainage currents and discharges of
the brain are not purely physical facts. They are _psycho-physical_
facts, and the spiritual quality of them seems a codeterminant of
their mechanical effectiveness. If the mechanical activities in a
cell, as they increase, give pleasure, they seem to increase all the
more rapidly for that fact; if they give displeasure, the displeasure
seems to damp the activities. The psychic side of the phenomenon
thus seems, somewhat like the applause or hissing at a spectacle, to
be an encouraging or adverse _comment_ on what the machinery brings
forth. The soul _presents_ nothing herself; _creates_ nothing; is at
the mercy of the material forces for all _possibilities_; but amongst
these possibilities she _selects_; and by reinforcing one and checking
others, she figures not as an 'epiphenomenon,' but as something from
which the play gets moral support. I shall therefore never hesitate
to invoke the efficacy of the conscious comment, where no strictly
mechanical reason appears why a current escaping from a cell should
take one path rather than another.[507] But the _existence_ of the
current, and its _tendency_ towards either path, I feel bound to
account for by mechanical laws.

       *       *       *       *       *

Having now considered a nervous system reduced to its lowest possible
terms, in which all the paths are connate, and the possibilities of
inhibition not extrinsic, but due solely to the agreeableness or
disagreeableness of the feeling aroused, let us turn to the conditions
under which new paths may be formed. Potentialities of new paths
are furnished by the fibres which connect the sensory cells amongst
themselves; but these fibres are not originally pervious, and have
to be made so by a process which I proceed hypothetically to state
as follows: _Each discharge from a sensory cell in the forward
direction_[508] _tends to drain the cells lying behind the discharging
one of whatever tension they may possess. The drainage from the
rearward cells is what for the first time makes the fibres pervious.
The result is a new-formed 'path,' running from the cells which were
'rearward' to the cell which was 'forward' on that occasion; which
path, if on future occasions the rearward cells are independently
excited, will tend to carry off their activity in the same direction so
as to excite the_ _forward cell, and will deepen itself more and more
every time it is used_.

Now the 'rearward cells,' so far, stand for all the sensory cells
of the brain other than the one which is discharging; but such an
indefinitely broad path would practically be no better than no path, so
here I make a third hypothesis, which, taken together with the others,
seems to me to cover all the facts. It is that _the deepest paths are
formed from the most drainable to the most draining cells;_ that _the
most drainable cells are those which have just been discharging,_ and
that _the most draining cells are those which are now discharging or
in which the tension is rising towards the point of discharge._[509]
Another diagram, Fig. 88, will make the matter clear. Take the
operation represented by the previous diagram at the moment when, the
muscular contraction having occurred, the cell K is discharging forward
into M. Through the dotted line _p_ it will, according to our third
hypothesis, drain S (which, in the supposed case, has just discharged
into M by the connate path P, and caused the muscular contraction), and
the result is that _p_ will now remain as a new path open from S to K.
When next S is excited from without it will tend not only to discharge
into M, but into K as well. K thus gets excited directly by S _before_
it gets excited by the incoming current from the muscle; or, translated
into psychic terms: _when a sensation has once produced a movement in
us, the next time we have the sensation, it tends to suggest the idea
of the movement, even before the movement occurs._[510]

[Illustration: FIG. 88.]

The same principles also apply to the relations of K and M. M, lying in
the forward direction, drains K, and the path KM, even though it be no
primary or connate path, becomes a secondary or habitual one. Hereafter
K may be aroused in any way whatsoever (not as before from S or from
without) and still it will tend to discharge into M; or, to express it
again in psychic terms, _the idea of the movement M's sensory effects
will have become an immediately antecedent condition to the production
of the movement itself._

Here, then, we have the answer to our original question of how a
sensory process which, the first time it occurred, was the effect of a
movement, can later figure as the movement's cause.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is obvious on this scheme that the cell which we have marked K
may stand for the seat of either a resident or a remote sensation
occasioned by the motor discharge. It may indifferently be a tactile,
a visual, or an auditory cell. The idea of how the arm _feels_ when
raised may cause it to rise; but no less may the idea of some _sound_
which it makes in rising, or of some _optical_ impression which it
produces. Thus we see that the 'mental cue' may belong to either of
various senses; and that what our diagrams lead us to infer is what
really happens; namely, that in our movements, such as that of speech,
for example, in some of us it is the tactile, in others the acoustic,
_Effectsbild_, or memory-image, which seems most concerned in starting
the articulation (Vol. I. pp. 54-5). The _primitive_ 'starters,'
however, of all our movements are not _Effectsbilder_ at all, but
sensations and objects, and subsequently ideas derived therefrom.

       *       *       *       *       *

Let us now turn to the more complex and serially concatenated movements
which oftenest meet us in real life. The object of our will is seldom
a single muscular contraction; it is almost always an orderly sequence
of contractions, ending with a sensation which tells us that the goal
is reached. But the several contractions of the sequence are not each
distinctly willed; each earlier one seems rather, by the sensation
it produces, to call its follower up, after the fashion described in
Chapter VI, where we spoke of habitual concatenated movements being
due to a series of secondarily organized reflex arcs (Vol. I. p. 116).
The first contraction is the one distinctly willed, and after willing
it we let the rest of the chain rattle off of its own accord. How now
is such an orderly concatenation of movements originally learned? or in
other words, how are paths formed for the first time between one motor
centre and another, so that the discharge of the first centre makes the
others discharge in due order all along the line?

The phenomenon involves a rapid alternation of motor discharges and
resultant afferent impressions, for as long a time as it lasts. They
must be associated in one definite order; and the order must once have
been _learned_, i.e., it must have been picked out and held to more
and more exclusively out of the many other random orders which first
presented themselves. The random afferent impressions fell out, those
that felt right were selected and grew together in the chain. A chain
which we actively teach ourselves by stringing a lot of right-feeling
impressions together differs in no essential respect from a chain
which we passively learn from someone else who gives us impressions
in a certain order. So to make our ideas more precise, let us take a
particular concatenated movement for an example, and let it be the
recitation of the alphabet, which someone in our childhood taught us to
say by heart.

What we have seen so far is how the idea of the sound or articulatory
feeling of A may make us say 'A,' that of B, 'B,' and so on. But what
we now want to see is _why the sensation that A is uttered should make
us say 'B,' why the sensation that B is uttered should make us say 'C,'
and so on._

[Illustration: FIG. 89.]

To understand this we must recall what happened when we first learned
the letters in their order. Someone repeated A, B, C, D to us over and
over again, and we imitated the sounds. Sensory cells corresponding
to each letter were awakened in succession in such wise that each one
of them (by virtue of our second law) must have 'drained' the cell
just previously excited and left a path by which that cell tended ever
afterwards to discharge into the cell that drained it. Let S^a, S^b,
S^c in figure 89 stand for three of these cells. Each later one of
them, as it discharges motorwards, draws a current from the previous
one, S^b from S^a, and S^c from S^b. Cell S^b having thus drained S^a,
if S^a ever gets excited again, it tends to discharge into S^b; whilst
S^c having drained S^b, S^b later discharges into S^c, etc., etc.--all
through the dotted lines. Let now the idea of the letter A arise in the
mind, or, in other words, let S^a be aroused: what happens? A current
runs from S^a not only into the motor cell M^a for pronouncing that
letter, but also into the cell S^b. When, a moment later, the effect
of M^a's discharge comes back by the afferent nerve and re-excites
S^a, this latter cell is inhibited from discharging again into M^a and
reproducing the 'primordial motor circle' (which in this case would
be the continued utterance of the letter A), by the fact that the
process in S^b, already under headway and tending to discharge into
its own motor associate M^b, is, _under the existing conditions_, the
stronger drainage-channel for S^a's excitement. The result is that M^b
discharges and the letter B is pronounced; whilst at the same time S^c
receives some of S^b's overflow; and, a moment later when the sound of
B enters the ear, discharges into the motor cell for pronouncing C, by
a repetition of the same mechanism as before; and so on _ad libitum_.
Figure 90 represents the entire set of processes involved.

[Illustration: FIG. 90.]

The only thing that one does not immediately see is the reason why
'under the existing conditions' the path from S^a to S^b should be
the stronger drainage-channel for S^a's excitement. If the cells and
fibres in the figure constituted the entire brain we might suppose
either a mechanical or a psychical reason. The mechanical reason might
lie in a general law that cells like S^b and M^b, whose excitement is
in a rising phase, are stronger drainers than cells like M^a, which
have just discharged; or it might lie in the fact that an irradiation
of the current beyond S^b into S^c and M^c has already begun also;
and in a still farther law that drainage tends in the direction of
the widest irradiations. Either of these suppositions would be a
sufficient mechanical reason why, having once said A, we should not
say it again. But we must not forget that the process has a psychical
side, nor close our eyes to the possibility that the _sort of feeling_
aroused by incipient currents may be the reason why certain of them are
instantly inhibited and others helped to flow. There is no doubt that
before we have uttered a single letter, the general intention to recite
the alphabet is already there; nor is there any doubt that to that
intention corresponds a widespread premonitory rising of tensions along
the entire system of cells and fibres which are later to be aroused.
So long as this rise of tensions _feels good_, so long every current
which increases it is furthered, and every current which diminishes it
is checked; and this may be the chief one of the 'existing conditions'
which make the drainage-channel from S^a to S^b temporarily so
strong.[511]

The new paths between the sensory cells of which we have studied the
formation are paths of 'association,' and we now see why associations
run always in the forward direction; why, for example, we cannot say
the alphabet backward, and why, although S^b discharges into S^c, there
is no tendency for S^c to discharge into S^b, or at least no more
than for it to discharge into S^a.[512] The first-formed paths had,
according to the principles which we invoked, to run from cells that
had just discharged to those that were discharging; and now, to get
currents to run the other way, we must go through a new learning of
our letters with their order reversed. There will _then_ be two sets
of association-pathways, either of them possible, between the sensible
cells. I represent them in Fig. 91, leaving out the motor features
for simplicity's sake. The dotted lines are the paths in the backward
direction, newly organized from the reception by the ear of the letters
in the order C B A.

[Illustration: FIG. 91.]

The same principles will explain the formation of new paths
successively concatenated to no matter how great an extent, but it
would obviously be folly to pretend to illustrate by more intricate
examples. I will therefore only bring back the case of the child and
flame (Vol. I. p. 25), to show how easily it admits of explanation as a
'purely cortical transaction' (_ibid._ p. 80). The sight of the flame
stimulates the cortical centre S^1 which discharges by an instinctive
reflex path into the centre M^1 for the grasping-movement. This
movement produces the feeling of burn, as its effects come back to the
centre S^2; and this centre by a second connate path discharges into
M^2, the centre for withdrawing the hand. The movement of withdrawal
stimulates the centre S^3, and this, as far as we are concerned, is
the last thing that happens. Now the next time the child sees the
candle, the cortex is in possession of the secondary paths which the
first experience left behind. S^2, having been stimulated immediately
after S^1, drained the latter, and now S^1 discharges into S^2 before
the discharge of M^1 has had time to occur; in other words, the sight
of the flame suggests the idea of the burn before it produces its own
natural reflex effects. The result is an inhibition of M^1, or an
overtaking of it before it is completed, by M^2.--The characteristic
physiological feature in all these acquired systems of paths lies in
the fact that the new-formed sensory irradiations keep _draining things
forward_, and so breaking up the 'motor circles' which would otherwise
accrue. But, even apart from catalepsy, we see the 'motor circle'
every now and then come back. An infant learning to execute a simple
movement at will, without regard to other movements beyond it, keeps
repeating it till tired. How reiteratively they babble each new-learned
word! And we adults often catch ourselves reiterating some meaningless
word over and over again, if by chance we once begin to utter it
'absent-mindedly,' that is, without thinking of any ulterior train of
words to which it may belong.

[Illustration: FIG. 92.]

       *       *       *       *       *

One more observation before closing these already too protracted
physiological speculations. Already (Vol. I. p. 71) I have tried to
shadow forth a reason why collateral innervation should establish
itself after loss of brain-tissue, and why incoming stimuli should find
their way out again, after an interval, by their former paths. I can
now explain this a little better. Let S^1 be the dog's hearing-centre
when he receives the command 'Give your paw.' This _used_ to discharge
into the motor centre M^1, of whose discharge S^2 represents the
kinæsthetic effect; but now M^1 has been destroyed by an operation,
so that S^1 discharges as it can, into other movements of the body,
whimpering, raising the wrong paw, etc. The kinæsthetic centre S^2
meanwhile has been awakened by the order S^1, and the poor animal's
mind tingles with expectation and desire of certain incoming sensations
which are entirely at variance with those which the really executed
movements give. None of the latter sensations arouse a 'motor circle,'
for they are displeasing and inhibitory. But when, by random accident,
S^1 and S^2 _do_ discharge into a path leading through M^2, by which
the _paw is again given_, and S^2 is excited at last from without as
well as from within, there are no inhibitions and the 'motor circle' is
formed: S^1 discharges into M^2 over and over again, and the path from
the one spot to the other is so much deepened that at last it becomes
organized as the regular channel of efflux when S^1 is aroused. No
other path has a chance of being organized in like degree.

[Illustration: FIG. 93.]

       *       *       *       *       *

[430] Parts of this chapter have appeared in an essay called "The
Feeling of Effort," published in the Anniversary Memoirs of the Boston
Society of Natural History, 1880; and parts in Scribner's Magazine for
Feb. 1888.

[431] I am abstracting at present for simplicity's sake, and so as to
keep to the elements of the matter, from the learning of acts by seeing
others do them.

[432] Deutsches Archiv f. Klin. Medicin, xxii. 321.

[433] Landry: Mémoire sur la Paralysie du Sens Musculaire, Gazette des
Hôpitaux, 1855, p. 270.

[434] Tàkacs: Ueber die Verspätung der Empfindungsleitung, Archiv für
Psychiatrie, Bd. x. Heft 3, p. 533. Concerning all such cases see the
remarks made above on pp. 205-6.

[435] Proceedings of American Soc. for Psychical Research, p. 95.

[436] In reality the movement cannot even be _started_ correctly in
some cases without the kinæsthetic impression. Thus Dr. Strümpell
relates how turning over the boy's hand made him bend the little
finger instead of the forefinger, when his eye was closed. "Ordered
to point, e.g., towards the left with his left arm, the arm was
usually raised straight forward, and then wandered about in groping
uncertainty, sometimes getting the right position and then leaving
it again. Similarly with the lower limbs. If the patient, lying
in bed, had, immediately after the tying of his eyes, to lay the
left leg over the right, it often happened that he moved it farther
over towards the left, and that it lay over the side of the bed in
apparently the most intolerably-uncomfortable position. The turning of
the head, too, from right to left, or towards certain objects known
to the patient, only ensued correctly when the patient, immediately
before his eye was bandaged, specially refreshed his perception as to
what the required movement was to be." In another anæsthetic of Dr.
Strümpell's (described in the same essay) the arm could not be moved
_at all_ unless the eyes were opened, however energetic the volition.
The variations in these hysteric cases are great. Some patients cannot
move the anæsthetic part _at all_ when the eyes are closed. Others
move it perfectly well, and can even write continuous sentences
with the anæsthetic hand. The causes of such differences are as yet
incompletely unexplored. M. Binet suggests (Revue Philosophique, xxv.
478) that in those who cannot move the hand at all the sensation of
light is required as a 'dynamogenic' agent (see above, p. 377);
and that in those who can move it skilfully the anæsthesia is only a
pseudo-insensibility and that the limb is in reality governed by a
dissociated or secondary consciousness. This latter explanation is
certainly correct. Professor G. E. Müller (Pflüger's Archiv, xlv. 90)
invokes the fact of individual differences of imagination to account
for the cases who cannot write at all. Their kinæsthetic images
properly so called may be weak, he says, and their optical images
insufficiently powerful to supplement them without a 'fillip' from
sensation. Janet's observation that hysteric anæsthesias may carry
amnesias with them would perfectly legitimate Müller's supposition.
What we now want is a minute examination of the individual cases.
Meanwhile Binet's article above referred to, and Bastian's paper in
Brain for April 1887, contain important discussions of the question. In
a later note I shall return to the subject again (see p. 520).

[437] Professor Beaunis found that the accuracy with which a certain
tenor sang was not lost when his vocal cords were made anæsthetic by
cocain. He concludes that the guiding sensations here are resident in
the laryngeal muscles themselves. They are much more probably in the
ear. (Beaunis, Les Sensations Internes (1889), p. 253).

[438] As the feeling of heat, for example, is the last psychic
antecedent of sweating, as the feeling of bright light is that of the
pupil's contraction, as the sight or smell of carrion is that of the
movements of disgust, as the remembrance of a blunder may be that of
a blush, so the idea of a movement's sensible effects might be that
of the movement itself. It is true that the idea of sweating will not
commonly make us sweat, nor that of blushing make us blush. But in
certain nauseated states the idea of vomiting will make us vomit; and
a kind of sequence which is in this case realized only exceptionally
might be the rule with the so-called voluntary muscles. It all
depends on the nervous connections between the centres of ideation
and the discharging paths. These may differ from one sort of centre
to another. They do differ somewhat from one individual to another.
Many persons never blush at the idea of their blunders, but only when
the actual blunder is committed; others blush at the idea; and some
do not blush at all. According to Lotze, with some persons "It is
possible to weep at will by trying to recall that peculiar feeling in
the trigeminal nerve which habitually precedes tears. Some can even
succeed in sweating voluntarily, by the lively recollection of the
characteristic skin-sensations, and the voluntary reproduction of an
indescribable sort of feeling of relaxation, which ordinarily precedes
the flow of perspiration." (Med. Psych., p. 303.) The commoner type
of exceptional case is that in which the idea of the _stimulus_, not
that of the effects, provokes the effects. Thus we read of persons who
contract their pupils at will by strongly imagining a brilliant light.
A gentleman once informed me (strangely enough I cannot recall who he
was, but I have an impression of his being a medical man) that he could
sweat at will by imagining himself on the brink of a precipice. The
sweating palms of fear are sometimes producible by imagining a terrible
object (cf. Manouvrier in Rev. Phil., xxii. 203). One of my students,
whose eyes were made to water by sitting in the dentist's chair before
a bright window, can now shed tears by imagining that situation again.
One might doubtless collect a large number of idiosyncratic cases of
this sort. They teach us how greatly the centres vary in their power to
discharge through certain channels. All that we need, now, to account
for the differences observed between the psychic antecedents of the
voluntary and involuntary movements is that centres producing ideas of
the movement's sensible effects should be able to instigate the former,
but be out of gear with the latter, unless in exceptional individuals.
The famous case of Col. Townsend, who could stop his heart at will, is
well known. See, on this whole matter, D. H. Tuke: Illustrations of
the Influence of the Mind on the Body, chap. xiv. § 3; also J. Braid:
Observations on Trance or Human Hybernation (1850). The latest reported
case of voluntary control of the heart is by Dr. S. A. Pease, in Boston
Medical and Surgical Journal, May 30, 1889.

[439] Prof. Harless, in an article which in many respects forestalls
what I have to say (Der Apparat des Willens, in Fichte's Zeitschrift
f. Philos., Bd. 38, 1861), uses the convenient word _Effectsbild_ to
designate these images.

[440] The best modern statement I know is by Jaccoud: Des Paraplégies
et de l'Ataxie du Mouvement (Paris, 1864), p. 591.

[441] Leidesdorf u. Meynert's Vierteljsch. f. Psychiatrie, Bd. i. Heft
i. S. 36-7 (1867). Physiologische Psychologie, 1st ed. S. 316.

[442] Professor Fouillée, who defends them in the Revue Philosophique,
xxviii, 561 ff., also admits (p. 574) that they are the same whatever
be the movement, and that all our discrimination of _which_ movement
we are innervating is afferent, consisting of sensations after, and of
sensory images before, the act.

[443] Cf. Souriau in Rev. Philosophique, xxii. 454.--Professor G. E.
Müller thus describes some of his experiments with weights: If, after
lifting a weight of 8000 grams a number of times we suddenly get a
weight of only 500 grams to lift, "this latter weight is then lifted
with a velocity which strikes every onlooker, so that the receptacle
for the weight with all its contents often flies high up as if it
carried the arm along with it, and the energy with which it is raised
is sometimes so entirely out of proportion to the weight itself, that
the contents of the receptacle are slung out upon the table in spite of
the mechanical obstacles which such a result has to overcome. A more
palpable proof that the trouble here is a wrong adaptation of the motor
impulse could not be given." Pflüger's Archiv, xlv. 47. Compare also p.
57, and the quotation from Hering on the same page.

[444] Archiv für Psychiatrie, iii. 618-635. Bernhardt strangely
enough seems to think that what his experiments disprove is the
existence of afferent muscular feelings, not those of efferent
innervation--apparently because he deems that the peculiar thrill of
the electricity ought to overpower all other afferent feelings from
the part. But it is far more natural to interpret his results the
other way, even aside from the certainty yielded by other evidence
that passive muscular feelings exist. This other evidence, after being
compendiously summed up by Sachs in Reichert und Du Bois' Archiv
(1874), pp. 174-188, is, as far as the anatomical and physiological
grounds go, again thrown into doubt by Mays, Zeitschrift f. Biologie,
Bd. xx.

[445] Functions of the Brain, p. 228.

[446] Vorlesungen über Menschen und Thierseele, i. 222.

[447] In some instances we get an opposite result. Dr. H. Charlton
Bastian (British Medical Journal (1869), p. 461, note), says:

"Ask a man whose lower extremities are completely paralyzed, whether,
when he ineffectually wills to move either of these limbs, he is
conscious of an expenditure of energy in any degree proportionate to
that which he would have experienced if his muscles had naturally
responded to his volition. He will tell us rather that he has a sense
only of his utter powerlessness, and that his volition is a mere mental
act, carrying with it no feelings of expended energy such as he is
accustomed to experience when his muscles are in powerful action, and
from which action and its consequences alone, as I think, he can derive
any adequate notion of resistance."

[448] Münsterberg's words may be added: "In lifting an object in the
hand I can discover no sensation of volitional energy. I perceive in
the first place a slight tension about the head, but that this results
from a contraction in the head muscles, and not from a feeling of the
brain-discharge, is shown by the simple fact that I get the tension
on the right side of the head when I move the right arm, whereas the
motor discharge takes place in the opposite side of the brain.... In
maximal contractions of body- and limb-muscles there occur, as if it
were to reinforce them, those special contractions of the muscles of
the face [especially frowning and clinching teeth] and those tensions
of the skin of the head. These sympathetic movements, felt particularly
on the side which makes the effort, are perhaps the immediate ground
why we ascribe our awareness of maximal contraction to the region
of the head, and call it a consciousness of force, instead of a
peripheral sensation." (Die Willenshandlung (1888), pp. 73, 82.) Herr
Münsterberg's work is a little masterpiece, which appeared after my
text was written. I shall have repeatedly to refer to it again, and
cordially recommend to the reader its most thorough refutation of the
Innervationsgefühl-theory.

[449] Physiologische Optik, p. 600.

[450] [The left and sound eye is here supposed covered. If both eyes
look at the same field there are double images which still more perplex
the judgment. The patient, however, learns to see correctly before many
days or weeks are over.--W. J.]

[451] Alfred Graefe, in Handbuch der gesammten Augenheilkunde, Bd. vi.
pp. 18-21.

[452] Professor G. E. Müller (Zur Grundlegung der Psychophysik (1878),
p. 318,) was the first to explain the phenomenon after the manner
advocated in the text. Still unacquainted with his book, I published my
own similar explanation two years later.

Professor Mach in his wonderfully original little work 'Beiträge
zur Analyse der Empfindungen,' p. 57, describes an artificial way of
getting translocation, and explains the effect likewise by the feeling
of innervation. "Turn your eyes," he says, "as far as possible towards
the left and press against the right sides of the orbits two large
lumps of putty. If you then try to look as quickly as possible towards
the right, this succeeds, on account of the incompletely spherical
form of the eyes, only imperfectly, and the objects consequently
appear translocated very considerably towards the right. The _bare
will_ to look rightwards gives to all images on the retina a greater
_rightwards value_, to express it shortly. The experiment is at first
surprising."--I regret to say that I cannot myself make it succeed--I
know not for what reason. But even where it does succeed it seems to
me that the conditions are much too complicated for Professor Mach's
theoretic conclusions to be safely drawn. The putty squeezed into the
orbit, and the pressure of the eyeball against it must give rise to
peripheral sensations _strong_ enough, at any rate (if only of the
right kind), to justify any amount of false perception of our eyeball's
position, quite apart from the innervation feelings which Professor
Mach supposes to coexist.

[453] An illusion in principle exactly analogous to that of the patient
under discussion can be produced experimentally in anyone in a way
which Hering has described in his Lehre von Binocularen Sehen, pp.
13-14. I will quote Helmholtz's account of it, which is especially
valuable as coming from a believer in the _Innervationsgefühl_: "Let
the two eyes first look parallel, then let the right eye be closed
whilst the left still looks at the infinitely distant object _a_. The
directions of both eyes will thus remain unaltered, and _a_ will be
seen in its right place. Now accommodate the left eye for a point _f_
[a needle in Hering's experiment] lying on the optical axis between it
and _a_, only very near. The position of the left eye and its optical
axis, as well as the place of the retinal image upon it... are wholly
unaltered by this movement. But the consequence is that an apparent
movement of the object occurs--a movement towards the left. As soon
as we accommodate again for distance the object returns to its old
place. Now what alters itself in this experiment is only the position
of the closed right eye: its optical axis, when the effort is made to
accommodate for the point _f_, also converges towards this point....
Conversely it is possible for me to make my optical axes diverge, even
with closed eyes, so that in the above experiment the right eye should
turn far to the right of _a_. This divergence is but slowly reached,
and gives me therefore no illusory movement. But when I suddenly relax
my effort to make it, and the right optical axis springs back to the
parallel position, I immediately see the object which the left eye
fixates shift its position towards the left. Thus not only the position
of the seeing eye _a_, but also that of the closed eye _b_, influences
our judgment of the direction in which the seen object lies. The open
eye remaining fixed, and the closed eye moving towards the right or
left, the object seen by the open eye appears also to move towards the
right or left" (Physiol. Optik, pp. 607-8.)

[454] Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen, p. 65.

[455] P. 68.

[456] I owe the interpretation in the text to my friend and former
student, Mr. E. S. Drown, whom I set to observe the phenomenon
before I had observed it myself. Concerning the vacillations in our
interpretation of relative motion over retina and skin, see above, p.
173.

Herr Münsterberg gives additional reasons against the feeling of
innervation, of which I will quote a couple. First, our ideas of
movement are all _faint_ ideas, resembling in this the copies of
sensations in memory. Were they feelings of the outgoing discharge,
they would be original states of consciousness, not copies; and ought
by analogy to be _vivid_ like other original states.--Second, our
unstriped muscles yield no feelings in contracting, nor can they be
contracted at will, differing thus in _two_ peculiarities from the
voluntary muscles. What more natural than to suppose that the two
peculiarities hang together, and that the reason why we cannot contract
our intestines, for example, at will, is, that we have no memory-images
of how their contraction feels? Were the supposed innervation-feeling
always the 'mental cue,' one doesn't see why we might not have it even
where, as here, the contractions themselves are unfelt, and why it
might not bring the contractions about. (Die Willenshandlung, pp 87-8.)

[457] Revue Philosophique, xxiii. 442.

[458] _Ibid._ xx. 604.

[459] Herr Sternberg (Pflüger's Archiv, xxxvii. p. 1) thinks that he
proves the feeling of innervation by the fact that when we have willed
to make a movement we generally think that it is made. We have already
seen some of the facts on pp. 105-6, above. S. cites from Exner the
fact that if we put a piece of hard rubber between our back teeth and
bite, our front teeth seem actually to approach each other, although it
is physically impossible for them to do so. He proposes the following
experiment: Lay the palm of the hand on a table with the forefinger
overlapping its edge and flexed back as far as possible, whilst the
table keeps the other fingers extended; then try to flex the terminal
joint of the forefinger without looking. You do not do it, and yet
you think that you do. Here again the innervation, according to the
author, is felt as an executed movement. It seems to me, as I said in
the previous place, that the illusion is in all these cases due to
the inveterate association of ideas. Normally our will to move has
always been followed by the sensation that we _have_ moved, except when
the simultaneous sensation of an external resistance was there. The
result is that where we feel no external resistance, and the muscles
and tendons tighten, the invariably associated idea is intense enough
to be hallucinatory. In the experiment with the teeth, the resistance
customarily met with when our masseters contract is a soft one. We
do not close our teeth on a thing like hard rubber once in a million
times; so when we do so, we imagine the habitual result.--Persons with
_amputated limbs_ more often than not continue to feel them as if they
were still there, and can, moreover, give themselves the feeling of
moving them at will. The life-long sensorial associate of the idea of
'working one's toes,' e.g. (uncorrected by any opposite sensation,
since no real sensation of non-movement can come from non-existing
toes), follows the idea and swallows it up. The man thinks that his
toes are 'working' (cf. Proceedings of American Soc. for Psych.
Research, p. 249).

Herr Loeb also comes to the rescue of the feeling of innervation
with observations of his own made after my text was written, but
they convince me no more than the arguments of others. Loeb's facts
are these (Pflüger's Archiv, xliv. p. 1): If we stand before a
vertical surface, and if, with our hands _at different heights_, we
_simultaneously_ make with them what seem to us equally extensive
movements, that movement always turns out really shorter which is
made with the arm whose muscles (in virtue of the arm's position) are
already the more contracted. The same result ensues when the arms
are laterally unsymmetrical. Loeb assumes that both arms contract by
virtue of a common innervation, but that although this innervation is
relatively less effective upon the more contracted arm, our _feeling_
of its equal strength overpowers the disparity of the incoming
sensations of movement which the two limbs send back, and makes us
think that the spaces they traverse are the same. "The sensation of the
extent and direction of our voluntary movements depends accordingly
upon the impulse of our will to move, and not upon the feelings set up
by the motion in the active organ." Now if this is the elementary law
which Loeb calls it, why does it only manifest its effect when both
hands are moving simultaneously? Why not when the _same_ hand makes
_successive_ movements? and especially why not when both hands move
symmetrically or at the same level, but _one of them_ is _weighted_? A
weighted hand surely requires a stronger innervation than an unweighted
one to move an equal distance upwards; and yet, as Loeb confesses, we
do not tend to overestimate the path which it traverses under these
circumstances. The fact is that the illusion which Loeb has studied
is a complex resultant of many factors. One of them, it seems to me,
is an instinctive tendency to _revert to the type of the bilateral
movements of childhood_. In adult life we move our arms for the most
part in alternation; but in infancy the free movements of the arms are
almost always similar on both sides, symmetrical when the direction
of motion is horizontal, and with the hands on the same level when
it is vertical. The most natural innervation, when the movements are
rapidly performed, is one which takes the movement hack to this form.
Our _estimation_ meanwhile of the lengths severally traversed by the
two hands is mainly based, as such estimations with closed eyes usually
are (see Loeb's own earlier paper, _Untersuchungen über den Fühlraum
der Hand_, in Pflüger's Archiv, xli. 107), upon the apparent velocity
and duration of the movement. The duration is the same for both hands,
since the movements begin and end simultaneously. The velocities of
the two hands are under the experimental conditions almost impossible
of comparison. It is well known how imperfect a discrimination of
_weights_ we have when we 'heft' them simultaneously, one in either
hand; and G. E. Müller has well shown (Pflüger's Archiv, xlv. 57) that
the velocity of the lift is the main factor in determining our judgment
of weight. It is hardly possible to conceive of more unfavorable
conditions for making an accurate comparison of the length of two
movements than those which govern the experiments which are under
discussion. The only prominent sign is the duration, which would lead
us to infer the equality of the two movements. We consequently deem
them equal, though a native tendency in our motor centres keeps them
from being so.

[460] This is by no means an unplausible opinion. See Vol. I. p. 65.

[461] Maine de Biran, Royer Collard, Sir John Herschel, Dr. Carpenter,
Dr. Martineau, all seem to posit a force-sense by which, in becoming
aware of an outer resistance to our will, we are taught the existence
of an outer world. I hold that every peripheral sensation gives us
an outer world. An insect crawling on our skin gives us as 'outward'
an impression as a hundred pounds weighing on our back.--I have read
M. A. Bertrand's criticism of my views (La Psychologie de l'Effort,
1889); but as he seems to think that I deny the _feeling_ of effort
altogether, I can get no profit from it, despite his charming way of
saying things.

[462] Bowditch and Southard in Journal of Physiology, vol. iii. No.
3. It was found in these experiments that the maximum of accuracy was
reached when two seconds of time elapsed between locating the object
by eye or hand and starting to touch it. When the mark was located
with one hand, and the other hand had to touch it, the error was
considerably greater than when the same hand both located and touched
it.

[463] The same caution must be shown in discussing pathological cases.
There are remarkable discrepancies in the effects of peripheral
anæsthesia upon the voluntary power. Such cases as I quoted in the
text (p. 490) are by no means the only type. In those cases the
patients could move their limbs accurately when the eyes were open,
and inaccurately when they were shut. In other cases, however, the
anæsthetic patients _cannot move their limbs at all_ when the eyes are
shut. (For reports of two such cases see Bastian in 'Brain,' Binet in
Rev. Philos., xxv. 478.) M. Binet explains these (hysterical) cases as
requiring the 'dynamogenic' stimulus of light (see above, p. 377).
They _might_, however, be cases of such congenitally defective optical
imagination that the 'mental cue' was normally 'tactile;' and that when
this tactile cue failed through functional inertness of the kinæsthetic
centres, the only optical cue strong enough to determine the discharge
had to be an actual _sensation_ of the eye.--There is still a third
class of cases in which the limbs have lost all sensibility, even for
movements passively imprinted, but in which voluntary movements can
be accurately executed even when the eyes are closed. MM. Binet and
Féré have reported some of these interesting cases, which are found
amongst the hysterical hemianæsthetics. They can, for example, write
accurately at will, although their eyes are closed and they have no
feeling of the writing taking place, and many of them do not know
when it begins or stops. Asked to write repeatedly the letter _a_,
and then say how many times they have written it, some are able to
assign the number and some are not. Some of them admit that they are
guided by visual imagination of what is being done. Cf. Archives de
Physiologie, Oct. 1887, pp. 363-5. Now it would seem at first sight
that feelings of outgoing innervation must exist in these cases and
be kept account of. There are no other guiding impressions, either
immediate or remote, of which the patient is conscious; and unless
feelings of innervation be there, the writing would seem miraculous.
But if such feelings are present in these cases, and suffice to direct
accurately the succession of movements, why do they not suffice in
those other anæsthetic cases in which movement becomes disorderly
when the eyes are closed? _Innervation_ is there, or there would be
no movement; why is the _feeling_ of the innervation gone? The truth
seems to be, as M. Binet supposes (Rev. Philos., xxiii. p. 479), that
these cases are not arguments for the feeling of innervation. They are
pathological curiosities; and the patients are not really anæsthetic,
but are victims of that curious dissociation or splitting-off of one
part of their consciousness from the rest which we are just beginning
to understand, thanks to Messrs. Janet, Binet, and Gurney, and in
which the split-off part (in this case the kinæsthetic sensations) may
nevertheless remain to produce its usual effects. Compare what was said
above, p. 491.

[464] Medicinische Psychologie, p. 293. In his admirably acute chapter
on the Will this author has most explicitly maintained the position
that what we call muscular exertion is an afferent and not an efferent
feeling; "We must affirm universally that in the muscular feeling we
are not sensible of _the force_ on its way to produce an effect, but
only of the _sufferance_ already produced in our movable organs, the
muscles, after the force has, in a manner unobservable by us, exerted
upon them its causality" (p. 311). How often the battles of psychology
have to be fought over again, each time with heavier armies and bigger
trains, though not always with such able generals!

[465] Ch. Féré: Sensation et Mouvement (1887), chapter iii.

[466] Professor A. Bain (Senses and Intellect, pp 336-48) and Dr. W. B.
Carpenter (Mental Physiology, chap. vi) give examples in abundance.

[467] For a full account, by an expert, of the 'willing-game,' see
Mr. Stuart Cumberland's article: A Thought-reader's Experiences in
the Nineteenth century, xx. 867. M. Gley has given a good example
of ideo-motor action in the Bulletins de la Société de Psychologie
Physiologique for 1889. Tell a person to think intently of a certain
name, and saying that you will then force her to write it, let her hold
a pencil, and do you yourself hold her hand. She will then probably
trace the name involuntarily, believing that you are forcing her to do
it.

[468] I abstract here from the fact that a certain _intensity_ of
the consciousness is required for its impulsiveness to be effective
in a complete degree. There is an inertia in the motor processes as
in all other natural things. In certain individuals, and at certain
times (disease, fatigue), the inertia is unusually great, and we
may then have ideas of action which produce no visible act, but
discharge themselves into merely nascent dispositions to activity or
into emotional expression. The inertia of the motor parts here plays
the same rôle as is elsewhere played by antagonistic ideas. We shall
consider this restrictive inertia later on, it obviously introduces no
essential alteration into the law which the text lays down.

[469] I use the common phraseology here for mere convenience' sake.
The reader who has made himself acquainted with Chapter IX will always
understand, when he hears of many ideas simultaneously present to the
mind and acting upon each other, that what is really meant is a mind
with one idea before it, of many objects, purposes, reasons, motives,
related to each other, some in a harmonious and some in an antagonistic
way. With this caution I shall not hesitate from time to time to fall
into the popular Lockian speech, erroneous though I believe it to be.

[470] My attention was first emphatically called to this class of
decisions by my colleague, Professor C. C. Everett.

[471] In an excellent article on The 'Mental Qualities of an Athlete'
in the Harvard Monthly, vol. vi. p. 43, Mr. A. T. Dudley assigns the
first place to the rapidly impulsive temperament. "Ask him how, in some
complex trick, he performed a certain act, why he pushed or pulled at
a certain instant, and he will tell you he does not know; he did it by
instinct; or rather his nerves and muscles did it of themselves....
Here is the distinguishing feature of the good player: the good player,
confident in his training and his practice, in the critical game trusts
entirely to his impulse, and does not think out every move. The poor
player, unable to trust his impulsive actions, is compelled to think
carefully all the time. He thus not only loses the opportunities
through his slowness in comprehending the whole situation, but, being
compelled to think rapidly all the time, at critical points becomes
confused; while the first-rate player, not trying to reason, but acting
as impulse directs, is continually distinguishing himself and plays the
better under the greater pressure."

[472] T. B. Clouston, Clinical Lectures on Mental Diseases (London
1883), pp. 310-318.

[473] In his Maladies de la Volonté, p. 77.

[474] For other cases of 'impulsive insanity,' see H. Maudsley's
Responsibility in Mental Disease, pp. 133-170, and Forbes Winslow's
Obscure Diseases of the Mind and Brain, chapters vi, vii, viii.

[475] Quoted by G. Burr, in an article on the Insanity of Inebriety in
the N. Y. Psychological and Medico-Legal Journal, Dec. 1874.

[476] Autobiography, Howells' edition (1877), pp. 192-6.

[477] See a paper on Insistent and Fixed Ideas by Dr. Cowles in
American Journal of Psychology, i. 222; and another on the so-called
Insanity of Doubt by Dr. Knapp, _ibid._ iii. 1. The latter contains a
partial bibliography of the subject.

[478] Quoted by Ribot, _op cit._ p. 39.

[479] The silliness of the old-fashioned pleasure-philosophy _saute aux
yeux_. Take, for example, Prof. Bain's explanation of sociability and
parental love by the pleasures of touch: "Touch is the fundamental and
generic sense.... Even after the remaining senses are differentiated,
the primary sense continues to be a leading susceptibility of the mind.
The soft warm touch, if not a first-class influence, is at least an
approach to that. The combined power of soft contact and warmth amounts
to a considerable pitch of massive pleasure; while there may be subtle
influences not reducible to these two heads, such as we term, from
not knowing anything about them, magnetic or electric. The sort of
thrill from taking a baby in arms is something beyond mere warm touch;
and it may rise to the ecstatic height, in which case, however, there
may be concurrent sensations and ideas.... In mere tender emotion not
sexual, there is nothing but the sense of touch to gratify, unless we
assume the occult magnetic influences.... In a word, our love pleasures
begin and end in sensual contact. Touch is both the alpha and omega
of affection. As the terminal and satisfying sensation, the _ne plus
ultra_, it must be a pleasure of the highest degree.... Why should
a more lively feeling grow up towards a fellow-being than towards a
perennial fountain? [This 'should' is simply delicious from the more
modern evolutionary point of view.] It must be that there is a source
of pleasure in the companionship of other sentient creatures, over
and above the help afforded by them in obtaining the necessaries of
life. To account for this, I can suggest nothing but the primary and
independent pleasure of the animal embrace." [Mind, this is said not of
the sexual interest, but of 'Sociability at Large.'] "For this pleasure
every creature is disposed to pay something, even when it is only
fraternal. A certain amount of material benefit imparted is a condition
of the full heartiness of a responding embrace, the complete fruition
of this primitive joy. In the absence of those conditions the pleasure
of giving ... can scarcely be accounted for; we know full well that,
without these helps, it would be a very meagre sentiment in beings
like ourselves.... It seems to me that there must be at the [parental
instinct's] foundation that intense pleasure in the embrace of the
young which we find to characterize the parental feeling throughout.
Such a pleasure once created would associate itself with the prevailing
features and aspects of the young, and give to all of these their very
great interest. For the sake of the pleasure, the parent discovers the
necessity of nourishing the subject of it, and comes to regard the
ministering function as a part or condition of the delight" (Emotions
and Will, pp. 126, 127, 132, 133, 140). Prof. Bain does not explain why
a satin cushion kept at about 98º F. would not on the whole give us the
pleasure in question more cheaply than our friends and babies do. It
is true that the cushion might lack the 'occult magnetic influences.'
Most of us would say that neither a baby's nor a friend's skin would
possess them, were not a tenderness already there. The youth who feels
ecstasy shoot through him when by accident the silken palm or even the
'vesture's hem' of his idol touches him, would hardly feel it were he
not hard hit by Cupid in advance. The love creates the ecstasy, not the
ecstasy the love. And for the rest of us can it possibly be that all
our social virtue springs from an appetite for the sensual pleasure of
having our hand shaken, or being slapped on the back?

[480] Emotion and Will, p. 352. But even Bain's own description belies
his formula, for the idea appears as the 'moving' and the pleasure as
the 'directing' force.

[481] P. 398.

[482] P. 354.

[483] P. 355.

[484] P. 390.

[485] Pp. 295-6.

[486] P. 121.

[487] Cf. also Bain's note to Jas. Mill's Analysis, vol. ii. p. 305.

[488] How much clearer Hume's head was than that of his disciples! "It
has been proved beyond all controversy that even the passions commonly
esteemed selfish carry the Mind beyond self directly to the object;
that though the satisfaction of these passions gives us enjoyment, yet
the prospect of this enjoyment is not the cause of the passions but, on
the contrary, the passion is antecedent to the enjoyment, and without
the former the latter could never possibly exist," etc. (Essay on the
Different Species of Philosophy, § 1, note near the end.)

[489] In favor of the view in the text, one may consult H. Sidgwick,
Methods of Ethics, book i. chap. iv; T. H. Green, Prolegomena to
Ethics, bk. iii. chap. i. p. 179; Carpenter, Mental Physiol., chap vi;
J. Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, part ii, bk. i, chap. ii. i,
and bk. ii, branch i. chap. i. i. § 3. Against it see Leslie Stephen,
Science of Ethics, chap. ii. § ii; H. Spencer, Data of Ethics, §§ 9-15;
D. G. Thompson, System of Psychology, part ix, and Mind, vi. 62. Also
Bain, Senses and Intellect, 738-44; Emotions and Will, 436.

[490] This sentence is written from the author's own consciousness. But
many persons say that where they disbelieve in the effects ensuing,
as in the case of the table, they cannot will it. They "cannot exert
a volition that a table should move." This personal difference may be
partly verbal. Different people may attach different connotations to
the word 'will.' But I incline to think that we differ psychologically
as well. When one knows that he has no power, one's desire of a thing
is called a _wish_ and not a will. The sense of impotence inhibits the
volition. Only by abstracting from the thought of the impossibility
am I able to imagine strongly the table sliding over the floor, to
make the bodily 'effort' which I do, and to will it to come towards
me. It may be that some people are unable to perform this abstraction,
and that the image of the table stationary on the floor inhibits the
contradictory image of its moving, which is the object to be willed.

[491] A normal palsy occurs during sleep. We will all sorts of motions
in our dreams, but seldom perform any of them. In nightmare we become
conscious of the non-performance, and make a muscular 'effort.' This
seems then to occur in a restricted way, limiting itself to the
occlusion of the glottis and producing the respiratory anxiety which
wakes us up.

[492] Both resolves and beliefs have of course immediate motor
consequences of a quasi-emotional sort, changes of breathing, of
attitude, internal speech movements, etc.; but these movements are not
the _objects_ resolved on or believed. The movements in common volition
are the objects willed.

[493] This _volitional_ effort pure and simple must be carefully
distinguished from the _muscular_ effort with which it is usually
confounded. The latter consists of all those peripheral feelings to
which a muscular 'exertion' may give rise. These feelings, whenever
they are massive and the body is not 'fresh,' are rather disagreeable,
especially when accompanied by stopped breath, congested head, bruised
skin of fingers, toes, or shoulders, and strained joints. And it is
only _as thus disagreeable_ that the mind must make its _volitional_
effort in stably representing their reality and consequently bringing
it about. That they happen to be made real by muscular activity is a
purely accidental circumstance. A soldier standing still to be fired
at expects disagreeable sensations from his muscular passivity. The
action of his will, in sustaining the expectation, is identical with
that required for a painful muscular effort. What is hard for both _is
facing an idea as real_.

Where much muscular effort is not needed or where the 'freshness' is
very great, the volitional effort is not required to sustain the idea
of movement, which comes then and stays in virtue of association's
simpler laws. More commonly, however, muscular effort involves
volitional effort as well. Exhausted with fatigue and wet and watching,
the sailor on a wreck throws himself down to rest. But hardly are his
limbs fairly relaxed, when the order 'To the pumps!' again sounds
in his ears. Shall he, can he, obey it? Is it not better just to let
his aching body lie, and let the ship go down if she will? So he lies
on, till, with a desperate heave of the will, at last he staggers to
his legs, and to his task again. Again, there are instances where the
fiat demands great volitional effort though the muscular exertion be
insignificant, e.g., the getting out of bed and bathing one's self on a
cold morning.

[494] Cf. Aristotle's Nichomachæan Ethics, vii. 3; also a discussion of
the doctrine of 'The Practical Syllogism' in Sir A. Grant's edition of
this work, 2d ed. vol. i. p. 212 ff.

[495] The Duality of the Mind, pp. 141-2. Another case from the
same book (p. 123): "A gentleman of respectable birth, excellent
education, and ample fortune, engaged in one of the highest departments
of trade,... and being induced to embark in one of the plausible
speculations of the day ... was utterly ruined. Like other men he could
bear a sudden overwhelming reverse better than a long succession of
petty misfortunes, and the way in which he conducted himself on the
occasion met with unbounded admiration from his friends. He withdrew,
however, into rigid seclusion, and being no longer able to exercise
the generosity and indulge the benevolent feelings which had formed
the happiness of his life, made himself a substitute for them by
daydreams, gradually fell into a state of irritable despondency, from
which he only gradually recovered with the loss of reason. He now
fancied himself possessed of immense wealth, and gave without stint
his imaginary riches. He has ever since been under gentle restraint,
and leads a life not merely of happiness, but of bliss; converses
rationally, reads the newspapers, where every tale of distress attracts
his notice, and being furnished with an abundant supply of blank
checks, he fills up one of them with a munificent sum, sends it off to
the sufferer, and sits down to his dinner with a happy conviction that
he has earned the right to a little indulgence in the pleasures of the
table; and yet, on a serious conversation with one of his old friends,
he is quite conscious of his real position, but the conviction is so
exquisitely painful that _he will not let himself believe it_."

[496] 'Le Sentiment de l'Effort, et la Conscience de l'Action,' in
Revue Philosophique, xxviii. 561.

[497] P. 577.

[498] They will be found indicated, in somewhat popular form, in a
lecture on 'The Dilemma of Determinism,' published in the Unitarian
Review (of Boston) for September 1884 (vol. xxii. p. 193).

[499] See Grundtatsachen des Seelenlebens, pp. 594-5; and compare the
conclusion of our own chapter on Attention, Vol. I. pp. 448-454.

[500] Thus at least I interpret Prof. Lipps's words: "Wir wissen uns
naturgemäss in jedem Streben umsomehr aktiv, je mehr unser _ganzes_ Ich
bei dem Streben beheiligt ist," u. s. w. (p. 601).

[501] Such ejaculations as Mr. Spencer's: "Psychical changes either
conform to law or they do not. If they do not, this work, in common
with all works on the subject, is sheer nonsense: no science of
Psychology is possible" (Principles of Psychology, i. 503),--are
beneath criticism. Mr. Spencer's work, like all the other 'works on
the subject,' treats of those general conditions of _possible_ conduct
within which all our real decisions must fall no matter whether their
effort be small or great. However closely psychical changes may conform
to law, it is safe to say that individual histories and biographies
will never be written in advance no matter how 'evolved' psychology may
become.

[502] _Caricatures_ of the kind of supposition which free will demands
abound in deterministic literature. The following passage from John
Fiske's Cosmic Philosophy (pt. ii. chap. xvii) is an example: "If
volitions arise without cause, it necessarily follows that we cannot
infer from them the character of the antecedent states of feeling.
If, therefore, a murder has been committed, we have _a priori_ no
better reason for suspecting the worst enemy than the best friend of
the murdered man. If we see a man jump from a fourth-story window, we
must beware of too hastily inferring his insanity, since he may be
merely exercising his free-will; the intense love of life implanted
in the human breast being, as it seems, unconnected with attempts at
suicide or at self-preservation. We can thus frame no theory of human
actions whatever. The countless empirical maxims of every-day life, the
embodiment as they are of the inherited and organized sagacity of many
generations, become wholly incompetent to guide us; and nothing which
any one may do ought ever to occasion surprise. The mother may strangle
her first-born child, the miser may cast his long-treasured gold into
the sea, the sculptor may break in pieces his lately-finished statue,
in the presence of no other feelings than those which before led them
to cherish, to hoard, and to create.

"To state these conclusions is to refute their premise. Probably no
defender of the doctrine of free-will could be induced to accept them,
even to save the theorem with which they are inseparably wrapped up.
Yet the dilemma cannot be avoided. Volitions are either caused or they
are not. If they are not caused, an inexorable logic brings us to the
absurdities just mentioned. If they are caused, the free-will doctrine
is annihilated.... In truth, the immediate corollaries of the free-will
doctrine are so shocking, not only to philosophy but to common-sense,
that were not accurate thinking a somewhat rare phenomenon, it would
be inexplicable how any credit should ever have been given to such a
dogma. This is but one of the many instances in which by the force
of words alone men have been held subject to chronic delusion....
Attempting, as the free-will philosophers do, to destroy the science of
history, they are compelled by an inexorable logic to pull down with
it the cardinal principles of ethics, politics, and jurisprudence.
Political economy, if rigidly dealt with on their theory, would fare
little better; and psychology would become chaotic jargon.... The
denial of causation is the affirmation of chance, and 'between the
theory of Chance and the theory of Law there can be no compromise, no
reciprocity, no borrowing and lending.' To write history on any method
furnished by the free-will doctrine would be utterly impossible."--All
this comes from Mr. Fiske's not distinguishing between the possibles
which really tempts man and those which tempt him not at all.
Free-will, like psychology, deals with the former possibles exclusively.

[503] On the education of the Will from a pedagogic point of view, see
an article by G. Stanley Hall in the Princeton Review for November
1882, and some bibliographic references there contained.

[504] See his Emotions and Will, 'The Will,' chap. i. I take the name
of random movements from Sully, Outlines of Psychology, p. 593.

[505] This figure and the following ones are purely schematic, and
must not be supposed to involve any theory about protoplasmatic and
axis-cylinder processes. The latter, according to Golgi and others,
emerge from the base of the cell, and each cell has but one. They alone
form a nervous network. The reader will of course also understand that
none of the hypothetical constructions which I make from now to the end
of the chapter are proposed as definite accounts of what happens. All I
aim at is to make it clear in some more or less symbolic fashion that
the formation of new paths, the learning of habits, etc., is in _some_
mechanical way conceivable. Compare what was said in Vol. I. p. 81,
note.

[506] The Nervous System and the Mind (1888), pp. 75-6.

[507] Compare Vol. I. pp. 137, 142.

[508] That is, the direction towards the motor cells.

[509] This brain-scheme seems oddly enough to give a certain basis of
reality to those hideously fabulous performances of the Herbartian
_Vorstellungen_. Herbart says that when one idea is inhibited by
another it fuses with that other and thereafter helps it to ascend into
consciousness. Inhibition is thus the basis of association in both
schemes, for the 'draining' of which the text speaks is tantamount to
an inhibition of the activity of the cells which are drained, which
inhibition makes the inhibited revive the inhibiter on later occasions.

[510] See the luminous passage in Münsterberg: Die Willenshandlung, pp.
144-5.

[511] L. Lange's and Münsterberg's experiments with 'shortened' or
'muscular' reaction-time (see Vol. I. p. 432) show how potent a fact
dynamically this anticipatory preparation of a whole set of possible
drainage-channels is.

[512] Even as the proofs of these pages are passing through my hands,
I receive Heft 2 of the Zeitschrift für Psychologie u. Physiologie der
Sinnesorgane, in which the irrepressible young Münsterberg publishes
experiments to show that there is no association between successive
ideas, apart from intervening movements. As my explanations have
assumed that an earlier excited _sensory_ cell drains a later one, his
experiments and inferences would, if sound, upset all my hypotheses. I
therefore can (at this late moment) only refer the reader to Herr M.'s
article, hoping to review the subject again myself in another place.




CHAPTER XXVII.

HYPNOTISM.

MODES OF OPERATING, AND SUSCEPTIBILITY.


The 'hypnotic,' 'mesmeric,' or 'magnetic' trance _can be induced in
various ways_, each operator having his pet method. The simplest one
is to leave the subject seated by himself, telling him that if he
close his eyes and relax his muscles and, as far as possible, think
of vacancy, in a few minutes he will 'go off.' On returning in ten
minutes you may find him effectually hypnotized. Braid used to make
his subjects look at a bright button held near their forehead until
their eyes spontaneously closed. The older mesmerists made 'passes'
in a downward direction over the face and body, but without contact.
Stroking the skin of the head, face, arms and hands, especially that
of the region round the brows and eyes, will have the same effect.
Staring into the eyes of the subject until the latter droop, making him
listen to a watch's ticking; or simply making him close his eyes for a
minute whilst you describe to him the feeling of falling into sleep,
'talk sleep' to him, are equally efficacious methods in the hands of
some operators; whilst with trained subjects any method whatever from
which they have been led by previous suggestion to expect results
will be successful.[513] The touching of an object which they are
told has been 'magnetized,' the drinking of 'magnetized' water, the
reception of a letter ordering them to sleep, etc., are means which
have been frequently employed. Recently M. Liégeois has hypnotized some
of his subjects at a distance of 1 1/2 kilometres by giving them an
intimation to that effect through a telephone. With some subjects, if
you tell them in advance that at a certain hour of a certain day they
will become entranced, the prophecy is fulfilled. Certain hysterical
patients are immediately thrown into hypnotic catalepsy by any violent
sensation, such as a blow on a gong or the flashing of an intense
light in their eyes. Pressure on certain parts of the body (called
_zones hypnogènes_ by M. Pitres) rapidly produces hypnotic sleep in
some hysterics. These regions, which differ in different subjects,
are oftenest found on the forehead and about the root of the thumbs.
Finally, persons in ordinary sleep may be transferred into the hypnotic
condition by verbal intimation or contact, performed so gently as not
to wake them up.

       *       *       *       *       *

Some operators appear to be more successful than others in getting
control of their subjects. I am informed that Mr. Gurney (who made
valuable contributions to the theory of hypnotism) was never able
himself to hypnotize, and had to use for his observations the subjects
of others. On the other hand, Dr. Liébeault claims that he hypnotizes
92% of all comers, and Wetterstrand in Stockholm says that amongst 718
persons there proved to be only 18 whom he failed to influence. Some
of this disparity is unquestionably due to differences in the personal
'authority' of the operator, for the prime condition of success is
that the subject should confidently _expect_ to be entranced. Much
also depends on the operator's tact in interpreting the physiognomy
of his subjects, so as to give the right commands, and 'crowd it on'
to the subject, at just the propitious moments. These conditions
account for the fact that operators grow more successful the more
they operate. Bernheim says that whoever does not hypnotize 80 per
cent of the persons whom he tries has not yet learned to operate
as he should. Whether certain operators have over and above this a
peculiar 'magnetic power' is a question which I leave at present
undecided.[514] Children under three or four, and insane persons,
especially idiots, are unusually hard to hypnotize. This seems due to
the impossibility of getting them to fix their attention continuously
on the idea of the coming trance. All ages above infancy are probably
equally hypnotizable, as are all races and both sexes. A certain
amount of mental training, sufficient to aid concentration of the
attention, seems a favorable condition, and so does a certain momentary
indifference or passivity as to the result. Native strength or weakness
of 'will' have absolutely nothing to do with the matter. Frequent
trances enormously increase the susceptibility of a subject, and many
who resist at first succumb after several trials. Dr. Moll says he has
more than once succeeded after forty fruitless attempts. Some experts
are of the opinion that every one is hypnotizable essentially, the only
difficulty being the more habitual presence in some individuals of
hindering mental preoccupations, which, however, may suddenly at some
moment be removed.

       *       *       *       *       *

The trance may be dispelled instantaneously by saying in a rousing
voice, 'All right, wake up!' or words of similar purport. At the
Salpétrière they awaken subjects by blowing on their eyelids. Upward
passes have an awakening effect; sprinkling cold water ditto. Anything
will awaken a patient who expects to be awakened by that thing. Tell
him that he will wake after counting five, and he will do so. Tell him
to waken in five minutes, and he is very likely to do so punctually,
even though he interrupt thereby some exciting histrionic performance
which you may have suggested.--As Dr. Moll says, any theory which
pretends to explain the physiology of the hypnotic state must keep
account of the fact that so simple a thing as hearing the word 'wake!'
will end it.


THEORIES ABOUT THE HYPNOTIC STATE.


_The intimate nature of the hypnotic condition,_ when once induced,
can hardly be said to be understood. Without entering into details
of controversy, one may say that three main opinions have been held
concerning it, which we may call respectively the theories of

    1. Animal magnetism;
    2. of Neurosis; and finally of
    3. Suggestion.

According to the _animal-magnetism theory_ there is a direct passage of
force from the operator to the subject, whereby the latter becomes the
former's puppet. This theory is nowadays given up as regards all the
ordinary hypnotic phenomena, and is only held to by some persons as an
explanation of a few effects exceptionally met with.

       *       *       *       *       *

According to the _neurosis-theory_, the hypnotic state is a peculiar
pathological condition into which certain predisposed patients fall,
and in which special physical agents have the power of provoking
special symptoms, quite apart from the subjects mentally expecting
the effect. Professor Charcot and his colleagues at the Salpétrière
hospital admit that this condition is rarely found in typical form.
They call it then _le grand hypnotisme_, and say that it accompanies
the disease hystero-epilepsy. If a patient subject to this sort
of hypnotism hear a sudden loud noise, or look at a bright light
unexpectedly, she falls into the _cataleptic_ trance. Her limbs and
body offer no resistance to movements communicated to them, but
retain permanently the attitudes impressed. The eyes are staring,
there is insensibility to pain, etc., etc. If the eyelids be forcibly
closed, the cataleptic gives place to the _lethargic_ condition,
characterized by apparent abolition of consciousness, and absolute
muscular relaxation except where the muscles are kneaded or the
tendons struck by the operator's hand, or certain nerve-trunks
are pressed upon. Then the muscles in question, or those supplied
by the same nerve-trunk enter into a more or less steadfast tonic
contraction. Charcot calls this symptom by the name of neuro-muscular
hyperexcitability. The lethargic state may be _primarily_ brought on
by fixedly looking at anything, or by pressure on the closed eyeballs.
Friction on the top of the head will make the patient pass from either
of the two preceding conditions into the _somnambulic_ state, in which
she is alert, talkative, and susceptible to all the suggestions of
the operator. The somnambulic state may also be induced primarily, by
fixedly looking at a small object. In this state the accurately limited
muscular contractions characteristic of lethargy do not follow upon the
above-described manipulations, but instead of them there is a tendency
to rigidity of entire regions of the body, which may upon occasion
develop into general tetanus, and which is brought about by gently
touching the skin or blowing upon it. M. Charcot calls this by the name
of cutaneo-muscular hyperexcitability.

Many other symptoms, supposed by their observers to be independent of
mental expectation, are described, of which I only will mention the
more interesting. Opening the eyes of a patient in lethargy causes her
to pass into catalepsy. If one eye only be opened, the corresponding
half of the body becomes cataleptic, whilst the other half remains
in lethargy. Similarly, rubbing one side of the head may result in a
patient becoming hemilethargic or hemicataleptic and hemisomnambulic.
The approach of a magnet (or certain metals) to the skin causes these
half-states (and many others) to be transferred to the opposite sides.
Automatic repetition of every sound heard ('_echolalia_') is said
to be produced by pressure on the lower cervical vertebræ or on the
epigastrium. _Aphasia_ is brought about by rubbing the head over the
region of the speech-centre. Pressure behind the occiput determines
_movements of imitation_. Heidenhain describes a number of curious
automatic tendencies to movement, which are brought about by stroking
various portions of the vertebral column. Certain other symptoms
have been frequently noticed, such as a flushed face and cold hands,
brilliant and congested eyes, dilated pupils. Dilated retinal vessels
and spasm of the accommodation are also reported.

       *       *       *       *       *

_The theory of Suggestion_ denies that there is any special hypnotic
_state_ worthy of the name of trance or neurosis. All the symptoms
above described, as well as those to be described hereafter, are
results of that mental susceptibility which we all to some degree
possess, of yielding assent to outward suggestion, of affirming what
we strongly conceive, and of acting in accordance with what we are
made to expect. The bodily symptoms of the Salpétrière patients are
all of them results of expectation and training. The first patients
accidentally did certain things which their doctors thought typical and
caused to be repeated. The subsequent subjects 'caught on' and followed
the established tradition. In proof of this the fact is urged that the
classical three stages and their grouped symptoms have _only_ been
reported as spontaneously occurring, so far, at the Salpétrière, though
they may be superinduced by deliberate suggestion, in patients anywhere
found. The ocular symptoms, the flushed face, accelerated breathing,
etc., are said not to be symptoms of the passage into the hypnotic
state as such, but merely consequences of the strain on the eyes when
the method of looking at a bright object is used. They are absent in
the subjects at Nancy, where simple verbal suggestion is employed. The
various reflex effects (aphasia, echolalia, imitation, etc.) are but
habits induced by the influence of the operator, who unconsciously
urges the subject into the direction in which he would prefer to have
him go. The influence of the magnet, the opposite effects of upward and
downward passes, etc., are similarly explained. Even that sleepy and
inert condition, the advent of which seems to be the prime condition
of farther symptoms being developed, is said to be merely due to the
fact that the mind expects it to come; whilst its influence on the
other symptoms is not physiological, so to speak, but psychical, its
own easy realization by suggestion simply encouraging the subject to
expect that ulterior suggestions will be realized with equal ease.
The radical defenders of the suggestion-theory are thus led to deny
the very existence of the hypnotic state, in the sense of a peculiar
trance-like condition which deprives the patient of spontaneity and
makes him passive to suggestion from without. The trance itself is
only one of the suggestions, and many subjects in fact can be made to
exhibit the other hypnotic phenomena without the preliminary induction
of this one.

       *       *       *       *       *

The theory of suggestion may be said to be quite triumphant at the
present day over the neurosis-theory as held at the Salpétrière, with
its three states, and its definite symptoms supposed to be produced by
physical agents apart from co-operation of the subject's mind. But it
is one thing to say this, and it is quite another thing to say that
there is no peculiar physiological condition whatever worthy of the
name of hypnotic trance, no peculiar state of nervous equilibrium,
'hypotaxy,' 'dissociation,' or whatever you please to call it, during
which the subject's susceptibility to outward suggestion is greater
than at ordinary times. All the facts seem to prove that, until this
trance-like state is assumed by the patient, suggestion produces very
insignificant results, but that, when it is once assumed, there are no
limits to suggestion's power. The state in question has many affinities
with ordinary sleep. It is probable, in fact, that we all pass through
it transiently whenever we fall asleep; and one might most naturally
describe the usual relation of operator and subject by saying that
the former keeps the latter suspended between waking and sleeping by
talking to him enough to keep his slumber from growing profound, and
yet not in such a way as to wake him up. A hynotized patient, _left
to himself,_ will either fall sound asleep or wake up entirely. The
difficulty in hypnotizing refractory persons is that of catching them
at the right moment of transition and making it permanent. Fixing
the eyes and relaxing the muscles of the body produce the hypnotic
state just as they facilitate the advent of sleep. The first stages
of ordinary sleep are characterized by a peculiar dispersed attitude
of the attention. Images come before consciousness which are entirely
incongruous with our ordinary beliefs and habits of thought. The
latter either vanish altogether or withdraw, as it were, inertly
into the background of the mind, and let the incongruous images reign
alone. These images acquire, moreover, an exceptional vivacity; they
become first 'hypnagogic hallucinations,' and then, as the sleep grows
deeper, dreams. Now the 'mono-ideism,' or else the impotency and
failure to 'rally' on the part of the background-ideas, which thus
characterize somnolescence, are unquestionably the result of a special
physiological change occurring in the brain at that time. Just so
that similar mono-ideism, or dissociation of the reigning fancy from
those other thoughts which might possibly act as its 'reductives,'
which characterize the hypnotic consciousness, must equally be due
to a special cerebral change. The term 'hypnotic trance,' which I
employ, tells us nothing of what the change is, but it marks the fact
that it exists, and is consequently a useful expression. The great
vivacity of the hypnotic images (as gauged by their motor effects), the
oblivion of them when normal life is resumed, the abrupt awakening,
the recollection of them again in subsequent trances, the anæsthesia
and hyperæsthesia which are so frequent, all point away from our
simple waking credulity and 'suggestibility' as the type by which the
phenomena are to be interpreted, and make us look rather towards sleep
and dreaming, or towards those deeper alterations of the personality
known as automatism, double consciousness, or 'second' personality for
the true analogues of the hypnotic trance.[515] Even the best hypnotic
subjects pass through life without any one suspecting them to possess
such a remarkable susceptibility, until by deliberate experiment it is
made manifest. The operator fixes their eyes or their attention a short
time to develop the propitious phase, holds them in it by his talk, and
_the state being there_, makes them the puppets of all his suggestions.
But no ordinary suggestions of waking life ever took such control of
their mind.

_The suggestion-theory may therefore be approved as correct, provided
we grant the trance-state as its prerequisite._ The three states
of Charcot, the strange reflexes of Heidenhain, and all the other
bodily phenomena which have been called direct consequences of the
trance-state itself, are not such. They are products of suggestion,
the trance-state having no particular outward symptoms of its own; but
without the trance-state there, those particular suggestions could
never have been successfully made.[516]


THE SYMPTOMS OF THE TRANCE.


This accounts for the altogether indefinite array of symptoms which
have been gathered together as characteristic of the hypnotic state.
The law of habit dominates hypnotic subjects even more than it does
waking ones. Any sort of personal peculiarity, any trick accidentally
fallen into in the first instance by some one subject, may, by
attracting attention, become stereotyped, serve as a pattern for
imitation, and figure as the type of a school. The first subject trains
the operator, the operator trains the succeeding subjects, all of
them in perfect good faith conspiring together to evolve a perfectly
arbitrary result. With the extraordinary perspicacity and subtlety
of perception which subjects often display for all that concerns the
operator with whom they are _en rapport_, it is hard to keep them
ignorant of anything which he expects. Thus it happens that one easily
verifies on new subjects what one has already seen on old ones, or any
desired symptom of which one may have heard or read.

The symptoms earliest observed by writers were all thought to be
typical. But with the multiplication of observed phenomena, the
importance of most particular symptoms as marks of the state has
diminished. This lightens very much our own immediate task. Proceeding
to enumerate the symptoms of the hypnotic trance, I may confine
myself to those which are intrinsically interesting, or which differ
considerably from the normal functions of man.

       *       *       *       *       *

First of all comes _amnesia_. In the earlier stages of hypnotism the
patient remembers what has happened, but with successive sittings
he sinks into a deeper condition, which is commonly followed by
complete loss of memory. He may have been led through the liveliest
hallucinations and dramatic performances, and have exhibited the
intensest apparent emotion, but on waking he can recall nothing at all.
The same thing happens on waking from sleep in the midst of a dream--it
quickly eludes recall. But just as we may be _reminded_ of it, or of
parts of it, by meeting persons or objects which figured therein, so
on being adroitly prompted, the hypnotic patient will often remember
what happened in his trance. One cause of the forgetfulness seems to be
the disconnection of the trance performances with the system of waking
ideas. Memory requires a continuous train of association. M. Delbœuf,
reasoning in this way, woke his subjects in the midst of an action
begun during trance (washing the hands, e.g.), and found that they then
remembered the trance. The act in question bridged over the two states.
But one can often make them remember by merely telling them during the
trance that they _shall_ remember. Acts of one trance, moreover, are
usually recalled, either spontaneously or at command, during another
trance, provided that the contents of the two trances be not mutually
incompatible.

_Suggestibility._ The patient believes everything which his hypnotizer
tells him, and does everything which the latter commands. Even results
over which the will has normally no control, such as sneezing,
secretion, reddening and growing pale, alterations of temperature and
heart-beat, menstruation, action of the bowels, etc., may take place
in consequence of the operator's firm assertions during the hypnotic
trance, and the resulting conviction on the part of the subject,
that the effects will occur. Since almost all the phenomena yet to be
described are effects of this heightened suggestibility, I will say no
more under the general head, but proceed to illustrate the peculiarity
in detail.

_Effects on the voluntary muscles_ seem to be those most easily got;
and the ordinary routine of hypnotizing consists in provoking them
first. Tell the patient that he cannot open his eyes or his mouth,
cannot unclasp his hands or lower his raised arm, cannot rise from
his seat, or pick up a certain object from the floor, and he will be
immediately smitten with absolute impotence in these regards. The
effect here is generally due to the _involuntary contraction_ of
antagonizing muscles. But one can equally well suggest _paralysis_, of
an arm for example, in which case it will hang perfectly placid by the
subject's side. Cataleptic and tetanic rigidity are easily produced
by suggestion, aided by handling the parts. One of the favorite shows
at public exhibitions is that of a subject stretched stiff as a board
with his head on one chair and his heels on another. The cataleptic
retention of impressed attitudes differs from voluntary assumption of
the same attitude. An arm voluntarily held out straight will drop from
fatigue after a quarter of an hour at the utmost, and before it falls
the agent's distress will be made manifest by oscillations in the arm,
disturbances in the breathing, etc. But Charcot has shown that an arm
held out in hypnotic catalepsy, though it may as soon descend, yet does
so slowly and with no accompanying vibration, whilst the breathing
remains entirely calm. He rightly points out that this shows a profound
physiological change, and is proof positive against simulation, as far
as this symptom is concerned. A cataleptic attitude, moreover, may be
held for many hours.--Sometimes an expressive attitude, clinching of
the fist, contraction of the brows, will gradually set up a sympathetic
action of the other muscles of the body, so that at last a _tableau
vivant_ of fear, anger, disdain, prayer, or other emotional condition,
is produced with rare perfection. This effect would seem to be due
to the suggestion of the mental state by the first contraction.
Stammering, aphasia, or inability to utter certain words, pronounce
certain letters, are readily producible by suggestion.

_Hallucinations_ of all the senses and _delusions_ of every conceivable
kind can be easily suggested to good subjects. The emotional
effects are then often so lively, and the pantomimic display so
expressive, that it is hard not to believe in a certain 'psychic
hyper-excitability,' as one of the concomitants of the hypnotic
condition. You can make the subject think that he is freezing or
burning, itching or covered with dirt, or wet; you can make him
eat a potato for a peach, or drink a cup of vinegar for a glass of
champagne;[517] ammonia will smell to him like cologne water; a chair
will be a lion, a broom-stick a beautiful woman, a noise in the
street will be an orchestral music, etc., etc., with no limit except
your powers of invention and the patience of the lookers on.[518]
Illusions and hallucinations form the _pièces de résistance_ at public
exhibitions. The comic effect is at its climax when it is successfully
suggested to the subject that his personality is changed into that of
a baby, of a street boy, of a young lady dressing for a party, of a
stump orator, or of Napoleon the Great. He may even be transformed into
a beast, or an inanimate thing like a chair or a carpet, and in every
case will act out all the details of the part with a sincerity and
intensity seldom seen at the theatre. The excellence of the performance
is in these cases the best reply to the suspicion that the subject
may be shamming--so skilful a shammer must long since have found his
true function in life upon the stage. Hallucinations and histrionic
delusions generally go with a certain depth of the trance, and are
followed by complete forgetfulness. The subject awakens from them at
the command of the operator with a sudden start of surprise, and may
seem for a while a little dazed.

Subjects in this condition will receive and execute suggestions of
crime, and act out a theft, forgery, arson, or murder. A girl will
believe that she is married to her hypnotizer, etc. It is unfair,
however, to say that in these cases the subject is a pure puppet with
no spontaneity. His spontaneity is certainly not in abeyance so far
as things go which are harmoniously associated with the suggestion
given him. He takes the text from his operator; but he may amplify
and develop it enormously as he acts it out. His spontaneity is lost
only for those systems of ideas which _conflict_ with the suggested
delusion. The latter is thus 'systematized'; the rest of consciousness
is shut off, excluded, dissociated from it. In extreme cases the rest
of the mind would seem to be actually abolished and the hypnotic
subject to be literally a changed personality, a being in one of those
'second' states which we studied in Chapter X. But the reign of the
delusion is often not as absolute as this. If the thing suggested
be too intimately repugnant, the subject may strenuously resist and
get nervously excited in consequence, even to the point of having an
hysterical attack. The conflicting ideas slumber in the background
and merely permit those in the foreground to have their way until a
_real_ emergency arises; then they assert their rights. As M. Delbœuf
says, the subject surrenders himself good-naturedly to the performance,
stabs with the pasteboard dagger you give him because he knows what it
is, and fires off the pistol because he knows it has no ball; but for
a real murder he would not be your man. It is undoubtedly true that
subjects are often well aware that they are acting a part. They know
that what they do is absurd. They know that the hallucination which
they see, describe, and act upon, is not really there. They may laugh
at themselves; and they always recognize the abnormality of their state
when asked about it, and call it 'sleep.' One often notices a sort of
mocking smile upon them, as if they were playing a comedy, and they
may even say on 'coming to' that they were shamming all the while.
These facts have misled ultra-skeptical people so far as to make them
doubt the genuineness of any hypnotic phenomena at all. But, save the
consciousness of 'sleep,' they do not occur in the deeper conditions;
and when they do occur they are only a natural consequence of the fact
that the 'monoideism' is incomplete. The background-thoughts still
exist, and have the power of _comment_ on the suggestions, but no power
to inhibit their motor and associative effects. A similar condition is
frequent enough in the waking state, when an impulse carries us away
and our 'will' looks on wonderingly like an impotent spectator. These
'shammers' continue to sham in just the same way, every new time you
hypnotize them, until at last they are forced to admit that if shamming
there be, it is something very different from the free voluntary
shamming of waking hours.

_Real sensations may be abolished_ as well as false ones suggested.
Legs and breasts may be amputated, children born, teeth extracted, in
short the most painful experiences undergone, with no other anæsthetic
than the hypnotizer's assurance that no pain shall be felt. Similarly
morbid pains may be annihilated, neuralgias, toothaches, rheumatisms
cured. The sensation of hunger has thus been abolished, so that a
patient took no nourishment for fourteen days. The most interesting of
these suggested anæsthesias are those limited to certain objects of
perception. Thus a subject may be made blind to a certain person and to
him alone, or deaf to certain words but to no others.[519] In this case
the anæsthesia (or _negative hallucination_, as it has been called) is
apt to become _systematized_. Other things related to the person to
whom one has been made blind may also be shut out of consciousness.
What he says is not heard, his contact is not felt, objects which he
takes from his pocket are not seen, etc. Objects which he screens are
seen as if he were transparent. Facts about him are forgotten, his name
is not recognized when pronounced. Of course there is great variety
in the completeness of this systematic extension of the suggested
anæsthesia, but one may say that some tendency to it always exists.
When one of the subjects' own limbs is made anæsthetic, for example,
memories as well as sensations of its movements often seem to depart.
An interesting degree of the phenomenon is found in the case related
by M. Binet of a subject to whom it was suggested that a certain M. C.
was invisible. She still saw M. C., but saw him as a stranger, having
lost the memory of his name and his existence.--Nothing is easier than
to make subjects forget their own name and condition in life. It is one
of the suggestions which most promptly succeed, even with quite fresh
ones. A systematized amnesia of certain periods of one's life may also
be suggested, the subject placed, for instance, where he was a decade
ago with the intervening years obliterated from his mind.

The mental condition which accompanies these systematized anæsthesias
and amnesias is a very curious one. The anæsthesia is not a genuine
sensorial one, for if you make a real red cross (say) on a sheet of
white paper invisible to an hypnotic subject, and yet cause him to
look fixedly at a dot on the paper on or near the cross, he will, on
transferring his eye to a blank sheet, see a bluish-green after-image
of the cross. This proves that it has impressed his sensibility. He
has _felt_ it, but not _perceived_ it. He had actively ignored it,
refused to recognize it, as it were. Another experiment proves that he
must _distinguish_ it first in order thus to ignore it. Make a stroke
on paper or blackboard, and tell the subject it is not there, and he
will see nothing but the clean paper or board. Next, he not looking,
surround the original stroke with other strokes exactly like it, and
ask him what he sees. He will point out one by one all the new strokes
and omit the original one every time, no matter how numerous the new
strokes may be, or in what order they are arranged. Similarly, if the
original single stroke to which he is blind be _doubled_ by a prism of
sixteen degrees placed before one of his eyes (both being kept open),
he will say that he now sees _one_ stroke, and point in the direction
in which the image seen through the prism lies.

Obviously, then, he is not blind to the _kind_ of stroke in the least.
He is blind only to one individual stroke of that kind in a particular
position on the board or paper,--that is, to a particular complex
object; and, paradoxical as it may seem to say so, he must distinguish
it with great accuracy from others like it, in order to remain blind
to it when the others are brought near. He 'apperceives' it, as a
preliminary to not seeing it at all! How to conceive of this state of
mind is not easy. It would be much simpler to understand the process,
if adding new strokes made the first one visible. There would then be
two different objects apperceived as totals,--paper with one stroke,
paper with two strokes; and, blind to the former, he would see all
that was _in_ the latter, because he would have apperceived it as a
different total in the first instance.

A process of this sort occurs sometimes (not always) when the new
strokes, instead of being mere repetitions of the original one, are
lines which combine with it into a total object, say a human face. The
subject of the trance then may regain his sight of the line to which he
had previously been blind, by seeing it as part of the face.

When by a prism before one eye a previously invisible line has been
made visible to that eye, and the other eye is closed or screened,
_its_ closure makes no difference; the line still remains visible. But
if _then_ the prism is removed, the line will disappear even to the eye
which a moment ago saw it, and both eyes will revert to their original
blind state.

We have, then, to deal in these cases neither with a sensorial
anæsthesia, nor with a mere failure to notice, but with something much
more complex; namely, an active counting out and positive exclusion of
certain objects. It is as when one 'cuts' an acquaintance, 'ignores'
a claim, or 'refuses to be influenced' by a consideration of whose
existence one remains aware. Thus a lover of Nature in America
finds himself able to overlook and ignore entirely the board- and
rail-fences and general roadside raggedness, and revel in the beauty
and picturesqueness of the other elements of the landscape, whilst to
a newly-arrived European the fences are so aggressively present as to
spoil enjoyment.

Messrs. Gurney, Janet, and Binet have shown that the ignored elements
are preserved in a split-off portion of the subjects' consciousness
which can be tapped in certain ways, and made to give an account of
itself (see Vol. I. p. 209).

_Hyperæsthesia of the senses_ is as common a symptom as anæsthesia.
On the skin two points can be discriminated at less than the normal
distance. The sense of touch is so delicate that (as M. Delbœuf
informs me) a subject after simply poising on her finger-tips a
blank card drawn from a pack of similar ones can pick it out from
the pack again by its 'weight.' We approach here the line where, to
many persons, it seems as if something more than the ordinary senses,
however sharpened, were required in explanation. I have seen a coin
from the operator's pocket repeatedly picked out by the subject from a
heap of twenty others,[520] by its greater 'weight' in the subject's
language.--Auditory hyperæsthesia may enable a subject to hear a watch
tick, or his operator speak, in a distant room.--One of the most
extraordinary examples of visual hyperæsthesia is that reported by
Bergson, in which a subject who seemed to be reading through the back
of a book held and looked at by the operator, was really proved to be
reading the image of the page reflected on the latter's cornea. The
same subject was able to discriminate with the naked eye details in a
microscopic preparation. Such cases of 'hyperæsthesia of vision' as
that reported by Taguet and Sauvaire, where subjects could see things
mirrored by non-reflecting bodies, or through opaque pasteboard, would
seem rather to belong to 'psychical research', than to the present
category.--The ordinary test of visual hyperacuteness in hypnotism
is the favorite trick of giving a subject the hallucination of a
picture on a blank sheet of card-board, and then mixing the latter
with a lot of other similar sheets. The subject will always find the
picture on the original sheet again, and recognize infallibly if
it has been turned over, or upside down, although the bystanders
have to resort to artifice to identify it again. The Subject notes
peculiarities on the card, too small for waking observation to
detect.[521] If it be said that the spectators guide him by their
manner, their breathing, etc., that is only another proof of his
hyperæsthesia; for he undoubtedly _is_ conscious of subtler personal
indications (of his operator's mental states especially) than he
could notice in his waking state. Examples of this are found in the
so-called 'magnetic _rapport_.' This is a name for the fact that in
deep trance, or in lighter trance whenever the suggestion is made,
the subject is deaf and blind to everyone but the operator or those
spectators to whom the latter expressly awakens his senses. The most
violent appeals from anyone else are for him as if non-existent,
whilst he obeys the faintest signals on the part of his hypnotizer.
If in catalepsy, his limbs will retain their attitude only when the
operator moves them; when others move them they fall down, etc. A more
remarkable fact still is that the patient will often answer anyone
whom his operator touches, or at whom he even points his finger, in
however concealed a manner. All which is rationally explicable by
expectation and suggestion, if only it be farther admitted that his
senses are acutely sharpened for all the operator's movements.[522]
He often shows great anxiety and restlessness if the latter is out
of the room. A favorite experiment of Mr. E. Gurney's was to put the
subject's hands through an opaque screen, and cause the operator
to point at one finger. _That_ finger presently grew insensible or
rigid. A bystander pointing simultaneously at another finger, never
made that insensible or rigid. Of course the elective _rapport_ with
their operator had been developed in these trained subjects during
the hypnotic state, but the phenomenon then occurred in some of them
during the waking state, even when their consciousness was absorbed in
animated conversation with a fourth party.[523] I confess that when I
saw these experiments I was impressed with the necessity for admitting
between the _emanations_ from different people differences for which
we have no name, and a discriminative sensibility for them of the
nature of which we can form no clear conception, but which seems to be
developed in certain subjects by the hypnotic trance.--The enigmatic
reports of the effect of magnets and metals, even if they be due, as
many contend, to unintentional suggestion on the operator's part,
certainly involve hyperæsthetic perception, for the operator seeks as
well as possible to conceal the moment when the magnet is brought into
play, and yet the subject not only finds it out that moment in a way
difficult to understand, but may develop effects which (in the first
instance certainly) the operator did not expect to find. Unilateral
contractures, movements, paralyses, hallucinations, etc., are made to
pass to the other side of the body, hallucinations to disappear, or
to change to the complementary color, suggested emotions to pass into
their opposites, etc. Many Italian observations agree with the French
ones, and the upshot is that if unconscious suggestion lie at the
bottom of this matter, the patients show an enormously exalted power
of divining what it is they are expected to do. This hyperæsthetic
perception is what concerns us now.[524] Its _modus_ cannot yet be said
to be defined.

_Changes in the nutrition of the tissues_ may be produced by
suggestion. These effects lead into therapeutics--a subject which
I do not propose to treat of here. But I may say that there seems
no reasonable ground for doubting that in certain chosen subjects
the suggestion of a congestion, a burn, a blister, a raised papule,
or a bleeding from the nose or skin, may produce the effect.
Messrs. Beaunis, Berjon, Bernheim, Bourru, Burot, Charcot, Delbœuf,
Dumontpallier, Focachon, Forel, Jendrássik, Krafft-Ebing, Liébeault,
Liégeois, Lipp, Mabille, and others have recently vouched for one or
other of these effects. Messrs. Delbœuf and Liégeois have annulled by
suggestion, one the effects of a burn, the other of a blister. Delbœuf
was led to his experiments after seeing a burn on the skin produced
by suggestion, at the Salpétrière, by reasoning that if the idea of
a pain could produce inflammation it must be because pain was itself
an inflammatory irritant, and that the abolition of it from a real
burn ought therefore to entail the absence of inflammation. He applied
the actual cautery (as well as vesicants) to symmetrical places on
the skin, affirming that no pain should be felt on one of the sides.
The result was a dry scorch on that side, with (as he assures me) no
after-mark, but on the other side a regular blister with suppuration
and a subsequent scar. This explains the innocuity of certain assaults
made on subjects during trance. To test simulation, recourse is often
had to sticking pins under their finger-nails or through their tongue,
to inhalations of strong ammonia, and the like. These irritations, when
not felt by the subject, seem to leave no after-consequences. One is
reminded of the reported non-inflammatory character of the wounds made
on themselves by dervishes in their pious orgies. On the other hand,
the reddenings and bleedings of the skin along certain lines, suggested
by tracing lines or pressing objects thereupon, put the accounts handed
down to us of the stigmata of the cross appearing on the hands, feet,
sides, and forehead of certain Catholic mystics in a new light. As so
often happens, a fact is denied until a welcome interpretation comes
with it. Then it is admitted readily enough; and evidence judged quite
insufficient to back a claim, so long as the church had an interest
in making it, proves to be quite sufficient for modern scientific
enlightenment, the moment it appears that a reputed saint can thereby
be classed as 'a case of hystero-epilepsy.'

       *       *       *       *       *

There remain two other topics, viz., post-hypnotic effects of
suggestion, and effects of suggestion in the waking state.

_Post-hypnotic, or deferred, suggestions_ are such as are given to
the patients during trance, to take effect after waking. They succeed
with a certain number of patients even when the execution is named
for a remote period--months or even a year, in one case reported by
M. Liégeois. In this way one can make the patient feel a pain, or
be paralyzed, or be hungry or thirsty, or have an hallucination,
positive or negative, or perform some fantastic action after emerging
from his trance. The effect in question may be ordered to take place
not immediately, but after an interval of time has elapsed, and the
interval may be left to the subject to measure, or may be marked by
a certain signal. The moment the signal occurs, or the time is run
out, the subject, who until then seems in a perfectly normal waking
condition, will experience the suggested effect. In many instances,
whilst thus obedient to the suggestion, he seems to fall into the
hypnotic condition again. This is proved by the fact that the moment
the hallucination or suggested performance is over he forgets it,
denies all knowledge of it, and so forth; and by the further fact
that he is 'suggestible' during its performance, that is, will
receive new hallucinations, etc., at command. A moment later and this
suggestibility has disappeared. It cannot be said, however, that
relapse into the trance is an absolutely necessary condition for the
post-hypnotic carrying out of commands, for the subject may be neither
suggestible nor amnesic, and may struggle with all the strength of his
will against the absurdity of this impulse which he feels rising in
him, he knows not why. In these cases, as in most cases, he forgets the
circumstance of the impulse having been suggested to him in a previous
trance; regards it as arising within himself; and often improvises, as
he yields to it, some more or less plausible or ingenious motive by
which to justify it to the lookers-on. He acts, in short, with his
usual sense of personal spontaneity and freedom; and the disbelievers
in the freedom of the will have naturally made much of these cases in
their attempts to show it to be an illusion.

The only really mysterious feature of these deferred suggestions is
the patient's absolute ignorance during the interval preceding their
execution that they have been deposited in his mind. They will often
surge up at the preappointed time, even though you have vainly tried a
while before to make him recall the circumstances of their production.
The most important class of post-hypnotic suggestions are, of course,
those relative to the patient's health--bowels, sleep, and other bodily
functions. Among the most _interesting_ (apart from the hallucinations)
are those relative to future trances. One can determine the hour and
minute, or the signal, at which the patient will of his own accord
lapse into trance again. One can make him susceptible in future to
another operator who may have been unsuccessful with him in the past.
Or more important still in certain cases, one can, by suggesting that
certain persons shall never be able hereafter to put him to sleep,
remove him for all future time from hypnotic influences which might
be dangerous. This, indeed, is the simple and natural safeguard
against those 'dangers of hypnotism' of which uninstructed persons
talk so vaguely. A subject who knows himself to be ultra-susceptible
should never allow himself to be entranced by an operator in whose
moral delicacy he lacks complete confidence; and he can use a trusted
operator's suggestions to protect himself against liberties which
others, knowing his weakness, might be tempted to take with him.

The mechanism by which the command is retained until the moment for
its execution arrives is a mystery which has given rise to much
discussion. The experiments of Gurney and the observations of M.
Pierre Janet and others on certain hysterical somnabulists seem to
prove that it is stored up in consciousness; not simply organically
registered, but that _the consciousness which thus retains it is split
off, dissociated from the rest of the subject's mind._ We have here,
in short, an experimental production of one of those 'second' states
of the personality of which we have spoken so often. Only here the
second state coexists as well as alternates with the first. Gurney had
the brilliant idea of _tapping_ this second consciousness by means of
the planchette. He found that certain persons, who were both hypnotic
subjects and automatic writers, would if their hands were placed on
a planchette (after being wakened from a trance in which they had
received the suggestion of something to be done at a later time) write
out unconsciously the order, or something connected with it. This shows
that something inside of them, which could express itself through
the hand alone, was continuing to think of the order, and possibly
of it alone. These researches have opened a new vista of possible
experimental investigations into the so-called 'second' states of the
personality.

Some subjects seem almost as obedient to suggestion in the waking state
as in sleep, or even more so, according to certain observers. Not only
muscular phenomena, but changes of personality and hallucinations are
recorded as the result of simple affirmation on the operator's part,
without the previous ceremony of 'magnetizing' or putting into the
'mesmeric sleep.' These are all trained subjects, however, so far as I
know, and the affirmation must apparently be accompanied by the patient
concentrating his attention and gazing, however briefly, into the eyes
of the operator. It is probable therefore that an extremely rapidly
induced condition of trance is a prerequisite for success in these
experiments.

       *       *       *       *       *

I have now made mention of all the more important phenomena of the
hypnotic trance. Of their therapeutic or forensic bearings this is
not the proper place to speak. The recent literature of the subject
is quite voluminous, but much of it consists in repetition. The best
compendious work on the subject is 'Der Hypnotismus,' by Dr. A. Moll
(Berlin, 1889; and just translated into English, N. Y., 1890), which
is extraordinarily complete and judicious. The other writings most
recommendable are subjoined in the note.[525] Most of them contain a
historical sketch and much bibliography. A complete bibliography has
been published by M. Dessoir (Berlin, 1888).

       *       *       *       *       *

[513] It should be said that the methods of leaving the patient to
himself, and that of the simple verbal suggestion of sleep (the
so-called Nancy method introduced by Liébeault of that place), seem,
wherever applicable, to be the best, as they entail none of the
after-inconveniences which occasionally follow upon straining his eyes.
A new patient should not be put through a great variety of different
suggestions in immediate succession. He should be waked up from time to
time, and then rehypnotized to avoid mental confusion and excitement.
Before finally waking a subject you should _undo_ whatever delusive
suggestions you may have implanted in him, by telling him that they
are all gone, etc., and that you are now going to restore him to his
natural state. Headache, languor, etc., which sometimes follow the
first trance or two, must be banished at the outset, by the operator
strongly assuring the subject that such things _never_ come from
hypnotism, that the subject _must not_ have them, etc.

[514] Certain facts would seem to point that way. Cf., e.g., the
case of the man described by P. Despine, Étude Scientifique sur le
Somnambulisme, p. 286 ff.

[515] The state is not _identical_ with sleep, however analogous in
certain respects. The lighter stages of it, particularly, differ
from sleep and dreaming, inasmuch as they are characterized almost
exclusively by _muscular_ inabilities and compulsions, which are not
noted in ordinary somnolescence, and the _mind_, which is confused in
somnolescence, may be quite clearly conscious, in the lighter state of
trance, of all that is going on.

[516] The word 'suggestion' has been bandied about too much as if it
explained all mysteries: When the subject obeys it is by reason of the
'operator's suggestion'; when he proves refractory it is in consequence
of an 'auto-suggestion' which he has made to himself, etc., etc. What
explains everything explains nothing; and it must be remembered that
what _needs_ explanation here is the fact that in a certain condition
of the subject suggestions operate as they do _at no other time_; that
through them functions are affected which ordinarily elude the action
of the waking will; and that usually all this happens in a condition of
which no after-memory remains.

[517] A complete fit of drunkenness may be the consequence of the
suggested champagne. It is even said that real drunkenness has been
cured by suggestion.

[518] The suggested hallucination may be followed by a negative
after-image, just as if it were a real object. This can be very easily
verified with the suggested hallucination of a colored cross on a sheet
of white paper. The subject, on turning to another sheet of paper, will
see a cross of the complementary color. Hallucinations have been shown
by MM. Binet and Féré to be doubled by a prism or mirror, magnified by
a lens, and in many other ways to behave optically like real objects.
These points have been discussed already on p. 138 ff.

[519] M. Liégeois explains the common exhibition-trick of making the
subject unable to get his arms into his coat-sleeves again after he has
taken his coat off, by an anæsthesia to the necessary parts of the coat.

[520] Precautions being taken against differences of temperature and
other grounds of suggestion.

[521] It should be said, however, that the bystander's ability to
discriminate unmarked cards and sheets of paper from each other is much
greater than one would naturally suppose.

[522] I must repeat, however, that we are here on the verge of possibly
unknown forces and modes of communication. Hypnotization at a distance,
with no grounds for expectation on the subject's part that it was to be
tried, seems pretty well established in certain very rare cases. See in
general, for information on these matters, the Proceedings of the Soc.
for Psych. Research, _passim_.

[523] Here again the perception in question must take place below the
threshold of ordinary consciousness, possibly in one of those split-off
selves or 'second' states whose existence we have so often to recognize.

[524] I myself verified many of the above effects of the magnet on a
blindfolded subject on whom I was trying them for the first time, and
whom I believe to have never heard of them before. The moment, however,
an opaque screen was added to the blindfolding, the effects ceased to
coincide with the approximation of the magnet, so that it looks as if
visual perception had been instrumental in producing them. The subject
passed from my observation, so that I never could clear up the mystery.
Of course I gave him consciously no hint of what I was looking for.

[525] Binet and Féré, 'Animal Magnetism,' in the International
Scientific Series; A. Bernheim. 'Suggestive Therapeutics' (N. Y.,
1889); J. Liégeois, 'De la Suggestion' (1889); E. Gurney, two articles
in Mind, vol. ix.--In the recent revival of interest in the history
of this subject, it seems a pity that the admirably critical and
scientific work of Dr. John Kearsley Mitchell of Philadelphia should
remain relatively so unknown. It is quite worthy to rank with Braid's
investigations. See "Five Essays" by the above author, edited by S.
Weir Mitchell, Philadelphia, 1859, pp. 141-274.




CHAPTER XXVIII.

NECESSARY TRUTHS AND THE EFFECTS OF EXPERIENCE.


In this final chapter I shall treat of what has sometimes been called
_psychogenesis_, and try to ascertain just how far the connections
of things in the outward environment can account for our tendency to
think of, and to react upon, certain things in certain ways and in no
others, even though personally we have had of the things in question
no experience, or almost no experience, at all. It is a familiar truth
that some propositions are _necessary_. We _must_ attach the predicate
'equal' to the subject 'opposite sides of a parallelogram' if we think
those terms together at all, whereas we need not in any such way attach
the predicate 'rainy,' for example, to the subject 'to-morrow.' The
dubious sort of coupling of terms is universally admitted to be due to
'experience'; the certain sort is ascribed to the 'organic structure'
of the mind. This structure is in turn supposed by the so-called
_apriorists_ to be of transcendental origin, or at any rate not to
be explicable by experience; whilst by evolutionary empiricists it
is supposed to be also due to experience, only not to the experience
of the individual, but to that of his ancestors as far back as one
may please to go. Our emotional and instinctive tendencies, our
irresistible impulses to couple certain movements with the perception
or thought of certain things, are also features of our connate mental
structure, and like the necessary judgments, are interpreted by the
apriorists and the empiricists in the same warring ways.

I shall try in the course of the chapter to make plain three things:

1) That, taking the word experience as it is universally understood,
the experience of the race can no more account for our necessary or _a
priori_ judgments than the experience of the individual can;

2) That there is no good evidence for the belief that our instinctive
reactions are fruits of our ancestors' education in the midst of the
same environment, transmitted to us at birth.

3) That the features of our organic mental structure cannot be
explained at all by our conscious intercourse with the outer
environment, but must rather be understood as congenital variations,
'accidental'[526] in the first instance, but then transmitted as fixed
features of the race.

On the whole, then, the account which the apriorists give of the
_facts_ is that which I defend; although I should contend (as will
hereafter appear) for a naturalistic view of their _cause_.

       *       *       *       *       *

The first thing I have to say is that all schools (however they
otherwise differ) must allow that the _elementary qualities_ of cold,
heat, pleasure, pain, red, blue, sound, silence, etc., are original,
innate, or _a priori_ properties of our subjective nature, even though
they should require the touch of experience to waken them into actual
consciousness, and should slumber, to all eternity, without it.

This is so on either of the two hypotheses we may make concerning the
relation of the feelings to the realities at whose touch they become
alive. For in the first place, if a feeling do _not_ mirror the reality
which wakens it and to which we say it corresponds, if it mirror no
reality whatever outside of the mind, it of course is a purely mental
product. By its very definition it can be nothing else. But in the
second place, even if it _do_ mirror the reality exactly, still it _is_
not that reality itself, it is a duplication of it, the result of a
mental reaction. And that the mind should have the power of reacting in
just that duplicate way can only be stated as a _harmony_ between its
nature and the nature of the truth outside of it, a harmony whereby it
follows that the qualities of both parties match.

The originality of these _elements_ is not, then, a question for
dispute. _The warfare of philosophers is exclusively relative to
their_ FORMS OF COMBINATION. The empiricist maintains that these forms
can only follow the order of combination in which the elements were
originally awakened by the impressions of the external world; the
apriorists insist, on the contrary, that _some_ modes of combination,
at any rate, follow from the natures of the elements themselves, and
that no amount of experience can modify this result.


WHAT IS MEANT BY EXPERIENCE?

The phrase 'organic mental structure' names the matter in dispute. Has
the mind such a structure or not? Are its contents _arranged_ from
the start, or is the arrangement they may possess simply due to the
shuffling of them by experience in an absolutely plastic bed? Now the
first thing to make sure of is that when we talk of 'experience,' we
attach a definite meaning to the word. _Experience means experience
of something foreign supposed to impress us,_ whether spontaneously
or in consequence of our own exertions and acts. Impressions, as we
well know, affect certain orders of sequence and coexistence, and the
mind's habits copy the habits of the impressions, so that our images
of things assume a time- and space-arrangement which resembles the
time- and space-arrangements outside. To uniform outer coexistences
and sequences correspond constant conjunctions of ideas, to fortuitous
coexistences and sequences casual conjunctions of ideas. We are sure
that fire will burn and water wet us, less sure that thunder will come
after lightning, not at all sure whether a strange dog will bark at
us or let us go by. In these ways experience moulds us every hour,
and makes of our minds a mirror of the time- and space-connections
between the things in the world. The principle of habit within us so
_fixes_ the copy at last that we find it difficult even to imagine how
the outward order could possibly be different from what it is, and we
continually divine from the present what the future is to be. These
habits of transition, from one thought to another, are features of
mental structure which were lacking in us at birth; we can see their
growth under experience's moulding finger, and we can see how often
experience undoes her own work, and for an earlier order substitutes
a new one. '_The order of experience_,' in this matter of the time-
and space-conjunctions of things, is thus an indisputably _vera causa_
of our forms of thought. It is our educator, our sovereign helper and
friend; and its name, standing for something with so real and definite
a use, ought to be kept sacred and encumbered with no vaguer meaning.

If _all_ the connections among ideas in the mind could be interpreted
as so many combinations of sense-data wrought into fixity in this way
from without, then experience in the common and legitimate sense of the
word would be the sole fashioner of the mind.

The empirical school in psychology has in the main contended that they
can be so interpreted. Before our generation, it was the experience
of the individual only which was meant. But when one nowadays says
that the human mind owes its present shape to experience, he means the
experience of ancestors as well. Mr. Spencer's statement of this is the
earliest emphatic one, and deserves quotation in full:[527]

 "The supposition that the inner cohesions are adjusted to the outer
 persistences by _accumulated_ experience of those outer persistences
 is in harmony with all our actual knowledge of mental phenomena.
 Though in so far as reflex actions and instincts are concerned,
 the experience-hypothesis seems insufficient; yet its seeming
 insufficiency occurs only where the evidence is beyond our reach.
 Nay, even here such few facts as we can get point to the conclusion
 that automatic psychical connections result from the registration of
 _experiences continued for numberless generations_.

 "In brief, the case stands thus: It is agreed that all psychical
 relations, save the absolutely indissoluble, are determined by
 experiences. Their various strengths are admitted, other things equal,
 to be proportionate to the _multiplication of experiences_. It is an
 unavoidable corollary that an _infinity of experiences_ will produce
 a psychical relation that is indissoluble. Though such infinity of
 experiences cannot be received by a single individual, yet it may be
 received by the succession of individuals forming a race. And if there
 is a transmission of induced tendencies in the nervous system, it is
 inferrible that _all psychical relations whatever_, from the necessary
 to the fortuitous, result from the experiences of the corresponding
 external relations; and are so brought into harmony with them.

 "Thus, the experience-hypothesis furnishes an adequate solution. The
 genesis of instinct, the development of memory and reason out of
 it, and the consolidation of rational actions and inferences into
 instinctive ones, are alike explicable on the _single principle_
 that the cohesion between psychical states is proportionate to the
 _frequency_ with which the relation between the answering external
 phenomena has been _repeated in experience_.

 "The _universal law_ that, other things equal, the cohesion of
 psychical states is proportionate to the _frequency_ with which they
 have followed one another in experience, supplies an explanation of
 the so-called 'forms of thought,' as soon as it is supplemented by
 the law that _habitual_ psychical successions entail some hereditary
 tendency to such successions, which, under persistent conditions,
 will become cumulative in generation after generation. We saw that
 the establishment of those compound reflex actions called instincts
 is comprehensible on the principle that inner relations are, _by
 perpetual repetition,_ organized into correspondence with outer
 relations. We have now to observe that the establishment of those
 consolidated, those indissoluble, those instinctive mental relations
 constituting our ideas of Space and Time is comprehensible on the
 same principle. For if even to external relations that are _often_
 experienced during the life of a single organism, answering internal
 relations are established that become next to automatic--if such a
 combination of psychical changes as that which guides a savage in
 hitting a bird with an arrow becomes, by constant repetition, so
 organized as to be performed almost without thought of the processes
 of adjustment gone through--and if skill of this kind is so far
 transmissible that particular races of men become characterized by
 particular aptitudes, which are nothing else than partially-organized
 psychical connections; then, if there exist certain external relations
 which are experienced by all organisms at all instants of their
 waking lives--relations which are absolutely constant, absolutely
 universal--there will be established answering internal relations
 that are absolutely constant, absolutely universal. Such relations
 we have in those of Space and Time. The organization of subjective
 relations adjusted to these objective relations has been cumulative,
 not in each race of creatures only, but throughout successive races of
 creatures; and such subjective relations have, therefore, become more
 consolidated than all others. Being experienced in every perception
 and every action of each creature, these connections among outer
 existences must, for this reason too, be responded to by connections
 among inner feelings, that are, above all others, indissoluble. As
 the substrata of all other relations in the _non-ego_, they must
 be responded to by conceptions that are the substrata of all other
 relations in the _ego_. Being the _constant and infinitely-repeated_
 elements of thought, they must become the automatic elements of
 thought--the elements of thought which it is impossible to get rid
 of--the 'forms of intuition.'

 "Such, it seems to me, is the only possible reconciliation between the
 experience-hypothesis and the hypothesis of the transcendentalists;
 neither of which is tenable by itself. Insurmountable difficulties
 are presented by the Kantian doctrine (as we shall hereafter see);
 and the antagonist doctrine, taken alone, presents difficulties
 that are equally insurmountable. To rest with the unqualified
 assertion that, antecedent to experience, the mind is a blank,
 is to ignore the questions--whence comes the power of organizing
 experiences? whence arise the different degrees of that power
 possessed by different races of organisms, and different individuals
 of the same race? If, at birth, there exists nothing but a passive
 receptivity of impressions, why is not a horse as educable as a man?
 Should it be said that language makes the difference, then why do
 not the cat and the dog, reared in the same household, arrive at
 equal degrees and kinds of intelligence? Understood in its current
 form, the experience-hypothesis implies that the presence of a
 definitely-organized nervous system is a circumstance of no moment--a
 fact not needing to be taken into account! Yet it is the all-important
 fact--the fact to which, in one sense, the criticisms of Leibnitz and
 others pointed--the fact without which an assimilation of experiences
 is inexplicable. Throughout the animal kingdom in general, the actions
 are dependent on the nervous structure. The physiologist shows us
 that each reflex movement implies the agency of certain nerves and
 ganglia; that a development of complicated instincts is accompanied by
 complication of the nervous centres and their commissural connections;
 that the same creature in different stages, as larva and imago for
 example, changes its instincts as its nervous structure changes; and
 that as we advance to creatures of high intelligence, a vast increase
 in the size and in the complexity of the nervous system takes place.
 What is the obvious inference? It is that the ability to co-ordinate
 impressions and to perform the appropriate actions always implies
 the pre-existence of certain nerves arranged in a certain way. What
 is the meaning of the human brain? It is that the many _established_
 relations among its parts stand for so many _established_ relations
 among the psychical changes. Each of the constant connections
 among the fibres of the cerebral masses answers to some _constant
 connection_ of phenomena in the experiences of the race. Just as
 the organized arrangement subsisting between the sensory nerves of
 the nostrils and the motor nerves of the respiratory muscles not
 only makes possible a sneeze, but also, in the newly-born infant,
 implies sneezings to be hereafter performed; so, all the organized
 arrangements subsisting among the nerves of the infant's brain not
 only make possible certain combinations of impressions, but also imply
 that such combinations will hereafter be made--imply that there are
 answering combinations in the outer world--imply a preparedness to
 cognize these combinations--imply faculties of comprehending them.
 It is true that the resulting compound psychical changes do not take
 place with the same readiness and automatic precision as the simple
 reflex action instanced--it is true that some individual experiences
 seem required to establish them. But while this is partly due to the
 fact that these combinations are highly involved, extremely varied in
 their modes of occurrence, made up therefore of psychical relations
 less completely coherent, and hence need further repetitions to
 perfect them; it is in a much greater degree due to the fact that at
 birth the organization of the brain is incomplete, and does not cease
 its spontaneous progress for twenty or thirty years afterwards. Those
 who contend that knowledge results wholly from the experiences of the
 individual, ignoring as they do the mental evolution which accompanies
 the autogenous development of the nervous system, fall into an error
 as great as if they were to ascribe all bodily growth and structure
 to exercise, forgetting the innate tendency to assume the adult form.
 Were the infant born with a full-sized and completely-constructed
 brain, their position would be less untenable. But, as the case
 stands, the gradually-increasing intelligence displayed throughout
 childhood and youth is more attributable to the completion of the
 cerebral organization than to the individual experiences--a truth
 proved by the fact that in adult life there is sometimes displayed
 a high endowment of some faculty which, during education, was never
 brought into play. Doubtless, experiences received by the individual
 furnish the concrete materials for all thought. Doubtless, the
 organized and semi-organized arrangements existing among the cerebral
 nerves can give no knowledge until there has been a presentation of
 the external relations to which they correspond. And doubtless the
 child's daily observations and reasonings aid the formation of those
 involved nervous connections that are in process of spontaneous
 evolution; just as its daily gambols aid the development of its
 limbs. But saying this is quite a different thing from saying that
 its intelligence is wholly _produced_ by its experiences. That is an
 utterly inadmissible doctrine--a doctrine which makes the presence of
 a brain meaningless--a doctrine which makes idiotcy unaccountable.

 "In the sense, then, that there exist in the nervous system certain
 pre-established relations answering to relations in the environment,
 there is truth in the doctrine of 'forms of intuition'--not the truth
 which its defenders suppose, but a parallel truth. Corresponding to
 absolute external relations, there are established in the structure
 of the nervous system absolute internal relations--relations that
 are potentially present before birth in the shape of definite
 nervous connections; that are antecedent to, and independent of,
 individual experiences; and that are automatically disclosed along
 with the first cognitions. And, as here understood, it is not only
 these fundamental relations which are thus predetermined, but also
 hosts of other relations of a more or less constant kind, which are
 congenitally represented by more or less complete nervous connections.
 But these predetermined internal relations, though independent of the
 experiences of the individual, are not independent of experiences in
 general: they have been determined by the experiences of preceding
 organisms. The corollary here drawn from the general argument is that
 the human brain is an organized register of _infinitely-numerous_
 experiences received during the evolution of life, or rather during
 the evolution of that series of organisms through which the human
 organism has been reached. The effects of the most _uniform and
 frequent_ of these experiences have been successively bequeathed,
 principal and interest; and have slowly amounted to that high
 intelligence which lies latent in the brain of the infant--which the
 infant in after-life exercises and perhaps strengthens or further
 complicates--and which, with minute additions, it bequeaths to future
 generations. And thus it happens that the European inherits from
 twenty to thirty cubic inches more brain than the Papuan. Thus it
 happens that faculties, as of music, which scarcely exist in some
 inferior human races, become congenital in superior ones. Thus it
 happens that out of savages unable to count up to the number of their
 fingers, and speaking a language containing only nouns and verbs,
 arise at length our Newtons and Shakspeares."

This is a brilliant and seductive statement, and it doubtless includes
a good deal of truth. Unfortunately it fails to go into details; and
when the details are scrutinized, as they soon must be by us, many
of them will be seen to be inexplicable in this simple way, and the
choice will then remain to us either of denying the experiential origin
of certain of our judgments, or of enlarging the meaning of the word
experience so as to include these cases among its effects.


TWO MODES OF ORIGIN OF BRAIN STRUCTURE.


If we adopt the former course we meet with a controversial difficulty.
The 'experience-philosophy' has from time immemorial been the
opponent of theological modes of thought. The word experience has
a halo of anti-supernaturalism about it; so that if anyone express
dissatisfaction with any function claimed for it, he is liable to be
treated as if he could only be animated by loyalty to the catechism,
or in some way have the interests of obscurantism at heart. I am
entirely certain that, on this ground alone, what I have erelong to
say will make this a sealed chapter to many of my readers. "He denies
experience!" they will exclaim, "denies science; believes the mind
created by miracle; is a regular old partisan of innate ideas! That is
enough! we'll listen to such antediluvian twaddle no more." Regrettable
as is the loss of readers capable of such wholesale discipleship, I
feel that a definite meaning for the word experience is even more
important than their company. 'Experience' does not mean every natural,
as opposed to every supernatural, cause. It means a particular sort
of natural agency, alongside of which other more recondite natural
agencies may perfectly well exist. With the scientific animus of
anti-supernaturalism we ought to agree, but we ought to free ourselves
from its verbal idols and bugbears.

       *       *       *       *       *

Nature has many methods of producing the same effect. She may make a
'born' draughtsman or singer by tipping in a certain direction at an
opportune moment the molecules of some human ovum; or she may bring
forth a child ungifted and make him spend laborious but successful
years at school. She may make our ears ring by the sound of a bell,
or by a dose of quinine; make us see yellow by spreading a field of
buttercups before our eyes, or by mixing a little santonine powder with
our food; fill us with terror of certain surroundings by making them
really dangerous, or by a blow which produces a pathological alteration
of our brain. It is obvious that we need two words to designate these
two modes of operating. _In the one case the natural agents produce
perceptions which take cognizance of the agents themselves; in the
other case, they produce perceptions which take cognizance of something
else._ What is taught to the mind by the 'experience,' in the first
case, is the _order of the experience itself_--the 'inner relation' (in
Spencer's phrase) 'corresponds' to the 'outer relation' which produced
it, by remembering and knowing the latter. But in the case of the
_other_ sort of natural agency, what is taught to the mind has nothing
to do with the agency itself, but with some different outer relation
altogether. A diagram will express the alternatives. B stands for our
human brain in the midst of the world. All the little _o_'s with arrows
proceeding from them are natural objects (like sunsets, etc.), which
impress it through the senses, and in the strict sense of the word give
it _experience_, teaching it by habit and association what is the order
of their ways. All the little _x_'s inside the brain and all the little
_x's_ outside of it are other natural objects and processes (in the
ovum, in the blood, etc.), which equally modify the brain, but mould
it to no cognition of _themselves_. The _tinnitus aurium_ discloses no
properties of the quinine; the musical endowment teaches no embryology;
the morbid dread (of solitude, perhaps) no brain-pathology; but the way
in which a dirty sunset and a rainy morrow hang together in the mind
copies and teaches the sequences of sunsets and rainfall in the outer
world.

[Illustration: FIG. 94.]

In zoological evolution we have two modes in which an animal race may
grow to be a better match for its environment.

First, the so-called way of 'adaptation,' in which the environment may
itself modify its inhabitant by exercising, hardening, and habituating
him to certain sequences, and these habits may, it is often maintained,
become hereditary.

Second, the way of 'accidental variation,' as Mr. Darwin termed it,
in which certain young are born with peculiarities that help them and
their progeny to survive. That variations of _this_ sort tend to become
hereditary, no one doubts.

The first mode is called by Mr. Spencer direct, the second indirect,
equilibration. Both equilibrations must of course be natural and
physical processes, but they belong to entirely different physical
spheres. The direct influences are obvious and accessible things. The
causes of variation in the young are, on the other hand, molecular
and hidden. The direct influences are the animal's 'experiences,' in
the widest sense of the term. Where what is influenced by them is the
_mental_ organism, they are _conscious_ experiences, and become the
_objects_ as well as the causes of their effects. That is, the effect
consists in a tendency of the experience itself to be remembered, or
to have its elements thereafter coupled in imagination just as they
were coupled in the experience. In the diagram these experiences
are represented by the _o_'s exclusively. The _x_'s, on the other
hand, stand for the indirect causes of mental modification--causes
of which we are not immediately conscious as such, and which are not
the direct _objects_ of the effects they produce. Some of them are
molecular accidents before birth; some of them are collateral and
remote combinations, unintended combinations, one might say, of more
direct effects wrought in the unstable and intricate brain-tissue. Such
a result is unquestionably the susceptibility to music, which some
individuals possess at the present day. It has no zoological utility;
it corresponds to no object in the natural environment; it is a pure
_incident_ of having a hearing organ, an incident depending on such
instable and inessential conditions that one brother may have it and
another brother not. Just so with the susceptibility to sea-sickness,
which, so far from being engendered by long experience of its 'object'
(if a heaving deck can be called its object) is erelong annulled
thereby. Our higher æsthetic, moral, and intellectual life seems made
up of affections of this collateral and incidental sort, which have
entered the mind by the back stairs, as it were, or rather have not
entered the mind at all, but got surreptitiously born in the house. No
one can successfully treat of psychogenesis, or the factors of mental
evolution, without distinguishing between these two ways in which the
mind is assailed. The way of 'experience' proper is the front door,
the door of the five senses. The agents which affect the brain in this
way immediately become the mind's _objects_. The other agents do not.
It would be simply silly to say of two men with perhaps equal effective
skill in drawing, one an untaught natural genius, the other a mere
obstinate plodder in the studio, that both alike owe their skill to
their 'experience.' The reasons of their several skills lie in wholly
disparate natural cycles of causation.[528]

_I will then,_ with the reader's permission, _restrict the
word 'experience' to processes which influence the mind by the
front-door-way of simple habits and association._ What the
back-door-effects may be will probably grow clearer as we proceed; so
I will pass right on to a scrutiny of the actual mental structure which
we find.


THE GENESIS OF THE ELEMENTARY MENTAL CATEGORIES.


We find: 1. Elementary sorts of sensation, and feelings of personal
activity;

2. Emotions; desires; instincts; ideas of worth; æsthetic ideas;

3. Ideas of time and space and number;

4. Ideas of difference and resemblance, and of their degrees.

5. Ideas of causal dependence among events; of end and means; of
subject and attribute.

6. Judgments affirming, denying, doubting, supposing any of the above
ideas.

7. Judgments that the former judgments logically involve, exclude, or
are indifferent to, each other.

Now we may postulate at the outset that all these forms of thought have
a _natural_ origin, if we could only get at it. That assumption must
be made at the outset of every scientific investigation, or there is
no temptation to proceed. But the first account of their origin which
we are likely to hit upon is a snare. All these mental affections are
ways of knowing objects. Most psychologists nowadays believe that the
objects first, in some natural way, engendered a brain from out of
their midst, and then imprinted these various cognitive affections
upon it. But how? The ordinary evolutionist answer to this question
is exceedingly simple-minded. The idea of most speculators seems to
be that, since it suffices _now_ for us to become acquainted with a
complex object, that it should be simply _present_ to us often enough,
so it must be fair to assume universally that, with time enough
given, the _mere presence_ of the various objects and relations to
be known must end by bringing about the latter's cognition, and that
in this way all mental structure was from first to last evolved. Any
ordinary Spencerite will tell you that just as the experience of blue
objects wrought into our mind the color blue, and hard objects got it
to feel hardness, so the presence of large and small objects in the
world gave it the notion of size, moving objects made it aware of
motion, and objective successions taught it time. Similarly in a world
with different impressing things, the mind had to acquire a sense of
difference, whilst the like parts of the world as they fell upon it
kindled in it the perception of similarity. Outward sequences which
sometimes held good, and sometimes failed, naturally engendered in it
doubtful and uncertain forms of expectation, and ultimately gave rise
to the disjunctive forms of judgment; whilst the hypothetic form, 'if
_a_, then _b_,' was sure to ensue from sequences that were invariable
in the outer world. On this view, if the outer order suddenly were
to change its elements and modes, we should have no faculties to
cognize the new order by. At most we should feel a sort of frustration
and confusion. But little by little the new presence would work on
us as the old one did; and in course of time another set of psychic
categories would arise, fitted to take cognizance of the altered world.

This notion of the outer world inevitably building up a sort of mental
duplicate of itself if we only give it time, is so easy and natural in
its vagueness that one hardly knows how to start to criticise it. One
thing, however, is obvious, namely that _the manner in which we now
become acquainted with complex objects need not in the least resemble
the manner in which the original elements of our consciousness grew
up._ Now, it is true, a new sort of animal need only be present to me,
to impress its image permanently on my mind; but this is because I am
already in possession of categories for knowing each and all of its
several attributes, and of a memory for retracing the order of their
conjunction. I now have preformed categories for all possible objects.
The objects need only awaken these from their slumber. But it is a very
different matter to account for the categories themselves. I think we
must admit that the origin of the various elementary feelings is a
recondite history, even after some sort of neural tissue is there for
the outer world to begin its work on. The mere existence of things
to be known is even now not, as a rule, sufficient to bring about a
knowledge of them. Our abstract and general discoveries usually come
to us as lucky fancies: and it is only _après coup_ that we find that
they correspond to some reality. What immediately produced them were
previous thoughts, with which, and with the brain-processes of which,
that reality had naught to do.

Why may it not have been so of the original elements of consciousness,
sensation, time, space, resemblance, difference, and other relations?
Why may they not have come into being by the back-door method, by such
physical processes as lie more in the sphere of morphological accident,
of inward summation of effects, than in that of the 'sensible presence'
of objects? Why may they not, in short, be pure _idiosyncrasies_,
spontaneous variations, fitted by good luck (those of them which have
survived) to take cognizance of objects (that is, to steer us in our
active dealings with them), without being in any intelligible sense
immediate derivatives from them? I think we shall find this view gain
more and more plausibility as we proceed.[529]

All these elements are subjective duplicates of outer objects. They
_are_ not the outer objects. The secondary qualities among them are
not supposed by any educated person even to resemble the objects.
Their _nature_ depends more on the reacting brain than on the stimuli
which touch it off. This is even more palpably true of the natures of
pleasure and pain, effort, desire and aversion, and of such feelings
as those of cause and substance, of denial and of doubt. Here then is
a native wealth of inner forms whose origin is shrouded in mystery,
and which at any rate were not simply 'impressed' from without, in any
intelligible sense of the verb 'to impress.'

       *       *       *       *       *

Their _time- and space-relations_, however, _are_ impressed from
without--for two outer things at least the evolutionary psychologist
must believe to resemble our thoughts of them, these are the time and
space in which the objects lie. _The time- and space-relations between
things do stamp copies of themselves within._ Things juxtaposed in
space impress us, continue to be thought of _as_ thus juxtaposed.
Things sequent in time impress their sequence on our memory. And thus,
through experience in the legitimate sense of the word there can be
truly explained an immense number of our mental habitudes, many of
our abstract beliefs, and all our ideas of concrete things, and of
their ways of behavior. Such truths as that fire burns and water
wets, that glass refracts, heat melts snow, fishes live in water and
die on land, and the like, form no small part of the most refined
education, and are the all-in-all of education amongst the brutes and
lowest men. Here the mind is passive and tributary, a servile copy,
fatally and unresistingly fashioned from without. It is the merit of
the associationist school to have seen the wide scope of these effects
of neighborhood in time and space; and their exaggerated applications
of the principle of mere neighborhood ought not to blind us to the
excellent service it has done to Psychology in their hands. As far
as a large part of our thinking goes, then, it can intelligibly be
formulated as a mere lot of _habits_ impressed upon us from without.
The degree of cohesion of our inner relations, is, in this part of
our thinking, proportionate, in Mr. Spencer's phrase, to the degree
of cohesion of the outer relations; the causes and the objects of our
thought are one; and we are, in so far forth, what the materialistic
evolutionists would have us altogether, mere offshoots and creatures of
our environment, and naught besides.[530]

But now the plot thickens, for the images impressed upon our memory
by the outer stimuli are not restricted to the mere time- and
space-relations, in which they originally came, but revive in various
manners (dependent on the intricacy of the brain-paths and the
instability of the tissue thereof), and form secondary combinations
such as the _forms of judgment_, which, taken _per se_, are not
congruent either with the forms in which reality exists or in those in
which experiences befall us, but which may nevertheless be explained
by the way in which experiences befall in a mind gifted with memory,
expectation, and the possibility of feeling doubt, curiosity, belief,
and denial. The conjunctions of experience befall more or less
invariably, variably, or never. The idea of one term will then engender
a fixed, a wavering, or a negative expectation of another, giving
affirmative, the hypothetical, disjunctive, interrogative, and negative
judgments, and judgments of actuality and possibility about certain
things. The separation of attribute from subject in all judgments
(which violates the way in which nature exists) may be similarly
explained by the piecemeal order in which our perceptions come to us,
a vague nucleus growing gradually more detailed as we attend to it
more and more. These particular secondary mental forms have had ample
justice done them by associationists from Hume downwards.

Associationists have also sought to account for discrimination,
abstraction, and generalization by the rates of frequency in which
attributes come to us conjoined. With much less success, I think. In
the chapter on Discrimination, I have, under the "law of dissociation
by varying concomitants," sought to explain as much as possible by the
passive order of experience. But the reader saw how much was left for
active interest and unknown forces to do. In the chapter on Imagination
I have similarly striven to do justice to the 'blended image' theory of
generalization and abstraction. So I need say no more of these matters
here.


THE GENESIS OF THE NATURAL SCIENCES.


Our 'scientific' ways of thinking the outer reality are highly abstract
ways. The essence of things for science is not to be what they seem,
but to be atoms and molecules moving to and from each other according
to strange laws. Nowhere does the account of inner relations produced
by outer ones in proportion to the frequency with which the latter have
been met, more egregiously break down than in the case of scientific
conceptions. The order of scientific thought is quite incongruent
either with the way in which reality exists or with the way in which
it comes before us. Scientific thought goes by selection and emphasis
exclusively. We break the solid plenitude of fact into separate
essences, conceive generally what only exists particularly, and by
our classifications leave nothing in its natural neighborhood, but
separate the contiguous, and join what the poles divorce. The reality
_exists_ as a _plenum_. All its parts are contemporaneous, each is as
real as any other, and each as essential for making the whole just what
it is and nothing else. But we can neither experience nor think this
_plenum_. What we experience, what _comes before us_, is a chaos of
fragmentary impressions interrupting each other;[531] what we _think_
is an abstract system of hypothetical data and laws.[532]

This sort of scientific algebra, little as it immediately resembles
the reality given to us, turns out (strangely enough) applicable
to it. That is, it yields expressions which, at given places and
times, can be translated into real values, or interpreted as definite
portions of the chaos that falls upon our sense. It becomes thus a
practical guide to our expectations as well as a theoretic delight.
But I do not see how any one with a sense for the facts can possibly
call our systems immediate results of 'experience' in the ordinary
sense. Every scientific conception is in the first instance a
'spontaneous variation' in some one's brain.[533] For one that proves
useful and applicable there are a thousand that perish through their
worthlessness. Their genesis is strictly akin to that of the flashes
of poetry and sallies of wit to which the instable brain-paths equally
give rise. But whereas the poetry and wit (like the science of the
ancients) are their 'own excuse for being,' and have to run the
gauntlet of no farther test, the 'scientific' conceptions must prove
their worth by being 'verified.' This test, however, is the cause of
their _preservation_, not that of their production; and one might as
well account for the origin of Artemus Ward's jokes by the 'cohesion'
of subjects with predicates in proportion to the 'persistence of the
outer relations' to which they 'correspond' as to treat the genesis of
scientific conceptions in the same ponderously unreal way.

The most persistent outer relations which science believes in are never
matters of experience at all, but have to be disengaged from under
experience by a process of elimination, that is, by ignoring conditions
which are always present. The _elementary_ laws of mechanics, physics,
and chemistry are all of this sort. The principle of uniformity in
nature is of this sort; it has to be _sought_ under and in spite of
the most rebellious appearances; and our conviction of its truth is
far more like a religious faith than like assent to a demonstration.
The only cohesions which experience in the literal sense of the
word produces in our mind are, as we contended some time back, the
proximate laws of nature, and habitudes of concrete things, that heat
melts ice, that salt preserves meat, that fish die out of water, and
the like.[534] Such 'empirical truths' as these we admitted to form
an enormous part of human wisdom. The 'scientific' truths have to
harmonize with these truths, or be given up as useless; but they arise
in the mind in no such passive associative way as that in which the
simpler truths arise. Even those experiences which are used to prove a
scientific truth are for the most part artificial experiences of the
laboratory gained after the truth itself has been conjectured. Instead
of experiences engendering the 'inner relations,' the inner relations
are what engender the experiences here.

What happens in the brain after experience has done its utmost is what
happens in every material mass which has been fashioned by an outward
force,--in every pudding or mortar, for example, which I may make
with my hands. The fashioning from without brings the elements into
collocations which set new internal forces free to exert their effects
in turn. And the random irradiations and resettlements of our ideas,
which _supervene upon experience_, and constitute our free mental
play, are due entirely to these secondary internal processes, which
vary enormously from brain to brain, even though the brains be exposed
to exactly the same 'outer relations.' The higher thought-processes
owe their being to causes which correspond far more to the sourings
and fermentations of dough, the setting of mortar, or the subsidence
of sediments in mixtures, than to the manipulations by which these
physical aggregates came to be compounded. Our study of similar
association and reasoning taught us that the whole superiority of man
depended on the facility with which in his brain the paths worn by the
most frequent outer cohesions could be ruptured. The causes of the
instability, the reasons why now this point and now that become in him
the seat of rupture, we saw to be entirely obscure. (Vol. I. p. 580;
Vol. II. p. 364.) The only clear thing about the peculiarity seems to
be its interstitial character, and the certainty that no mere appeal to
man's 'experience' suffices to explain it.

When we pass from scientific to æsthetic and ethical systems, every one
readily admits that, although the elements are matters of experience,
the peculiar forms of relation into which they are woven are
incongruent with the order of passively received experience. The world
of æsthetics and ethics is an ideal world, a Utopia, a world which the
outer relations persist in contradicting, but which we as stubbornly
persist in striving to make actual. Why do we thus invincibly crave
to alter the given order of nature? Simply because other relations
among things are far more interesting to us and more charming than
the mere rates of frequency of their time- and space-conjunctions.
These other relations are all secondary and brain-born, 'spontaneous
variations' most of them, of our sensibility, whereby certain elements
of experience, and certain arrangements in time and space, have
acquired an agreeableness which otherwise would not have been felt.
It is true that habitual arrangements may also become agreeable. But
this agreeableness of the merely habitual is felt to be a mere ape and
counterfeit of real inward fitness; and one sign of intelligence is
never to mistake the one for the other.

_There are then ideal and inward relations amongst the objects of our
thought which can in no intelligible sense whatever be interpreted
as reproductions of the order of outer experience._ In the æsthetic
and ethical realms they conflict with its order--the early Christian
with his kingdom of heaven, and the contemporary anarchist with his
abstract dream of justice, will tell you that the existing order
must perish, root and branch, ere the true order can come. Now the
peculiarity of those relations among the objects of our thought which
are dubbed 'scientific' is this, that although they no more are inward
_reproductions_ of the outer order than the ethical and æsthetic
relations are, yet they do not conflict with that order, but, once
having sprung up by the play of the inward forces, are found--some
of them at least, namely the only ones which have survived long
enough to be matters of record--to be _congruent_ with the time- and
space-relations which our impressions affect.

In other words, though nature's materials lend themselves slowly and
discouragingly to our translation of them into ethical forms, but more
readily into æsthetic forms; to translation into scientific forms they
lend themselves with relative ease and completeness. The translation,
it is true, will probably never be ended. The perceptive order does
not give way, nor the right conceptive substitute for it arise, at our
bare word of command.[535] It is often a deadly fight; and many a man
of science can say, like Johannes Müller, after an investigation, '_Es
klebt Blut an der Arbeit_.' But victory after victory makes us sure
that the essential doom of our enemy is defeat.[536]


THE GENESIS OF THE PURE SCIENCES.


I have now stated in general terms the relation of the natural sciences
to experience strictly so called, and shall complete what I have to say
by reverting to the subject on a later page. At present I will pass to
the so-called _pure_ or _a priori sciences_ of Classification, Logic,
and Mathematics. My thesis concerning these is that they are even less
than the natural sciences effects of the order of the world as it comes
to our experience. THE PURE SCIENCES EXPRESS RESULTS OF COMPARISON
_exclusively; comparison is not a conceivable effect of the order in
which outer impressions are experienced--it is one of the house-born_
(p. 627) _portions of our mental structure; therefore the pure
sciences form a body of propositions with whose genesis experience has
nothing to do._

       *       *       *       *       *

First, consider the nature of comparison. _The relations of resemblance
and difference among things have nothing to do with the time- and
space-order in which we may experience the latter._ Suppose a hundred
beings created by God and gifted with the faculties of memory and
comparison. Suppose that upon each of them the same lot of sensations
are imprinted, but in different orders. Let some of them have no
single sensation more than once. Let some have this one and others
that one repeated. Let every conceivable permutation prevail. And then
let the magic-lantern show die out, and keep the creatures in a void
eternity, with naught but their memories to muse upon. Inevitably in
their long leisure they will begin to play with the items of their
experience and rearrange them, make classificatory series of them,
place gray between white and black, orange between red and yellow, and
trace all other degrees of resemblance and difference. And this new
construction will be absolutely identical in all the hundred creatures,
the diversity of the sequence of the original experiences having no
effect as regards this rearrangement. Any and every form of sequence
will give the same result, because the result expresses the relation
between the _inward natures_ of the sensations; and to that the
question of their outward succession is quite irrelevant. Black will
differ from white just as much in a world in which they always come
close together as in one in which they always come far apart; just as
much in one in which they appear rarely as in one in which they appear
all the time.

       *       *       *       *       *

But the advocate of 'persistent outer relations' may still return to
the charge: These _are_ what make us so sure that white and black
differ, he may say; for in a world where sometimes black resembled
white and sometimes differed from it, we could never be so sure. It
is because in this world black and white have _always_ differed that
the sense of their difference has become a necessary form of thought.
The pair of colors on the one hand and the sense of difference on
the other, inseparably experienced, not only by ourselves but by
our ancestors, have become inseparably connected in the mind. Not
through any essential structure of the mind, which made difference
the only possible feeling which they could arouse; no, but because
they simply _did_ differ so often that at last they begat in us an
impotency to imagine them doing anything else, and made us accept such
a fabulous account as that just presented, of creatures to whom a
single experience would suffice to make us feel the necessity of this
relation.

I know not whether Mr. Spencer would subscribe to this or not;--nor do
I care, for there are mysteries which press more for solution than the
meaning of this vague writer's words. But to me such an explanation of
our difference-judgment is absolutely unintelligible. We now find black
and white different, the explanation says, _because we have always have
so found them._ But why should we always have so found them? Why should
difference have popped into our heads so invariably with the thought of
them? There must have been either a subjective or an objective reason.
The subjective reason can only be that our minds were so constructed
that a sense of difference was the only sort of conscious transition
possible between black and white; the objective reason can only be
that difference was always there, with these colors, outside the mind
as an objective fact. The subjective reason explains outer frequency
by inward structure, not inward structure by outer frequency; and so
surrenders the experience-theory. The objective reason simply says that
if an outer difference is there the mind must needs know it--which is
no explanation at all, but a mere appeal to the fact that somehow the
mind does know what is there.

The only clear thing to do is to give up the sham of a pretended
explanation, and to fall back on the fact that the sense of difference
_has_ arisen, in some natural manner doubtless, but in a manner which
we do not understand. It was by the back-stairs way, at all events;
and, from the very first, happened to be the only mode of reaction
by which consciousness could feel the transition from one term to
another of what (in _consequence_ of this very reaction) we now call a
contrasted pair.

       *       *       *       *       *

In noticing the differences and resemblances of things, and their
degrees, the mind feels its own activity, and has given the name
of _comparison_ thereto. It need not compare its materials, but if
once roused to do so, it can compare them with but one result, and
this a fixed consequence of the nature of the materials themselves.
Difference and resemblance are thus relations between ideal objects, or
conceptions as such. To learn whether black and white differ, I need
not consult the world of experience at all; the mere ideas suffice.
_What I mean_ by black differs from _what I mean_ by white, whether
such colors exist _extra mentem meam_ or not. If they ever do so exist,
they _will_ differ. White things may blacken, but the black of them
will differ from the white of them, so long as I mean anything definite
by these three words.[537]

       *       *       *       *       *

_I shall now in what follows call all propositions which express time-
and space-relations empirical propositions; and I shall give the name
of rational propositions to all propositions which express the results
of a comparison._ The latter denomination is in a sense arbitrary, for
resemblance and difference are not usually held to be the only rational
relations between things. I will next proceed to show, however, how
many other rational relations commonly supposed distinct can be
resolved into these, so that my definition of rational propositions
will end, I trust, by proving less arbitrary than it now appears to be.


SERIES OF EVEN DIFFERENCE AND MEDIATE COMPARISON.


In Chapter XII we saw that the mind can at successive moments _mean
the same_, and that it gradually comes into possession of a stock of
permanent and fixed meanings, ideal objects, or conceptions, some of
which are universal qualities, like the black and white of our example,
and some, individual things. We now see that not only are the objects
permanent mental possessions, but the results of their comparison are
permanent too. The objects and their differences together form an
immutable system. _The same objects, compared in the same way, always
give the same results;_ if the result be not the same, then the
objects are not those originally meant.

This last principle, which we may call the _axiom of constant result_,
holds good throughout all our mental operations, not only when we
compare, but when we add, divide, class, or infer a given matter in
any conceivable way. Its most general expression would be "_the Same
operated on in the same way gives the Same_." In mathematics it takes
the form of "equals added to, or subtracted from, equals give equals,"
and the like. We shall meet with it again.

The next thing which we observe is that _the operation of comparing may
be repeated on its own results_; in other words, that we can think of
the various resemblances and differences which we find and compare them
with each other, making differences and resemblances of a higher order.
_The mind thus becomes aware of sets of similar differences, and forms
series of terms with the same kind and amount of difference between
them, terms which, as they succeed each other, maintain a constant
direction of serial increase._ This sense of constant direction in a
series of operations we saw in Chapter XIII (p. 490) to be a cardinal
mental fact. "A differs from B differs from C differs from D, etc.,"
makes a _series_ only when the differences are in the same direction.
In any such difference-series all terms differ in just the same way
from their predecessors. The numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,... the notes of the
chromatic scale in music, are familiar examples. As soon as the mind
grasps such a series as a whole, it perceives that _two terms taken far
apart differ more than two terms taken near together_, and that any one
term differs more from a remote than from a near successor, and this no
matter what the terms may be, or what the sort of difference may be,
provided it is always the same sort.

This PRINCIPLE OF MEDIATE COMPARISON might be briefly (though
obscurely) expressed by the formula "_more than the more is more than
the less_"--the words _more_ and _less_ standing simply for degrees
of increase along a constant direction of differences. Such a formula
would cover all possible cases, as, earlier than early is earlier than
late, worse than bad is worse than good, east of east is east of west;
etc., etc., _ad libitum_.[538] Symbolically, we might write it as _a_
< _b_ < _c_ < _d_.... and say that any number of intermediaries may be
expunged without obliging us to alter anything in what remains written.

The principle of mediate comparison is only one form of a law which
holds in many series of homogeneously related terms, the law that
_skipping intermediary terms leaves relations the same_. This AXIOM
OF SKIPPED INTERMEDIARIES or of TRANSFERRED RELATIONS occurs, as we
soon shall see, in logic as the fundamental principle of inference,
in arithmetic as the fundamental property of the number-series, in
geometry as that of the straight line, the plane and the parallel. _It
seems to be on the whole the broadest and deepest law of man's thought._

In certain lists of terms the result of comparison may be to find
no-difference, or equality in place of difference. Here also
intermediaries may be skipped, and mediate comparison be carried on
with the general result expressed by the _axiom of mediate equality_,
"equals of equals are equal," which is the great principle of the
mathematical sciences. This too as a result of the mind's mere
acuteness, and in utter independence of the order in which experiences
come associated together. Symbolically, again: _a = b = c = d...,_ with
the same consequence as regards expunging terms which we saw before.


CLASSIFICATORY SERIES.


Thus we have a rather intricate system of necessary and immutable
_ideal truths of comparison_, a system applicable to terms
_experienced_ in any order of sequence or frequency, or even to
terms never experienced or to be experienced, such as the mind's
imaginary constructions would be. These truths of comparison result in
_Classifications_. It is, for some unknown reason, a great æsthetic
delight for the mind to break the order of experience, and class its
materials in serial orders, proceeding from step to step of difference,
and to contemplate untiringly the crossings and inosculations of the
series among themselves. The first steps in most of the sciences are
purely classificatory. Where facts fall easily into rich and intricate
series (as plants and animals and chemical compounds do), the mere
sight of the series fills the mind with a satisfaction _sui generis_;
and a world whose _real_ materials naturally lend themselves to serial
classification is _pro tanto_ a more rational world, a world with which
the mind will feel more intimate, than with a world in which they do
not. By the pre-evolutionary naturalists, whose generation has hardly
passed away, classifications were supposed to be ultimate insights
into God's mind, filling us with adoration of his ways. The fact that
Nature lets us make them was a proof of the presence of his Thought
in her bosom. So far as the facts of experience can _not_ be serially
classified, therefore, so far experience fails to be rational in _one_
of the ways, at least, which we crave.


THE LOGIC-SERIES.


Closely akin to the function of comparison is that of _judging,
predicating, or subsuming_. In fact, these elementary intellectual
functions run into each other so, that it is often only a question of
practical convenience whether we shall call a given mental operation
by the name of one or of the other. Comparisons result in groups of
like things; and presently (through discrimination and abstraction)
in conceptions of the _respects_ in which the likenesses obtain. The
groups are _genera_ or _classes_, the respects are _characters_ or
_attributes_. The attributes again may be compared, forming genera of
higher orders, and their characters singled out; so that we have a new
sort of series, _that of predication, or of kind including kind_. Thus
horses are quadrupeds, quadrupeds animals, animals machines, machines
liable to wear out, etc. In such a series as this the several couplings
of terms may have been made out originally at widely different times
and under different circumstances. But memory may bring them together
afterwards; and whenever it does so, our faculty of apprehending serial
increase makes us conscious of them as a single system of successive
terms united by the same relation.[539]

Now whenever we become thus conscious, we may become aware of an
additional relation which is of the highest intellectual importance,
inasmuch as upon it the whole structure of logic is reared. _The
principle of mediate predication or subsumption_ is only the axiom of
skipped intermediaries applied to a series of successive predications.
It expresses the fact that any earlier term in the series stands to any
later term in the same relation in which it stands to any intermediate
term; in other words, that _whatever has an attribute has all the
attributes of that attribute;_ or more briefly still, that _whatever
is of a kind is of that kind's kind._ A little explanation of this
statement will bring out all that it involves.

We learned in the chapter on Reasoning what our great motive is for
abstracting attributes and predicating them. It is that our varying
practical purposes require us to lay hold of different angles of the
reality at different times. But for these we should be satisfied to
'see it whole,' and always alike. The purpose, however, makes one
aspect essential; so, to avoid dispersion of the attention, we treat
the reality as if for the time being it were nothing but that aspect,
and we let its supernumerary determinations go. In short, we substitute
the aspect for the whole real thing. _For our purpose_ the aspect _can_
be substituted for the whole, and the two treated as the same; and the
word _is_ (which couples the whole with its aspect or attribute in the
categoric judgment) expresses (among other things) the identifying
operation performed. The predication-series _a_ is _b, b_ is _c,
c_ is _d_,... closely resembles for certain practical purposes the
equation-series _a = b, b = c, c = d_, etc.

But what is our purpose in predicating? Ultimately, it may be
anything we please; but proximately and immediately, it is always the
gratification of a certain curiosity as to whether the object in hand
is or is not _of a kind_ connected with that ultimate purpose. Usually
the connection is not obvious, and we only find that the object S is of
a kind connected with P, after first finding that it is of a kind M,
which itself is connected with P. Thus, to fix our ideas by an example,
we have a curiosity (our ultimate purpose being conquest over nature)
as to how Sirius may move. It is not obvious whether Sirius is a kind
of thing which moves in the line of sight or not. When, however, we
find it to be a kind of thing in whose spectrum the hydrogen-line is
shifted, and when we reflect that _that_ kind of thing is a kind of
thing which moves in the line of sight; we conclude that Sirius does
so move. Whatever Sirius's attribute is, Sirius is; its adjective's
adjective can supersede its own adjective in our thinking, and this
with no loss to our knowledge, _so long as we stick to the definite
purpose in view._

Now please note that this elimination of intermediary kinds and
transfer of _is_'s along the line, results from our insight into the
very meaning of the word _is_, and into the constitution of any series
of terms connected by that relation. It has naught to do with what
any particular thing is or is not; but, _whatever_ any given thing
may be, we see that it also is whatever _that_ is, indefinitely. To
grasp in one view a succession of _is_'s is to apprehend this relation
between the terms which they connect; just as to grasp a list of
successive equals is to apprehend their _mutual_ equality throughout.
The principle of mediate subsumption thus expresses relations of ideal
objects as such. It can be discovered by a mind left at leisure with
any set of meanings (however originally obtained), of which some are
predicable of others. The moment we string them in a serial line, that
moment we see that we can drop intermediaries, treat remote terms just
like near ones, and put a genus in the place of a species. This shows
that _the principle of mediate subsumption has nothing to do with the
particular order of our experiences, or with the outer coexistences and
sequences of terms._ Were it a mere outgrowth of habit and association,
we should be forced to regard it as having no universal validity; for
every hour of the day we meet things which we consider to be of this
kind or of that, but later learn that they have none of the kind's
properties, that they _do not_ belong to the kind's kind. Instead,
however, of correcting the principle by these cases, we correct the
cases by the principle. We say that if the thing we named an M has
not M's properties, then we were either mistaken in calling it an M,
or mistaken about M's properties; or else that it is no longer M, but
has changed. But we never say that it is an M without M's properties;
for by conceiving a thing as of the kind M I mean that it _shall_ have
M's properties, be of M's kind, even though I should never be able to
find in the real world anything which is an M. The principle emanates
from my perception of what a lot of successive is's _mean_. This
perception can no more be confirmed by one set, or weakened by another
set, of outer facts, than the perception that black is not white can be
confirmed by the fact that snow never blackens, or weakened by the fact
that photographer's paper blackens as soon as you lay it in the sun.

The abstract scheme of successive predications, extended indefinitely,
with all the possibilities of substitution which it involves, is thus
an immutable system of truth which flows from the very structure
and form of our thinking. _If_ any real terms ever do fit into such
a scheme, they will obey its laws; _whether_ they do is a question
as to nature's facts, the answer to which can only be empirically
ascertained. _Formal logic_ is the name of the Science which traces
in skeleton form all the remote relations of terms connected by
successive _is_'s with each other, and enumerates their possibilities
of mutual substitution. To our principle of mediate subsumption she has
given various formulations, of which the best is perhaps this broad
expression, that _the same can be substituted for the same in any
mental operation._[540]

The ordinary logical series contains but three terms--"Socrates, man,
mortal." But we also have 'Sorites'--Socrates, man, animal, machine,
run down, mortal, etc.--and it violates psychology to represent these
as syllogisms with terms suppressed. The ground of there being any
logic at all is our power to grasp any series as a whole, and the more
terms it holds the better. This synthetic consciousness of an uniform
direction of advance through a multiplicity of terms is, apparently,
what the brutes and lower men cannot accomplish, and what gives to us
our extraordinary power of ratiocinative thought. The mind which can
grasp a string of _is_'s as a whole--the objects linked by them may
be ideal or real, physical, mental, or symbolic, indifferently--can
also apply to it the principle of skipped intermediaries. _The
logic-list is thus in its origin and essential nature just like
those graded classificatory lists which we erewhile described._ The
'rational proposition' which lies at the basis of all reasoning, the
_dictum de omni et nullo_ in all the various forms in which it may be
expressed, the fundamental law of thought, is thus _only the result
of the function of comparison_ in a mind which has come by some lucky
variation to apprehend a series of more than two terms at once.[541]
So far, then, _both Systematic Classification and Logic are seen to
be incidental results of the mere capacity for discerning difference
and likeness,_ which capacity is a thing with which the _order of
experience_, properly so styled, has absolutely nothing to do.

       *       *       *       *       *

But how comes it (it may next be asked) when systematic classifications
have so little ultimate theoretic importance--for the conceiving of
things according to their mere degrees of resemblance always yields to
other modes of conceiving when these can be obtained--that the logical
relations among things should form such a mighty engine for dealing
with the facts of life?

Chapter XXII already gave the reason (see p. 335, above). This world
_might_ be a world in which all things differed, and in which what
properties there were were ultimate and had no farther predicates.
In such a world there would be as many kinds as there were separate
things. We could never subsume a new thing under an old kind; or if we
could, no consequences would follow. Or, again, this might be a world
in which innumerable things were of a kind, but in which no concrete
thing remained of the same kind long, but all objects were in a flux.
Here again, though we could subsume and infer, our logic would be of no
practical use to us, for the subjects of our propositions would have
changed whilst we were talking. In such worlds, logical relations would
obtain, and be known (doubtless) as they are now, but they would form
a merely theoretic scheme and be of no use for the conduct of life.
But our world is no such world. It is a very peculiar world, and plays
right into logic's hands. _Some_ of the things, at least, which it
contains are of the same kind as other things; _some_ of them remain
always of the kind of which they once were; and some of the properties
of them cohere indissolubly and are always found together. _Which_
things these latter things are we learn by experience in the strict
sense of the word, and the results of the experience are embodied in
'empirical propositions.' Whenever such a thing is met with by us now,
our sagacity notes it to be of a certain kind; our learning immediately
recalls that kind's kind, and then _that_ kind's kind, and so on; so
that a moment's thinking may make us aware that the thing is of a kind
so remote that we could never have directly perceived the connection.
The flight to this last kind _over the heads of the intermediaries_ is
the essential feature of the intellectual operation here. Evidently it
is a pure outcome of our sense for apprehending serial increase; and,
unlike the several propositions themselves which make up the series
(and which may all be empirical), it has nothing to do with the time-
and space-order in which the things have been experienced.


MATHEMATICAL RELATIONS.


So much for the _a priori_ necessities called systematic classification
and logical inference. The other couplings of data which pass for _a
priori_ necessities of thought are the _mathematical_ judgments, and
certain metaphysical propositions. These latter we shall consider
farther on. As regards the mathematical judgments, they are all
'rational propositions' in the sense defined on p. 644, for they
express results of comparison and nothing more. The mathematical
sciences deal with similarities and equalities exclusively, and
not with coexistences and sequences. Hence they have, in the first
instance, no connection with the order of experience. The comparisons
of mathematics are between numbers and extensive magnitudes, giving
rise to arithmetic and geometry respectively.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Number_ seems to signify primarily the strokes of our attention in
discriminating things. These strokes remain in the memory in groups,
large or small, and the groups can be compared. The discrimination is,
as we know, psychologically facilitated by the mobility of the thing
as a total (p. 173). But within each thing we discriminate parts; so
that the number of things which any one given phenomenon may be depends
in the last instance on our way of taking it. A globe is one, if
undivided; two, if composed of hemispheres. A sand-heap is one thing,
or twenty thousand things, as we may choose to count it. We amuse
ourselves by the counting of _mere_ strokes, to form rhythms, and these
we compare and name. Little by little in our minds the number-series is
formed. This, like all lists of terms in which there is a direction of
serial increase, carries with it the sense of those mediate relations
between its terms which we expressed by the axiom "the more than the
more is more than the less." That axiom seems, in fact, only a way of
stating that the terms do form an increasing series. But, in addition
to this, we are aware of certain other relations among our strokes of
counting. We may interrupt them where we like, and go on again. All
the while we feel that the interruption does not alter the strokes
themselves. We may count 12 straight through; or count 7 and pause,
and then count 5, but still the strokes will be the same. We thus
distinguish between our acts of counting and those of interrupting
or grouping, as between an unchanged matter and an operation of
mere shuffling performed on it. The matter is the original units or
strokes; which all modes of grouping or combining simply give us back
unchanged. In short, _combinations of numbers are combinations of their
units_, which is the fundamental axiom of arithmetic,[542] leading to
such consequences as that 7 + 5 = 8 + 4 because both = 12. The general
axiom of mediate equality, that equals of equals are equal, comes in
here.[543] The principle of constancy in our meanings, when applied to
strokes of counting, also gives rise to the axiom that the same number,
operated on (interrupted, grouped) in the same way will always give
the same result or be the same. How shouldn't it? Nothing is supposed
changed.

_Arithmetic and its fundamental principles are thus independent of our
experiences or of the order of the world._ The matter of arithmetic
is _mental matter_; its principles flow from the fact that the matter
forms a series, which can be cut into by us wherever we like without
the matter changing. The empiricist school has strangely tried to
interpret the truths of number as results of coexistences among
outward things. John Mill calls number a physical property of things.
'One,' according to Mill, means one sort of passive sensation which we
receive, 'two' another, 'three' a third. The same things, however, can
give us different number-sensations. Three things arranged thus, ---,
for example, impress us differently from three things arranged thus,
-_-. But experience tells us that every real object-group which can
be arranged in one of these ways can always be arranged in the other
also, and that 2 + 1 and 3 are thus modes of numbering things which
'coexist' invariably with each other. The indefeasibility of our belief
in their 'coexistence' (which is Mill's word for their equivalence)
is due solely to the enormous amount of experience we have of it. For
all things, whatever other sensations they may give us, give us at any
rate number-sensations. Those number-sensations which the same thing
may be successively made to arouse are the numbers which we deem equal
to each other; those which the same thing refuses to arouse are those
which we deem unequal.

This is as clear a restatement as I can make of Mill's doctrine.[544]
And its failure is written upon its front. Woe to arithmetic, were such
the only grounds for its validity! The same real things are countable
in numberless ways, and pass from one numerical form, not only to
its equivalent (as Mill implies), but to its other, as the sport of
physical accidents or of our mode of attending may decide. How could
our notion that one and one are eternally and necessarily two ever
maintain itself in a world where every time we add one drop of water to
another we get not two but one again? in a world where every time we
add a drop to a crumb of quicklime we get a dozen or more?--had it no
better warrant than such experiences? At most we could then say that
one and one are _usually_ two. Our arithmetical propositions would
never have the confident tone which they now possess. That confident
tone is due to the fact that they deal with abstract and ideal numbers
exclusively. _What we mean_ by one plus one _is_ two; we _make_ two out
of it; and it would mean two still even in a world where _physically_
(according to a conceit of Mill's) a third thing was engendered every
time one thing came together with another. We are masters of our
meanings, and discriminate between the things we mean and our ways of
taking them, between our strokes of numeration themselves, and our
bundlings and separatings thereof.

Mill ought not only to have said, "All things are numbered." He
ought, in order to prove his point, to have shown that they are
_unequivocally_ numbered, which they notoriously are not. Only the
abstract numbers themselves are unequivocal, only those which we create
mentally and hold fast to as ideal objects always the same. A concrete
natural thing can always be numbered in a great variety of ways. "We
need only conceive a thing divided into four equal parts (and all
things may be conceived as so divided)," as Mill is himself compelled
to say, to find the number four in it, and so on.

The relation of numbers to experience is just like that of 'kinds'
in logic. So long as an experience will keep its kind we can handle
it by logic. So long as it will keep its number we can deal with it
by arithmetic. _Sensibly_, however, things are constantly changing
their numbers, just as they are changing their kinds. They are forever
breaking apart and fusing. Compounds and their elements are never
numerically identical, for the elements are sensibly many and the
compounds sensibly one. Unless our arithmetic is to remain without
application to life, we must somehow _make_ more numerical continuity
than we spontaneously find. Accordingly Lavoisier discovers his
weight-units which remain the same in compounds and elements, though
volume-units and quality-units all have changed. A great discovery!
And modern science outdoes it by denying that compounds exist at all.
There is no such thing as 'water' for 'science;' that is only a handy
name for H_{2} and O when they have got into the position H-O-H, and
then affect our senses in a novel way. The modern theories of atoms,
of heat, and of gases are, in fact, only intensely artificial devices
for gaining that constancy in the numbers of things which sensible
experience will not show. "Sensible things are not the things for
me," says Science, "because in their changes they will not keep their
numbers the same. Sensible qualities are not the qualities for me,
because they can with difficulty be numbered at all. These hypothetic
atoms, however, are the things, these hypothetic masses and velocities
are the qualities for me; they will stay numbered all the time."

By such elaborate inventions, and at such a cost to the imagination, do
men succeed in making for themselves a world in which real things shall
be coerced _per fas aut nefas_ under arithmetical law.

       *       *       *       *       *

The other branch of mathematics is _geometry_. Its objects are also
ideal creations. Whether nature contain circles or not, I can know what
I mean by a circle and can stick to my meaning; and when I mean two
circles I mean two things of an identical kind. The axiom of constant
results (see above, p. 645) holds in geometry. The same forms,
treated in the same way (added, subtracted, or compared), give the
same results--how shouldn't they? The axioms of mediate comparison (p.
645), of logic (p. 648), and of number (p. 654) all apply to the
forms which we imagine in space, inasmuch as these resemble or differ
from each other, form kinds, and are numerable things. But in addition
to these general principles, which are true of space-forms only as they
are of other mental conceptions, there are certain axioms relative to
space-forms exclusively, which we must briefly consider.

Three of them give marks of identity among straight lines, planes,
and parallels. Straight lines which have two points, planes which
have three points, parallels to a given line which have one point, in
common, coalesce throughout. Some say that the certainty of our belief
in these axioms is due to repeated experiences of their truth; others
that it is due to an intuitive acquaintance with the properties of
space. It is neither. We experience lines enough which pass through
two points only to separate again, only we won't call them straight.
Similarly of planes and parallels. We have a definite idea of what we
mean by each of these words; and when something different is offered
us, we see the difference. Straight lines, planes, and parallels,
as they figure in geometry, are mere inventions of our faculty for
apprehending serial increase. The farther continuations of these forms,
we say, _shall_ bear the same relation to their last visible parts
which these did to still earlier parts. It thus follows (from that
axiom of skipped intermediaries which obtains in all regular series)
that parts of these figures separated by other parts must agree in
direction, just as contiguous parts do. This uniformity of direction
throughout is, in fact, all that makes us care for these forms, gives
them their beauty, and stamps them into fixed conceptions in our mind.
But obviously if two lines, or two planes, with a common segment,
were to part company beyond the segment, it could only be because the
direction of at least one of them had changed. Parting company in lines
and planes _means_ changing direction, means assuming a new relation
to the parts that pre-exist; and assuming a new relation means ceasing
to be straight or plane. If we mean by a parallel a line that will
never meet a second line; and if we have one such line drawn through a
point, any new line drawn through that point which does not coalesce
with the first must be inclined to it, and if inclined to it must
approach the second, i.e., cease to be parallel with it. No properties
of outlying space need come in here: only a definite conception of
uniform direction, and constancy in sticking to one's point.

The other two axioms peculiar to geometry are that figures can be
moved in space without change, and that no variation in the way of
subdividing a given amount of space alters its total quantity.[545]
This last axiom is similar to what we found to obtain in numbers. 'The
whole is equal to its parts' is an abridged way of expressing it. A man
is not the same biological whole if we cut him in two at the neck as if
we divide him at the ankles; but geometrically he is the same whole,
no matter in which place we cut him. The axiom about figures being
movable in space is rather a postulate than an axiom. _So far as they
are_ so movable, then certain fixed equalities and differences obtain
between forms, _no matter where placed_. But if translation through
space warped or magnified forms, then the relations of equality, etc.,
would always have to be expressed with a position-qualification added.
A geometry as absolutely certain as ours could be invented on the
supposition of such a space, if the laws of its warping and deformation
were fixed. It would, however, be much more complicated than our
geometry, which makes the simplest possible supposition; and finds,
luckily enough, that it is a supposition with which the space of our
experience seems to agree.

By means of these principles, all playing into each other's hands, the
mutual equivalences of an immense number of forms can be traced, even
of such as at first sight bear hardly any resemblance to each other.
We move and turn them mentally, and find that parts of them will
superpose. We add imaginary lines which subdivide or enlarge them, and
find that the new figures resemble each other in ways which show us
that the old ones are equivalent too. We thus end by expressing all
sorts of forms in terms of other forms, enlarging our knowledge of the
kinds of things which certain other kinds of things are, or to which
they are equivalent.

The result is a new system of mental objects which can be treated
as identical for certain purposes, a new series of _is_'s almost
indefinitely prolonged, just like the series of equivalencies among
numbers, part of which the multiplication-table expresses. And all this
is in the first instance regardless of the coexistences and sequences
of nature, and regardless of whether the figures we speak of have ever
been outwardly experienced or not.


CONSCIOUSNESS OF SERIES IS THE BASIS OF RATIONALITY.


Classification, logic, and mathematics all result, then, from the mere
play of the mind comparing its conceptions, no matter whence the latter
may have come. The essential condition for the formation of all these
sciences is that we should have grown capable of apprehending series
as such, and of distinguishing them as homogeneous or heterogeneous,
and as possessing definite directions of what I have called 'increase.'
This consciousness of series is a human perfection which has been
gradually evolved, and which varies greatly from man to man. There is
no accounting for it as a result of habitual associations among outward
impressions, so we must simply ascribe it to the factors, whatever they
be, of inward cerebral growth. Once this consciousness attained to,
however, _mediate_ thought becomes possible; with our very awareness of
a series may go an awareness that dropping terms out of it will leave
identical relations between the terms that remain; and thus arises a
perception of relations between things so naturally separate that we
should otherwise never have compared them together at all.

The axiom of skipped intermediaries applies, however, only to certain
particular series, and among them to those which we have considered,
in which the recurring relation is either of difference, of likeness,
of kind, of numerical addition, or of prolongation in the same linear
or plane direction. It is therefore not a purely formal law of
thinking, but flows from the nature of the matters thought about. It
will not do to say universally that in all series of homogeneously
related terms the remote members are related to each other as the near
ones are; for that will often be untrue. The series A is not B is
not C is not D.... does not permit the relation to be traced between
remote terms. From two negations no inference can be drawn. Nor, to
become more concrete, does the lover of a woman generally love her
beloved, or the contradictor of a contradictor contradict whomever
he contradicts. The slayer of a slayer does not slay the latter's
victim; the acquaintances or enemies of a man need not be each other's
acquaintances or enemies; nor are two things which are on top of a
third thing necessarily on top of each other.

All skipping of intermediaries and transfer of relations occurs
within homogeneous series. But not all homogeneous series allow of
intermediaries being skipped and relations transferred. It depends on
which series they are, on what relations they contain.[546] Let it
not be said that it is a mere matter of verbal association, due to
the fact that language sometimes permits us to transfer the _name_ of
a relation over skipped intermediaries, and sometimes does not; as
where we call men 'progenitors' of their remote as well as of their
immediate posterity, but refuse to call them 'fathers' thereof. There
are relations which are _intrinsically_ transferable, whilst others are
not. The relation of _condition_, e.g., is intrinsically transferable.
What conditions a condition conditions what it conditions--"cause of
cause is cause of effect." The relations of negation and _frustration,_
on the other hand, are not transferable: what frustrates a frustration
does not frustrate what it frustrates. No changes of terminology would
annul the intimate difference between these two cases.

Nothing but the clear sight of the ideas themselves shows whether
the axiom of skipped intermediaries applies to them or not. Their
connections, immediate and remote, flow from their inward natures.
We try to consider them in certain ways, to bring them into certain
relations, and we find that sometimes we can and sometimes we cannot
_The question whether there are or are not inward and essential
connections between conceived objects as such, really is the same
thing as the question whether we can get any new perception from
mentally coupling them together, or pass from one to another by a
mental operation which gives a result._ In the case of some ideas and
operations we get a result; but no result in the case of others. Where
a result comes, it is due exclusively to the _nature_ of the ideas and
of the operation. Take blueness and yellowness, for example. We can
operate on them in some ways, but not in other ways. We can compare
them; but we cannot add one to or subtract it from the other. We can
refer them to a common kind, color; but we cannot make one a kind of
the other, or infer one from the other. This has nothing to do with
experience. For we _can_ add blue _pigment_ to yellow _pigment_, and
subtract it again, and get a result both times. Only we know perfectly
that this is no addition or subtraction of the blue and yellow
qualities or natures themselves.[547]

       *       *       *       *       *

There is thus no denying the fact that _the mind is filled with
necessary and eternal relations which it finds between certain of its
ideal conceptions, and which form a determinate system, independent
of the order of frequency in which experience may have associated the
conception's originals in time and space._

Shall we continue to call these sciences 'intuitive,' innate,' or '_a
priori_' bodies of truth, or not?[548] Personally I should like to
do so. But I hesitate to use the terms, on account of the odium which
controversial history has made the whole of their connotation for many
worthy persons. The most politic way not to alienate these readers is
to flourish the name of the immortal Locke. For in truth I have done
nothing more in the previous pages than to make a little more explicit
the teachings of Locke's fourth book:

 "The immutability of the same relations between the same immutable
 things is now the idea that shows him that if the three angles of a
 triangle were once equal to two right angles, they will always be
 equal to two right ones. And hence he comes to be certain that what
 was once true in the case is always true; what ideas once agreed will
 always agree.... Upon this ground it is that particular demonstrations
 in mathematics afford general knowledge. If, then, the perception that
 the same ideas will eternally have the same habitudes and relations
 be not a sufficient ground of knowledge, there could be no knowledge
 of general propositions in mathematics.... All general knowledge lies
 only in our own thoughts, and consists barely in the contemplation of
 our abstract ideas. Wherever we perceive any agreement or disagreement
 amongst them, there we have general knowledge; and by putting the
 names of those ideas together accordingly in propositions, can with
 certainty pronounce general truths.... What is once known of such
 ideas will be perpetually and forever true. So that, as to all general
 knowledge, we must search and find it only in our own minds and it
 is only the examining of our own ideas that furnisheth us with that.
 Truths belonging to essences of things (that is, to abstract ideas)
 are eternal, and are to be found out only by the contemplation of
 those essences.... Knowledge is the consequence of the ideas (be they
 what they will) that are in our minds, producing there certain general
 propositions.... Such propositions are therefore called 'eternal
 truths,'... because, being once made about abstract ideas so as to
 be true, they will, whenever they can be supposed to be made again,
 at any time past or to come, by a mind having those ideas, always
 actually be true. For names being supposed to stand perpetually for
 the same ideas, and the same ideas having immutably the same habitudes
 one to another, propositions concerning any abstract ideas that are
 once true must needs be eternal verities."

But what are these eternal verities, these 'agreements,' which the
mind discovers by barely considering its own fixed meanings, except
what I have said?--relations of likeness and difference, immediate or
mediate, between the terms of certain series. Classification is serial
comparison, logic mediate subsumption, arithmetic mediate equality of
different bundles of attention-strokes, geometry mediate equality of
different ways of carving space. None of these eternal verities has
anything to say about facts, about what is or is not in the world.
Logic does not say whether Socrates, men, mortals or immortals _exist_;
arithmetic does not tell us where her 7's, 5's, and 12's are to be
_found_; geometry affirms not that circles and rectangles are _real_.
All that these sciences make us sure of is, that _if_ these things are
anywhere to be found, the eternal verities will obtain of them. Locke
accordingly never tires of telling us that the

 "universal propositions of whose truth or falsehood we can have
 certain knowledge, concern not existence.... These universal and
 self-evident principles, being only our constant, clear, and distinct
 knowledge of our own ideas more general or comprehensive, can assure
 us of nothing that passes without the mind; their certainty is founded
 only upon the knowledge of each idea by itself, and of its distinction
 from others; about which we cannot be mistaken whilst they are in
 our minds.... The mathematician considers the truth and properties
 belonging to a rectangle or circle only as they are in idea in his
 own mind. For it is possible he never found either of them existing
 mathematically, i.e., precisely true, in his life. But yet the
 knowledge he has of any truths or properties belonging to a circle, or
 any other mathematical figure, are nevertheless true and certain even
 of real things existing; because real things are no farther concerned
 nor intended to be meant by any such propositions, than as things
 really agree to those archetypes in his mind. Is it true of the idea
 of a triangle, that its three angles are equal to two right ones? It
 is true also of a triangle wherever it really exists. Whatever other
 figure exists that is not exactly answerable to that idea in his mind
 is not at all concerned in that proposition. And therefore he is
 certain all his knowledge concerning such ideas is real knowledge:
 because, intending things no farther than they agree with those his
 ideas, he is sure what he knows concerning those figures when they
 have barely an ideal existence in his mind will hold true of them also
 when they have a real existence in matter." But "that any or what
 bodies do exist, that we are left to our senses to discover to us as
 far as they can."[549]

Locke accordingly distinguishes between 'mental truth' and 'real
truth.'[550] The former is intuitively certain; the latter dependent
on experience. Only _hypothetically_ can we affirm intuitive truths
of real things--by _supposing_, namely, that real things exist
which correspond exactly with the ideal subjects of the intuitive
propositions.

If our senses corroborate the supposition all goes well. But note
the strange descent in Locke's hands of the dignity of _a priori_
propositions. By the ancients they were considered, without farther
question, to reveal the constitution of Reality. Archetypal things
existed, it was assumed, in the relations in which we had to think
them. The mind's necessities were a warrant for those of Being; and
it was not till Descartes' time that scepticism had so advanced (in
'dogmatic' circles) that the warrant must itself be warranted, and
the veracity of the Deity invoked as a reason for holding fast to our
natural beliefs.

But the intuitive propositions of Locke leave us as regards outer
reality none the better for their possession. We still have to "go
to our senses" to find what the reality is. The vindication of the
intuitionist position is thus a barren victory. The eternal verities
which the very structure of our mind lays hold of do not necessarily
themselves lay hold on extra-mental being, nor have they, as Kant
pretended later,[551] a legislating character even for all possible
experience. They are primarily interesting only as subjective facts.
They stand waiting in the mind, forming a beautiful ideal network; and
the most we can say is that we _hope_ to discover outer realities over
which the network may be flung so that ideal and real may coincide.

       *       *       *       *       *

And this brings us back to 'science' from which we diverted our
attention so long ago (see p. 640). Science thinks that she has
discovered the outer realities in question. Atoms and ether, with
no properties but masses and velocities expressible by numbers, and
paths expressible by analytic formulas, these at last are things
over which the mathematico-logical network may be flung, and by
supposing which instead of sensible phenomena science becomes yearly
more able to manufacture for herself a world about which rational
propositions may be framed. Sensible phenomena are pure delusions for
the mechanical philosophy. The 'things' and qualities we instinctively
believe in do not exist. The only realities are swarming solids in
everlasting motion, undulatory or continued, whose expressionless
and meaningless changes of position form the history of the world,
and are deducible from initial collocations and habits of movement
hypothetically assumed. Thousands of years ago men started to cast
the chaos of nature's sequences and juxtapositions into a form that
might seem intelligible. Many were their ideal prototypes of rational
order: teleological and æsthetic ties between things, causal and
substantial bonds, as well as logical and mathematical relations. The
most promising of these ideal systems at first were of course the
richer ones, the sentimental ones. The baldest and least promising were
the mathematical ones; but the history of the latter's application
is a history of steadily advancing successes, whilst that of the
sentimentally richer systems is one of relative sterility and
failure.[552] Take those aspects of phenomena which interest you as a
human being most, and class the phenomena as perfect and imperfect, as
ends and means to ends, as high and low, beautiful and ugly, positive
and negative, harmonious and discordant, fit and unfit, natural and
unnatural, etc., and barren are all your results. In the ideal world
the kind 'precious' has characteristic properties. What is precious
should be preserved; unworthy things should be sacrificed for its sake;
exceptions made on its account; its preciousness is a reason for other
things' actions, and the like. But none of these things need happen to
your 'precious' object in the real world. Call the things of nature as
much as you like by sentimental, moral, and æsthetic names, no natural
consequences follow from the naming. They may be of the kinds you
allege, but they are not of '_the kind's kind_': and the last great
system-maker of this sort, Hegel, was obliged explicitly to repudiate
logic in order to make any inferences at all from the names he called
things by.

       *       *       *       *       *

But when you give things mathematical and mechanical names and call
them just so many solids in just such positions, describing just
such paths with just such velocities, all is changed. Your sagacity
finds its reward in the verification by nature of all the deductions
which you may next proceed to make. Your 'things' realize all the
_consequences_ of the names by which you classed them. The modern
mechanico-physical philosophy of which we are all so proud, because
it includes the nebular cosmogony, the conservation of energy, the
kinetic theory of heat and gases, etc., etc., begins by saying that
the _only_ facts are collocations and motions of primordial solids,
and the only laws the changes of motion which changes in collocation
bring. The ideal which this philosophy strives after is a mathematical
world-formula, by which, if all the collocations and motions at a
given moment were known, it would be possible to reckon those of
any wished-for future moment, by simply considering the necessary
geometrical, arithmetical, and logical implications. Once we have the
world in this bare shape, we can fling our net of _a priori_ relations
over all its terms, and pass from one of its phases to another by
inward thought-necessity. Of course it is a world with a very minimum
of rational _stuff_. The sentimental facts and relations are butchered
at a blow. But the rationality yielded is so superbly complete in
_form_ that to many minds this atones for the loss, and reconciles
the thinker to the notion of a purposeless universe, in which all the
things and qualities men love, _dulcissima mundi nomina_, are but
illusions of our fancy attached to accidental clouds of dust which will
be dissipated by the eternal cosmic weather as carelessly as they were
formed.

The popular notion that 'Science' is forced on the mind _ab extra_,
and that our interests have nothing to do with its constructions, is
utterly absurd. The craving to believe that the things of the world
belong to kinds which are related by inward rationality together, is
the parent of Science as well as of sentimental philosophy; and the
original investigator always preserves a healthy sense of how plastic
the materials are in his hands.

 "Once for all," says Helmholtz in beginning that little work of
 his which laid the foundations of the 'conservation of energy,'
 "it is the task of the physical sciences to seek for laws by which
 particular processes in nature may be referred to general rules,
 and deduced from such again. Such rules (for example the laws of
 reflection or refraction of light, or that of Mariotte and Gay-Lussac
 for gas-volumes) are evidently nothing but generic-concepts for
 embracing whole classes of phenomena. The search for them is the
 business of the experimental division of our Science. Its theoretic
 division, on the other hand, tries to discover the unknown causes of
 processes from their visible effects; tries to understand them by
 the law of causality.... The ultimate goal of theoretic physics is
 to find the last _unchanging_ causes of the processes in Nature.
 Whether all processes be really ascribable to such causes, whether,
 in other words, _nature be completely intelligible,_ or whether there
 be changes which would elude the law of a necessary causality, and
 fall into a realm of spontaneity or freedom, is not here the place
 to determine; but at any rate it is clear that the Science whose aim
 it is to make nature appear intelligible [_die Natur zu begreifen_]
 must start with the _assumption_ of her intelligibility, and draw
 consequences in conformity with this assumption, until irrefutable
 facts show the limitations of this method.... The postulate that
 natural phenomena must be reduced to changeless ultimate causes next
 shapes itself so that _forces unchanged by time_ must be found to
 be these causes. Now in Science we have already found portions of
 matter with changeless forces (indestructible qualities), and called
 them (chemical) elements. If, then, we imagine the world composed of
 elements with inalterable qualities, the only changes that can remain
 possible in such a world are spatial changes, i.e. movements, and
 the only outer relations which can modify the action of the forces
 are spatial too, or, in other words, the forces are motor forces
 dependent for their effect only on spatial relations. More exactly
 still: The phenomena of nature must be reduced to [_zurückgeführt_,
 conceived as, classed as] motions of material points with inalterable
 motor forces acting according to space-relations alone.... But points
 have no mutual space-relations except their distance,... and a motor
 force which they exert upon each other can cause nothing but a change
 of distance--i.e. be an attractive or a repulsive force.... And its
 intensity can only depend on distance. So that at last the task of
 Physics resolves itself into this, to refer phenomena to inalterable
 attractive and repulsive forces whose intensity varies with distance.
 The solution of this task would at the same time be the condition of
 Nature's complete intelligibility."[553]

The subjective interest leading to the assumption could not be more
candidly expressed. What makes the assumption 'scientific' and not
merely poetic, what makes a Helmholtz and his kin _discoverers_, is
that the things of Nature turn out to act as if they _were_ of the
kind assumed. They behave as such mere drawing and driving atoms would
behave; and so far as they have been distinctly enough translated into
molecular terms to test the point, so far a certain fantastically ideal
object, namely, the mathematical sum containing their mutual distances
and velocities, is found to be constant throughout all their movements.
This sum is called the total energy of the molecules considered. Its
constancy or 'conservation' gives the name to the hypothesis of
molecules and central forces from which it was logically deduced.

Take any other mathematico-mechanical theory and it is the same.
They are all translations of sensible experiences into other forms,
substitutions of items between which ideal relations of kind, number,
form, equality, etc., obtain, for items between which no such relations
obtain; coupled with declarations that the experienced form is
false and the ideal form true, declarations which are justified by
the appearance of new sensible experiences at just those times and
places at which we logically infer that their ideal correlates ought
to be. Wave-hypotheses thus make us predict rings of darkness and
color, distortions, dispersions, changes of pitch in sonorous bodies
moving from us, etc.; molecule-hypotheses lead to predictions of
vapor-density, freezing point, etc.,--all which predictions fall true.

Thus the world grows more orderly and rational to the mind, which
passes from one feature of it to another by deductive necessity, as
soon as it conceives it as made up of so few and so simple phenomena as
bodies with no properties but number and movement to and fro.


METAPHYSICAL AXIOMS.


But alongside of these ideal relations between terms which the world
verifies, there are other ideal relations not as yet so verified. I
refer to those propositions (no longer expressing mere results of
comparison) which are formulated in such metaphysical and æsthetic
axioms as "The Principle of things is one;" "The quantity of existence
is unchanged;" "Nature is simple and invariable;" "Nature acts by the
shortest ways;" "_Ex nihilo nihil fit;_" "Nothing can be evolved which
was not involved;" "Whatever is in the effect must be in the cause;" "A
thing can only work where it is;" "A thing can only affect another of
its own kind;" "_Cessante causa, cessat et effectus;_" "Nature makes
no leaps;" "Things belong to discrete and permanent kinds;" "Nothing
is or happens without a reason;" "The world is throughout rationally
intelligible;" etc., etc., etc. Such principles as these, which might
be multiplied to satiety,[554] are properly to be called _postulates of
rationality_, not propositions of fact. If nature _did_ obey them, she
_would_ be _pro tanto_ more intelligible; and we seek meanwhile so to
conceive her phenomena as to show that she does obey them. To a certain
extent we succeed. For example, instead of the 'quantity of existence'
so vaguely postulated as unchanged, Nature allows us to suppose that
curious sum of distances and velocities which for want of a better
term we call 'energy.' For the effect being 'contained in the cause,'
nature lets us substitute 'the effect _is_ the cause,' so soon as she
lets us conceive both effect and cause as the same molecules, in two
successive positions.--But all around these incipient successes (as all
around the molecular world, so soon as we add to it as its 'effects'
those illusory 'things' of common-sense which we had to butcher for its
sake), there still spreads a vast field of irrationalized fact whose
items simply _are_ together, and from one to another of which we can
pass by no ideally 'rational' way.

It is not that these more metaphysical postulates of rationality are
absolutely barren--though barren enough they were when used, as the
scholastics used them, as immediate propositions of fact.[555] They
have a fertility as ideals, and keep us uneasy and striving always to
recast the world of sense until its lines become more congruent with
theirs. Take for example the principle that 'nothing can happen without
a cause.' We have no definite idea of what we mean by cause, or of
what causality consists in. But the principle expresses a demand for
_some_ deeper sort of inward connection between phenomena than their
merely habitual time-sequence seems to us to be. The word 'cause' is,
in short, an altar to an unknown god; an empty pedestal still marking
the place of a hoped-for statue. _Any_ really inward belonging-together
of the sequent terms, if discovered, would be accepted as what the
word cause was meant to stand for. So we seek, and seek; and in the
molecular systems we find a sort of inward belonging in the notion of
identity of matter with change of collocation. Perhaps by still seeking
we may find other sorts of inward belonging, even between the molecules
and those 'secondary qualities,' etc., which they produce upon our
minds.

It cannot be too often repeated that the triumphant application of
any one of our ideal systems of rational relations to the real world
justifies our hope that other systems may be found also applicable.
Metaphysics should take heart from the example of physics, simply
confessing that hers is the longer task. Nature _may_ be remodelled,
nay, certainly will be remodelled, far beyond the point at present
reached. Just how far?--is a question which only the whole future
history of Science and Philosophy can answer.[556] Our task being
Psychology, we cannot even cross the threshold of that larger problem.

       *       *       *       *       *

Besides the mental structure which results in such metaphysical
principles as those just considered, there is a mental structure which
expresses itself in


ÆSTHETIC AND MORAL PRINCIPLES.


The æsthetic principles are at bottom such axioms as that a note sounds
good with its third and fifth, or that potatoes need salt. We are once
for all so made that when certain impressions come before our mind, one
of them will seem to call for or repel the others as its companions.
To a certain extent the principle of habit will explain these æsthetic
connections. When a conjunction is repeatedly experienced, the cohesion
of its terms grows grateful, or at least their disruption grows
unpleasant. But to explain _all_ æsthetic judgments in this way would
be absurd; for it is notorious how seldom natural experiences come up
to our æsthetic demands. Many of the so-called metaphysical principles
are at bottom only expressions of æsthetic feeling. Nature is simple
and invariable; makes no leaps, or makes nothing but leaps; is
rationally intelligible; neither increases nor diminishes in quantity;
flows from one principle, etc., etc.,--what do all such principles
express save our sense of how pleasantly our intellect would feel if
it had a Nature of that sort to deal with? The subjectivity of which
feeling is of course quite compatible with Nature also turning out
objectively to be of that sort, later on.

The _moral_ principles which our mental structure engenders are quite
as little explicable _in toto_ by habitual experiences having bred
inner cohesions. Rightness is not _mere_ usualness, wrongness not
_mere_ oddity, however numerous the facts which might be invoked
to prove such identity. Nor are the moral judgments those most
invariably and emphatically impressed on us by public opinion. The most
characteristically and peculiarly moral judgments that a man is ever
called on to make are in unprecedented cases and lonely emergencies,
where no popular rhetorical maxims can avail, and the hidden oracle
alone can speak; and it speaks often in favor of conduct quite unusual,
and suicidal as far as gaining popular approbation goes. The forces
which conspire to this resultant are subtle harmonies and discords
between the elementary ideas which form the data of the case. Some
of these harmonies, no doubt, have to do with habit; but in respect
to most of them our sensibility must assuredly be a phenomenon of
supernumerary order, correlated with a brain-function quite as
secondary as that which takes cognizance of the diverse excellence
of elaborate musical compositions. No more than the higher musical
sensibility can the higher moral sensibility be accounted for by the
frequency with which outer relations have cohered.[557] Take judgments
of justice or equity, for example. Instinctively, one judges everything
differently, according as it pertains to one's self or to some one
else. Empirically one notices that everybody else does the same. But
little by little there dawns in one the judgment "nothing can be right
for me which would not be right for another similarly placed;" or "the
fulfilment of my desires is intrinsically no more imperative than that
of anyone else's;" or "what it is reasonable that another should do for
me, it is also reasonable that I should do for him;"[558] and forthwith
the whole mass of the habitual gets overturned. It gets _seriously_
overturned only in a few fanatical heads. But its overturning is
due to a back-door and not to a front-door process. Some minds are
preternaturally sensitive to logical consistency and inconsistency.
When they have ranked a thing under a kind, they _must_ treat it as
of that kind's kind, or feel all out of tune. In many respects we do
class ourselves with other men, and call them and ourselves by a common
name. They agree with us in having the same Heavenly Father, in not
being consulted about their birth, in not being themselves to thank
or blame for their natural gifts, in having the same desires and pains
and pleasures, in short in a host of fundamental relations. Hence, _if
these things be our essence,_ we should be substitutable for other men,
and they for us, in any proposition in which either of us is involved.
The more fundamental and common the essence chosen, and the more
simple the reasoning,[559] the more wildly radical and unconditional
will the justice be which is aspired to. Life is one long struggle
between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases, and
opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive perception of them
as individual facts. The logical stickler for justice always seems
pedantic and mechanical to the man who goes by tact and the particular
instance, and who usually makes a poor show at argument. Sometimes
the abstract conceiver's way is better, sometimes that of the man of
instinct. But just as in our study of reasoning we found it impossible
to lay down any mark whereby to distinguish _right_ conception of a
concrete case from _confusion_ (see pp. 336, 350), so here we can
give no general rule for deciding when it is morally useful to treat a
concrete case as _sui generis_, and when to lump it with others in an
abstract class.[560]

An adequate treatment of the way in which we come by our æsthetic
and moral judgments would require a separate chapter, which I cannot
conveniently include in this book. Suffice it that these judgments
express inner harmonies and discords between objects of thought;
and that whilst outer cohesions frequently repeated will often seem
harmonious, all harmonies are not thus engendered, but our feeling
of many of them is a secondary and incidental function of the mind.
Where harmonies are asserted of the real world, they are obviously
mere postulates of rationality, so far as they transcend experience.
Such postulates are exemplified by the ethical propositions that the
individual and universal good are one, and that happiness and goodness
are bound to coalesce in the same subject.


SUMMARY OF WHAT PRECEDES.


I will now sum up our progress so far by a short summary of the most
important conclusions which we have reached.

The mind has a native structure in this sense, that certain of its
objects, if considered together in certain ways, give definite results;
and that no other ways of considering, and no other results, are
possible if the same objects be taken.

The results are 'relations' which are all expressed by judgments of
subsumption and of comparison.

The judgments of subsumption are themselves subsumed under the _laws of
logic_.

Those of comparison are expressed in _classifications_, and in the
_sciences of arithmetic and geometry_.

Mr. Spencer's opinion that our consciousness of classificatory,
logical, and mathematical relations between ideas is due to the
frequency with which the corresponding 'outer relations' have impressed
our minds, is unintelligible.

Our consciousness of these relations, no doubt, has a natural genesis.
But it is to be sought rather in the inner forces which have made the
brain grow, than in any mere paths of 'frequent' association which
outer stimuli may have ploughed in that organ.

But let our sense for these relations have arisen as it may, the
relations themselves form a fixed system of lines of cleavage, so to
speak, in the mind, by which we naturally pass from one object to
another; and the objects connected by these lines of cleavage are
often not connected by any regular time- and space-associations. We
distinguish, therefore, between the empirical order of things, and this
their rational order of comparison; and, so far as possible, we seek to
translate the former into the latter, as being the more congenial of
the two to our intellect.

Any classification of things into kinds (especially if the kinds form
series, or if they successively involve each other) is a more rational
way of conceiving the things than is that mere juxtaposition or
separation of them as individuals in time and space which is the order
of their crude perception. Any assimilation of things to terms between
which such classificatory relations, with their remote and mediate
transactions, obtain, is a way of bringing the things into a more
rational scheme.

Solids in motion are such terms; and the mechanical philosophy is only
a way of conceiving nature so as to arrange its items along some of the
more natural lines of cleavage of our mental structure.

Other natural lines are the moral and æsthetic relations. Philosophy is
still seeking to conceive things so that these relations also may seem
to obtain between them.

As long as things have not successfully been so conceived, the moral
and æsthetic relations obtain only between _entia rationis_, terms in
the mind; and the moral and æsthetic principles remain but postulates,
not propositions, with regard to the real world outside.

There is thus a large body of _a priori_ or intuitively necessary
truths. As a rule, these are truths of _comparison_ only, and in the
first instance they express relations between merely mental terms.
Nature, however, acts as if some of her realities were identical with
these mental terms. So far as she does this, we can make _a priori_
propositions concerning natural fact. The aim of both science and
philosophy is to make the identifiable terms more numerous. So far it
has proved easier to identify nature's things with mental terms of the
mechanical than with mental terms of the sentimental order.

The widest postulate of rationality is that the world _is_ rationally
intelligible throughout, after the pattern of _some_ ideal system.
The whole war of the philosophies is over that point of faith. Some
say they can see their way already to the rationality; others that
it is hopeless in any other but the mechanical way. To some the
very fact that there is a world at all seems irrational. Nonentity
would be a more natural thing than existence, for these minds. One
philosopher at least says that the relatedness of things to each other
is irrational anyhow, and that a world of relations can never be made
intelligible.[561]

With this I may be assumed to have completed the programme which I
announced at the beginning of the chapter, so far as the _theoretic_
part of our organic mental structure goes. It can be due neither to
our own nor to our ancestors' experience. I now pass to those practical
parts of our organic mental structure. Things are a little different
here; and our conclusion, though it lies in the same direction, can be
by no means as confidently expressed.

To be as short and simple as possible, I will take the case of
instincts, and, supposing the reader to be familiar with Chapter
XXIV, I will plunge _in medias res_.


THE ORIGIN OF INSTINCTS.


Instincts must have been either

1) Each specially created in complete form, or

2) Gradually evolved.

As the first alternative is nowadays obsolete, I proceed directly to
the second. The two most prominent suggestions as to the way in which
instincts may have been evolved are associated with the names of
Lamarck and Darwin.

Lamarck's statement is that animals have _wants_, and contract, to
satisfy them, _habits_ which transform themselves gradually into
so many propensities which they can neither resist nor change.
These _propensities_, once acquired, propagate themselves by way
of transmission to the young, so that they come to exist in new
individuals, anteriorly to all exercise. Thus are the same emotions,
the same habits, the same _instincts_, perpetuated without variation
from one generation to another, so long as the outward conditions of
existence remain the same.[562] Mr. Lewes calls this the theory of
'lapsed intelligence.' Mr. Spencer's words are clearer than Lamarck's,
so that I will quote from him:[563]

 "Setting out with the unquestionable assumption, that every new form
 of emotion making its appearance in the individual or the race is a
 modification of some pre-existing emotion, or a compounding of several
 pre-existing emotions, we should be greatly aided by knowing what
 always are the pre-existing emotions. When, for example, we find that
 very few, if any, of the lower animals show any love of accumulation,
 and that this feeling is absent in infancy; when we see that an infant
 in arms exhibits anger, fear, wonder, while yet it manifests no desire
 of permanent possession; and that a brute which has no acquisitive
 emotion can nevertheless feel attachment, jealousy, love of
 approbation,--we may suspect that the feeling which property satisfies
 is compounded out of simpler and deeper feelings. We may conclude
 that as when a dog hides a bone there must exist in him a prospective
 gratification of hunger, so there must similarly, at first, in all
 cases where anything is secured or taken possession of, exist an
 ideal excitement of the feeling which that thing will gratify. We may
 further conclude that when the intelligence is such that a variety of
 objects come to be utilized for different purposes; when, as among
 savages, divers wants are satisfied through the articles appropriated
 for weapons, shelter, clothing, ornament,--the act of appropriating
 comes to be one constantly involving agreeable associations, and one
 which is therefore pleasurable, irrespective of the end subserved.
 And when, as in civilized life, the property acquired is of a kind
 not conducing to one order of gratifications, but is capable of
 ministering to all gratifications, the pleasure of acquiring property
 grows more distinct from each of the various pleasures subserved--is
 more completely differentiated into a separate emotion.[564] It is
 well known that on newly-discovered islands not inhabited by man,
 birds are so devoid of fear as to allow themselves to be knocked over
 with sticks, but that in the course of generations they acquire
 such a dread of man as to fly on his approach, and that this dread
 is manifested by young as well as old. Now unless this change be
 ascribed to the killing off of the least fearful, and the preservation
 and multiplication of the more fearful, which, considering the small
 number killed by man, is an inadequate cause, it must be ascribed to
 accumulated experiences, and each experience must be held to have a
 share in producing it. We must conclude that in each bird that escapes
 with injuries inflicted by man, or is alarmed by the outcries of other
 members of the flock,... there is established an association of ideas
 between the human aspect and the pains, direct and indirect, suffered
 from human agency. And we must further conclude that the state of
 consciousness which impels the bird to take flight is at first nothing
 more than an ideal reproduction of those painful impressions which
 before followed man's approach; that such ideal reproduction becomes
 more vivid and more massive as the painful experiences, direct or
 sympathetic, increase; and that thus the emotion, in its incipient
 state, is nothing else than an aggregation of the revived pains
 before experienced. As, in the course of generations, the young birds
 of this race begin to display a fear of man before they have been
 injured by him, it is an unavoidable inference that the nervous system
 of the race has been organically modified by these experiences; we
 have no choice but to conclude that when a young bird is thus led
 to fly, it is because the impression produced on its senses by the
 approaching man entails, through an incipiently reflex action, a
 partial excitement of all those nerves which, in its ancestors, had
 been excited under the like conditions; that this partial excitement
 has its accompanying painful consciousness; and that the vague painful
 consciousness thus arising constitutes emotion proper--_emotion
 undecomposable into specific experiences, and therefore seemingly
 homogeneous. If such be the explanation of the fact in this case, then
 it is in all cases. If the emotion is so generated here, then it is
 so generated throughout._ If so, we must perforce conclude that the
 emotional modifications displayed by different nations, and those
 higher emotions by which civilized are distinguished from savage,
 are to be accounted for on the same principle. And, concluding this,
 we are led strongly to suspect that the emotions in general have
 severally thus originated."[565]

Obviously the word 'emotion' here means instinct as well,--the actions
we call instinctive are expressions or manifestations of the emotions
whose genesis Mr. Spencer describes. Now if habit could thus bear fruit
outside the individual life, and if the modifications so painfully
acquired by the parents' nervous systems could be found ready-made
at birth in those of the young, it would be hard to overestimate
the importance, both practical and theoretical, of such an extension
of its sway. In principle, instincts would then be assimilated to
'secondarily-automatic' habits, and the origin of many of them out
of tentative experiments made during ancestral lives, perfected by
repetition, addition, and association through successive generations,
would be a comparatively simple thing to understand.

Contemporary students of instinct have accordingly been alert to
discover all the facts which would seem to establish the possibility
of such an explanation. The list is not very long, considering what a
burden of conclusions it has to bear. Let acquisitiveness and fear of
man, as just argued for by Spencer, lead it off. Other cases of the
latter sort are the increased shyness of the woodcock noticed to have
occurred within sixty years' observation by Mr. T. A. Knight, and the
greater shyness everywhere shown by large than by small birds, to which
Darwin has called attention. Then we may add--

The propensities of 'pointing,' 'retrieving,' etc., in sporting dogs,
which seem partly, at any rate, to be due to training, but which in
well-bred stock are all but innate. It is in these breeds considered
bad for a litter of young if its sire or dam have not been trained in
the field.

Docility of domestic breeds of horses and cattle.

Tameness of young of tame rabbit--young wild rabbits being invincibly
timid.

Young foxes are most wary in those places where they are most severely
hunted.

Wild ducks, hatched out by tame ones, fly off. But if kept close for
some generations, the young are said to become tame.[566]

Young savages at a certain age will revert to the woods.

English greyhounds taken to the high plateau of Mexico could not at
first run well, on account of rarefied air. Their whelps entirely got
over the difficulty.

Mr. Lewes somewhere[567] tells of a terrier pup whose parents had been
taught to 'beg,' and who constantly threw himself spontaneously into
the begging attitude. Darwin tells of a French orphan-child, brought up
out of France, yet _shrugging_ like his ancestors.[568]

Musical ability often increases from generation to generation in the
families of musicians.

The hereditarily epileptic guinea-pigs of Brown-Séquard, whose parents
had become epileptic through surgical operations on the spinal cord or
sciatic nerve. The adults often lose some of their hind toes, and the
young, in addition to being epileptic, are frequently born with the
corresponding toes lacking. The offspring of guinea-pigs whose cervical
sympathetic nerve has been cut on one side will have the ear larger,
the eyeball smaller, etc., just like their parents after the operation.
Puncture of the 'restiform body' of the medulla will, in the same
animal, congest and enlarge one eye, and cause gangrene of one ear. In
the young of such parents the same symptoms occur.

Physical refinement, delicate hands and feet, etc., appear in families
well-bred and rich for several generations.

The 'nervous' temperament also develops in the descendants of sedentary
brain-working people.

Inebriates produce offspring in various ways degenerate.

Nearsightedness is produced by indoor occupation for generations. It
has been found in Europe much more frequent among schoolchildren in
towns than among children of the same age in the country.

These latter cases are of the inheritance of structural rather than of
functional peculiarities. But as structure gives rise to function it
may be said that the principle is the same. Amongst other inheritances
of adaptive[569] structural change may be mentioned:

The 'Yankee' type.

Scrofula, rickets, and other diseases of bad conditions of life.

The udders and permanent milk of the domestic breeds of cow.

The 'fancy' rabbit's ears, drooping through lack of need to erect them.
Dog's, ass's, etc., in some breeds ditto.

The obsolete eyes of mole and various cave-dwelling animals.

The diminished size of the wing-bones of domesticated ducks, due to
ancestral disuse of flight.[570]

These are about all the facts which, by one author or another, have
been invoked as evidence in favor of the 'lapsed intelligence' theory
of the origin of instincts.

       *       *       *       *       *

Mr. Darwin's theory is that of the natural selection of accidentally
produced tendencies to action.

 "It would," says he, "be the most serious error to suppose that
 the greater number of instincts have been acquired by habit in
 one generation, and then transmitted by inheritance in succeeding
 generations. It can clearly be shown that the most wonderful instincts
 with which we are acquainted, namely, those of the hive-bee and
 of many ants, could not possibly have been thus acquired.[571] It
 will be universally admitted that instincts are as important as
 corporeal structure for the welfare of each species, under its present
 conditions of life. Under changed conditions of life, it is at least
 possible that slight modifications of instinct might be profitable
 to a species; and if it can be shown that instincts do vary ever so
 little, then I can see no difficulty in natural selection preserving
 and continually accumulating variations of instinct to any extent
 that may be profitable. It is thus, as I believe, that all the most
 complex and wonderful instincts have arisen.... I believe that the
 effects of habit are of quite subordinate importance to the effects of
 the natural selection of what may be called accidental variations of
 instincts;--that is, of variations produced by the same unknown causes
 which produce slight deviations of bodily structure."[572]

The evidence for Mr. Darwin's view is too complex to be given in
this place. To my own mind it is quite convincing. If, with the
Darwinian theory in mind, one re-reads the list of examples given in
favor of the Lamarckian theory, one finds that many of the cases are
irrelevant, and that some make for one side as well as for the other.
This is so obvious in many of the cases that it is needless to point
it out in detail. The shrugging child and the begging pup, e.g.,
prove somewhat too much. They are examples so unique as to suggest
spontaneous variation rather than inherited habit. In other cases the
observations much need corroboration, e.g., the effects of not training
for a generation in sporting dogs and race-horses, the difference
between young wild rabbits born in captivity and young tame ones, the
cumulative effect of many generations of captivity on wild ducks, etc.

Similarly, the increased wariness of the large birds, of those on
islands frequented by men, of the woodcock, of the foxes, may be due
to the fact that the bolder families have been killed off, and left
none but the naturally timid behind, or simply to the individual
experience of older birds being imparted by example to the young
so that a new _educational tradition_ has occurred.--The cases of
physical refinement, nervous temperament, Yankee type, etc., also need
much more discriminating treatment than they have yet received from
the Lamarckians. There is no real evidence that physical refinement
and nervosity tend to accumulate from generation to generation in
aristocratic or intellectual families; nor is there any that the
change in that direction which Europeans transplanted to America
undergo is not all completed in the first generation of children bred
on our soil. To my mind, the facts all point that way. Similarly the
better breathing of the greyhounds born in Mexico was surely due to a
post-natal adaptation of the pups' thorax to the rarer air.

Distinct neurotic _degeneration_ may undoubtedly accumulate from
parent to child, and as the parent usually in this case grows worse
by his own irregular habits of life, the temptation lies near to
ascribe the child's deterioration to this cause. This, again, is a
hasty conclusion. For neurotic degeneration is unquestionably a
disease whose original causes are unknown; and like other 'accidental
variations' it is hereditary. But it ultimately ends in sterility; and
it seems to me quite unfair to draw any conclusions from its natural
history in favor of the transmission of acquired peculiarities. Nor
does the degeneration of the children of alcoholics prove anything in
favor of their having inherited the shattered nervous system which
the alcohol has induced in their parents: because the poison usually
has a chance to directly affect their own bodies before birth, by
acting on the germinal matter from which they are formed whilst it
is still nourished by the alcoholized blood of the parent. In many
cases, moreover, the parental alcoholics are themselves degenerates
neurotically, and the drink-habit is only a symptom of their disease,
which in some form or other they also propagate to their children.

There remain the inherited mutilations of the guinea-pig. But these are
such startling exceptions to the ordinary rule with animals that they
should hardly be used as examples of a typical process. The docility of
domestic cattle is certainly in part due to man's selection, etc., etc.
In a word, the proofs form rather a beggarly array.

Add to this that the writers who have tried to carry out the theory of
transmitted habit with any detail are always obliged _somewhere_ to
admit inexplicable variation. Thus Spencer allows that

 "Sociality can begin only where, through some slight variation, there
 is less tendency than usual for the individuals to disperse.... That
 slight variations of mental nature, sufficient to initiate this
 process, may be fairly assumed, all our domestic animals show us:
 differences in their characters and likings are conspicuous. Sociality
 having thus commenced, and survival of the fittest tending ever to
 maintain and increase it, it will be further strengthened by the
 inherited effects of habit."[573] Again, in writing of the pleasure
 of pity, Mr. Spencer says: "This feeling is not one that has arisen
 through the inherited effects of experiences, but belongs to a quite
 different group, traceable to the survival of the fittest simply--to
 the natural selection of incidental variations. In this group are
 included all the bodily appetites, together with those simpler
 instincts, sexual and parental, by which every race is maintained; and
 which must exist before the higher processes of mental evolution can
 commence."[574]

The inheritance of tricks of manner and trifling peculiarities, such
as handwriting, certain odd gestures when pleased, peculiar movements
during sleep, etc., have also been quoted in favor of the theory of
transmission of acquired habits. Strangely enough; for of all things in
the world these tricks seem most like idiosyncratic variations. They
are usually defects or oddities which the education of the individual,
the pressure of what is really _acquired_ by him, would counteract, but
which are too native to be repressed, and breaks through all artificial
barriers, in his children as well as in himself.

       *       *       *       *       *

I leave my text practically just as it was written in 1885. I proceeded
at that time to draw a tentative conclusion to the effect that the
origin of _most_ of our instincts must certainly be deemed fruits of
the back-door method of genesis, and not of ancestral experience in the
proper meaning of the term. Whether acquired ancestral habits played
any part at all in their production was still an open question in which
it would be as rash to affirm as to deny. Already before that time,
however, Professor Weismann of Freiburg had begun a very serious attack
upon the Lamarckian theory,[575] and his polemic has at last excited
such a widespread interest among naturalists that the whilom almost
unhesitatingly accepted theory seems almost on the point of being
abandoned.

I will therefore add some of Weismann's criticisms of the supposed
evidence to my own. In the first place, he has a captivating theory of
descent of his own,[576] which makes him think it _a priori_ impossible
that any peculiarity acquired during lifetime by the parent should be
transmitted to the germ. Into the nature of that theory this is not
the place to go. Suffice to say that it has made him a keener critic
of Lamarck's and Spencer's theory than he otherwise might have been.
The only way in which the germinal products can be influenced whilst
in the body of the parent is, according to Weismann, by good or bad
nutrition. Through this they may degenerate in various ways or lose
vitality altogether. They may also be infected through the blood by
small-pox, syphilis, or other virulent diseases, and otherwise be
poisoned. But peculiarities of neural structure and habit in the
parents _which the parents themselves were not born with_, they can
never acquire unless perhaps accidentally through some coincidental
variation of their own. _Accidental_ variations develop of course into
idiosyncrasies which tend to pass to later generations in virtue of the
well-known law which no one doubts.

Referring to the often-heard assertion that the increase of talent
found in certain families from one generation to another is due to
the transmitted effects of _exercise_ of the faculty concerned (the
Bachs, the Bernoullis, Mozart, etc.), he sensibly remarks, that the
talent being kept in exercise, it ought to have gone on growing for
an indefinite number of generations. As a matter of fact, it quickly
reaches a maximum, and then we hear no more of it, which is what
happens always when an idiosyncrasy is exposed to the effects of
miscellaneous intermarriage.

The hereditary epilepsy and other degenerations of the operated
guinea-pigs are explained by Professor Weismann as results of
_infection_ of the young by the parent's blood. The latter he supposes
to undergo a pathologic change in consequence of the original
traumatic injury. The obsolescence of disused organs he explains
very satisfactorily, without invoking any transmission of the direct
effects of disuse, by his theory of _panmixy_, for which I must refer
to his own writings. Finally, he criticises searchingly the stories we
occasionally hear of inherited mutilations in animals (dogs' ears and
tails, etc.), and cites a prolonged series of experiments of his own
on mice, which he bred for many generations, cutting off both parental
tails each time, without interfering in the least with the length of
tail with which the young continued to be born.

The strongest argument, after all, in favor of the Lamarckian theory
remains the _a priori_ one urged by Spencer in his little work (much
the solidest thing, by the way, which he has ever written) 'The Factors
of Organic Evolution.' Since, says Mr. Spencer, the accidental
variations of all parts of the body are independent of each other,
if the entire organization of animals were due to such accidental
variations alone, the amount of mutual adaptation and harmony that we
now find there could hardly possibly have come about in any finite
time. We must rather suppose that the divers varying parts _brought_
the other parts into harmony with themselves by _exercising them ad
hoc_, and that the effects of the exercise remained and were passed
on to the young. This forms, of course, a great _presumption_ against
the all-sufficiency of the view of selection of accidental variations
exclusively. But it must be admitted that in favor of the contrary
view, that adaptive changes are inherited, we have as yet perhaps not
one single unequivocal item of positive proof.

       *       *       *       *       *

I must therefore end this chapter on the genesis of our mental
structure by reaffirming my conviction that the so-called
Experience-philosophy has failed to prove its point. No more if we
take ancestral experiences into account than if we limit ourselves to
those of the individual after birth, can we believe that the couplings
of terms within the mind are simple copies of corresponding couplings
impressed upon it by the environment. This indeed is true of a small
part of our cognitions. But so far as logical and mathematical,
ethical, æsthetical, and metaphysical propositions go, such an
assertion is not only untrue but altogether unintelligible; for these
propositions say nothing about the time- and space-order of things, and
it is hard to understand how such shallow and vague accounts of them as
Mill's and Spencer's could ever have been given by thinking men.

The causes of our mental structure are doubtless natural, and
connected, like all our other peculiarities, with those of our nervous
structure. Our interests, our tendencies of attention, our motor
impulses, the æsthetic, moral, and theoretic combinations we delight
in, the extent of our power of apprehending schemes of relation, just
like the elementary relations themselves, time, space, difference and
similarity, and the elementary kinds of feeling, have all grown up in
ways of which at present we can give no account. Even in the clearest
parts of Psychology our insight is insignificant enough. And the more
sincerely one seeks to trace the actual course of _psychogenesis_,
the steps by which as a race we may have come by the peculiar mental
attributes which we possess, the more clearly one perceives "the slowly
gathering twilight close in utter night."


THE END.

       *       *       *       *       *

[526] 'Accidental' in the Darwinian sense, as belonging to a cycle of
causation inaccessible to the present order of research.

[527] The passage is in § 207 of the Principles of Psychology, at
the end of the chapter entitled 'Reason.' I italicize certain words
in order to show that the essence of this explanation is to demand
_numerically frequent_ experiences. The bearing of this remark will
later appear. (Cf. pp. 641-2, _infra_.)

[528] Principles of Biology, part iii. chaps. xi, xii.--Goltz and Loeb
have found that dogs become mild in character when their occipital,
and fierce when their frontal, brain-lobes are cut off. "A dog which
originally was cross in an extreme degree, never suffering himself
to be touched, and even refusing, after two days' fasting, to take a
piece of bread from my hand, became, after a bilateral operation on
the occipital lobes, perfectly trustful and harmless. He underwent
five operations on these parts.... Each one of them made him more
good-natured; so that at last (just as Goltz observed of his dogs) he
would let other dogs take away the very bones which he was gnawing"
(Loeb, Pflüger's Archiv, xxxix. 300). A course of kind treatment and
training might have had a similar effect. But how absurd to call two
such different causes by the same name, and to say both times that
the beast's 'experience of outer relations' is what educates him to
good-nature. This, however, is virtually what all writers do who ignore
the distinction between the 'front-door' and the back-door' manners of
producing mental change.

One of the most striking of these back-door affections is
_susceptibility to the charm of drunkenness_. This (taking drunkenness
in the broadest sense, as teetotalers use the word) is one of the
deepest functions of human nature. Half of both the poetry and the
tragedy of human life would vanish if alcohol were taken away. As it
is, the thirst for it is such that in the United States the cash-value
of its sales amounts to that of the sales of meat and of bread put
together. And yet what ancestral 'outer relation' is responsible
for this peculiar reaction of ours? The only 'outer relation' could
be the alcohol itself, which, comparatively speaking, came into the
environment but yesterday, and which, so far from creating, is tending
to eradicate, the love of itself from our mental structure, by letting
only those families of men survive in whom it is not strong. The love
of drunkenness is a purely accidental susceptibility of a brain,
evolved for entirely different uses, and its causes are to be sought
in the molecular realm, rather than in any possible order of 'outer
relations.'

[529] Mr. Grant Allen, in a brilliant article entitled Idiosyncrasy
(Mind, viii. 498), seeks to show that accidental morphological changes
in the brain cannot possibly be imagined to result in any mental
change of a sort which would _fit the animal to its environment_.
If spontaneous variation ever works on the brain, its product, says
Mr. Allen, ought to be an idiot or a raving madman, not a minister
and interpreter of Nature. Only the environment can change us in the
direction of accommodation _to itself_. But I think we ought to know
a little better just what the molecular changes in the brain are on
which thought depends, before we talk so confidently about what the
effect can be of their possible variations. Mr. Allen, it should be
said, has made a laudable effort to conceive them distinctly. To me
his conception remains too purely anatomical. Meanwhile this essay
and another by the same author in the Atlantic Monthly are probably
as serious attempts as any that have been made towards applying the
Spencerian theory in a radical way to the facts of human history.

[530] In my own previous chapters on habit, memory, association, and
perception, justice has been done to all these facts.

[531] "The order of nature, as perceived at a first glance, presents
at every instant a chaos followed by another chaos. We must decompose
each chaos into single facts. We must learn to see in the chaotic
antecedent a multitude of distinct antecedents, in the chaotic
consequent a multitude of distinct consequents. This, supposing it
done, will not of itself tell us on which of the antecedents each
consequent is invariably attendant. To determine that point, we must
endeavor to effect a separation of the facts from one another, not in
our minds only, but in nature. The mental analysis, however, must take
place first. And every one knows that in the mode of performing it, one
intellect differs immensely from another." (J. S. Mill, Logic, bk. iii.
chap. vii. § 1.)

[532] I quote from an address entitled 'Reflex Action and Theism,'
published in the 'Unitarian Review' for November 1881, and translated
in the Critique Philosophique for January and February 1882. "The
conceiving or theorizing faculty works exclusively for the sake of
ends that do not exist at all in the world of the impressions received
by way of our senses, but are set by our emotional and practical
subjectivity. It is a transformer of the world of our impressions
into a totally different world, the world of our conception; and the
transformation is effected in the interests of our volitional nature,
and for no other purpose whatsoever. Destroy the volitional nature,
the definite subjective purposes, preferences, fondness for certain
effects, forms, orders, and not the slightest motive would remain for
the brute order of our experience to be remodelled at all. But, as we
have the elaborate volitional constitution we do have, the remodelling
must be effected, there is no escape. The world's contents are _given_
to each of us in an order so foreign to our subjective interests that
we can hardly by an effort of the imagination picture to ourselves what
it is like. We have to break that order altogether, and by picking out
from it the items that concern us, and connecting them with others far
away, which we say 'belong' with them, we are able to make out definite
threads of sequence and tendency, to foresee particular liabilities and
get ready for them, to enjoy simplicity and harmony in the place of
what was chaos. Is not the sum of your actual experience taken at this
moment and impartially added together an utter chaos? The strains of my
voice, the lights and shades inside the room and out, the murmur of the
wind, the ticking of the clock, the various organic feelings you may
happen individually to possess, do these make a whole at all? Is it not
the only condition of your mental sanity in the midst of them that most
of them should become non-existent for you, and that a few others--the
sounds, I hope, which I am uttering--should evoke from places in
your memory, that have nothing to do with this scene, associates
fitted to combine with them in what we call a rational train of
thought?--rational because it leads to a conclusion we have some organ
to appreciate. We have no organ or faculty to appreciate the simply
given order. The real world as it is given at this moment is the sum
total of all its beings and events now. But can we think of such a sum?
Can we realize for an instant what a cross-section of all existence at
a definite point of time would be? While I talk and the flies buzz, a
sea gull catches a fish at the mouth of the Amazon, a tree falls in
the Adirondack wilderness, a man sneezes in Germany, a horse dies in
Tartary, and twins are born in France. What does that mean? Does the
contemporaneity of these events with each other and with a million more
as disjointed as they form a rational bond between them, and unite them
into anything that means for us a world? Yet just such a collateral
contemporaneity, and nothing else, is the _real_ order of the world. It
is an order with which we have nothing to do but to get away from it as
fast as possible. As I said, we break it: we break it into histories,
and we break it into arts, and we break it into sciences; and then we
begin to feel at home. We make ten thousand separate serial orders of
it. On any one of these, we may react as if the rest did not exist.
We discover among its parts relations that were never given to sense
at all,--mathematical relations, tangents, squares, and roots and
logarithmic functions,--and out of an infinite number of these we call
certain ones essential and lawgiving, and ignore the rest. Essential
these relations are, but only _for our purpose_, the other relations
being just as real and present as they; and our purpose is to _conceive
simply_ and _to foresee_. Are not simple conception and prevision
subjective ends, pure and simple? They are the ends of what we call
science; and the miracle of miracles, a miracle not yet exhaustively
cleared up by any philosophy, is that the given order lends itself to
the remodelling. It shows itself plastic to many of our scientific,
to many of our æsthetic, to many of our practical purposes and ends."
Cf. also Hodgson: Philos. of Refl., ch. v; Lotze: Logik, §§ 342-351;
Sigwart: Logik, §§ 60-63, 105.

[533] In an article entitled 'Great Men, Great Thoughts, and the
Environment,' published in the Atlantic Monthly for October 1880,
the reader will find some ampler illustrations of these remarks.
I have there tried to show that both mental and social evolution
are to be conceived after the Darwinian fashion, and that the
function of the environment properly so called is much more that of
_selecting_ forms, produced by invisible forces, than _producing_
of such forms,--producing being the only function thought of by the
pre-Darwinian evolutionists, and the only one on which stress is laid
by such contemporary ones as Mr. Spencer and Mr. Allen.

[534] "It is perfectly true that our world of experience begins with
such associations as lead us to expect that what has happened to us
will happen again. These associations lead the babe to look for milk
from its nurse and not from its father, the child to believe that the
apple he sees will taste good; and whilst they make him wish for it,
they make him fear the bottle which contains his bitter medicine.
But whereas a part of these associations grows confirmed by frequent
repetition, another part is destroyed by contradictory experiences; and
the world becomes divided for us into two provinces, one in which we
are at home and anticipate with confidence always the same sequences;
another filled with alternating, variable, accidental occurrences....

"Accident is, in a wide sphere, such an every-day matter that we need
not be surprised if it sometimes invades the territory where order
is the rule. And one personification or another of the capricious
power of chance easily helps us over the difficulties which further
reflection might find in the exceptions. Yes, indeed, Exception has a
peculiar fascination; it is a subject of astonishment, a θαῦμα, and the
credulity with which in this first stage of pure association we adopt
our supposed rules is matched by the equal credulity with which we
adopt the miracles that interfere with them.

"The whole history of popular beliefs about nature refutes the
notion that the thought of an universal physical order can possibly
have arisen through the purely passive reception and association of
particular perceptions. Indubitable as it is that all men infer from
known cases to unknown, it is equally certain that this procedure,
if restricted to the phenomenal materials that spontaneously offer
themselves, would never have led to the belief in a general uniformity,
but only to the belief that law and lawlessness rule the world in
motley alternation. From the point of view of strict empiricism nothing
exists but the sum of particular perceptions with their coincidences on
the one hand, their contradictions on the other.

"That there is more order in the world than appears at first sight is
not discovered till the order is looked for. The first impulse to look
for it proceeds from practical needs: where ends must be attained, we
must know trustworthy means which infallibly possess a property or
produce a result. But the practical need is only the first occasion
for our reflection on the conditions of a true knowledge; even were
there no such need, motives would still be present to carry us beyond
the stage of mere association. For not with an equal interest, or
rather with an equal lack of interest, does man contemplate those
natural processes in which like is joined to like, and those in which
like and unlike are joined; the former processes harmonize with the
conditions of his thinking, the latter do not; in the former his
concepts, judgments, inferences apply to realities, in the latter they
have no such application. And thus the intellectual satisfaction which
at first comes to him without reflection, at last excites in him the
conscious wish to find realized throughout the entire phenomenal world
those rational continuities, uniformities, and necessities which are
the fundamental element and guiding principle of his own thought." (C.
Sigwart: Logik, ii. 380-2.)

[535] Cf. Hodgson: Philosophy of Reflection, book ii, chap. v.

[536] The aspiration to be 'scientific' is such an idol of the tribe to
the present generation, is so sucked in with his mother's milk by every
one of us, that we find it hard to conceive of a creature who should
not feel it, and harder still to treat it freely as the altogether
peculiar and one-sided subjective interest which it is. But as a matter
of fact, few even of the cultivated members of the race have shared
it; it was invented but a generation or two ago. In the middle ages
it meant only impious magic; and the way in which it even now strikes
orientals is charmingly shown in the letter of a Turkish cadi to an
English traveller asking him for statistical information, which Sir A.
Bayard prints at the end of his 'Nineveh and Babylon.' The document is
too full of edification not to be given in full. It runs thus:

"_My Illustrious Friend, and Joy of my Liver!_

"The thing you ask of me is both difficult and useless. Although I have
passed all my days in this place, I have neither counted the houses nor
inquired into the number of the inhabitants; and as to what one person
loads on his mules and the other stows away in the bottom of his ship,
that is no business of mine. But, above all, as to the previous history
of this city, God only knows the amount of dirt and confusion that the
infidels may have eaten before the coming of the sword of Islam. It
were unprofitable for us to inquire into it.

"O my soul! O my lamb! seek not after the things which concern thee
not. Thou camest unto us and we welcomed thee: go in peace.

"Of a truth thou hast spoken many words; and there is no harm done, or
the speaker is one and the listener is another. After the fashion of
thy people thou hast wandered from one place to another, until thou
art happy and content in none. We (praise be to God) were born here,
and never desire to quit it. Is it possible, then, that the idea of a
general intercourse between mankind should make any impression on our
understandings? God forbid!

"Listen, O my son! There is no wisdom equal unto the belief in God! He
created the world, and shall we liken ourselves unto Him in seeking to
penetrate into the mysteries of His creation? Shall we say, Behold this
star spinneth round that star, and this other star with a tail goeth
and cometh in so many years! Let it go! He from whose hand it came will
guide and direct it.

"But thou wilt say unto me, Stand aside, O man, for I am more learned
than thou art, and have seen more things. If thou thinkest that thou
art in this respect better than I am, thou art welcome. I praise God
that I seek not that which I require not. Thou art learned in the
things I care not for; and as for that which thou hast seen, I spit
upon it. Will much knowledge create thee a double belly, or wilt thou
seek Paradise with thine eyes?

"O my friend! if thou wilt be happy, say, There is no God but God! Do
no evil, and thus wilt thou fear neither man nor death: for surely
thine hour will come!

"The meek in spirit (El Fakir)

"IMAUM ALI ZADI."

[537] "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 clear and distinct from the idea
of sweet as if he had tasted only gall. Nor does it make any more
confusion between the two ideas of sweet and bitter that the same sort
of body produces at one time one and at another time another idea by
the taste, than it makes a confusion in two ideas of white and sweet,
or white and round, that the same piece of sugar produces them both in
the mind at the same time." Locke's Essay, bk. ii. ch. xi. § 3.

[538] Cf. Bradley, Logic, p. 226.

[539] This apprehension of them as forming a single system is what
Mr. Bradley means by the act of _construction_ which underlies all
reasoning. The awareness, which then supervenes, of the additional
relation of which I speak in the next paragraph of my text, is what
this author calls the act of _inspection_. Cf. Principles of Logic, bk.
ii. pt. i. chap. iii.

[540] Realities fall under this only so far as they prove to _be_
the same. So far as they cannot be substituted for each other, for
the purpose in hand, so far they are not the same; though for other
purposes and in other respects they might be substituted, and then be
treated as the same. Apart from purpose, of course, no realities ever
are absolutely and exactly the same.

[541] A mind, in other words, which has got _beyond_ the merely
_dichotomic_ style of thought which Wundt alleges to be the essential
form of human thinking (Physiol. Psych., ii. 312).

[542] Said to be expressed by Grassman in the fundamental Axiom of
Arithmetic (_a_ + _b_) + 1 = _a_ + (_b_ + 1).

[543] Compare Helmholtz's more technically expressed Essay Zählen u.
Messen, in the Philosophische Aufsätze, Ed. Zeller gewidmet (Leipzig,
1887), p. 17.

[544] For the original statements, cf. J. S. Mill's Logic, bk. ii.
chap. vi. §§ 2, 3; and bk. iii. chap. xxiv. § 5.

[545] The subdivision itself consumes none of the space. In all
practical experience our subdivisions do consume space. They consume it
in our geometrical figures. But for simplicity's sake, in geometry we
postulate subdivisions which violate experience and consume none of it.

[546] Cf. A. de Morgan: Syllabus of a proposed System of Logic (1860),
pp. 46-56.

[547] Cf. Locke's Essay, bk. ii. chap. xvii. § 6.

[548] Some readers may expect me to plunge into the old debate as to
whether the _a priori_ truths are 'analytic' or 'synthetic.' It seems
to me that the distinction is one of Kant's most unhappy legacies,
for the reason that it is impossible to make it sharp. No one will
say that such analytic judgments as "equidistant lines can nowhere
meet" are _pure_ tautologies. The predicate is a somewhat new way of
conceiving as well as of naming the subject. There is _something_
'ampliative' in our greatest truisms, our state of mind is richer after
than before we have uttered them. This being the case, the question
"at what point does the new state of mind cease to be _implicit_ in
the old?" is too vague to be answered. The only sharp way of defining
synthetic propositions would be to say that they express a relation
between _two data_ at least. But it is hard to find any proposition
which cannot be construed as doing this. Even verbal definitions do it.
Such painstaking attempts as that latest one by Mr. D. G. Thompson to
prove all necessary judgments to be analytic (System of Psychology, ii.
pp. 232 ff.) seem accordingly but _nugæ difficiles_, and little better
than wastes of ink and paper. All philosophic interest vanishes from
the question, the moment one ceases to ascribe to _any a priori_ truths
(whether analytic or synthetic) that "legislative character for all
possible experience" which Kant believed in. We ourselves have denied
such legislative character, and contended that it was for experience
itself to prove whether its data can or cannot be assimilated to
those ideal terms between which _a priori_ relations obtain. The
analytic-synthetic debate is thus for us devoid of all significance.
On the whole, the best recent treatment of the question known to me is
in one of A. Spir's works, his Denken und Wirklichkeit, I think, but I
cannot now find the page.

[549] Book iv. chaps. ix. § 1; vii. 14.

[550] Chap. v. §§ 6, 8.

[551] Kant, by the way, made a strange tactical blunder in his way
of showing that the forms of our necessary thought are underived
from experience. He insisted on thought-forms with which experience
largely _agrees_, forgetting that the only forms which could not by any
possibility be the results of experience would be such as experience
_violated_. The first thing a Kantian ought to do is to discover forms
of judgment to which _no_ order in 'things' runs parallel. These would
indeed be features native to the mind. I owe this remark to Herr A.
Spir, in whose 'Denken und Wirklichkeit' it is somewhere contained. I
have myself already to some extent proceeded, and in the pages which
follow shall proceed still farther, to show the originality of the
mind's structure in this way.

[552] Yet even so late as Berkeley's time one could write: "As in
reading other books a wise man will choose to fix his thoughts on the
sense and apply it to use, rather than lay them out in grammatical
remarks on the language: so in perusing the volume of nature methinks
it is beneath the dignity of the mind to affect an exactness in
reducing each particular phenomenon to general rules, or showing how it
follows from them. We should propose to ourselves nobler views, namely,
to recreate and exalt the mind with a prospect of the beauty, order,
extent, and variety of natural things: hence, by proper inferences, to
enlarge our notions of the grandeur, wisdom, and beneficence of the
Creator," etc., etc., etc. (Principles of Human Knowledge, § 109.)

[553] Die Erhaltung der Kraft (1847), pp. 2-6.

[554] Perhaps the most influential of all these postulates is that the
nature of the world must be such that sweeping statements may be made
about it.

[555] Consider, e.g., the use of the axioms '_nemo potest supra
seipsum_,' and '_nemo dat quod non habet_,' in this refutation of
'Darwinism,' which I take from the much-used scholastic compendium
of Logic and Metaphysics of Liberatore, 3d ed. (Rome, 1880): "Hæc
hypothesis... aperte contradicit principiis Metaphysicæ, quæ docent
essentias rerum esse immutabiles, et effectum non posse superare
causam. Et sane, quando, juxta Darwin, species inferior se evolvit in
superiorem, unde trahit maiorem illam nobilitatem? Ex ejus carentia.
At nihil dat quod non habet; et minus gignere nequit plus, aut negatio
positionem. Præterea in transformatione quæ fingitur, nature prioris
speciei, servatur aut destruitur? Si primum, mutatio erit tantum
accidentalis, qualem reapse videmus in diversis stirpibus animantium.
Sin alterum asseritur, ut reapse fert hypothesis darwiniana, res
tenderet ad seipsam destruendam; cum contra omnia naturaliter tendant
ad sui conservationem, et nonnisi per actionem contrarii agentis
corruant." It is merely a question of fact whether these ideally proper
relations do or do not obtain between animal and vegetable ancestors
and descendants. If they do not, what happens? simply this, that we
cannot continue to class animal and vegetal facts under the _kinds_
between which those ideal relations obtain. Thus, we can no longer call
animal breeds by the name of 'species'; cannot call generating a kind
of 'giving,' or treat a descendant as an 'effect' of his ancestor.
The ideal scheme of terms and relations can remain, if you like; but
it must remain purely mental, and without application to life, which
'gangs its ain gait' regardless of ideal schemes. Most of us, however,
would prefer to doubt whether such abstract axioms as that 'a thing
cannot tend to its own destruction' express ideal relations of an
important sort at all.

[556] Compare A. Riehl: Der Philosophische Kriticismus, Bd. ii. Thl. i
Abschn. i. Cap. iii. § 6.

[557] As one example out of a thousand of exceptionally delicate
idiosyncrasy in this regard, take this: "I must quit society. I would
rather undergo twice the danger from beasts and ten times the danger
from rocks. It is not pain, it is not death, that I dread,--it is the
hatred of a man; there is something in it so shocking that I would
rather submit to any injury than incur or increase the hatred of a man
by revenging it.... Another sufficient reason for suicide is that I was
this morning out of temper with Mrs. Douglas (for no fault of hers). I
did not betray myself in the least, but I reflected that to be exposed
to the possibility of such an event once a year, was evil enough to
render life intolerable. The disgrace of using an impatient word is
to me overpowering." (Elton Hammond, quoted in Henry Crabb Robinson's
Diary, vol. i. p. 424.)

[558] Compare H. Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics, bk. iii. chap. xiii. § 3.

[559] A gentleman told me that he had a conclusive argument for opening
the Harvard Medical School to women. It was this: "Are not women
human?"--Which major premise of course had to be granted. "Then are
they not entitled to all the rights of humanity?" My friend said that
he had never met anyone who could successfully meet this reasoning.

[560] You reach the Mephistophelian point of view as well as the point
of view of justice by treating cases as if they belonged rigorously to
abstract classes. Pure rationalism, complete immunity from prejudice,
consists in refusing to see that the case before one is absolutely
unique. It is always possible to treat the country of one's nativity,
the house of one's fathers, the bed in which one's mother died, nay,
the mother herself if need be, on a naked equality with all other
specimens of so many respective genera. It shows the world in a
clear frosty light from which all fuliginous mists of affection, all
swamp-lights of sentimentality, are absent. Straight and immediate
action becomes easy then--witness a Napoleon's or a Frederick's career.
But the question always remains, "Are not the mists and vapors _worth_
retaining?" The illogical refusal to treat certain concretes by the
mere law of their genus has made the drama of human history. The
obstinate insisting that tweedledum is _not_ tweedledee is the bone and
marrow of life. Look at the Jews and the Scots, with their miserable
factions and sectarian disputes, their loyalties and patriotisms and
exclusions,--their annals now become a classic heritage, because men
of genius took part and sang in them. A thing is important if any
one _think_ it important. The process of history consists in certain
folks becoming possessed of the mania that certain special things are
important infinitely, whilst other folks cannot agree in the belief.
The Shah of Persia refused to be taken to the Derby Day, saying "It is
already known to me that one horse can run faster than another." He
made the question "_which_ horse?" immaterial. Any question can be made
immaterial by subsuming all its answers under a common head. Imagine
what college ball-games and races would be if the teams were to forget
the absolute distinctness of Harvard from Yale and think of both as
One in the higher genus College. The sovereign road to indifference,
whether to evils or to goods, lies in the thought of the higher
genus. "When we have meat before us," says Marcus Aurelius, seeking
indifference to _that_ kind of good, "we must receive the impression
that this is the dead body of a fish, and this is the dead body of
a bird or of a pig; and again that this Falernian is only a little
grape-juice, and this purple robe some sheep's wool dyed with the blood
of a shell-fish. Such, then, are these impressions, and they reach the
things themselves and penetrate them, and we see what kind of things
they are. Just in the same way ought we to act through life, and where
there are things which appear most worthy of our approbation, we ought
to lay them bare and look at their worthlessness and strip them of all
the words by which they are exalted." (Long's Translation, vi. 13.)

[561] "_An sich, in seinem eignen Wesen, ist jedes reale Object mit
sich selbst identisch und unbedingt_"--that is, the "_allgemeinste
Einsicht a priori_" and the "_allgemeinste aus Erfahrung_" is "_Alles
erkennbare ist bedingt_." (A. Spir: Denken und Wirklichkeit. Compare
also Herbart and Hegel.)

[562] Philosophie Zoölogique, 3me partie, chap. v., 'de l'Instinct.'

[563] It should be said that Mr. Spencer's most formal utterance about
instinct is in his Principles of Psychology, in the chapter under
that name. Dr. Romanes has reformulated and criticised the doctrine
of this chapter in his Mental Evolution in Animals, chapter xvii.
I must confess my inability to state its vagueness in intelligible
terms. It treats instincts as a further development of reflex actions,
and as forerunners of intelligence,--which is probably true of many.
But when it ascribes their formation to the mere 'multiplication
of experiences,' which, at first simple, mould the nervous system
to 'correspond to outer relations' by simple reflex actions, and,
afterwards complex, make it 'correspond' by 'compound reflex actions,'
it becomes too mysterious to follow without more of a key than is
given. The whole thing becomes perfectly simple if we suppose the
reflex actions to be accidental inborn idiosyncrasies preserved.

[564] This account of acquisitiveness differs from our own. Without
denying the associationist account to be a true description of a great
deal of our proprietary feeling, we admitted in addition an entirely
primitive form of desire. (See above, p. 420 ff.) The reader must
decide as to the plausibilities of the case. Certainly appearances are
in favor of there being in us _some_ cupidities quite disconnected
with the ulterior uses of the things appropriated. The source of their
fascination lies in their appeal to our æsthetic sense, and we wish
thereupon simply to _own_ them. Glittering, hard, metallic, odd, pretty
things; curious things especially; natural objects that look as if they
were artificial, or that mimic other objects,--these form a class of
things which human beings snatch at as magpies snatch rags. They simply
fascinate us. What house does not contain some drawer or cupboard full
of senseless odds and ends of this sort, with which nobody knows what
to do, but which a blind instinct saves from the ash-barrel? Witness
people returning from a walk on the sea-shore or in the woods, each
carrying some _lusus naturæ_ in the shape of stone or shell, or strip
of bark or odd-shaped fungus, which litter the house and grow daily
more unsightly, until at last reason triumphs over blind propensity and
sweeps them away.

[565] Review of Bain in H. Spencer: Illustrations of Universal Progress
(New York, 1864), pp. 311, 315.

[566] Ribot: De l'Herédité, 2me éd. p. 26.

[567] Quoted (without reference) in Spencer's Biology, vol. i. p. 247.

[568] Expression of Emotions (N. Y.), p. 287.

[569] 'Adaptive' changes are those produced by the direct effect of
outward conditions on an organ or organism. Sunburned complexion, horny
hands, muscular toughness, are illustrations.

[570] For these and other facts cf. Th. Ribot: De l'Hérédité; W. B.
Carpenter: Contemporary Review, vol. 21, p. 295, 779, 867; H. Spencer:
Princ. of Biol. pt. ii. ch. v, viii, ix, x; pt. iii. ch. xi, xii; C.
Darwin: Animals and Plants under Domestication, ch. xii, xiii. xiv;
Sam'l Butler: Life and Habit; T. A. Knight: Philos. Trans. 1837; E.
Dupuy: Popular Science Monthly, vol. xi. p. 332; F. Papillon; Nature
and Life, p. 330; Crothers, in Pop. Sci. M., Jan. (or Feb.) 1889.

[571] [Because, being exhibited by neuter insects, the effects of mere
practice cannot accumulate from one generation to another.--W. J.]

[572] Origin of Species, chap. vii.

[573] Princ. of Psychol., ii. 561.

[574] _Ibid._ p. 263.

[575] Ueber die Vererbung (Jena, 1883). Prof. Weismann's Essays on
Heredity have recently (1889) been published in English in a collected
form.

[576] Best expressed in the Essay on the _Continuitat des Keimplasmas_
(1885).











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